April 4, 2020
The middle girls have mellowed and are not on hair triggers as they were during our first week of lock down. It helps that the weather has been heart wrenchingly beautiful. I didn't expect that we would have weather like this in North Carolina---lush, green days, clear and cool and bursting with bird song.
They spend long hours in the backyard, constructing a town they call "Rose Gates"--their own backyard
Roxaboxen. The shops are crepe myrtle twigs stuck in the ground and lashed together with twine or long grass. Pip is the one designated to climb the crepe myrtle tree and rip off branches. We would have objections to this if we didn't know that the previous occupants ruthlessly cut the branches--Pip is only doing the pruning that her parents are too preoccupied to perform.) The girls make themselves hammers, bows and arrows, and brooms from the twigs, rocks, and pine needles they find. They're delicate, preposterous little creations; Don and I get great pleasure from seeing them. This seems like childhood properly spent.
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| A Rose Gates Structure |
Meanwhile, the school's communication App, Seesaw, is all abuzz with suggestions for online activities, and the homeschool schedule I drew up two weeks ago includes "device time" from 1pm-2pm. I'm having a hard time actually reading my email or Seesaw or mustering ambition for anything other than maintaining a livable order. Allowing the girls to spend their afternoons outside or perusing the picture books we have lying arounds seems more conducive to a comfortable, livable order, than a Lexia and DreamBox regime.
Speaking of order, last week we welcomed two office-grade cabinets for our living room/school room. After looking into options (do we install built-ins, do we buy bookcases, etc) Don and I decided to favor durability and ease of locking. Someday, these cabinets may be relegated to the office or garage, but for now, their job is to corral art and homeschool supplies. There's a time for crafting and there's a time when you need a rest from swarms of felt bits, paper scraps and stray colored pencils. Need I mention that we spent more time herding up all the little pieces of the educational games we owned than we did playing them? The principal agent of chaos is little Donnie, of course--but we all benefit from the ritual of locking and unlocking. Here are the cabinets, Zigzag and Chewy (so named, because of the shapes of their respective keys). They're a tad utilitarian--and a tad dark. My romance with black furniture may have gone too far here. But we're grateful for the storage and a little more order. We can even hang the kids' artwork in the plexiglass windows.
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| Living Room/School Room |
