ajohns

Or maybe I’ve just adjusted my expectations so low that my idea of “okay” is “nobody is on fire, nobody has Covid, and we have food. Huzzah!”

Nate is currently going to school in person. He has a lot of anxiety around school (though I suspect he’s displacing some Covid anxiety onto school), so we’re working with a therapist and his teachers on how to make him feel as comfortable as possible. And yeah, school is weird. His teacher is remote (for health reasons), they all wear masks, they have plexiglass shields between them, they work with their iPads a lot so that when/if they go remote, it’ll hopefully be pretty seamless. But at least he gets to see his friends and have a change of scenery (and I get a break from him).

I’m in the first semester of a licensure program for teaching kids with moderate disabilities, grades 5-12. I’m loving it in a nerdy way - the class about reading and teaching reading is especially cool (brains are wild. The ways we learn are wild and various).

We’re building a workshop outbuilding - we’ve been working on it for three years now, and I’ve been using a fair amount of my time that’s not parenting or school working on it. I really, really, really want it to be weather tight by snow fall. Then we could move stuff from our porch and greenhouse into the workshop, and actually use the porch as a porch and the greenhouse as a greenhouse. But some of the tasks that remain are ones that cannot be done with one person.... and Chris has shingles. Ugh. So we’ll see how progress goes in the next week or so. And if the snow holds off until late November, that would be awesome.

Chris and I already voted - it was very low-drama in our small town. Chris just dropped our mail-in ballots with the town clerk while he was there for a Select Board meeting.

Chris, Nate and I went for a two-night backpacking trip (north of here in Vermont). It was lovely - we were at a primitive campsite on a lake, there were loons, we had a campfire both nights, we did a day hike to a waterfall and swam (very briefly) in the pretty but very cold pool at the bottom of the waterfall. I had no cell service, and by the morning of day 3, (this morning) my iPhone and Apple Watch had both run out of charge, so I didn’t even know what time it was. Okay, we got damp when it rained, we were totally grubby by the end, and my hips are Not Happy with this whole sleeping on the ground thing, but it was such a blissful break.

And now we’re back, and I’m so angry with the world that I feel like I’m choking on it. First it was the sight of several large and prominent Trump signs in people’s yards, then it was the correspondence from Nate’s school (they’re doing the best they can, but it still sucks and is uncertain, and it didn’t have to be this bad if as a country we hadn’t so thoroughly screwed up our Covid response, and our kids are paying for it). And I had to deal with money things, which never put me in a great mood. How soon can I run away to the backcountry again?

Nate responded so badly to online learning in the spring - his mental health seriously suffered and he fell in to self-harming behavior which scared the crap out of me. He despises any kind of social interaction over screens (he says its worse than no interaction).

Pandemic summer has been okay - he’s missed all of the social interaction from camps, but we’ve had some socially distanced play dates and hikes which have helped a lot with that. We’ve stayed active and busy and his mood has been stable and pretty good, all things considered.

And now the school year looms. His private school is planning on in-person education (and they have the space to pull it off), but we just learned that his teacher has an underlying health condition that means that he’ll be teaching remotely. So there will be some responsible adult with the kids in the classroom, and his teacher will try to teach them over a screen. I...... suppose it’s better than nothing? But I’m super anxious about it - we’re taking a risk sending him in person, and I’m not sure that having his teacher remote will be much better than the entire class being remote. He’s an anxious, perfectionist student, and a teacher who is interacting with him in real space can see him start to spiral and reassure him, but that doesn’t happen over a screen. And I’m not at all confident that the person in the room (whoever that may be) will be up to the task.

And is this just a harbinger of things to come? How are Nate and I going to survive this school year? I thought seriously about just home schooling him this year in order to have certainty and control, but I allowed myself to be convinced (by Nate, by Chris, by Chris’s parents). But I’m the one who gets to salvage the pieces when things fall apart, and I just want to crawl in a hole and come back out next June. Can we all just skip this school year and try again later?

A bear has been regularly visiting and hanging around our property. To date, it hasn’t done much damage, and in fact has been strangely... delicate and discerning. The only thing it’s actually done is remove the flowering heads from a sunflower (leaving the rest of the plant intact). It hasn’t made a serious attempt to break into the chicken coop, and has left the beehive alone entirely (I’m hoping that the electric fence is doing its job). But having a bear around is incredibly nerve wracking. It’s wicked cute, but it’s also large, strong, and has sharp teeth and claws. I would really like it to go away.

I don’t trust Massachusetts’ move into Phase 3. We’re going to continue supporting local restaurants with take-out for the foreseeable future, and I’m going to wait at least until August to see how the Covid trends are going before thinking about going back to my karate studio. Everything I’ve read about transmission in enclosed spaces makes me dubious about any non-essential indoor activity.

My misanthropic tendencies came out hard last night, when various neighbors were setting off fireworks for *hours*. I wanted my own sleep, but also felt bad for the terrified dogs, the upset toddlers, the veterans with PTSD... I mean, really. It was a perfect example of the kind of inconsiderate individualism that makes me both angry and despair for humanity.

On the plus side, we have successfully found water to submerge ourselves in - a local pond that has thus far been both open for swimming and not very busy, and a river with some deep spots. Yesterday Chris, Nate and I spent part of the afternoon exploring said river, and it was lovely and felt like summer.

Nate is currently at my parents’ house - after weighing the risks and the continued decrease in local COVID cases, we decided that it was worth the risk. I’m really hoping that he’ll be willing to spend a morning or two a week with them, so I can actually do some focused work. I’ve tried (in a very distracted way) over the past few months to stay engaged with work, but I just can’t do much thinking and writing when I’m the primary parent. The whole situation brings out the worse of the working-parent feelings: I feel like a total failure at being an employee, plus I feel like I’m not consistently being a good parent, since I would like to do some work and so my attention is split. Ugh. Anyway, even a few hours of grand-parental child care each week would help a lot.

Our farm share has started up, and I’m so damn grateful for the gorgeous lettuce and wee little radishes (which are not too spicy, just how I like them). Instead of the normal pickup, we drive up and are handed a bagged share, so it’s no the same, but still, I’ll take it. And while the libraries across the border are still closed, our tiny little library in town is open for curb side pickup, so I spent a bit of time looking through their catalog. It’s very limited, but there are a few titles that I’ve been wanting to read (and they’re all currently available, not checked out).

I bought some herb divisions today (and planting them out), focusing on medicinal herbs that are helpful with cough and sore throat. My poor kid has a persistent cough in the best of time (allergies), and he’s vulnerable to upper respiratory ick, so I figure some horehound and hyssop tea in addition to all of the traditional western medicine is worthwhile.

I really miss privacy and quiet. I know so much more about Chris’s job now than I ever thought I would, because there aren’t great sound isolated spaces in our house, so I hear all of his meetings. And when he’s having a meeting and Nate is listening to an audiobook, I just want to hide somewhere. Luckily it’s been nice enough outside that I can sometimes go out and hide in the screen tent in our yard. On the plus side, Nate is listening to “The Hobbit” currently, which is an audiobook that I don’t mind overhearing at all.

-Running, particularly trail running when the weather allows. I often seen cool things (today I saw three little tree frogs at different times, and accidentally scared out a family of ducks), I get a break from being Mom, and it’s the one activity I did before Covid-19 that is basically the same now as it was then.
-I instituted “mom rest time” where I disappear into our bedroom from 12:45 to 1:30. I may nap, I may read, I may just stare out the window, but I get a break, particularly from the endless noise in our house.
-Spending time working on our garden. I accomplish concrete things and I get outside time.
-Counting down the days until the end of school for Nate. We’re doing pretty minimal school work (mostly end of the year review of math), but there are still often tears (or nearly tears), and it will be a relief to both of us when it’s over.
-I have an appointment with my therapist later this morning.

Things that aren’t helping:
-our internet is slow to the point of near uselessness. Someone is coming to look into the problem tomorrow, but in the meanwhile, what little bandwidth we have goes to Chris during working hours. This leads to Nate being bored and looking to me for constant companionship and entertainment.
-He’s having some health issues that could be stress related, but could be more significant. We have an appointment with his pediatrician this afternoon(telemedicine, of course). She’ll probably order blood work, and the last time I took him in to have blood drawn, he literally screamed and had to be held down (he’s got a pretty serious fear of the needles). Not looking forward to that AT ALL.
-My mom is feeling stir crazy and is being kind of passive aggressive about the fact that we’re not hanging out with them in their back yard. I have enough on my plate, trying to keep my kid and myself mostly sane and mostly healthy, and I cannot be responsible for one more person. I just can’t.

Spring has finally really happened, thank goodness. I bought us a screen tent to put in our yard so that we can hang around outside without being devoured by the black flies, and it’s a serious upgrade to life. It gives us another sound-separated space, which is in high demand in our open-plan house. I spent some time outside yesterday reading while Nate was inside playing one of his games, and I blessedly didn’t have to listen to all the beeps and boops and commentary.

And the spring whether means lots of projects outside, which keep me occupied and help me feel like I’m accomplishing concrete things. We’re making progress on the workshop, and today is the day for planting out a lot of the garden (since it’s supposed to be in the eighties(!!!) tomorrow).

Two more weeks of school for Nate, and neither of them are full weeks (four days this week, three next week, and then we’re done). I have limited ambitions for the remaining time - finish up a research project that we started, do daily reading, maybe some logic puzzles (since he seems to actually enjoy those).

We’re thinking of sending Nate to see his grandparents in Connecticut for a week - doing a full two weeks of serious self-isolation both before and after. The self-isolation is a big commitment (no grocery store trips, no feed store trips) and takes some planning, but it would do Nate a world of good to spend some time at the ocean, and it would do us a world of good to have a break from 24-7 childcare. We need to have a serious talk with the grandparents about our definition of social distancing, though. We worry that they’ve been more casual than we have.

I’m also hoping to go backpacking with Nate later in the summer. Most car campgrounds are still closed, but backcountry camping is pretty low risk, especially if we stay away from popular trails. The interaction of backcountry camping with the various restrictions are somewhat confusing - when the time gets closer, I’ll just have to call the ranger office to talk to a human rather than trying to figure it out from various cryptic website messages.

Poor Nate. He had severe stomach cramps last night around dinner time, enough that I called his pediatrician to talk through appendicitis risk. They said to give it a few hours, and in that time he threw up twice and felt much less pain (though felt woozy from the vomiting). So we’re figuring some kind of mild food poisoning, I guess. And then just this evening he stepped on a nail (screw?) outside and got a nasty puncture in his foot. It bled profusely, but we controlled it, and he’s up to date on his tetanus vaccination, so.... we’ll just watch it and keep it clean. But seriously, moderately typical kid illness and injury is far more fraught in the current environment. Schooling went okay - because of last night’s vomiting, I kept expectations very low, so there was no weeping (woo hoo!).

I feel bad that I’m not contributing more at work - various of us are meeting regularly to plan out what business development/salvation looks like in a pandemic, and it’s creative work and my brain is just not functioning in that way right now.

I built a garden bed and constructed a insect/groundhog deterring cover for it. I haven’t planted out the broccoli and parsley that will go in that bed - hopefully I’ll get that done this weekend.

The hardest thing about this whole situation for me is watching my kid suffer and having limited ways of making things better. He was up late again last night - he came out of his bedroom and wanted to snuggle because he was feeling lonely. We’re having previews of next year in the coming weeks - I’m doing the parent preview tomorrow and he’ll meet with next year’s teacher sometime soon. But I can’t help but worry about what next year will actually look like. Nate has been looking forward to having this teacher for years, and the idea that he probably won’t get the kind of school year that he’s looking forward to is so sad.

And yesterday’s school work lead to tears and frustration again. His variety of perfectionism means that he flips out over material that he doesn’t already know, but then he refuses to let me coach him through because he prefers to learn by doing (by himself, thank you very much). I spiraled hard into my own feeling of failing at everything, and hid in the closet to have a good cry at one point. I just don’t know what to do to help him.

I finally have a FaceTime appointment with my therapist today, so that’s a good thing. And an online book community that I’m part of is having a summer book preview event today, and I’m looking forward to that.

I woke to several inches of the Precipitation Which Shall Not Be Named (PWSNBN). I’ve been pretending that it doesn’t exist, and instead reading my book and drinking hot cocoa, and that cat snuggled briefly on my lap, so there’s that. And after lunch we will watch the season finale of whichever season of FaceOff we’re currently watching. I’ll probably finish my book. I’ll eventually go for a walk, since I’ve been trying to walk outside every day. I wonder if I can still pretend that the PWSNBN doesn’t exist if I’m outside?

Nate and I talked some yesterday about how we want to go backpacking again this summer. I think we can pull it off, even if social distancing rules are still in effect. Backcountry latrines are still closed (since it’s basically impossible to clean and disinfect them to CDC standards), but we could dig our own hole, as long as we follow Leave No Trace rules.

My pandemic response at least in part involves doubling down on our already-present homesteading impulses. How about a few goats? Or a cow? Maybe a pond with fish and ducks? A few more garden beds? Some new fruit trees to replace the ones the DamnDeer ate? A crossbow to hunt the DamnDeer with?

At least it gives me something to daydream about while refusing to acknowledge the PWSNBN.