Category: Parenting

  • Post Covid-19 World; Death to Snow Days

    I have to admit that Covid-19 has changed the way America works, and thinks. Remote working has changed employment and where people can live to be employed. The pandemic has ushered in a different attitude towards universal healthcare. I also think that we all now know what, “The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or one,” truly means in practice. And as long as we are on a Spock kick, I will also quote him by saying, “Change is the essential process of all existence.”

    In that vein, we got the new NYC school calendar for 2021-2022. As I was skimming over it, looking at the dates of holidays and in-service, I saw this little addition:

    “On ‘Snow Days’ or days when school buildings are closed due to an emergency, all students and families should plan on participating in remote learning.”

    Yup, it’s official; SNOW DAYS are DEAD! Long Live Snow Days!

    I kidded about the death of snows days this past winter, as no matter how much it snowed, there were still remote classes. But now, the death of snow days is official policy. Never again will kids watch the news in the morning to see if enough snow fell to cancel school. No more will children know the joy of missing school to play in the snow! Gone now is the last hope of a child to avoid a test, praying that God will drop a foot of snow in one night.

    We have entered a new world.

  • This Morning with the Kid

    Some days are easier than others, you know. Today started off as a tough one for the kid. She was getting out of bed, when I went to take the dog for a walk. I could tell that she was still tired and a little grumpy. When I got back from the walk, there was a sulk on her. She was listening to her mother by getting dressed, and brushing her teeth, but the kid wasn’t into it. As my wife was putting the kid’s hair in a ponytail, the child was in a full frown. The kid went over to her desk, where her computer was to start her remote day in school, and just pout landed in her little chair.

    I went over to her, and picked her up, and just gave her a big hug. “Tough morning?” I asked.

    Her face was buried into my shoulder, but I could feel her head nodding a yes to my question.

    “Well,” I started, “today is going to get better.”

    She lifted her head to face me. “How do you know?” she asked.

    “I don’t. I just believe it will get better.”

    “Like a prediction?”

    “Sort of. But more like, I’m sure it’s going to happen.”

    “…okay.”

    I put her down, and she took her seat for the remote class. “Can we go to the park?” she asked.

    “Sure.” I confirmed.

    “Good,” the kid answered.

  • Staying in Remote Learning

    Spring Break is over for the kid, and we are back at it with remote school. When last I wrote about school, it was about the decision that the wife and I have to make about whether we would send our daughter to the school, or if we would continue remote learning. After kicking the idea around for a week, we decided that it would be best for our daughter to stay in her remote class. This is the best choice out of nothing but bad options.

    The main driving force in our decision was consistency. By switching over to blended learning, it would mean that the kid would get two new teachers; one in the classroom, and one that is remote, as this would be an every other day system. Also, NYC schools still have a policy implemented that shuts down the school if two people have positive test results. At any point, the kid could get moved to remote learning until the Department of Education gives an all clear to return. In some cases, that may take up to a week to reopen. Though I just saw on my phone that the Mayor is revising this policy.

    By staying with the remote learning, we will have a consistent teacher, who is the school’s actual kindergarten teacher, and we know, as she has been at the school for over ten years, that she is teaching the kids in the system to get them ready for first grade in that school. This, we feel, gives the kid the best foundation for continuing to succeed at this school. And it is a school that we really like, and tests academically well, so we plan on staying there.

    But, this decision means that our daughter will go this entire school year without having any kid interaction in the school, which is awful. There is all the social interaction with being around kids, learning to communicate, and make friends, and share, and all of that fun wonderful stuff. And also, learning to separate from us and be her own person.

    Like I said, there was no clear right choice. It was a decision that we hope is right, and only time will tell.

  • Sharing Photos with the Kid

    There has been a project that I have been meaning to get started on, which is getting photographs framed, and up on the walls. I have been squirreling away picture frames for some time, because when we go to IKEA, I pick up one or two. (Yes, I have a very unhealthy obsession with IKEA.) With it being Spring Break this week for the kid, I thought this might be fun for us to do together. We went out to our storage space, and grabbed the boxes for pictures and frames, and settled in on this project last night.

    When I started pulling out the pictures from the box, all still in that folder envelope that your pictures would come in after they were developed, the kid wanted to know why they were like that. (She has only lived in a digital world, and will never know that you used to have to wait for your pictures, and even then, you weren’t sure that they would turn out.) The pictures that I had were from Fall of 1995 to Summer of 2006, as after 2006, I used a digital camera, and never when back to film.

    And as I shared these pictures of my early and late 20’s life with my daughter, she had a perplexed look on her face. I remember feeling confused when my parents would show me pictures of their life at Southern Illinois University, or back in their high school days in Kankakee. Little six-year-old me was confused because it was hard for me to fathom my parents had a life before me and my brothers. My parents were fun, but serious, responsible people who ate their vegetables, paid their bills, and went to bed on time. Who were these people with beers in their hands, smoking, captured mid-laugh in photographs? Who were these people?

    The kid looked at the photos of me, with long hair, circle glasses, beer in hand, smoking, and wondered what I wondered when I was her age; who is this guy? Who are these people with Dad? What are they doing? Why is that guy hugging a tree?

  • SPRING BREAK with THE KID

    The kid is off from school, and I had it in my mind that somehow this might be a little vacation for me as well. That was very inaccurate. When there is no school, I become chief entertainer. Now, what can I come up with for this week?

    The park is an easy go-to, and we’ll be doing lots of that, weather permitting.

    Then, I have been putting off a home project of hanging a spice rack in the kitchen. That I think is something that we can do together. You know, a 44-year-old dad and his six-year-old daughter hanging something on the wall; can they do it without one of them getting angry, crying, or saying, “You can help dad by getting him a beer.”

    I also have a family picture project, which is getting up on the wall of the pictures of our family; Aunts, Uncles, Cousins and all. We have boxes of framed family pictures that for whatever reason we never get around to putting up. In fact, as I look at the living room, we don’t have any pictures of the kid. We have like twenty pieces of her artwork up on the wall, but not an actual photograph. Does that say something about us as a family?

    The big project that I want to tackle with the kid is to make a puppet show out of a story she told me about a girl and three friendly ghosts. There is a very fine line I walk with this stuff and her. I would love for us to make a puppet show together, but at the same time, I don’t want to force her to do it. She knows that her dad has worked as a puppeteer before the Covid times, and has every now and then asked me about it, but she doesn’t asked to make a show. And I also don’t want to take her story and make something out of it without her. So, I want to see if I can encourage her to do this with me.

    Either way, we gotta pass the time.