Back in January, I had big dreams.
Like many other naïve fools who thought 2020 was going to be *their* year, I had romantically envisioned what our year retiring from the military might look like.
I’d written in my calendar (for August, back in January — because this Type A planner really loves learning again and again that she is not actually the one in control) weekly romantic lunch dates with my husband, and I’d set aside the first six weeks of school to play around with the idea of writing a new book.
With a kindergartner through a freshman all in school, I was imagining morning runs with friends I hadn’t seen since the highlight of my daily schedule was Mommy and Me music class, and I’d already organized my bookshelf in order of the books I was going to read with this newfound margin in my life. (Bring it on, one-year Bible plan, and every book I’ve ordered and never read over the last year. We were actually going to get past the Old Testament this year!)
Although I was originally struggling, lamenting and generally breaking down in near-tears three days per week at the thought of children old enough to be kindergarteners and high schoolers, I had since pumped myself up by reminding myself that I would now have time to return to blogging and meaningful advocacy and writing and regularly dating my forever boyfriend … during lunch dates where little people weren’t discussing their boy parts and eating spaghetti off my plate. In the midst of small humans turning into big ones, these were beautiful things.
But apparently my first year of life I was supposed to have all four kids in school with a retired husband living on this continent was not actually for writing or running or any kind of restful existence after 16 married years of frequently-deploying military life.
It was for EDUCATING.
(No problem, Jesus. It’s not like I completely failed as the building sub that first year of post-graduate life at North Pole Elementary. I would *love* to learn a second time why teachers are so special … and why I am not special enough to BE one. Check.)
Because we have just completed our first Covid quarter, and the only thing this girl has time to write and read around here are emails to co-ops and teachers trying to figure out what on God’s green earth my kid is supposed to be doing.
In our state, children were allowed to return to school in August under a hybrid attendance plan (in our district, two days per week), or they could elect to enroll in an all-virtual academy.
We prayerfully chose to place four children in three schools on two different schooling plans (two hybrid, two all-virtual), while simultaneously creating two different co-ops hosted two days per week at our home for supplemental learning.
Because it was the best option for each specific child.
And because we enjoy making really simple things really complex at all times.
As I was drafting my eight-page (no joke) schedule to ensure that each little learner got to the correct location on the correct day and time, all while ensuring a child of legal babysitting age was home at the same time to ensure that every Google meeting works for every virtual child who depends on our excellent internet that has historically gone out for three Covid weeks at a time, I was beginning to feel like maybe we weren’t so good at listening to the voice of God.
Because cray-cray didn’t exactly exude that supernatural peace I was hoping to feel in the midst of mass chaos.
And for the first six weeks of steep-curve-learning school, there was at least one human crying in my house each week. (Insert raising-hand emoji here, because more than once it was me).
But it’s now week 10. Last week, we officially completed our first quarter of pandemic-style school! And now, instead of crying through the chaos, we’re just doing a whole lot of laughing. (Listen, you haven’t lived until you’ve listened to your middle schooler sit through four Google meetings per day where the most patient teachers on the planet have to ask 6th grade boys to please stop howling like wolves at the computer screen. Just God bless.)
And in the midst of total bedlam, we sure are finding a whole lot of beauty.
Whereas my own freshman year of high school I essentially became so busy with classes and extra-curriculars that I rarely saw my family through the week ever again, Superhero 1’s Covid freshman year has been anything but. And it’s been *such* a blessing to have that motivated, [mostly] kind, responsible and servant-hearted boy HOME (when he’s not out running).
He attends school twice per week and works virtually three days per week, and his course load, even with honors and AP classes, has been light enough that, if he works all day Wednesday and Thursday, he can essentially give himself Fridays off (because clearly, no genes in this 10-words-per-day, introverted academic came from me).
With that free time, he’s stayed involved in youth group, taken up Spanish (he joins Superhero 2’s co-op class twice per week), enrolled in and now nearly completed the Dave Ramsey Foundations in Personal Finance online high school class, worked sporadically with his buddy picking up pinecones at local farms and increased his trumpet practicing from one hour-long session per day to two. He runs six days per week with either his formal high school cross country team (the official season begins in November) or his cross country buddies on off days, and he volunteers teaching guitar and P.E. for his brother’s co-op and the teen S.T.E.M. station for our Thursday morning co-op.
And in a HUGE help to me, he serves as our at-home tutor for all things homeschool.
Superhero 2 doesn’t understand the all-virtual math lesson?
Superhero 1 to the geometry rescue.
Mom is too stupid to understand the difference between convection and conduction?
Superhero teaches Superman the difference.
Mom is too lazy and exhausted to sit through phonics one more time?
Superhero 1 trades in chores for kindergarten teaching time.
At 14 ½ this month, that boy can now enroll in driver’s education classes in our state, and it reminds me just how quickly this quality time with him will be gone.
What an absolute gift, even on the days he acts like a snarky teenager, to have him home so much this year.
While Superhero 1 seems to be enjoying schooling in a pandemic (can you think of a better introduction to high school than social distancing for an introvert who loves independent learning but not so much crowds or being touched?), Superhero 2, our snuggly social butterfly, we knew would NOT.
So we did the natural thing you do for extroverts who need lots and lots of quality, in-person conversation.
We enrolled him in all-virtual middle school.
And then partnered with last year’s Odyssey of the Mind team to create a learning co-op.
The J.E.F.F. Co-op (Junior Educated Fun Friends, as they named it) meets three times per week for 8- to 10-hour days. All seven members are enrolled in all-virtual school, and they gather at a different house on Monday, Wednesday and Friday to attend virtual classes side-by-side their peers and best friends. They form a Covid social bubble, and they get to interact in meaningful ways with the school friends they love the most.
What’s more, because of an incredibly talented and generous pool of parents and grandparents, these kids take Spanish (Miss Lynn teaches the most engaging classes twice per week and the kids practice on DuoLingo 15 minutes per day at home), robotics (my computer programming whiz of a daddy and the talented “Professor Paul” teach programming twice per week and the kids take turns taking home robots for programming practice), band (my musical mama generously donates her Wednesday mornings to band instruction and the actual middle school band director generously volunteers her Monday afternoons to these kids!), guitar (Superhero 1 uses his love for guitar to work with our one guitar player), art (my amazing sister, a professional artist and art educator, provides virtual lessons and occasional live instruction), speech and debate, public presentation (each of the kids are giving a 15-minute “passion presentation” this semester), Mathletes (because Professor Paul the anesthesiologist can teach him some MATH!), P.E. (Superhero 1 the cross-country lover has them running the trail and timing their miles each week) and hands-on science (Professor Paul has them constructing rockets and studying embryology with eggs they incubated for 21 days and hatched into chicks that they now raise and care for).
All while I, the verbose girl whose only talent is pimping out various family members for theirs, have served as the chief writer of obnoxiously long weekly co-op emails and the reigner-in of animal-loving boys who are now begging us for chickens after hatching them from eggs and spending every Friday on a mini-farm.
Truly, this little group who started out as an Odyssey team and now just calls themselves best friends is so stinking special, and hosting them and spending so much quality time with them each week has been such a blast.
It’s also been an experiment in humility.
Mental note: If you want to continue to feel good about your life, do not allow a group of 6th graders to create for you a bitmoji.
What is a bitmoji, you, like me, may ask if you forgot to join the 21st century and have never been taught by a virtual elementary school teacher who now essentially decorates her virtual classroom in such a thing? It’s apparently a digital representation of yourself you use to show the internet community that you are hip and with the times.
It’s also something you should never create if your life is consumed by virtual schooling and co-op organizing and little kid managing and not so much by showers, dressing or changing out of running clothes that you actually run in exactly 1 percent of the time. Unless you want a good, hard, way-too-honest stare in the mirror.
For this year’s middle school yearbook, the yearbook adviser asked each of the virtual middle schoolers to please create and submit a bitmoji for their school pictures.
When they were done, I asked them if they wanted to create one for me (since I clearly couldn’t even figure out how to download the bitmoji app).
Seven sixth graders quickly sat me on the floor and piled up on the couch around one of the girls’ phones and began a conversation that sounded like this:
“Superhero 2, how long is your mom’s hair? We’ve never seen it outside of a ponytail.”
“Superhero 2, what kind of clothes does your mom normally wear? If she owns anything but sweatpants, we’ve never seen them.”
“No, guys, take that off! Mrs. Cuthrell doesn’t wear makeup!”
“Mrs. Cuthrell, we tried to add that deep wrinkle line on your forehead, but wrinkles just don’t look good on bitmojis, so you’ll have to be okay with looking younger in yours.”
All of which resulted in a new bitmoji that looks like THIS.
In younger form, of course.
Because apparently it doesn’t matter what you WISH you looked like or what you DO look like one day per quarter when you attempt to exit your bubble and interact with the outside world. It doesn’t matter that you own a curling iron if you never use it, doesn’t matter if you own a pair of jeans if all you don are stretchy pants.
Because bitmojis, as my sweet 6th graders explained to me, represent what you ACTUALLY look like — not what you WISH you did.
“Bam,” said the woman in purple yoga pants with her hair in a headband and ponytail.
Truly, despite the honest inventory of my wardrobe and my hygiene life, this little co-op has been the biggest blessing. And as we gathered with the other co-op families this weekend and stood by in amazement as this sweet little group choreographed a dance fight with four programmed robots, performed three skits in Spanish, performed three band songs with their ensemble and gave multiple presentations on chick embryology and climate change and bacteria phages to adults too stupid (raising hand emoji) to understand everything they were conveying, all of us agreed that THIS Covid quarter would be one they’ll remember forever.
What a gift for not just these kids but ALL our kids, who have gotten to participate in some form of the co-op each week.
Superman was blessed enough this year to have the same teacher he had for second grade, just in the all-virtual format (which, by the way, this Teacher of the Year just OWNS, customized bitmojis and all)!
He attends virtual school five days per week, and it has been *such* a gift to have this snuggly sweetheart (who still loves holding hands in public) home with me every day.
If we can just be honest, in this life, sometimes the middles can get unintentionally overlooked. (Or at least the middle child who doesn’t talk 500 miles per minute for every hour of every day.) Which is why enrolling just the middles, who are actually the two BFFs in the household and just cherish their play time together at home, in all-virtual school was so perfect.
Superman is an extrovert who loves laughter, loves people and values time with family and friends, but he doesn’t get chatty unless he’s one on one.
So this quarter, he and I have set aside Mondays (the only day other kids are at co-op and school) as our special days. We’ve enjoyed Monday bike-and-runs and special outdoor coffee shop dates, and between assignments, he’s been the biggest helper here at home. (Using the art skills he’s been gaining in weekly co-op classes with Aunt Mandy, he’s also drawn the sweetest pictures for family and friends.)
Although third grade is legitimately taking him from 8 to 5 some days, this little man has bravely jumped into both Spanish and art in his free time, activities he now participates in through Superhero 2’s co-op, and he’s been taking French horn lessons from Grandma on Tuesday nights. And if he has free time, he’s researching, drawing or talking about his favorite animal — wolves — whom he dreams about caring for at a rescue in a professional capacity someday.
I’ll be honest, even with the most incredible virtual teacher, learning via computer is not this little man’s jam, and he’s had to watch videos three and four times to comprehend material he might learn the first time through in a live classroom. But what makes our hearts so proud is that, through tears and sometimes five and six attempts at activities he misunderstood the first time, he’s learned to put in the time, put in the attention and complete work that is getting faster and faster to do as he goes. We could not be more proud of this guy who fiercely fought for every single straight A on this quarter’s report card.
While I host the 6th grade co-op at our house on Wednesdays, this guy and his baby brother (who he has been entertaining and playing with so selflessly these days) enjoy special Grandma and Pop lunches at their house, where Pop both helps with science and math homework and also apparently serves as a fierce Mario Kart competitor. (In an act of sheer sainthood, Pop also serves as the driver and dropper at three OT/PT/speech therapy sessions so that Mama has three less appointments to transport to each virtual schooling week. Thank you, Lord, for parents who could be bamboozled into retiring up the street. Thank God they didn’t see a pandemic and all the neediness in their oldest daughter coming.)
To ensure this little man who can sometimes get lost in a crowd had enough interaction with friends not related to him, we also started a Thursday morning co-op with four other fantastically fun and faith-filled families with same-aged children. We meet completely outside in our back yard, rain or shine, and rotate 21 kids through three educational stations then let the kids run the property and play for the last hour of the day. The teens in the group plan for, execute and teach one informational station each week, which have included such useful sessions as how to create a proper hunting snare, how to properly stretch and run a mile, how to explode soda bottles with Mentos and how to improve teamwork when using a rope to jump from landing to landing. (Because these, friends, are real-world elementary school skills.)
Two other adults form the other two stations, which run the gamut in topic from simple sewing projects to self-regulation and conflict management skills to Mid-Autumn Festival and Chinese customs to seminars on the importance of exercise and nutrition to S.T.E.M. experiments like the Big Bad Wolf Aerodynamics Experiment, where Superhero 3 got so excited that he actually ran into the garage to go retrieve his wolf hat for the big event. (Although if you want to pee your pants, observe Miss Jessy teach the voting and civic engagement seminar to kindergartners. Saturday Night Live has got NOTHING on this K-1 group.)
That leaves one adult each week to play with and entertain the toddlers in the yard while one rotating adult each week drops kids, runs and steals away three straight hours to herself.
Sans children.
And noise.
And bags of snacks hanging out of her fanny pack.
And Zoom meeting alarms ringing in her phone.
Because when we get down to it, this co-op isn’t really for the kids.
It’s actually for the moms.
It’s just that it sounds a whole lot holier to meet under the guise of education when really, these three hours among other adults who don’t speak in terms of poop emojis are really for our own mental health. Halleluhah and praise the Lord for other beautiful, life-giving, life-saving women also homeschooling and half-schooling in a pandemic, and also for those glorious three hours per month off our education-dominated lives.
As for the kindergartner, he stinkin’ loves co-op (the one day we had to cancel because of sick kids and mamas out of town, Superhero 4 angrily demanded, “Why you got to go and cancel my co-op?!”), and he *loves* school. After he attended his first two days in person, he essentially returned home furious that we have withheld this thing called “elementary school” from him longer than he deemed it necessary to do so. (“Why you not tell me kindergarten so fun?!” he demanded on the first day.) He loves his teachers, I love the teacher-to-child ratio (with 10 kids in his class and both a teacher and TA each day, he’s getting more one-on-one help than he would ever receive inside a traditional classroom) and I also love the fact that, in a pandemic, kids aren’t allowed to share supplies.
Which means that rather than going back-to-school shopping and spending exactly $5.2 million on new items that we already had in our house, I just dumped out the entire box of shoddy, half-broken crayons from every school year past and had him pick 12 colors to cram in a soap dish.
And felt 0 percent bad about it.
Listen, when other kids have to use our kids’ shoddy supplies, we buy new. But if these supplies are for said kid who broke all these crayons last year and no one else’s use, we’re shamelessly reusing ALL THE DIRTY THINGS and pretentiously calling it “recycling.”
You need a notebook? Tear the first 10 pages out of brother’s science notebook he barely used last year.
You need erasers? If you put together the four halves at the bottom of the pencil bin, that’s totally the equivalent of two shiny new pink erasers. And bonus, you even practiced fractions along the way.
Great parenting.
On the days Superhero 4 is not with his dynamic duo of a teaching team, he gets stuck with the JV team here at home, where we use flashcards, readers, a packet provided from the school and our homeschooling materials from last year to homeschool the other three days per week.
And we do rainbow writing, lots and lots of rainbow writing.
After umpteen pages of rainbow writing, where Superhero 4 meticulously used exactly 309 half-broken crayons to trace the letter A, this tired half-homeschool mama told him one color was probably fine for the next 25 letters.
Because I was exhausted. And for the love of all things holy, I just wanted some lunch.
He literally gasped.
“Mama!” he cried. “You can’t disobey the rules! I get fired from kindergarten!”
If only you felt that way about chores, my Padawan.
The first month of school, said packet included a house rules poster. The students had to write down one rule they had in their homes and draw a picture of it.
When I asked Superhero 4 what he thought our most important rule was, he first said, “You can’t get married at age 6.” (This is indeed a rule that we had to make when our little Casanova who loves hugging and kissing everything in sight outside a pandemic asked when HE could get married.)
When I asked him to brainstorm a rule we might use a little more frequently in our house, he then said, “You can’t have kids at age 6.”
Also a good rule.
When I asked him to think of a rule he actually had to abide by inside our home on a regular basis, he sat in silence for a moment, tapped his fingers on his paper and then said, “I know! Don’t be naked.”
You know you live in a house full of boys when “please don’t swing your penis around in the family room following your shower” is actually a common phrase in your home.
“Buddy, can you think of any other rule that might be more appropriate for school? Something that you use every day? What’s the most IMPORTANT rule in our home?” I asked him, attempting to prompt something valuable, something with character, something that would indicate that in this home, we actually learn something other than how not to engage in baby making at age 6.
That’s when Superhero 4’s eyes lit up and, without even sharing his answer, he began furiously drawing a picture in the space provided on his sheet.
“That’s a great picture, buddy!” I told him. “Can you tell me what rule it applies to?”
I thought maybe he was illustrating something touching, something beautiful, like maybe “love your brother as yourself,” or “do small things with great love.”
You know, something that would make us look like good parents to the kindergarten teacher and the TA, both of whom I adore and one whose son is best friends with Superhero 3.
He then looked up at me with very serious eyes.
“The most important one.”
“And that is?”
“Don’t interrupt Mom’s shower.”
I can’t even argue with that.
Besides clearly winning at parenting, Super-Spouse and I have been slowly tackling our list of tasks to transition out of the military.
After 20 years of service, my handsome soldier will spend his last day on active duty signing out of post on November 2, and on November 3, he will begin his terminal leave (the three months of active duty leave he saved up over the last several years to use now as padding in his transition out of the military).
That means that, between hosting co-ops and running tae kwon do and cross country carpools and half-homeschooling multiple kids multiple days per week, we’re tackling as many therapies and medical appointments as we possibly can while we still have active duty Army health insurance. (Because, let’s be honest, free is for me!) Between his full-time “internship” as an orthopedic PA in the civilian sector, Super-Spouse is completing his own medical appointments and follow-ups (because it’s always a great idea to self-treat your injuries for 20 years and then take care of all the things all at once the year before you get out of the military) and completing his long list of tasks to clear post and exit the Army. (“It was easier to get INTO the Army than it is to get OUT of it,” said the 42-year-old man who just had to complete his post-Army big boy budget and submit it to the military for approval.)
And together, we’re completing all the household projects and repairs we’ve let go for the last five years of rapidly deploying life and planning a pandemic-style retirement ceremony for the week of Veterans Day, which has somehow morphed into a mini-family reunion full of precious people we haven’t seen for years now gathering outdoors in masks and tents and under showers of hand sanitizer, because, Covid.
Anytime life starts to feel a bit hectic in this virtual-schooling, retirement-transitioning, house-repairing (welcome to living on this continent, baby — grab a paintbrush), checklist-managing life, I just stop, take a deep breath and ask Superhero 2 to please remove his headphones from his chrome book. Because all it takes is 10 seconds of observation of a 6th grade class Google meeting where saints of teachers are asking not just once, but three times, for said boy or girl to please put down the X-box, stop jumping on beds AND LISTEN to remember that my life is indeed AWESOME.
God bless teachers, every one.
And celebrate hard, fellow pandemic-schooling parents. Covid quarter one — DONE.
