Fireworks and Fireflies: social distancing {week one ~ no school for two weeks!}

And so, with the finish of the day, we find ourselves a week into these strange times of extreme social distancing.

Ian and the kids (except Kylie) have not left our property save for our evening walks together since last Friday when they got home from school. I've gone to meet Mom...Kylie went with me...to get her sweet companion puppy back to her, and gone to the grocery twice. At this point I'd say we're in a pretty good place, but I find myself wondering what I'll be thinking at this time next week...let alone possibly weeks later if our city/county/state/country governmental leaders follow the lead of others around the world as we face this global crisis.

Ian and I bounced between the rails of "panic and alarm" (having a son with BOTH a severe unprepared heart condition and advanced lung disease will do that to you in the face of a disease like this) and "hopeful optimism" and have settled somewhat in the center at "cautious and careful." To that end we're creating some schedule to our weekdays with no school, trying to strike a balance that gives time for creative exploring and honing of skills nobody has had time to work on in our usual schedule of life, but also keeping enough structure for those of our kids that need some sort of daily routine.

"Home school" for the kids at this point is pretty loose. As this stretches on at some point we will likely get some guidance from the system, but for now it's pretty informal at the M8 Academy (which I guess is re-open for business through the end of the school year). Math has looked like the middle school bunch woking on some math olympiad challenge problems and the elementary set doing challenge problems and 100s Board mental math activities, all stuff from my former teaching days. For EL there has been family wide reading time and they've been writing letters to friends and family or recording their thoughts and feelings about the home quarantine in poem or traditional journal form. Science has looked like the home safari live casts from the Cincinnati Zoo though I've been given a link to some family science experiments that we'll give a go this next week. I feel like keeping up with current world events has been enough for social studies this week, but since I'm a map geek we'll be doing some sort of map skills starting soon. And everyone has been assigned to select a skill they would like to hone in this time where we have more time.

Kylie has selected to ramp up her baking and work on her calligraphy/drawing skills. Caleb is determined to learn to juggle, Darcy is furthering her calligraphy/fancy font writing, Daniel is both baking on his own and drawing and both Natalie and Nicholas have been enjoying learning to sketch favorite animals and characters. Ian and I worked in the yard a good bit of Saturday and have each been reading, taking lots of walks together (and with various groupings of the kids) and both are trying to figure out what skill we'd like to take time to learn.

Following is a digital scrapbook of what our week has looked like...

Kylie's first baking project...Dole Whip cupcakes.
took us right back to Disney!

visiting Daddy in his office while reviewing her high school credit math class
(totally motivated on her own at this point...no official assignments have been sent yet but she wants to keep up)

reuniting Mama and her sweet pup...so bizarre to see Mama and not touch her, but I didn't want to risk possibly exposing her to this virus if one of my kids is carrying it
(Mama and my sister's family had been in Honduras for a week..Lacie stayed with us while they were gone.)

sweet moment captured on our nightly walk Monday

sister bonding
one positive thing of all this is relationships are being re-established

evening walk...Tuessday edition

free time with the 100s board cubes
the next day we established a "come downstairs dressed on weekdays" guideline just to create some structure...weekends are still pjs all day if you please

waiting for the "campfire" to be just right

campgrounds may be closed, but we can still have a fire based dinner/dessert at home!

Kylie was proud of us for "being adaptable" as we had hot dogs on hamburger buns because that's what was available

only one package of hot dog buns meant seconds were bunless...he'd already tossed his plate, so getting ketchup on the dog called for creative measures