Quarantine Journal - Catch up

Website:

I have been drowning myself in this website.  I am so tired of being consumed with it, but then, on the other hand, it is nice exercise for my brain and makes me feel good that I can still do something other than mom.  I just wish I could hit the part where the website has launched and then it's just balancing one thing instead of running it and making it and everything else.

School:

Penny's teacher is driving me nuts.  She keeps talking about how Penny isn't writing enough. Or spelling well enough.  Meanwhile, I think she does more of her work consistently than anyone else distance learning. She's eager to learn and always cooperative and helpful, high scores.. but it's like this woman is never happy. And I hate it.  First of all, they aren't even teaching spelling.  But she's griping about how the kids aren't spelling words right.  

"I didn't know you were doing spelling words. Where can I find them?"

"Oh well, it's not part of the curriculum." 

....

And then she kept complaining that Penny wasn't writing enough for her writing assignments, claiming other kids are writing two pages and Penny is just writing a few sentences.  

"Well, the prompt was to write 4 facts, and she was able to do that in 5 sentences..."
"She should be writing more."
"I do not think that's been communicated to her."
"Well, she needs to do it."

So all week, Penny has slaved over her writing, her handwriting, her spelling, and after a really good letter that Penny was super proud of, the teacher has the NERVE to look at it in a small group and say, "Did you write this yourself?"  "Do you ever look at the back of the book?"  "You didn't have help?"  "So you really wrote this all alone and didn't copy it from anywhere?"

My fucking god I was seeing red. Are you serious right now?  No "Hey, that is really good. I can tell you worked really hard on it and see obvious improvement in your work"... straight to accusing her of cheating.  FFS I am counting down the days until this teacher is no longer in my life.

Meanwhile, Penny is unaffected by this conversations, maybe even flattered, and tells me she wants to find a way to tell her teacher what a good job she's doing.  Sweet kid.

Zooms:

Penny has been having zooms with her friend Trevor every couple of weeks and they just LOVE them.  She was on a zoom call with him on Friday for 3 hours and still didn't want to get off.  I even let her eat dinner on her bed while they chatted.  It's really sweet and I'm glad it's helping them feel connected.

I signed Oliver up for some zoom classes on Outschool so that he could get the social connection I knew he was missing.  I kept trying to setup calls on facebook messenger, but he spent so much time playing with filters, I don't think he was getting anything out of them.  He seems to really enjoy the classes. Penny does too, tbh.  They do one silly workout group where they do character themed group exercise, and then Oliver does one social group with 3 other kids.  He loves them.

Vaccines:

My brother got his second shot and he was fine, very little side effects.  Richard gets his second one on Wednesday and I think we are all holding our breaths.  Mine should be due, but I haven't gotten a message yet. I hope we get a few days between ours, ppleeaaasseeee.

My dad still shows little to no interest in getting his and I really, really wish he would.

Misc

I told Richard to get himself a new grill and he got it this week.  He loves it, and he's used it at least half a dozen times since.  Today he made a brisket for like 20 hours. It was yummy.  

We took the kids to that school parking lot again this weekend. There was no one there when we pulled up, and within about 5 minutes there were cars everywhere.  It was stressful, but he let them have the playground and stayed away from everyone in the parking lot.  We surprised the kids with roller skates and they had so so so much fun.  Oliver couldn't stop laughing.