What are you talking about?!
That is one of Sarah’s latest additions to her “huh?” play where she is pretending to be the squirrel in Mo Willems’ I Broke My Trunk. This is woven in with being (or asking me to be) a sad cat or saying “but, Gerald… No, do not speak… it is too late.” Since we watched “An American Tail” last weekend she also loves to be a sad Fievel. Fievel is sad because he can’t find his family and he sings “Somewhere out there.” Sarah sings a tiny bit of it. I picked the movie because I remembered it was about a mouse and I loved the main song. I forgot that Fievel is sad for large parts of the movie, thus perfect for a Sarah who loves to be a sad mouse. She likes to refer to herself as Baby Fievel and to call us Mommy and Daddy Fievel.
Sarah and Amy had sleepovers in our basement guest room every night this past week. It felt very strange to have them so far away. While the pandemic has had many challenging components, I will admit to appreciating how much closer Amy and Sarah are to each other because of it. They always played together, but Amy had been getting more and more annoyed by Sarah just being Sarah. Amy had wanted to play more with her other friends, but now she is oh so glad to have a built-in friend at home all of the time.
We have also been playing Catopoly, losing as usual to Amy. I’m not even trying to let her win! It just happens. Yesterday she and Carl and Sarah played Monopoly so Amy could understand more fully why Carl and I are always messing up with the money in Catopoly and why I’m always accidentally referring to litter boxes as houses or hotels. The colors are the same hue but the denominations have been switched around. I was just an observer to the Monopoly game yesterday but it looks like Sarah is on track to win with a strong presence in the light blues, which have always been my favorite.
Sometimes the girls play MarioCart on Nintendo. They have created a song about ice lasers, firebombs, avalanches, and giant pendulums. They also like to create such obstacles in real life, pretending to go through a course while needing to avoid cushions that have gone rakishly askew.
Yesterday Carl and Amy went mountain biking. Amy created a scenario, as she often does, of a field trip taking place at the end of their year in seventh grade. What luck that Emma (Amy) and Jesse (Carl) were paired together! After a short ride, Amy had to come back to see the school nurse for a knee injury. That didn’t stop her from going back out on the trail, but it did slow her down for many other activities because it hurts when it touches her other leg. Sometimes it can break my heart that she needs to fill her days with pretend school field trips because there will be no real school field trips. But, I love how many scenarios Amy creates and I am reminding myself that she does that whether or not we are in a pandemic.
The basic plan for Amy’s school reopening has been tentatively set. The first few weeks will be distance learning. Then there will be three cohorts of students that will rotate through in-person attendance for one week at a time and then they will be home for 2 weeks of distance learning. I know we will manage this easily in terms of logistics because my work is flexible and we can have some sitters, but I imagine this is rather a nightmare of planning for some parents and teachers. I haven’t heard anything from Sarah’s school aside from receiving the school supply list. Being me, I promptly got half of the items on the list, many of which she probably wouldn’t use even in a normal year. If her school does return in full I think I will just request that she stay in her resource room rather than joining any of the other classes. I will probably also drive her both ways, even though she loves riding the bus and I love not driving.
Sometimes in the midst of living this altered reality, I pause, feeling stunned with a bit of dumbfounded grief that this is actually all happening. That we are in the middle of a pandemic and it’s not just going to end in a month. Somehow when things closed in March I think there was a lot of hope that by the start of school in the fall things would be back to normal. Haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! Now I wonder how many more years it will be before I can see my parents in person or hug them. I have to not think about that too much or it is just too sad. Thank goodness for Zoom and Facetime and even regular phones.
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