Day 4 of the Spanish Lockdown: We start homeschooling
My daughter goes to a Montessori school where they do pretty granola–and-nutty kinds of things. Now that we’re off, her teacher is sending work to us each day on a special WhatsApp group chat. We respond by sharing photos of our kiddos doing the work, everyone sends smiling rainbow emoji’s, and such is the new schooling situation.
One thing that really helps is creating a schedule each day with our Little One. We make up the schedule with her together first thing in the morning, and it really makes a difference for all of us to know what’s coming, what the goals are, and what we want to accomplish, so we aren’t just flying blind.
Next up, she is encouraged by her teacher to make us breakfast, since they do that at school daily. On Monday she brought out coffee, yogurt, peanuts, and two slices of toast. And she was so proud. Bless!
We spent the first hour arranging a good schoolwork area for her. She’s still young enough that she doesn’t get homework, and so hasn’t required a proper big girl desk. But if she’s going to be working at home now (and there has been hints from the government that this is going to go longer than 2 weeks), she needs to have an area just dedicated to her work so that it can become a Pavolvian thing. An area just for learning and working, She organized all her supplies, and we got to work on our first activities.
The rhythm of our lives then is that in the afternoon we make lunch, and then we all have an hour of quiet time. It can be with an audiobook, but no TV. Just quiet relaxing in bed, or on the couch. Then I do some work, and Little One gets screen time with papa playing a video game. Then dinner, bath, and bed. We’re trying to keep things as consistent to school time as possible.
Personally, I feel as if I’ve lived a lifetime in the past week. March 7 was when the first case showed up in our town, and we decided to pull Little One out of school for a few days while we saw what developed. We’d been following the situation in Italy, and we didn’t want to be part of that scene if that’s what it was going to come to in Spain. So we’ve actually been on voluntary quarantine for closer to 10 days. At first I think people thought we were overreacting. Then on Thursday came more cases, and schools were closed. So then we looked like the zeitgeist.
As we find our new daily rhythms, realizing that we might be living like this for a Long Time, I am figuring out ways of working my goals and plans back into this new reality. We’re all in shock, and adjusting, but eventually things are going to get back to normal, and those goals and plans haven’t gone anywhere. So my goal over the next few days is to come up with some structures that can support my goals within this confines of the fact that we’re all basically on house arrest.
The first thing I’m finding: getting enough sleep is key. Stress wears you out, and these are nothing if not stressful times. Take care of yourselves. Drink water. Sleep. We all need to take care of ourselves more than ever now. My goal for the next few days is to get the sleep I need. To stop refreshing the news, and just sleep. Because it’s not going to change my life overnight anyway. It can wait until the morning.
We’ll see how the next few days progress. Morale is still high in our town from what I can see on the parents group chats. I’m so grateful we are in our situation now, and that we are weathering this okay so far.
Rain and snow is coming, so we’ll see how I feel after the sun goes away.
