I’m going to give myself a little pat on the back: I feel like I’m rocking this home-all-day-ness and keeping the kids and myself sane. I’ve been diligent about creating a routine and setting expectations with the kids on what we need to accomplish each day. It’s not so much about doing certain things at certain times, but more about a list of things we need to get done by the end of the day. Here’s a general outline of how we’re holding it together this quarantine season:

6:00 - my son wakes up and manages to wake everyone else up to. No one else likes this, yet it happens every. single. morning.

6:20 - The beginning of breakfast. Inevitable my daughter is an absolute terror until she gets food in her, and figuring out what is going to work on any given morning is a game worthy of Vegas bookies: what are the odds on waffles being an acceptable breakfast choice? 15:1? But wasn’t it 3:1 yesterday? WHY?????

7:00 - I’ve gone through three or four different versions of breakfast until everyone appears fed, and the combination of sugar and sleep means the kids are bouncing off the walls. I send them downstairs to get dressed which somehow is interpreted as destroy their rooms.

7:30 - I clean the kitchen, get myself dressed, and enjoy my one audience-free bathroom trip of the day. Then I go downstairs to cajole the kids into their school clothes. Yes. I’m making them wear their school uniforms to homeschool to help delineate between school time and home time. Surprisingly, I got no kick back on this.

7:55 - I end up yelling at the kids to brush their teeth as I try to brush my daughter’s hair.

8:00 - School starts! It’s mat time, where I sit in my teacher’s chair and go through the day’s schedule which I have written on a white board I picked up right before the quarantine began.

8:10 - Dance time! I pull up youtube videos like this Hokey Pokey video and this gem that necessitates a guy wearing a train engineer’s costume for no apparent reason. Youtube has a lot of options to choose from, and the movement helps the kids settle down for more serious work.

8:30 - My daughter has a Zoom check in with her homeroom teacher. The first day it was a hot mess as 4 and 5 year olds tried to press every button possible. It’s getting better now that the teacher has figured out how to mute everyone. My son reads his daily reader to me while she’s on Zoom.

8:50 - My daughter has another class at school. Sometimes it is French or Music or time with their teacher via Zoom. If it is with her teacher, I have time to work with my son on some of his work. (Today it was a poetry lesson that covers the sound combination “Pr.”) If it is a specialist teacher, my daughter tolerates it for about 30 seconds, then starts throwing her iPad around and throwing a tantrum. I try to turn off our video and mute her as soon as this starts, then give up about two minutes later and set her up on a reading app so I can finish working with my son.

9:30 - Morning tea time! Everyone gets a snack. I get more coffee because I need all the coffee now. I also clean up whatever crayons/colored pencils/random toys that are on the floor and fair game for the dog to chew up. Yesterday she pooped out pink and yellow crayon poo.

10:00 - My daughter is supposed to watch a digital safety movie, then I set her up with a “writing” project, meaning she scribbles on a page and I spell everything for her. My son is supposed to be publishing a story he wrote later in the week, so I stupidly assume that means he knows how to type. I set him up at my laptop and discover that he can’t type, but he can close every program I have open and delete a lot of work. It’s impressive.

10:40 - Break! The kids play Break the Ice. I can’t stand that hammering sound, so I go fold laundry.

11:00 - My daughter has a math lesson with her teacher that I need to listen in on, so I set my son up with Matific on his iPad. Every 45 seconds he’s calling me over to help him with something. I’m pretty sure no one learned any math and both of my kids realize that I am incapable of double digit addition without a calculator. Also, even with a calculator I can’t figure out the magic triangles exercise. My sides never add up.

11:40 -I sit down with my daughter to do her daily reading while I switch my son to Reading Eggs. She memorizes what I read to her and parrots it back while he covertly plays games. Someday they’ll be able to read chapter books, right?

12:00 - Lunch. Hot dogs, anyone? That’s about the extent of my cooking after the morning.

12:30 - We do Frozen Yoga - not to be confused with frozen yogurt… My daughter loves it. My son would’ve preferred frozen yogurt, but he went along with it anyway.

1:00 - My daughter has a Zoom French lesson that goes about as well as the morning specialist lesson. I leave the conference about five minutes into it, and set up both kids with a few videos my son’s French teacher posted for him to watch. I figure it is some French, so it counts for her, too.

1:40 - We do a STEM activity from my son’s school using a supply they are certain everyone has on hand: canned food. We build a tower of cans, then guess how tall it is, count how tall it is, then measure using first shoes then hands as units of measurement. The kids think this is great fun while I’m worried about denting our cans because they are precious, precious commodities.

2:00 - I set up my daughter with Reading Eggs while I quiz my son on his spelling and math facts he was supposed to memorize this week. Somehow I missed that memo and we have not been working on any spelling words or math facts this week. Whoops.

2:30 - Math Bingo - My daughter’s school sent a game of math bingo home, so I tweak the rules to incorporate those basic facts my son was supposed to learn to make it work for both of them. Mom for the win!

3:00 - My son has a Zoom social hour with kids from his class. They tell fart jokes and bring out their nerf guns. Then they start shooting nerf bullets at their iPads which seems like a bad, bad idea. I give my daughter a coloring page to work on.

3:30 - Outside time! I send them into the front yard to play in their treehouse while I hide in the bathroom.

4:00 -Snack time. Sugar will make everything temporarily better. I hand the kids off to their dad so I ca take a walk with the dog who does not appreciate this new schedule at all. She likes her walks in the morning and tends to follow me around with a displeased look on her face all day.

5:00 - I cook dinner while the kids “play” together - aka destroy their rooms and make it impossible to walk to their beds from the door.

5:30 - We eat and ask each other silly questions. The conversation goes something like this:

Me: R, if you could go anywhere in the world, where would you go?

R: I would go to Neptune.

Me: What about in this world?

Husband: Neptune is in the world.

Me: No it isn’t. The world means “Earth.”

Husband: I think the world means “Universe.”

** everyone stares at each other **

Me: I think you’re wrong.

Husband: I think we’re going to have to agree to disagree on this one.

Me: Fine. It’s two questions. First, where would you go on this planet? Second, where would you go in the universe?

6:00 - The kids take baths while the hubby and I clean up the kitchen and discuss whether or not we should have another movie night tonight. Clearly we should. What else are we going to do?

6:30 - The nightly fight over which Disney+ movie we should watch begins. We’re focusing on the older movies because they are less terrifying than the new ones. Ursula from The Little Mermaid still gives me nightmares.

8:00 - It’s bedtime! I quickly print out my son’s lessons for the next day as they are released around 8 the night prior. I stash them in our makeshift classroom, then begin the nighttime story negotiations. I swear these kids are born litigators and/or the offspring of Mel Horowitz.

8:30 - I’m in my glorious, glorious bed, enjoying the quiet, the ability to lay down without anyone touching me, and a real book that has more than 16 pages, an actual plot, and no illustrations. Did I mention how glorious this is? GLORIOUS.

So that’s us. All day, every day. How are you faring? Do you think there is any chance of us being sane at the end of this lockdown?