Soph's School of the Mad: Week One

We survived.

I mean, except that we're in isolation. Please pelt food at our house if you're passing. We'll return the favour when we're no longer plague-ridden.

It happened on Monday night. I hadn't been well on Friday or Saturday with a dreadful sore throat and viral symptoms. I felt better Sunday, felt mostly normal Monday. Alex had a brief fever on Sunday night, but recovered without incident. And then, while waiting for Johnson to lock us down, I coughed. A dry cough. Just once.

Then I coughed again.

And then some more.

O Shit, I thought. But, but, but, but, but I've not got a fever. It can't be coronavirus.

By Tuesday afternoon, I'd realised that yeah, this breathlessness, tight chest, and dry cough was probably coronavirus, fever or not. I enquired of 111 online, who told me to basically shutter the windows and dig a trench for the bodies. This is how the peasants must have felt when they first discovered a buboe in their armpit. I regretfully informed people I'd been in contact with, like Typhoid Mary, then went to bed to cry.

I have mild, atopic asthma, so I'm quite used to having a tight chest, particularly in summer. What I am not used to is not being able to hack my lungs up. When they say the cough is dry, they mean it. There's no wheeze, no movement to begin with; it's very odd. But you've probably all got it by now too, so you know this.

However, an unexpected bonus is that I've now got Tom at home to be my TA. Alex insisted on calling him Mrs Daddy, and actually did some work with him. No relentless howl of "I HATE YOU", no trying to break his pencils in half while I shriek "STOP IT, I'VE ONLY GOT THREE LEFT", no crying. A blessed relief. Wednesday, I was unwell, but Jim still managed to make this lot:

All the things you can reluctantly make out a buffalo.

Yesterday was also a moderate success. Alex learned about the planets, and then drew them:

Who knew Mercury was a black hole??

Such skills, very art. Jack got quite tearful because he did all his fun choices early in the week, and only had writing to do. One of his jobs was to write all the clock times in the house in digital and analogue form. Jesus, the wailing. You'd have thought we'd asked him to CREATE TIME. But Jim. Lawd, Jim. He had to make a dream catcher.

It went as poorly as you can imagine. First the wool was "too horrible to touch", then he couldn't be arsed to wind it round a disc. Then we could not work out how to create a star into the middle of it. Then we couldn't fit the supplied beads onto the supplied wool and gave up. Fuck it.

Looks more like a summoning circle than anything...

I saved all the easy work for Friday because I AM A GOOD MOTHER. HONEST.

Jack had to make a model to show the sun, a producer and two consumers. He was wracked with horror over the idea of modelling it out. "Just do it with the garden and playmobil?" suggested LifeHackMummy^TM: This was the slightly appalling result:

I'm not sure what the man is doing to the bullock. I'm not sure I want to.

Perhaps my favourite thing this week was Jim's advert for a magic cupboard. The whole premise of his ?racist? book is that the boy has a magic cupboard that brings toys to life. Jim...produced this entirely unaided:


And on that highlight, have a lovely weekend in the sun, in your OWN GARDEN, regularly WASHING YOUR FILTHY HANDS.

xxx

No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy

We live in unprecedented times, so the blog is back.

Sophie’s Homeschool Diaries

Friday 20th March. Jimmy’s eleventh birthday. The day normality ground to a halt. The schools...The schools closed.

Our household is low risk, but we have so many people around us who are high risk (notably my niece, who’s having chemo and my elderly grandparents) that we have no childcare at the moment, and are effectively self-isolating.

Theoretically, Jimmy should have remained in school as he had an EHCP, but this didn’t happen.

Theoretically, Tom should have been sent home as well to aid me in my quest. This didn’t happen either.

Jimmy’s teacher phoned to give me the terrible news. ‘Try not to panic’, she said, ‘I’ll phone you on Monday’. I’m not panicking, I thought. I’m in hell. There’s no point panicking about being in hell.

“LOLZ GIN”, shouted the other mothers. They can fuck off.

The children dutifully brought home books and boxes of stuff to do, while I hastily scrabbled together a couple of project books and pencils from the shattered remains of Asda’s stationary section.

My ex-husband arrived, with a Twinkl login, jogging bottoms for the kids, a massive chocolate cake, and handwash. For the first time in nearly a decade, I was grateful for his existence.

I sent the older two to their dad’s for the weekend, and retired to bed to cry over the last packet of Lockets. Mother’s Day weekend my arse.

Day One, 23rd March: No Plan Survives First Contact With The Enemy

Monday. 7:20am. My ex-husband rolled up in his van to deposit two overtired, overstimulated blonde children on my doorstep, before rolling away again cackling about seeing us in two weeks. Urgh. Then Tom went to work. Double urgh.

I had warned the children before the schools were closing that we would have a routine in place. All the boys are neurodivergent. Jim’s got autism, Jack’s either autistic or has ADHD or both, we don’t know yet, and Alex has autism plus a language disorder. If there is no routine, they all go to shit, flapping uselessly around, or staring at Dangermouse for seven hours straight. Not on my watch.

The routine is simple. They have breakfast and get dressed. They do PE with Joe Wicks. They do their work in the morning, at the dining room table. When the work is finished, they go and play. They are allowed fun screens after lunch, provided their work is done (so I can get some work done). At teatime, screens go off and they go and do something else. Like eat a packet of dried herbs because that’s all I’ve got in. Boom, educated.

Or at least, that was the plan.

But no plan survives first contact with the enemy.

So day one. Alex got thoroughly overexcited at the idea that a woman called Jo was coming to our house to do PE and insisted on putting his PE kit on. He was somewhat disappointed when permacheerful Essex dickhead Joe Wicks appeared on our living room TV and put us through a thirty minute cardio workout. Limbs, limbs everywhere. Jack enthusiastically joined in, Alex stared at the screen, jumped around a bit and then absconded. Jim acted like he was being RACKED. “I CAN’T DO THIS, I AM TOO TALL”.

Too tall.

PE complete, we retire to the dining room table, where I spent twenty minutes shrieking “WOULD YOU JUST WAIT A MINUTE WHILE I WORK OUT WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON”. Jim’s school have sent a massive box of stuff home to work through, complete with resources. I set him up with an audiobook of The Indian in the Cupboard, which I’m sure is racist, and get Jack to start a coronavirus diary. Then I turn my attention to Alex.

Alex then has a meltdown because I asked him to write with a pencil, when there are FELT TIPS in view. Alex cannot write. Alex cannot draw the number eight. He cannot. He hates me. He tells me at length how much, how deeply, how resolutely he HATES me. I ask him what sentence he wants to write “I HATE MUMMY” he says. Dutifully, I write it out for him to copy. This upsets him more. “BUT I LOVE YOU MUMMY” he says, and then writes I love Mummy. Except he writes it all over the page. Well, at least he can hold a pen now. There is felt tip everywhere. He manages to do some maths, by counting bastard felt tips, and then reads his tricky words. None of the links to youtube videos in his home learning sheets work. None. I give him up for a bad job and send him off with freight trains on Youtube.

Jack has enthusiastically written his coronavirus diary, and asks for more work. He has to do a grid of types of animals and draw some examples. Jack, who has spent the last weekend with his dad’s seven thousand rabbits, cannot remember what a rabbit looks like. “LOOK IT UP ON THE BASTARD COMPUTER” I yell.

You see, I am trying to do maths with Jim, who has finished listening to his ?racist? story and has answered some questions on it. Jim’s attitude to maths is “If I don’t know the answer, who cares?” I can’t do maths. Dyscalculia as a child is bad enough, but I’m an almost thirty-five-year-old wannabe academic, and it’s bloody awful. So, I have to look the answers up on a calculator. I make him do five questions, and then get him to do times tables on TopMarks.

Then Jack goes on TimeTables RockStars while me and Jim look at his science project: plant a load of fucking seeds. THERE IS SOIL, EVERYWHERE, BUT THE SEEDS ARE PLANTED AND ON THE WINDOWSILL. LONG MAY THEY GROW.

Jack has to make a graph of his running times for a week. He runs around the grass in our garden. It takes eight seconds. I chuck him out of the house to run around the close, and he’s almost run over. This takes thirty seconds. That’ll do. We do some spellings. Jim runs shrieking from the room when I suggest he might like to join in with the spellings.

I decide I’ve had enough, and get tidied up. Then I read the first chapter of Treasure Island to the kids, with as much eighteenth-century menace as I can muster. Not Alex. He’s still watching freight trains on Youtube in his PE kit. Halfway through the chapter, Tom phones to say he has LOCATED PROTEIN in Corby Morrisons and I nearly weep with relief.

And now I get to go and do some actual work this afternoon, while they watch TV and build dens. Woop.