Outside the Frame - Quarantine Edition

It’s day 44 of the COVID-19 pandemic for our household. It’s important for me to begin by saying that we have been incredibly lucky and blessed to be healthy and safe and staying put in our suburban house with a yard and cars we can take for rides.

My three and a half year old son and I spend the bulk of each day together. We also spend a good portion of each night together, since he began transitioning from his crib to a bed just before this whole thing started and has not been sleeping well. Thankfully we’re at the point that we’re averaging one 3am wakeup that requires me to go into his room and help him get back to sleep. It’s a good morning if he sleeps past 5:30am. This morning counted as a good morning, even if my alarm clock was him accidentally kicking me square in the nose (this is the third time my nose has been injured during quarantine, so my first stop when things reopen will likely be a plastic surgeon).

In the beginning, as worksheets and videos began to ping my email inbox and my FaceBook feed surged with educational ideas and color-coded schedules, I felt overwhelmed. I felt a lot of pressure to emulate what others were doing – something I thought I had let go around the time that my son was being evaluated for all of his differences and I had to accept that it would be a while – maybe never – before we would be doing what everyone else was doing. That was back when going to a simple birthday party was something to seriously consider and probably forego because he would become overstimulated and try to leave or get upset by a sound or sight and lash out. Thankfully, birthday parties have become something he mostly likes now (except when “Happy Birthday” is sung, although I know adults who don’t like that, either).

But this new challenge, this being at home with no school, no afternoon gym or science classes, and no in-person therapies (no SEIT, no Occupational Therapist, no Physical Therapist, no _T of any kind), was going to be difficult in an entirely new way. So why did I think that I should just jump on the homeschooling bandwagon? I’m happy for others for whom that has worked. But after a few days I realized it wasn’t going to work for us and I significantly lowered the bar for what counted as a good day.

What’s working is a goal of one eight-minute quasi-educational activity every day. What counts as a quasi-educational activity? Anything we do while awake that doesn’t involve an ipad…unless that ipad has a teacher on Zoom or a letter or number activity, then that totally counts!

I’m here to be honest about what this looks like. If you need an antidote to all those curated FaceBook highlights of preschoolers baking neat loaves of banana bread, making sidewalk chalk “thank you” signs that double as letter-tracing work, or basically anything anyone is doing from the Busy Toddler website, you’ve come to the right place.

Earlier this week, I convinced my son to engage in a rare sustained pretend play session. This was sparked by my giving him an electronic cash register with a scanner. We set up the aisles with toy food that has been laying untouched around our house for months. We grabbed a toy shopping cart that he inexplicably had only used to load down with random items and cover with a blanket (creating his own heavywork?). We took turns being the shopper and the cashier. When he was the cashier, he helped me find items I needed and even asked if I would like “big broccoli” or “small broccoli”? I definitely wanted small, or none, but he insisted I take the big one. Maybe he knew of a sale that day? He scanned and bagged my items, loaded them into my shopping cart, and even carted them all the way home to my play kitchen. We both laughed when we realized the supermarket cashier had left his post and had somehow ended up in my kitchen, as if that would be so funny if it happened in real life and not creepy at all. Then we switched roles and he shopped and I checked out and bagged his items.

But for every half-hour supermarket play session there are 33 refusals to make seed balls out of recycled paper for Earth Day and a baker’s dozen refusals to make cupcakes, ice them ourselves and top them off with ample rainbow sprinkles. Who doesn’t want to make cupcakes?? I mean, I shouldn’t want to since my sweatpants are fitting like a second skin... For every supermarket play session, there are also failed introductions of new Play Doh sets where I extrude, mold, and model shapes, and he takes the remaining Play Doh, smushes it all together into a ball, smears it like a new finish all over the table, then wants me to extricate it back to separate colors, and lays on the floor having a tantrum when I can’t.

I think we need an Instagram post about which stand is best for your child to be on your iPad all day while you make your seventh cup of coffee. I think we need an Instagram post about how to make a homemade pooch patch for your leggings so you can let them out and keep eating. How about an Instagram post about how okay it is if you want to put your maternity leggings back on during this time? Or one suggesting the best flavor ice cream to let your child have for breakfast?

Daily I also try to have my picture-perfect moments. A recent high for me: My son building LEGO with me and actually completing something. A recent low for me: Just as the last little brick is going in, a little Godzilla stomping all over it before the first pretend scene even began. If that’s not a good metaphor for these days, I have others...and they’re not metaphors, they’re things that have actually happened. Like the joy of seeing my son rediscover puzzles and start putting the pieces together on his own, only to misplace one piece, scream “It’s ruined!” as he chucked the whole thing to the side of the room followed by his body onto the floor. No biggie, not like I haven’t done this in my attempts to cook dinner.