All Aboard The Crazy Train

 You know, life is weird these days.

There's this pandemic floating around, and I don't mean the board game Pandemic (which we own and have been fittingly playing a lot of lately). I mean a world-shifting, school-closed-since-March pandemic. 

School.Closed.Since.MARCH.

I mean, I can't really complain. If you're going to live during a pandemic, living on a secluded island in the middle of the North Pacific Ocean is an ideal option. COVID cases are extremely low, and basically everything is open. 

Including school, officially, starting today.

But that's not to say that school is normal or anything. It's like normal with an asterisk - school is open** - with masks required all day, social distancing (a term I'm so tired of hearing), temperature taking, and all that. Which is fine(ish) and all, for now, until it isn't fine, we have a flareup or an outbreak or whatever you want to call it, and school is moved to virtual (inevitably). 

We did virtual school from March through May. It wasn't pretty. In fact, it was miserable. The boys hated virtual school almost as much as I did, especially when they had virtual class at the same time, then virtual small groups, virtual PE (that was actually a thing), and virtual Boy Scouts. 

That's a whole lot of virtual. 

And in the end, I virtually had two completely insane, grumpy, stir crazy, frustrated kids whose eyeballs melted out of their face whenever I mentioned the words "zoom meeting" or "Log in to Bluejeans."

And thus, we had to get creative for this upcoming school year and it's potential slew of "what if and when" questions. 

You know how you control things that are out of control? By taking control. If we can't control public school, it's rules, or the anxiety that both boys had about "if" school closes again, then we MAKE OUR OWN SCHOOL (enter mad scientist laugh here).

Honestly though, homeschool is a word I used to choke on when spoken out loud. It made me shutter and my eye twitch. But, life is weird these days, and like I said, living on a secluded island in Alaska, which has a massive homeschool community already, let alone the state funding and resources available for families, it became more and more like a good idea. When I asked the boys, they were both 100% on board with homeschool for this year.

All aboard the crazy train!

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When I started this blog eight YEARS ago (!!!), Calen was starting 3 year old preschool and looked like this:

Look at that BABY back when he had elbow rolls still

Baby Bam Bam Cam was 17 months old and was terrorizing the neighborhood like this:

Baby Bam Bam!

Things have sure changed since then. Today, Calen started 6th grade and Camden 4th. 

Are you kidding me?! I actually had to count on my fingers to make sure those were the right grades. 

And even though we are homeschooling and I'm mourning the loss of photos in front of their school, in their classroom, and getting off the bus, a lot of it was still the same today, sans Mom's cryfest in the car after driving away from school (that was nice to not have to endure). We dressed up in their best school clothes and new shiny shoes and took their traditional first day photos anyways. Fake it till you make it, I say.

Calen is so tall he could barely touch the board on the ground.

First stop on the Crazy Train tour is the dining room, which is the new official classroom and the table is their desk. In order to still, you know, have a functioning dining room table, I have bins for everything and also reorganized our bookshelf in there to hold all the school stuff, so at the end of the school day it can disappear like it never happened. 

I for one, am a huge fan of the cheesy 1st day of school stuff that the kids usually bring home. So I went to Pinterest and made our own!

Next stop: knowledge! Luckily, a friend a neighbor had an entire curriculum to lend to us, that covers BOTH 4th and 6th grade (writing and reading assignments are just adjusted to grade level), so I can teach both boys at the same time. It is also history based (US settlers history), and the boys LOVE history, plus it incorporates reading, writing, social studies, and even science into one lesson, so all I have to do outside of it is math. Pick me, I'm in. 

Rebel wanted to learn about the early Settlers too. Weirdo

After the shared lessons, we had to navigate the annoying and confusing maze of "teaching two different kids two different grades of math at the same time". In which, the Crazy Train almost completely derailed and rolled off a cliff into a fiery crash. So what's the solution? DON'T! I sent Camden off to do "Adventure Academy" (a learning game on the laptop) in another room while doing math with Calen, and then once Calen was done, sent Calen to the computer and did math with Cam.

How we do math: standing up on one leg *shrugs*

All in all, the crazy train was a runaway success. I only drank 3 cups of coffee, we somehow only had ONE snack break, and we got done by 12:30pm (starting at 7:45). 

Here's to tomorrow!

Endnote: It's a good thing we chose to keep the boys home, because Calen woke up with a fever in the middle of the night, and of course a fever is the most taboo thing to hit public school since....well since anything. 

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