I wanted to come up with a more creative name, you know… Life in the Time of Corona, or something similar. But all of the good ones are taken already. I was a bit slow to react. Nothing new there.

Ironically, my 16-year-old son said this is his ideal break. He’s amazing, but cerebral and introverted. He generally talks to his friends on a video game platform, so there you go. My 8-year-old daughter, on the other hand, is basically living her worst nightmare. She’s so social that after a full day of school and extracurriculars (cheer, contortion, Girl Scouts, gymnastics) her first question when we get home is typically “Are we doing anything?” It’s never enough; people are like air for her. So the big question is, how do I keep her from suffocating in this season of social distancing?

Today, we discovered the Marco Polo app thanks to a friend’s post. It’s kind of like FaceTiming with a pause button, because the friend can respond to the video whenever s/he wants. Mostly she’s been using it in real time, more or less. While I don’t want her whole life to become about screen time, it does seem to be a necessity at the moment, and not just for her.

My husband is now teaching from home, and like everyone else in this Upside Down world he’s getting up to speed as fast as he can. I’m working remotely as much as possible, and she’s doing math on both a computer and an app. (I’m trying to get her to read for at least an hour a day as well.) There’s even an online PE Coach these days (shout out to Coach Wood on YouTube). It’s a Brave New World, but I’m not feeling all that brave. Mostly, I’m overwhelmed. This is Day Seven, for us. I chose to keep them home a day before the school district made its decision. Weekends are definitely included in that count, since none of us can decipher them from weekdays anymore (maybe this will improve now that my husband is teaching online).

As much as I loved my weekends and longed for a nice break, this certainly wasn’t what I had in mind. Unlike my husband, I wasn’t born to teach, and encouraging my daughter to stay on (some sort of) track is stressful for both of us. My son is thankfully fairly self-motivated, because homeschooling her feels very much like a full-time job. One I didn’t sign up for. Last night I looked at the calendar on the fridge and started to laugh. “Oh look, next week is Spring Break! How quaint!” My husband laughed too, and we probably sounded slightly unhinged. A week ago, my thoughts about Spring Break were filled with annoyance, because while my kids’ break was scheduled for next week, my husband’s was scheduled for April, as was mine, but even our breaks didn’t overlap completely. We had planned for my father-in-law to come be with my daughter next week (my son is capable, but having him watch her would have eliminated his break, and as a junior with a tough course load and AP classes, he deserves one). Now look–AbraCorona!–our breaks overlap!

I’m tentatively thinking I will still view next week as a Spring Break of sorts… give the kids a week of truly unstructured time in which they aren’t required to stay in any kind of learning mode. The week after that the school district is supposed to begin some kind of “flexible learning model.” I don’t think anyone knows what that means yet, but hopefully it will be a starting place, and will give them (and especially her) some kind of structure that doesn’t require me to enforce it.

Like most people, I think I’m in a state of sustained shock. As crazy as portions of my life may have been prior to this, I don’t think my whole life has ever changed so abruptly on such a fundamental level. I mean, parenting, maybe? But obviously I knew that was coming. But this, waking up in a dystopian novel? This takes the cake. I know everyone’s in the same boat, and that helps. No one was prepared for a pandemic, or social distancing… two weeks ago I thought everyone was overreacting. There had been talk of scary viruses before, after all. How was I supposed to predict this? How were any of us?

Right now I’m wondering if I’m going to be any better at this version of life. I’m trying to stay mostly positive, at least around my kids. It’s not about me. My number one job is to help them navigate all of these drastic changes. My fears about the future are really fears about their future, after all. I have to believe we are all going to get through this and that their future will be a bright one. I really have to.

How’s everyone else handling this? Any tips or tricks to share? I’m all ears, truly. I’ve got the time.