COVID Summer Camp: Day 12

It’s Friday, and in the 70s today after a couple days of rain and cold weather. The girls are out back playing with some friends. I just finished cooking some breaded chicken for dinner and have a good forty minutes before my wife comes home. The US officially has the most coronavirus cases, but we have yet to see the brunt of it here. The medical center where my wife works officially has it’s first cases; the first in the city.

I called day care today, planning on officially withdrawing the kids, but they’ve no longer requiring partial tuition payments too hold spaces open, so we’ve just requested a refund on a couple thousand dollars tuition that we deposited a few months ago as part of our credit card rewards hacking. That will take five weeks to come back, then will go in our savings until we determine what to do with it. Not having the $280 a week to pay means I’ll be able to start saving half of that. More on that after I finish Choose FI.

This first week home by myself has been a bit rough. I had trouble sleeping two nights ago and was dead on my feet by the time my wife came home. I’m trying to get as much done on at my desk as I can while keeping the girls off of the TV, but it’s a battle. I’m not having much luck keeping them to the schedule that my wife set up, but that’s mainly because the school teacher can’t seem to have their Zoom meetings at the same time for two days in a row. She’s trying to accommodate parents on different schedules, but it’s annoying.

I start the little one off with Khan’s Academy Kids, so she can learn her letters, then I try to get them outside for a bit before a snack around ten. If it’s raining I try to get them moving via GoNoodle, or there’s a Cosmic Yoga vids that she like’s to do. I may let her watch PBSKids if I’m having issues keeping her busy and I need to get something done.

Her sister, I’m pushing a bit. Trying to get her to do a quiz on Khan’s academy, or on this reading app that the school has suggested. Apparently my second grader is reading at a fifth grade level. I also try to get her to do morning pages, and am still pushing her to play piano even though she says she “hates” it. I think what she hates is me telling her what to do. I’m trying to balance between work and play. I let the two of them watch some Disney+ shows around one in the afternoon, then I let them do whatever they want till their mom comes home. Thankfully they’ve spent several hours outside.

The past few days we’ve been able to do some morning meditation. A short kids-oriented lesson on the Waking Up app seems to be okay with them. This morning we set on the deck on cushions with blankets and sleeping bags, listening to the birds chirping and tweeting at each other.

My wife is attempting to get telework granted, but the beaucracy has set impossible tasks in front of her, as usual. Now that the patients have been prohibited from coming to the medical center, she’s at less risk, and I’m wondering if she even wants to work from home and have to share home-school duties with me. We’ll see.

For school, I’m in the middle of an exam for my computational methods class. I’ve got five days and am about halfway through it. And I’m working on our Django app for my group project. I still have my independent project, which I haven’t worked on much at all.

Work is not much… work right now. I’ve got little to do, so I’m going to have to be proactive to keep myself busy. I’m starting to warm up to some of the other projects I had abandoned months ago, both internal ones and things I can do for my clients, more as exercises for my programming chops.

We’re almost ready to launch the new WordPress site for the local party. I’ve also been looking at a new theme for this site, as well as standing up a professional portfolio/CV site. Right now I’ve picked out a few from Envato Elements, but need to get a few things in order for my cornerstone client before I do that.

Tonight, I promised my oldest that I would let her pick out a video game on Steam. She’s been playing Roblox obsessively, and I was fine with her playing that unsupervised, but some of the games are pretty mindless and last night I found her playing some sort of FPS called Arsenal. I had mentioned that I might work on a game for it, but after looking at the developer kit for it decided that I didn’t have time for another complex project like that. So I’ll let her take a crack at it tonight, or see if there are any of the numerous programming games on there that she’ll like.

We’ve also started planting some seeds. I bought a subscription to SmartGardener, and loaded all my (five year old) seeds in the app. We’ve missed the window for almost everything but the cilantro, but I had the girls plant tomato plants yesterday just as an teaching experience. Something tells me that we’re going to need to start taking gardening much more seriously now.