Congrats, fellow parents. It seems like we’ve almost done it again. Primary aged kids go back tomorrow and secondary kids follow at their own, test-lined pace. After the 6 month school-hiatus of 2020, we’re all used to understating what we’ve achieved but consider this – this latest break from school has been double the length of the summer holidays but with no holiday clubs, no trips to the grandparents’, no playdates, no cinema, no McDonald’s, no soft play and, for our primary-aged ones, not even an option to legally meet up with another child in the park.
It’s insane, that’s what it is. Pre-2020 it would have been unprecedented. And all at no notice at all. When we got our kids home from school on 14th Dec then were told not to send them in on the 15th, then were supposed to send them back on the 16th but didn’t…we had no idea how long this next stretch would be. And that was just Eva. Roo had already been home for a week at that point. So in many ways, we were as ill-prepared as we were the first time round but this time there seemed to be an expectation that kids would actually do some work rather than just playing Fortnite all day.
We got into the groove in the end. We might have been ill-prepared but schools weren’t and the routine of live lessons and recorded ones began to give the kids’ days a soothing familiarity. Which is just as well because these 12 weeks landed neatly between the Go-lives of two phases of a project I’ve been working on so the idea of being able to take some time off work to homeschool full-time was a bit ludicrous. Don’t get me wrong – I know we’re incredibly lucky to have jobs that we can do from home and I know our 12 weeks has been nowhere near as stressful as it has been for keyworkers who’ve still had to go to work every day. And our kids have been lucky, compared to the keyworker kids who have had to deal with the surreal challenges of virtualschool-in-actualschool.
Still tho, it’s been a bit hardgoing. And it’ll be nice to think that someone else will briefly be reponsible for one or both of them at some points during this week. Let’s just hope they’re back for good this time…
