There is a lot of talk of how COVID has squashed our adventures this past year. If that’s how you see it, you haven’t been looking hard enough. Home with four young children, three of which are participating in online schooling fills our house with enough adventure to keep the heart racing and adrenaline firing.
The rush one gets when poised and ready for adventure is alive and well here. It starts before my eyes are open. I should have them closed so as not to see the challenge looming before me but no, they are closed because I am asleep and small children are already protesting that today is a school day. Despite their protests of the day starting, they are up early to protest. Why not have a good sleep in to fortify oneself for rebellion? A good rabble rouser needs their wits about them. The protest isn’t going anywhere. Not seeing my point perhaps due to it being mumbled, I summon any enthusiasm not beaten out of me by a year living as we do now. While there is no leaping into a white water rafting expedition or testing the springiness of a bungee cord, I do have to half blind extricate myself from flailing limbs and stumble my way downstairs to the most magnificent of adventure companions, the Keurig. It and I have seen much together and it doesn’t fail me now.
Children would like to play Monopoly with me and it’s dark outside. They know my limitations and wait for the coffee to hit my bloodstream. Sight gradually returns and I can open my eyes more with each sip. Game is played, arguing ensues, good morning check-ins and snuggles and finally some breakfast. There is jam, yogourt and crumbs everywhere, people for some reason are pacing while eating, I am refilling endless glasses of milk and the dog has stolen someone’s egg. Seeming to think I can’t find them if they scatter, I turn around to help myself to just a wee bit more caffeine and perhaps the crust of someone’s toast eaten over the sink, and everyone has vanished. The joke’s on them though. Since we don’t leave the house, I know they are here. Abandoning any semblance of order in the kitchen I hunt and gather children and herd them upstairs. Once we arrive with me carrying and chasing, the only motivation to get dressed or brush teeth is mine alone. And this is waning. Most days we settle for some semblance of hygiene by teeth brushing and if someone wants to change clothes or perhaps wear a cat or pumpkin costume, that’s success.
We have been awake for hours before it’s even decent and somehow it is almost 9:00 and we are at risk of tardiness to reach the dining room that has been converted to a school room. All children have at least some teeth brushed, some degree of clothes have been adorned, and somehow I am still wearing my panda nightgown that says “the snuggle is real” and my teeth aren’t brushed, but we have made it. No one will sit down, my son has disappeared to the basement, one of my daughters is under the table and the youngest has decided to climb into the fridge to retrieve food as she is soooo hungry pleading why I never feed her. And worse yet, I have misplaced my coffee.
Setting up laptops and making sure camera angles are forgiving enough not to be pointing at yogourt and crumbs or general chaos of the house we somehow settle. Miraculously someone is online at 9:00, someone else at 9:15 and the other child will get to work….eventually. I am careful to avoid camera shots as I am still in my pjs. My eyes are almost all the way open with the excitement/panic of the start of school and I’m feeling fairly confident that we may have made it for another day of education when the 5-year-old bolts to avoid Jack Hartman singing his heart out to the seven days of the week. Ignoring, cajoling, encouraging has no effect. I have now resorted to threats. Not exactly the introduction to school I was hoping for, but it has the desired effect and she is back sitting more or less in front of the laptop and more or less listening to the earnest and kind kindergarten teachers trying to make this work. She and I settle for her close proximity to the laptop and a good colouring sheet.
Turning my attention to my son, he is easy to find as he is repeating his mantra “I hate school, why do I have to work” loudly as soon as I round the corner to the basement. My husband is also online in the basement and this view of his homelife must be enthralling for yet another audience in the house. The mere sight of my son’s journal which I bought specifically to encourage him and have decorated with stickers has him bellowing. The slightest whiff of the words of the week has him rocking back and forth. We settle for worksheets and while he may write the letters, he is making noises I can only compare to that of a sick moose. It’s actually quite impressive that he can still possess the manual dexterity to print words ending in -uck while still emitting such sounds. Surely this is extra credit? Any older and he would use those phonic skills to complete the -uck words rather aptly.
The three year old has now retrieved whatever it was I never feed her from the fridge and has joined us and begun to search for the ipad. We have until the pandemic kept all children off the tech rather well and here she is, oblivious to my heartache, clutching the ipad to her heart and declaring her love for the device. I might if I am lucky tempt her to colour with me while I work with Bullwinkle or perhaps she can crash the kindergarten program with her older sister. She will at some point turn to me and confess she has done no work today and “why don’t you ever let me do work?” So now I don’t feed her or provide her an education. She’s got me.
Keeping an eye on all who need paper, attention, misplaced work, or the continual flow of food and drink is not making me perform to my best abilities. Sometimes I turn around and someone is gone again. And sure as shooting as soon as I admonish anyone, the oldest child has unmuted her mic to speak to her class. I shudder when I think of what gems of conversation each class has heard from our home. Long suffering moose, dog barking, hungry children crying and a mother clearly on the edge.
At some point I feel I can scoot away to change and brush my teeth. Or at least change. It’s a risk. It must be the right balance of engagement and independence. At least I think that’s the recipe. I can’t recreate it. Maybe had it once. Regardless, I will at some point slip away and then will have to tear down the stairs as dog is barking and someone is unmuted and blessed ipad is running out of battery. The other day I heard my oldest daughter yelling at the dog in a voice that sounded hauntingly like myself and then unmute herself and speak to her teacher in the gentlest of tones. They are learning much. I seem to only have the one voice these days, and it borders on desperation and frustration and maybe on a good day a little angsty. We are here all day, every day.
Where is my coffee cup? I sneak in to the kitchen yelling commands, suggestions or encouragements as I go. I maneuver my way around laptop cameras and try to look supportive and in control of all that is happening here and make my way to my friend, Keurig. It understands me. I stand taller as I walk by and realise out of reflex I was composing myself as if there was a camera in the coffee maker. Now to the best of my knowledge there is not but in my own home I was now tiptoeing around and worried about what the world will see. I laugh at myself and utter a small prayer of thanks that there is no camera there. Can you imagine what those early morning headshots would be? My coffee maker loves me despite my air of desperation and is simply intrigued by that new twitch when my oldest yells, “mama, the teacher is going to pick me. Make everyone be quieeeet!” The Keurig may even love me because of, not despite, these things. Adventures bond us. My husband thought my adding the milk to the cup as the coffee maker poured was a little on the desperate side, but my Keurig doesn’t judge. It indulges and sustains.
The coffee was not finished pouring and there are now open cries of dissent coming from the school area. At some point I will release the five-year-old and shortly after the six-year-old needs a break as he sees his sister skip off out of the clutches of school. The eight year old perseveres for some time. There are periods of highs and lows, chases, pestering, playing, arguments, pleading by children and myself, and through it all I continue to lose my coffee cup and the dog continues to bark. It’s 10:30. More food and drink. Break time. Rev up and go again. At night when all children and wildlife have quieted, I can still hear the moose when I close my eyes. I ponder that we will all be illiterate including myself by the end of it. The end…of it. The end? And then I realise at this point, I’m not too sure I care if we are.
I have no idea if what I am doing is right in this adventure. I don’t know if I have the right approach or attitude for four lively minds to be remote schooling. We made the big decision to keep them home and make little decisions every day to educate them. The adventure is the constant balance of formal education, exercise, happiness, calm, confidence, play and a healthy awareness of current affairs. Some days are better than others. I would make the same decision tomorrow, the adrenaline junkie I am. I would however, like to remember to stop bending over in front of the cameras as I tidy. Laura Ingalls, you had it so good in your one room schoolhouse – not one camera.