Lockdown and Homeschool.

Hey, how's everyone doing in day five of lockdown? What I don't get and what I just kept saying while watching the news was "why didn't they close things ages ago?" Schools were still open 8 days ago! and I couldn't really take things seriously when the schools were still open. I mean I wasn't like going around licking Grannies and stuff, but I did meet up with people and take Eric swimming in the last week of schools. It was last weekend I thought "time to take things seriously now the schools are shut."

Obviously we should all be careful and stay indoors and that means hopefully in 2 weeks time not a lot of people will be dying from this. But the people who are dying today got infected when schools were still open and people were still living almost normal lives, and I personally would blame the government for that. I don't know all the ins and outs and science and economics but it's not like we were the first country to get this and didn't really know what we were doing. However much hand washing and social distancing we're doing today it's not helping the people who got it a week or two ago.

My sister Sarah has had a crazy time recently as she was due to get married on 11th April. At first when this stuff came into the news she thought "ok maybe I have to limit the wedding to less than 100 people", then she thought she'd have a very small wedding in the church and a big celebration in a year, then even her small wedding was not possible because the banns of marriage were not published 3 times, and churches were shut. Then she planned an outdoor social distancing small family wedding which would not be legal, but managed to see this wedding wizard guy who did something magic so that the banns thing didn't matter anymore. Straight from there they went to the church in normal clothes, got legally married with 2 witnesses and went back to separate houses. In her head the "real" wedding was going to be in the garden today where she would wear her dress and we would sing some songs and play some games at a safe distance. Then we went into lockdown and this was no longer possible. I suggested we all planned our weekly shop at the same time and that she walked down a different kind of aisle in her dress, but she didn't go for it.

Homeschooling has been quite fun at times, I'm sure the novelty will wear off. I feel like Eric is getting a bad deal. He normally gets me to himself in the day, but now a lot of focus has been on Percy's learning. We have a timetable which starts with yoga at 9AM. I love this kids yoga, Cosmic Kids yoga on YouTube. It's basically putting your kids in front of YouTube guilt free, Percy loves it. Eric joins in sporadically. At 10am I've been doing live craft which has been really fun. I like the interaction of it being live, but it is a little stressful when Eric is kicking off and having to make the crafts at a few different stages is effort. Yesterdays was super fun though.

Day 1 weaving

Day 2 Treasure maps

Day 3 Magazine holder

Day 4 Turtles

Day 5 Giant board game.

If you want to follow the crafts like my page.

It 11AM Percy does half an hour of reading while Eric has half an hour of 1-on-1 time with either me or Dan. Percy's reading is painfully slow. 12 is lunch and exercise time.

Then we have a bit of time for school worksheets. The teacher also sends work, yesterday was make a butterfly and we smashed it.

This school time is great if Eric naps, which is not what normally happens. Today we drove to a park (now banned I think) and we drove a bit extra to get Eric to sleep, which meant I could teach Percy properly. I quite enjoyed today's lesson where I taught him about money, how to recognise the coins, what £2 could actually buy you. He loved it, and it was a nice feeling to be like "I actually taught you something you didn't know today." It makes me think I should do more stuff like this in school time.

The kids watch TV at 3 and have daddy time after that. The first the plan was for him to teach music and French, but I think this was a bit ambitious at the end of the day.

Today I was feeling pretty positive, I like change, I've video chatted this week with people I haven't talked to for ages.

Extended family chat

I even played Monopoly with our friends Jess and Martin. It works well if you have two boards and when you owe money you put it in the bank and they take it out of their bank.

It's nice to have a break from doing so much comedy, it's nice to have lunch as a family, and now that they've announce the self employed thing I should be fine for money. But then I watched the news...
People are dying everywhere, but the thing that made me really sad was seeing a massive refugee camp of Syrians who don't have running water. So far no one there has it, but it's only really a matter of time before someone gets it, and then everyone will get it and anyone who would go to hospital here, and have the chance of getting better, will just die.
I don't know what I can do about that other than pray, but there's ways I can help people here. There's friends I can check up on, and I'm helping with a Food Bank. I hope my art is fun for parents out of ideas. I really hope I can be generous, and kind with what I have.

Stay safe x