Tag: #Kids

  • Thanksgiving

    2020 has been a shit filled dumpster on fire, floating down a river.

    And for my family, we have had a tough three years for that matter. Moves, job loss, pandemic, family tragedy, the 2020 election, but we are still here. We are still planning for tomorrow, still dreaming, still trying to make life better for our kid.

    My Grandma used to tell me, “You gotta have goals. Gotta have something to look forward to.” The wife and I have latched onto that idea; working toward something. Not that we think that everything will go back to normal, or that in three months everything will be better. We just know that we are working toward a better someday, and that’s about as realistic as we can get.

    And in that sense, there have been a few good things. I have spent so much great quality time with my daughter. I am watching her learn how to read, and write her first sentences, and see that spark of learning in her eye. That’s something real, and honest, and wonderful to experience. In this year, I have been able to rekindle my love of writing, and the creative process. Also in this year of insanity, I have watched my wife take on more than she thought she was capable of, and come out on the other end more confidant and successful. I am amazed by her. I feel that we still do make a great team, and I think I love her more than the day I told her I loved her on 14th street in front of Trader Joe’s way back in 2007.

    This was not a great year, but I still have my family who is healthy, my great friends who I miss and can’t wait to see again, and I still have my hope in things getting better.

    Happy Thanksgiving Everybody

  • Struggling to Get By

    I am tired. I haven’t been sleeping well. Trump’s refusal to concede the election, though I knew it would happen, isn’t helping either. I am also getting burned out of the routine that we are in, and I’m afraid of the possible 2nd/3rd wave of Covid that is coming.

    It really is like 2020 refuses to die.

    I am fortunate that I have my wife, as we are leaning on each other for support. We both find ourselves just getting by. In the sense that we can get the bare minimum out, but really can’t seem to muscle anything additional. Such as our Algot shelf project still hasn’t been completed yet. We are close, but still not there.

    The other thing that has been heavy on my mind is that it looks like September 2021 might be the earliest that we can get back to “normal.” If there is a safe and effective vaccine ready for next year, then we are looking at April or May until we can take it. That’s pretty much at the end of the school year. To me that says the kid won’t be back in a class until September. That means we will have a Summer together, and Fall will be the time, hopefully, that I’ll be able to get out there and find a job.

    And that feels like a million years away.

    Another million years of just barely getting by to hope that we get an opportunity to better our situation. Feels like we better have some good luck on our side.

  • Learning to Write

    So, day two of full online kindergarten classes didn’t go any better today as compared to yesterday. In fact it was a little worse.

    Our online teacher is making the best of a bad situation, and she is dedicated to the students and, as far as I have seen in the past five days, she is taking all of the kid’s mental well being very seriously. It has been a morning video chat, and then an assignment asking the kids to draw themselves. Then we had a second video chat about emotions and expressing how we feel. A lunch break with another assignment to watch a video of a person reading a book and asking the kids to draw their favorite part of the story. On the final chat of the day, the teacher wanted all the kids to show their drawing to the class, and then try writing a word or a sentence that can describe the picture each drew. The teacher was very clear that each kid should try writing a sentences, or word, or even a squiggle. She was clearly trying to see where each of the kids was at when it comes to writing words, language, and phonic sounds. That’s when we came off the wheels at our house.

    My daughter got very nervouse, then really embarassed that she couldn’t write out a sentence. Since we were down to the last 15 minutes of the day, and I could see that this was making her very upset, that I sent a text to the teacher that we had to leave, and I shut off the chat.

    This had been building all day.

    This is a big change for all of us, and making sure all the kids know and learn how to express themselves is very important, and our teacher is doing a very good job with that. My kid-o had a very clear expectation in her mind that as a kindergartener she thought that she would be learning, everyday. And with five days of drawing pictures, she was getting confused as to why she wasn’t learning. She kept saying that to me all day, “I want to learn. When will we learn?” Then when she was asked to do something, she ran right into the wall of not knowing how to do it.

    This is my fault, and I know it.

    I spent all Summer with her working on teaching her how to read. We worked throguh two different series of first reader books, and she is picking out words she recognizes in other books, newspapers, and even on tv. But as I learned today, learning to read is not the same as learning to write.

    We spent the next hour working on letters, and writing simple words, and just trying to make her feel confident in learning about writing.

    I’ve got a lot of learning to do myself.

  • Playgrounds and The Kid’s Mental Health

    Playgrounds and The Kid’s Mental Health

    Yesterday, I talked about how the virus may affect us and our kids in the future. I think about this often, especially when me and the kid head to the playground.

    When the playgrounds were closed in the City, it was awful for all of us. We tried to stay active by going for walks twice a day. The one nice benefit of this was that we got to explore all the streets in our neighborhood, but nonetheless it was not a substitute for a playground. Every time we walked through a park, and the kid laid eyes on the playground, I would get the question of, “When can we go back in there?” There was never an acceptable answer.

    With the lack of physically activity, and having no social contact with other kids, my daughter was starting to act out, and undertake behaviors she had never demonstrated before. She was more prone to scream, argue, throw things, and have temper tantrums, the likes she hadn’t done at least since she was three. We had been lucky in having a child that loved to sleep, and went to bed with no issues, but since April, she has been fighting going to bed, and getting up several times a night.

    Now that playgrounds have been open for almost a month now, it has made this situation more tolerable for the kid. Her behavior has gotten better, and she is generally sleeping solidly again. There are still flair ups, from time to time. I am sure that with the kid having a chance to be around other kids, and act out her frustrations and fears, that she is finding ways to cope with all of this stuff. It has been our one glimmer of hope in this season of unpredictability.

  • What Will We Remember from This?

    I had a video chat with a good friend the other day, who lives in Kansas City. He has a three-year-old son, and any day now, will have a newborn on his hands. Besides talking about the general insanity of the world, we started comparing notes of how we have been surviving with cuts to our income. I being laid off, and he having his salary cut. We both have been finding ways to make food last as long as possible, and we throw nothing out. We both joked to each other that we sounded like our grandparents talking about living through The Great Depression.

    When I was little and did ask my grandparents about the Depression, and mind you all of them were in their early 20’s when it happened, they all sort of laughed it off, but also, they did talk about not having a whole lot of money, and making every dime last. I especially remember all of them telling me that thy learned how to fix everything if it broke.

    I might have grandkids one day, and they might ask me about this, but what I really wonder about, and so did my good friend, was what will our little kids take away from this? My five-year-old knows that there was a lifestyle before Covid, and she is already telling me she can’t wait to return to normal when Covid is over. But is she going to remember the anxiety, the uncertainty and the feeling of discord from around the country? How much of this daily, just dumb fuckery will stick in her mind? How will this influence her for the rest of her life? For my grandparents, the Depression made them thrifty, inventive, and they had a sense of common purpose with all Americans to solve big problems.

    I hope we can do the same.