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