Quarantine, Day 25

I have wanted to sit and get out my thoughts, but it’s been hard to find time. Either I’ve been exhausted or nursing the baby or it’s just been beyond me.

I am realizing how much it helps to talk to other people. Not just texting but on the phone or even in video somehow. Today we joined a Zoom call for the Bible study Zoe went to back in Columbia with my friend Elise, and when we joined the breakout group for Zoe’s class my friend Elizabeth and her two girls popped up. Zoe spent a ton of time with them in the weeks leading up to our move, and Elizabeth and her husband have both been such faithful friends in general, and I don’t know what came over me, but as soon as they popped up I almost cried. I miss them, and I miss my family, and I miss normalcy. I know that many people are grieving many of the same things. But in most cases people will again get to see the people they miss with the same frequency. We won’t. We’ll get to see some people we don’t really know more often, and we will almost never get to see the people we miss the most right now. So even as this time feels very strange and weird, I think some of the grief is still to come when we actually get to the “new normal” and we realize how many people we don’t get to see anymore.

But tonight the women at our new church did a Zoom call where we read through the first chapter of Ephesians and the human connection was amazing. It wasn’t as good as in person but it was better than nothing. I felt like an adult human person, and it was one of the first things I’ve done since we’ve been here that didn’t involve the kids.

Christian is also giving me tomorrow afternoon to myself. I think I’m going to hole up in my bedroom with the baby and I want to sit here now and figure out what I’m going to do. I don’t want to waste it.

This will be over one day. One day the boys will go back to school. Or maybe this will last even longer than they’re saying. I don’t know. I can’t put my hope in that. I’m just trying to take it one day at a time. I wish I could do more with Zoe. I think once Noah gets a little bigger I will be able to. I’m thinking about coming up with one “activity” each day—for her something with the alphabet, and maybe for the boys something more hands on like drawing a comic strip or something. I tried to add more “school” things this week and Monday was a big flop so I scaled back a little. We still didn’t do all the things I wanted, but I was at least consistent with math, spelling, and writing. We also borrowed a bunch of books from some different families at church, so now they have stuff to read.

We will make it through. Every day can be a little better. Or it can be worse and still be OK. Jesus is still in control.

Quarantine, Day 19

I’m calling this first week experimental homeschooling. I only focused on a few subjects: math, writing (3 sentences from journal prompts), spelling, science/social studies (through documentaries), and attempting to listen to an audiobook. We did math and writing pretty much every day. Next week I’m trying to expand it by adding in foreign language practice and maybe art. I also want to be more consistent with the order we do things, and I printed a lesson plan page for each boy so they can check off what they did each day. I want to give them more autonomy and take as much stress off me as possible.

Some takeaways from this week:

• Cohen does better with math with pen and paper. Stephen enjoyed one of the online math programs we found.
• When left to themselves, they did come up with some interesting things to do. Today, that meant drawing pictures.
• They enjoyed the audiobook I chose, but I need to be more consistent about insisting we listen to it at lunch. Otherwise, it won’t happen.
• We have to get it all done before lunch. After that, I don’t have the energy to push it.

We also got the TV in our upstairs bonus room set up to be able to access streaming content, so I want to do either yoga or some kind of exercise video from YouTube with them first thing in the morning.

This morning was rough, and even though Christian was home, he was working outside, so I was on my own with the kids a lot. Tomorrow he’s going to take point and I honestly think I’m going to drive to Starbucks and sit in my car for a couple hours reading or doing whatever. I need a break from the kids and there’s no way to fully do that at home.

One good thing about today was that I went on two walks by myself with the dog and the baby, and those were refreshing.

Another thing that’s getting me through is listening to audiobooks. I am finding I am gravitating toward memoirs and nonfiction right now, which isn’t necessarily abnormal for me, but I usually like to throw a little fiction in to mix it up. But fiction on audio just isn’t working for me right now. I just finished Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance and am now about halfway through Stories I Only Tell My Friends by Rob Lowe. It’s amazing, and I only started it yesterday and probably will finish it this weekend at the rate I’m going.

Next week feels like a black hole that I’m moving toward and I don’t want to. There’s no light at the end of the tunnel, and this week was really, really hard. I’m banking all my hope on the nearness of Jesus and the possibility that Noah will start sleeping longer stretches at night. Right now he’s waking up usually twice, but sometimes I fall asleep nursing him for an hour and then wake up. I am able to put him in the bassinet then, but then I only get 1-1.5 more hours of sleep before he wakes up again, so my sleep is super interrupted and not restful. Yesterday I took a 30 minute nap and felt like a new person, so that might have to be a more vital part of my day.

I’m still feeling anxious about working. I need to work about 6 hours a week minimum, but preferably more. I think Christian and I are going to have to work out some sort of rhythm where I have a big block of time on the weekends to work. And once Noah gets in the groove of going to bed earlier, I guess I might be able to work some in the evenings. I always worked a lot during the afternoon rest time, but right now I have got to do some kind of self-care then or I just can’t make it through the day.

Fine

She called and asked how things were going, and all I could say was “Fine,” and she knew that me saying that meant everything wasn’t fine. We talked about how it was going trying to homeschool the boys. I told her it wasn’t so much the actual schooling part, although parts of that were challenging, but the hard part right now is how to give them attention and make sure we’re focusing on the right things while also dealing with an almost three-year-old and a newborn. The three-year-old can only entertain herself for so long, and every 2.5-3 hours I have to stop what we’re doing and feed the baby. Everything revolves around when the baby needs to eat. So it would be a lot easier to homeschool if the baby weren’t part of the equation, or if Zoe wasn’t. But of course they are, and I am not wishing it away, but it does complicate things.

I can’t even try to think about the fact that no one will be leaving the house for schooling of any kind until August. It’s only April 2. I guess there is hope that when summer comes, maybe all this will be over and we can go to the beach or get out of the house in some kind of fun way. But even if I’m just looking ahead to the end of the school year, it’s still two more months. We’ve only made it through 4 days trying to homeschool and I feel like I’m on the verge of a panic attack all day long. I know that part of it is sleep deprivation, and at some point in these two months, the baby will start sleeping more. I think it just feels like there is no light at the end of the tunnel. What do I have to look forward to? I guess I could be excited about school going back in August, but by the time we get there I feel like I will be so far gone that it won’t even feel like a relief.

I don’t know how to spend our days. I don’t have the energy to think up exciting activities. There are all these posts encouraging moms to cook with their kids, play games, etc. But how do you do that when you have to nurse a baby, or when the three-year-old just messes up the game? Am I doing something wrong?

It’s also hard to come up with activities when you can’t go to the store. I saw a post about Easter activities but we don’t have any of the things you need, and at least yesterday I didn’t see any of the items at the grocery store. Target is 45 minutes away from where we live, and now that there’s a shelter-in-place order, I’m pretty sure buying plastic Easter eggs at Target isn’t on the list of essential outings.

This seems like ripe territory for postpartum depression. I was already at risk, even without the pandemic and moving. But add those things in and it just feels like I’m on a slow (or fast, depending on the day) slide down into despair. Christian said tonight we can sit down and talk about everything and come up with some ways to maybe make it eaiser, but I’m not optimistic (which, to be honest, is how I roll anyway). He said it would get better, but I don’t know which of the hard parts can get better. I still have to figure out how to homeschool them. I still have a newborn baby who’s getting up multiple times a night. We’re still in a new place where we don’t know anyone and even if we did, we couldn’t spend time with them.

The only good thing about today so far is that Christian took the dog to the office with him after lunch. Other than that, I’m not sure what I’ll include on my nightly recap. There are still more hours in the day, but I’m not holding out hope.

Quarantine, Day 17

It has been two-and-a-half weeks since the schools in South Carolina closed, at the time temporarily. At the same time, recommendations began to go into effect encouraging everyone to stay home as much as possible to stop the spread of the coronavirus.

On Day 1, our newest baby was 5 days old. At the time, we were planning to move almost two weeks later, arriving in Georgia on what would be Day 13. But on Day 5, we decided that we would go ahead and move the following day—Day 6—because we were afraid if we waited, more businesses would be shut down and it would be harder to move.

On Day 7, we started unpacking. Day 8 and 9 were spent mostly back in South Carolina tying up loose ends and getting our dog from our old house. And Christian’s plants. Lots of plants.

On Day 10, we were finally in Georgia for good. A visit back home, which I had planned to do within a month of moving, seemed to be off the table with even stricter stay-at-home recommendations. Thankfully, people from our new church were willing to make contact with meals and help with our kids; otherwise, those first few days would have been even more difficult.

Sometime over the weekend, I think around Day 13, we found out that schools would be closed at least through the end of April. Previously they had said the kids might go back on April 13.

Once I found out about that, I realized that I needed to figure out what homeschooling woud look like. Because we weren’t able to register our boys for school in Georgia before everything shut down, we aren’t able to get schoolwork from their new school. So I started doing some research and came up with a very rough plan for Monday, Day 15.

It hasn’t been easy. It’s only been three days and I’m tired of it. It’s really hard to juggle homeschooling with an almost three-year-old little girl and a three-week-old baby.

Yesterday a friend posted a song I’d never heard of called “Tomorrow Will Be Kinder,” and just the title of it almost made me burst into tears. Every day I have gone to bed feeling like I yelled at the kids too much and failed in so many ways. And at the same time I’ve also been longing for more time alone, more separation from the kids, more time to recharge. All of us are struggling.

Today the governor announced that kids would not be going back to school this school year. So what at first was 3 weeks and then was 5 weeks is now more than 8 weeks. And then it’s summer. So it will be August before the boys go back to school, and we need to be doing some kind of schoolwork for the next two months. There is also a mandatory stay-at-home order for the whole state. (That part isn’t that big of a deal, since there’s not many places open or many places I would want to take all four kids.)

I cried when Christian told me. I don’t want to homeschool. I feel like I could if I wanted to, but I don’t want to.

I need to come up with a better plan than what I have, partly because I don’t think it’s quite enough work for them to be doing. But we did have some wins today. And I don’t want to forget them.

• We started listening to an audiobook, White Bird by R. J. Palacio. It’s a World War II story about a Jewish girl in France, and the boys are really into it. We listened to it while we ate lunch, and then at dinner, Christian was gone, so we listened to a few more chapters. It’s only 2 hours long, so I think we can finish it within the next week, and I’m hoping that if we can form the habit then we can start working on a longer book. I’m so thankful I still have access to audiobooks from our old library in South Carolina.
• Cohen and Zoe had a great time washing Zoe’s play kitchen and washing my car. It killed a good 30 minutes. I’m enjoying having a garage where I can sit with the baby in the shade and watch them.
• I went for a walk/run with the dog after all the kids were in bed. It was my first real postpartum exercise other than walks with the kids, and it was good for my soul.
• I discovered I can get a lot of audiobook listening in with my bluetooth headphones. I am struggling with fiction but nonfiction is working in this season.

Tomorrow is another day. Day 18. Lord, I pray tomorrow will be kinder. If nothing else, your mercies are new.