Skipping Town

Homeschool. Another afternoon of reading. Lucia read in the bathroom with the ceiling heater on because her room was so cold (#springinNJ). Facetime piano lessons. Every...day...is...exactly...the...same. Greta finished her grasslands diorama. It includes two Sculpey capybaras--a regular brown capybara and a "whimsical capybara" that's bright purple. I love having an eight-year-old. Andrew's trying to liven things up around here by reading one Shakespeare sonnet out loud to us after dinner, and then having a short discussion about the sonnet's meaning. The girls are VEHEMENTLY not on board. VEHEMENTLY. Being forced to listen to a sonnet is worse, really, than anything else they've ever been subjected to. Obviously, their bad attitudes have resulted in a threat of TWO sonnets if they don't simmer down. Today was a really depressing sonnet (#2) about aging and losing beauty and becoming nothing more than a "weed" and just hoping your kids car

Today passed...peacefully. Homeschool in the morning. Greta's working on a nonfiction piece about capybaras, so we've been watching a lot of videos about capybaras, which are pretty darn cute. Greta's drawings of capybaras are keeping me going. She also worked on a diorama about capybaras' habitat, grasslands, which involved making some tiny capybaras out of Sculpey. You KNOW I was on board with that. And Lucia's working on a story about the Great Depression, which she's enjoying. They played outside for a while to take a break, then came in for lunch. The kids made each other lunch--Greta made scrambled eggs for Lucia, and Lucia made grilled cheese for Greta. Then more work on school stuff. Then quiet time. And then quiet time just...didn't end. I was working on lots of different things in my office and the kids were reading and reading, and even after I went downstairs to take Farrah for a walk they were still reading. And they were still reading later

A lot of neighbors are getting inflatable above-ground pools this summer. It's probaby the quirkiest thing about lockdown so far. (If I don't look for the absurdity in all this, I'll wither.) Today, imagining all the pools dotting yards across our town, Cheever's "The Swimmer" popped into my head. "The Swimmer"! Yes. The character in this story, Neddy Merrill, decides one summer evening that instead of walking home from his neighbor's house, he'll swim home by pool-hopping across his neighbors' yards. It's a strange and juvenile idea, fueled by too many cocktails, but the terrain Neddy ultimately crosses is much darker and more fraught than a simple lark. As he swims he finds himself lost--literally and existentially--learning of personal misfortunes from others, misfortunes he hadn't realized he'd suffered. A great deal of time has passed as he's been swimming. He's become unwelcome among the people he'd considere

I made cinnamon bread today: dough in the bread machine, then roll out and spread with cinnamon, another rise, then baking. Delicious. A loaf of bread suggests productivity. At the very least, it gives me something to do while navigating the kids through their homeschool assignments. After lunch, there was some squabbling over the Lego sea in the basement. Though they've been dumped out for a week now, they're still not sorted, and now there's a big disagreement over HOW they should be sorted: by color or by shape? Lucia and I are saying color, but Greta is holding out for shape. My prediction? We'll end up putting them all back into the bins they came from, unsorted.  I filled a bin with water on the art table today so we could use the rest of our gel balls--those tiny balls that expand into marble-size squishy balls. They're super fun, and we hadn't used them for a while. We didn't have many left so I put in an order for 50,000 more. (50,000 gel bal

My mood has been closely tied to the weather in these quarantine days. Sunny days are bearable. Things seem okay. There are bright spots etc etc. On rainy, gloomy, dark days like today, however, bleakness permeates. There was no letup. Today featured rain and chill from morning to night, and I found myself sobbing over our delivered hoagies from Wawa, because we have NEVER eaten Wawa hoagies at our kitchen table; we always eat them in the car, balanced on our laps, as we drive to either New Hampshire or Connellsville, both places I would very very much like to go. We worked on a puzzle today, a new one made up of different Hostess snack cakes. Like the flower puzzle from last week, there was one single missing piece to this one. Is Farrah sneaking off with these pieces? Are these manufacturing errors? Two brand-new puzzles in a row. It's a mystery. And I just can't help but see these single missing pieces as symbolic of these dark times--these things we're missing in ou

Sun today, yay. The kids slept late. After breakfast we Zoomed with Mom, Dad, Molly, and Luca so Lucia could play through the piano pieces she was performing later today. Then L&G went off to play outside in the mud again, and Luca went outside, and the adults talked for a while. L&G stayed outside in the mud puddle until recital time--a Zoom recital, of course. Greta didn't have to perform today because she's still working on her piece. Lucia played four pieces she's been keeping up for about a year--their teacher's policy is that once you perform the piece, you don't have to keep it up for the book recital down the road. Lucia was nervous about the Zoom format, imagining all the people watching her, but did great. Dinner was pierogies and kielbasa, and we ate on the porch. Then we watched two episodes of Little House, a crazy dark set of episodes about the death of the Ingalls infant, Charles, and Laura's self-blame for the death. (I had to Google to

Thursday 4/23 Homeschool. Legos. The same usual drill, except that last night I did my first live Facebook reading, with the Writers Conference of Northern Appalachia, which was really fun. Andrew took the kids and Farrah on a walk around the block while I was reading. Here again is the problem of not blogging for one single day: the days are so similar, each one with both a set rhythm and zero rhythm, that I can't for the life of me remember what we did yesterday (except for the reading).  Friday 4/24 It was a blah day of rain. I think Andrew said it was sleeting this morning, but maybe that was a different day? What even are "different days" anymore? Anyhoo. Homeschool work was lighter than usual, mostly just catching up on things and uploading some things they'd done during the week. A happy and rare coincidence: Lucia's art assignment this week was to create a work with natural materials in the vein of Andy Goldsworthy--and doing a Goldworthy proje

I ordered an inflatable above-ground pool today. Ten feet diameter, with a filter. It's a panic purchase for sure. The idea had been on my radar for a while, but today when I did a search on Home Depot, almost all the inflatable above-ground pools were sold out. Everyone seems to be planning for the reality that public pools aren't going to open this summer. So I ordered one from Target. We can always just return it or sell it or not use it if things take a turn for the better. But better to be safe, and have a pool at the ready. A summer without our community pool is hard to imagine but also, at this point in quarantine, too easy to imagine. So. We'll be ready. Maybe we'll go crazy and get a trampoline too. Today we did homeschool stuff until lunchtime, and then L&G played for seven straight hours in the basement with their Legos. It was intense. No bickering or wandering up for snacks or anything--just intense, all-encompassing playing. The Legos are not being o

The Lego work continues, but instead of organizing, the kids are now just playing with the Lego Friends characters--the latest in quarantine rediscoveries. Those Lego bins hadn't been touched in months, and now the kids are begging for more time to play. They took Legos outside, had Legos with them at the dinner table, and were continuing to quietly arrange things while I read to them at bedtime. So now we've had Playmobil and Lego resurgences. What'll be next? Dinner tonight was fried tofu with peanut butter sauce, coconut rice, and broccoli. I managed to get an Amazon Fresh delivery slot for tomorrow night to replenish our milk and a few other things ("a few other things" to the tune of $200, of course, because spending ungodly amounts of money on groceries is required during quarantine). The delivery window is 10pm to midnight. Which means we could very well be out on the porch disinfecting groceries at midnight. Cool, cool. It'll be worth it because in t

Back to homeschool. We'd all rather be fully free, but it is what it is. Greta's learning to tell time, which is useful. Lucia's writing a story set in the Great Depression. After classwork, the kids played outside, had a Zoom call with their sewing teacher, and then--inspired--learned how to sew buttons. Then we cleaned the basement and they decided to organize all the Legos. This could take a while. It's not really clear yet how they plan to organize them. Right now they're in a giant pile in the middle of the floor. I don't have a picture, but if I did, I'd caption it, "This is why we renovated the basement." I don't have to look at that Lego pile for weeks if I don't want to. That's all I've got for today. Instead of reading a long blog post, you can hop on over to Littsburgh  and read the first chapter of The Distance from Four Points-- exciting to have the first excerpt out in the world. 

There are many challenges to marriage. For us, one of those challenges is being forced by a global lockdown to clean our own house. We haven't had our cleaners here in weeks, for their safety and ours (we're still paying them, of course), and wow, I miss them almost as much as I miss long consecutive hours of absolute quiet. I'm a very very tidy and organized person. Ask me where something is--anything! I challenge you!--and I'll be able to find it in a hot second. The worry dolls I made when I was eleven? Hold on, just let me find the box in my wooden chest. A contact-paper-covered collage of Pillsbury Dough Boys cut from magazine ads that I made when I was in seventh grade? It's right here, on the bookshelf in my office. This organization is a genetic trait. It's also a genetic trait to completely lose my sh*& when I CAN'T immediately find something. But I digress. As I was saying: I'm a neat and organized person, but I am NOT a scour-the-count

The days are really blurring together here. Especially this week, without even a modicum of scheduling to differentiate one day from the next. It's a strange feeling. And it's exhausting. There is just no break. I have zero time alone. And there is a constant hum of ambient noise--Andrew on calls, the kids playing or fighting or scream-laughing, the dog barking. Constant constant constant. I haven't exercised in two full weeks even though I ostensibly have all day long to do it. It's just really hard to break away from all the tending, and I need to do a better job of it. Goal for the week. I know a lot of people are saying that when this is all over they want to go to crowded restaurants and big parties and other boisterous gatherings. Me? I want a sensory deprivation tank. One of those things where you're immersed in a small tank of water and darkness. And then a hotel room for a couple of nights, where I can just be completely and totally alone. There will be n

A low-key day. The kids are now both obsessed with the School for Good and Evil books and spent much of today reading. Greta's started the first, and Lucia's rereading the third, desperate for our order of #4, 5, and 6 to arrive. "I wish, when you finish a series book, the next one could be RIGHT THERE," she lamented, prompting Andrew to mutter, "Yeah, e-books," temporarily forgetting who he's married to. (Longtime readers will remember that Andrew's first post-MBA job involved e-books, and I'm unable/unwilling to read e-books, which means a lot of our marriage is based on a pretty serious disjunct.) Anyhoo. L&G also worked on more peg dolls today, turning to wooden clothespins since the wooden pegs are all gone. I'm now out of wooden clothespins too. And clear gluesticks. The girls and I played two games of Dragonwood today--a really fun game. Later in the afternoon I took Farrah for a walk while L&G were doing more reading. Walk

Facebook memories are especially absurd right now. A year ago on this day, we were in London, having one of of most fun dinners out ever. Sigh. But today was a good, if busy, day. The kids had a single focus today: rag dolls. We got started right after breakfast, using a pretty easy pattern I found online. It wasn't a complicated project, but there were a lot of steps and two kids to guide through all those steps, and then taking turns sewing all the pieces, and etc. It was a morning-long project, then we had lunch, and then we finished up in the afternoon. They turned out really cute. I want to make one myself now. Lucia made a little girl, and Greta made a cat. It's not Spring Break in London, but I think they'll remember making rag dolls during quarantine. In the afternoon, while I got a little work done, they were back to making peg dolls in the basement. Now we're totally out of wooden pegs, so I'll have to figure out what our next craft will be. Maybe I

Much better day today. I think the trick is just imparting a little structure. (The trick might also be putting on jeans instead of leggings, which I did today.) In ordinary times, our structure-less weekend days are usually glorious. When every single day in a long long string of days is structure-less, the functionality breaks down. So this morning, after breakfast, I moved the kids to the basement right away for more peg doll creation, which they'd wanted to do yesterday but didn't get around to. The energy was just right today for a long, meticulous craft, and they made peg dolls for about two hours, till I had to drag them away for lunch. After lunch, they had quiet time in their rooms--for reading or making collages--and both girls chose to read. I got some work done on essays. They were so immersed in their books that I didn't hear a peep for almost two hours, and even when I called to them, they didn't want to stop reading. That's a win. They wanted to f

Ugh. Just a day of bickering and false starts and unstructured lethargy. Tomorrow I'm making a schedule to guide our day. There was nothing redeeming about today except for these three things: 1. Andrew made delicious Swedish meatballs for dinner. 2. While Greta was getting ready for bed, she randomly came up to me and said, "Hi, I'm Kathy Dickens," then walked away with no explanation. 3. Lucia was so angry tonight that she had to stop reading. She is wild about this School of Good and Evil series. She also declared she's going to read ALL DAY tomorrow and she hopes it's rainy so I don't make her go outside. Actually, she said she wants to make peg dolls and THEN read all day. My kids look nothing like me, and yet...I've successfully raised them into mini-me's. I'm not even sharing this post on Facebook today. Move along, anyone reading this. Nothing to see here but a ridiculous and wasted day of lockdown.

I'll start with the big news first: my Wegman's order from Instacart arrived!!! I was on pins and needles all day, even when I started getting notifications that the shopping was underway, even when I got the notification saying the order would arrive soon. It all came, pretty much. I haven't looked too closely to see what was refunded instead of substituted. But WOW do we have a lot of food now. Enough to make even a paranoid food hoarder like me feel secure. We have about 10 bags of shredded cheese, 72 slices of white American cheese, crackers for days, a giant family pack of tilapia, stacks of pasta boxes, rice, flour, eggs, coffee, coffee creamer, different types of sugar, canned beans, dry beans, and enough canned tomatoes in every conceivable variety to sustain us for months to come. Lots of green veggies too, some of which I'll par boil and freeze. WOW that's a lot of details about groceries. Am I forgetting my audience? No, I am not. The (small) audience o

Easter in quarantine. It was a strange one. Luckily, I'd gotten everything for the kids' Easter baskets and Easter eggs well before the lockdown. Last night, I arranged everything in their baskets, and Andrew and I filled the eggs. This year they got chocolate eggs plus mini Harry Potter Funko figurines and cute rabbit figurines in their eggs. In their baskets were two packs of Plus Plus tiles, a Maileg cat wearing a sweater and skirt, a "tackle box" of spring-themed candy from Dylan's Candy Bar, other chocolate, sheep and bunny Legos, and a Need-o squishy ball. They loved everything, especially the Harry Potter figurines, and played with them the entire rest of the day. Because of Slug Easter 2018 , the Easter Bunny no longer hides the eggs overnight or early in the morning. Instead, he leaves a bag of filled eggs for me to hide once everyone wakes up. So after the kids looked through their baskets, I hid the eggs outside, and they did the egg hunt. Then I made