One and a half days of peace and quiet

The fever passed. We hosted the pod week 2 instead of week 1. It went as well as could be expected. It was loud. Managing the five kids for just half an hour while the pod leader had her lunch break was crazy. Our house isn't well set up for five kids at once, especially not with social distancing, so we had to move some furniture around so they'd have a workspace and improvise ways they could play outside. The office Teresa and I set up for ourselves in the guest bedroom is very cramped. The pod leader does a little cleaning before and after but obviously it's mostly our problem. 

Around Wednesday, Lexie began complaining about her ear hurting. We dismissed this as being caused by excessive headphone use, since she was using them a lot for the online classes, and got out a more comfortable pair. But by Friday evening we couldn't dismiss it any more, she clearly had an ear infection. A secondary infection from the bug last week, I guess. It was insidious how the pain came and went. Friday night she woke us up screaming in the middle of the night, even with painkillers; during the day, most of the time, she was fine. Saturday we thought about getting to her doctor's but didn't get around to it before noon, which is when they close on Saturdays. Saturday night she was just screaming nonstop. Sunday we took her to the urgent care doctor's office not far away. Amoxicillin. No surprise. 

Sunday night and Monday morning she was still a wreck, so we kept her home from the pod. She did the bare minimum of distance learning. I did the essentials of my job and took a few hours off, both to spend time with her and to relax after several rough notes. 

Monday night she only woke up once, briefly, so Tuesday morning we brought her to the pod. We sent her with Tylenol just in case, but weren't too worried, and it turned out fine. Teresa and I set up our laptops and worked across from each other at the dining room table. We had elbow room, literally and metaphorically. 

This morning was the same. We walked together to drop her off. On the way home we ran some quick errands. And then, around 11, we got word that she had got off the waitlist at our preferred school in the area. For hours, my only reaction was "We've finally got a routine that works! We can't change anything!" I eventually was persuaded otherwise by literally everyone, but still.

Fine for modern values of "fine"

 Just to reassure people in case the last post would be scary - Tuesday afternoon or so, A. had a virtual doctor's appointment via Zoom. On Wednesday she had a coronavirus test. The results came back negative Friday. And even if they hadn't, T. and I felt healthy and the three of us have no risk factors. We weren't in mortal danger. We were just stuck in the house for a week with a 5-year-old who had a runny nose and doesn't like distance learning technology.

Of course it happened this way, why would we expect anything else?

We offered to host the pod for the first week. A. is the only girl, and she is new to this school whereas most (if not all?) of the other four aren't, so we thought a little familiarity might help get things started. Also, we figured that any mistakes we made as hosts would be indistinguishable with general problems getting the pod system started. The first day of school was yesterday.

Right around 12:10 AM yesterday, A. woke up with a fever of around 101. She went back to bed relatively quickly, but then woke up again around 2 AM. There's also a runny nose and a cough. We gave her acetaminophen and we don't think this is anything serious, but, of course, we couldn't host a pod of 4 more kids when ours has symptoms vaguely resembling coronavirus. You can't be too careful these days. So around 7 AM, with only about an hour to spare and short on sleep, we got a different family to host, dropped off some supplies with them, and prepared for home schooling while working from home. Yayyyyyyy...

The school is still figuring out how distance learning works. Yesterday there was online classes in the morning. For some reason A. is very shy in most video chat settings but we basically kept her on track. The minimal requirements are very forgiving. In the afternoon she took a nap, and fatigue is a symptom of several different illnesses, of course.