Happy Monday

Today was super busy. It is the first day of my first term in graduate school. Ahhh!!! This probably will sound weird to some, but grad school is a bucket list item for me. It’s an achievement that I have dreamed about since high school in the way that some people decide that they want to become a medical doctor. I didn’t know that I would end up in nursing and it took me a few years to determine which direction in nursing it suits me to be.

I’m a little intimidated as I look out at the long list of work ahead in this term, let alone the whole program. However, I know that I can do this, and I’m stubborn as a mule, so the saying goes. So, one day at a time, one page at a time.

I get the privilege of traveling down this road with an awesome MBU colleague too! Maria shared initial sentiments about the load and journey ahead. How cool is it to travel alongside another!?! A fellowship!

Anyway, I feel pretty tired after that long Zoom orientation. My mouse croaked in the middle of it, so Jon and I took an impromptu date to the Apple store. Where we only allowed ourselves to purchase one (rather expensive) but awesome trackpad to replace my mouse. Anybody want to give me a all I can grab sweepstakes at Apple? No? Hurmph!

We grabbed some sandwiches from a street vender and sat in the warm breezy courtyard while we ate. That is as close to dinning out as we have been since January. It was so nice to be away from the kids for a minute and just enjoying the quiet of each other’s company. I’m not sure how I can properly emphasize my need for those moments. Wes had an awful morning. He was screaming and melting down constantly. When he wasn’t, he laid his head on the table and covered it with a blanket. It seems that it is not just “going” to school that he dislikes. At lunch he started slapping his face over and over. When Jon tried to restrain him, he actively and vilolently resisted. Jon ended up walking him to his room where he was screaming and hyperventilating. It was a demonstration like we haven’t seen in a long time. Eventually I replaced Jon so that he could eat, and I used my Apple Watch Breathe app to help him find calm. I suggested a long time ago that Apple turn that into a phone or IPad app for kids like Wes, but I don’t know that it has happened.

Finally, Coco has been licking and gnawing a lot recently. I noticed an area above is right front leg that he won’t let me see very well. It’s yellowish and crusty and sensitive that he nips when I even touch the hair around it. We took him to the vet hospital because his vet wouldn’t see him, no appointments available. I was right, he had three infected areas. They think it’s allergies, so now he is getting antibiotics and an antihistamine. Hopefully this calms things down!

TGIF

Since I usually work every Friday, TGIF is not usually in my vocabulary, but today, TGIFF!!! I can see how live interactions with teachers and other students is helping most of my kids, especially Liv. But I can also see how stressful it is for them trying to follow their schedules, keep track of zoom links and assignments, and focus on what needs to happen in an environment full of things they would rather be doing. We all need this weekend. We need to regroup, rest, revitalize all that crap. Even my dogs look stressed out.

Wes is having a lot of behaviors. I think virtual classrooms are too busy for him and he can’t follow what is happening, so he just doesn’t try. He talks constantly to us or his PSW, but can’t seem to say a word to his class. The microphone goes on and he freezes. He screams and whines about every 5-10 minutes. He is excited for Halloween, which I can’t seem to emphasize for him enough, will not look anything like he is used to. I do t even know how to make Halloween fun this year. He hates that it’s fall, that we have a family of 6, the number 6, that he has to be in school, that we read books together, that his IPad has time limits, that 8 is bedtime, that the sun comes up, that Cheerios and pancakes don’t fall from the sky in unlimited quantities… I can go on, but I won’t.

It’s been raining for three days, on and off. I’m so grateful for rain, but I’m also feeling constrained by it. This morning I curled up on a chair next to an open window in my bedroom and just tried to hear the rain, feel the wind and the light. Loose myself in nature. Sure, it was a woo-woo moment, but sometimes our brain and bodies need woo-woo!

One week down!

CDL day 4

Ava has been working so hard this week. Wednesdays the school decided would be basically independent work days. Ava’s teacher sent me a list of her assignments, and when I went to enter them into her planner, she already had two of them written there. I wasn’t expecting that, but I was very pleased. She got started right away after her morning meeting and kept at it until everything was crossed off. Consequently, she was able to play the rest of the afternoon.

Today, she was able to log into all of her zoom classes on her own, and got set up for her tutor. When she is on, she does very well. I hope this carries on, but I anticipate that at some point it will overwhelm her. Until then, I intend to praise her well!

Wes continued to struggle, but did get into a Bingo game and scavenger hunt during one of his classes.

Taylor and Liv had a good day. Tay was eager to share what he learned in Marine biology. Liv was feeling better about math, but likes their Tuesday Friday schedule better.

Fall Harvest

I’ve been feeling a lot like a pioneer woman lately. I have been making jams, butters, apple pie filling, and canning pears. I tried to start slow to save stamina for the end of the fall fruit harvest, and well, now that is here. More and more pears are falling from the tree, which tells me that they are extra ready to come off. So today I enlisted some help. That is a huge Tupperware bin full of pears and a few apples that were hanging on!

My bold and fearless helper trying to learn the knack of picking the fruit that is really high up. Last year the pear tree got so tall that we decided to cut it back, but it still feels pretty tall! The fruit at the top is usually the best quality, although the squirrels have left their mark on a few.

Picking the fruit at the top is annoying because you can only get one fruit at a time, and unless you have multiple poles (which we don’t) only one person can pick at a time. It is helpful to have a helper that can stand a bit away to grab the fruit off the picker.

This tree is absolutely beautiful and filled with fruit. We have already been eating fresh pears for about a month, and canned 6 jars, with 5 jars of pear butter. I also made 2 batches of apple pie filling and a half gallon of applesauce from the apples on our sad recovering apple tree.

There I am! Grabbing the pear from the picker! And doing the photography! Don’t worry, I did some picking too. It takes more muscle that it looks, to aim and lift the pole in just the right place to snap the pear off and drop it into the picker. My abs and shoulder feel like they got a workout!

There is the sad apple tree. It had a major injury a few years ago, and last year literally broke in half. I cried as we sawed off the effected bits and cleaned up the half grown apples. This year I tried to thin it out early. It worked a little. My goal for next year is to try to get the pests under control. The apples that did grow well, grew big and crisp. they had delicious flavor, but they didn’t look very good.

This is our Cherry tree. Jon bought it for me for mother’s day last year. We drove it home in the back of our mini van and planted it here… obviously it enjoyed some growth. I can’t wait for it to have cherries! I really thought we were going to get some this year, but we didn’t. It is supposed to have five varieties of cherries when it does make fruit. It also had beautiful blossoms this spring. All the trees blossom at slightly different times, but is ok because we get to enjoy them in different stages. Though it would be gorgeous to see them all in bloom at once!

The gods of comprehensive distance learning gave us the gift of Wednesdays. On Wednesdays all the kids have one zoom period and the rest of the day is “work”. Today it was a gift, but it might be more of a curse later as they have more complex work to do. Anyway, I will take it. Chasing around all the kids to make sure they are in the correct zoom at the correct time is a full time job, and I don’t really appreciate it. I hope as they get more used to it, it gets easier.

Busy Life

I often feel really bad about not connecting better with people. This has been especially evident since the quarantine began mid March. Westli mostly, but all my kids in general, function best when there is a rigid routine. Consequently, I have worked hard to establish a routine since immediately following the announcement that schools were being closed here in Oregon. As the schools began making distance learning activities on their own, I have adjusted our routines as needed, but to keep track of each child’s specific things (zoom meetings, assignments, social engagements, and IEP meetings) I would be lost if not for my Google calendar. I was looking at this yesterday and realized that it was a profound act of juggling that I do everyday to get us through each week. This is the best way to demonstrate it.

In just 24 hours, today has morphed a lot as our school district announced, and teachers embraced, the reintroduction of whole class “meetings”. Today, it so happens, that all four of my kids have a “meeting” at 10am. I have heard a lot about what other families are doing to survive this time, and I don’t think any one solution can work for everyone. I wanted to share a glimpse of what this quarantine has meant for us and excuse away my own guilt for letting some of my social obligations fail.

In the Stanis house, we await the June 12th official close of school and their disruptions to our routines. I look forward to letting the kids sleep until 10 if they want and not keeping track of all their meetings and assignments!

Fudgy

Checking in

Hello from the Stanis Family quarantine, ehem social distancing… whatever. It feels like a quarantine, so let’s just call it what it is. Quarantines have been used for many hundreds of years to keep from mixing the sick with the healthy. Essentially this is what we are trying to do. Enough of that though, I thought it was time for an update about how the Stanis’ are coping with life in the face of SARS CoV 2 (the virus that leads to COVID 19, a disease). No one here has any symptoms of disease. Liv had cold symptoms a few days prior to the schools shutting down, but recovered her runny nose without incident or intervention. Therefore, we are not living in the face of COVID 19, just SARS CoV 2.

Having disclosed that we are all healthy, I will say that this season has been our worst season in a while. The kids one or more of them, have been sick (runny noses, coughs, fevers, ear infections, etc) since November! So this kinda feels good from a health perspective.

So Oregon schools cancelled as of March 16th (a Monday) Tay and Liv had a scheduled day off on March 13, so really they had an extra 3 days. Ava and Wes did have school that day, so our quarantine really started on March 14th.

Having kids with special needs, we knew that this shutdown meant that I had to figure out a routine. My kids all thrive on some sense of routine. I started with a “Covid 19 schedule” that quickly spread around social media pages. This was a great place to start. I learned during the first week that we couldn’t really have an academic period in the afternoon. My kid’s attention, especially Wes’, was so spent that it was impossible to try to learn anything. I also learned that while it was a great idea to put away electronics during the morning, I was pretty dependent upon electronics for most of my academic ideas, thus we needed electronics during academic time. So after our previously scheduled spring break, we embarked upon a new schedule that looks like this:

We have been following this one since yesterday, and so far, its working better for our lives. Tay and Liv go to a school that practices project based learning. So in the morning I try to come up with some kind of lesson (yesterday we made a sour dough starter) that we work on as a group. I try to incorporate math, reading, and writing skills into these “lessons”. In the afternoon, they can use creative time and project time to explore topics that they are interested in. Liv, Tay, and Ava then present what they learned during this time while we are having dinner. We expect that they will have a more formal presentation of everything they learned on Friday. Hopefully I can post them here later.

The schedules are met with a little resistance here and there, but for the most part, it creates an understanding of what is expected to happen. Wes has the hardest time with this. While it helps him to know what is coming, sometimes he doesn’t prefer that activity = resistance. This is not surprising and I try to keep reinventing things to keep it fresh, light, and interesting. Today he spent nearly his entire second table time learning typing lessons with an app on his iPad. It was mostly independent and easy. Which is an A in my book!

As for me and Jon, we are carving out time to keep exercising. This really is the only time we have for ourselves. Last week I went for a jog and an older gentleman on the trail (the trails were packed) pointed out that we had a similar pace. He asked if I minded if he walked along with me. I’m a really accommodating kind of person, so I said I didn’t mind. We had a nice casual conversation and stayed more like 3-4ft apart. In truth, I minded a little. As I said, exercising is the only time we have to ourselves. Every other minute is filled with kids or dogs needing something from us. I miss the hours of the kids at school when I could clear my head and get things I needed to get done taken care of. I felt good though, when it was time for me to turn back, because I think giving the man my “time” was a big thing to him. And right now we all need a few “big things” once in a while.

Our seclusion has marked the end of “winter” and the beginning of “spring”, quite truly here in Portland. Near the beginning the kids enjoyed our first, and only snow fall this year. Wes was dying for snow, he and Ava even scrambled outside to erect a “snowdon” before everything melted in the afternoon. Of all of us, he is the only one who really misses snow. I think that is because he never had to deal with any of the mess of it. Maybe I would like it too if I only got to enjoy the fun of snow.

We kept meaning to get up to the mountain to play in snow, but it just hasn’t really worked out this year. And with the virus shutting everything down, I’m not sure we will get there this season. Our governor has closed state parks, trails, and beaches. It saddens me because the state of things really is so dire. I hope in the end that we all will understand how very necessary our sacrifices were. The kids and I have talked about this a lot to them understand. The idea of not having school has been distressing to most of my kids.

“Snowdog”

As you have been reading along, I included some photos I took while on walks of spring’s blooming. I hope they can provide some brightness to those of you who are not yet blooming.

Welcome Spring