In Which My Luck Didn't Hold Out, But It's Okay

Well, the first quarter of the school year is over and it's almost Halloween. It simultaneously feels like yesterday that I wrote my last post in August and a year ago. I was looking forward to Squirrelboy and Kittygirl both returning to in-person school, but also terrified about potential Covid exposure, especially for Kittygirl.

Overall, they've both enjoyed school and it has gone well. Squirrelboy is taking two dual credit classes this semester. This means, in theory, that these are college level classes and he's earning both college and high school credit for them. One class is taught by a teacher at his school who is certified to teach college level classes using curriculum from the University of Kentucky. That class has been great. His dual credit Math class has been underwhelming because it's a self paced video class. The content is college level, but the actual teaching certainly isn't. However, next semester he'll start taking classes two days a week on an actual community college campus, so he's excited about that.

I'm very proud of how hard Squirrelboy works and how well he's doing in school. Ten and a half years ago his kindergarten teacher told us she thought he should be retained. We refused that and instead got him the help he needed to learn to read. Now he's getting excellent grades in dual credit classes. I kind of want to look up his old kindergarten teacher and send her an email, but my conscience has won out and I've decided that would be petty.

Despite the fact that he probably sees at least 60 different people every days, Squirrelboy has not yet been exposed to Covid at school. With the Delta variant surge finally going down, hopefully that will remain true. Because he's fully vaccinated, the school policy is that he would not need to quarantine, but we'd still get him tested.

Kittygirl is also loving school. Her fifth grade teachers are great and she's learning a lot and really enjoying being back with all of her friends instead of just one friend. She has joined the Battle of the Books Team (which makes me extremely proud because I did that back in the 1980's) and a club called Team Greenpower, which will build some kind of green powered car and race it with other teams near the end of the school year.

Unfortunately, Kittygirl, the one member of our family who can't be vaccinated and the one with a chronic illness, has been exposed to Covid at school. Not just once, but twice. Both times we had her tested even though all that's required is ten days of isolation unless the child has symptoms. The second time, she tested positive.

Thankfully, she only ever had one symptom and only for one day. There's a niggling fear at the back of my mind that the virus had some kind of long term effect we won't see for years, but I breathed a sigh of relief when she was cleared to return to the world with no apparent ill effects. Mostly she spent the time complaining that remote school was boring and she wanted to be allowed to leave the house. Especially since she was about to finish her ten days of isolation after her class exposure when we got the positive result, it felt onerous to add even more days of isolation.

The instruction she received the two times her class had to quarantine was great. Her teachers taught them over zoom and they followed the same schedule they would have followed in the classroom. When Kittygirl had to isolate without her class, however, the instruction was pretty pathetic. She just had google classroom assignments to do. Her teachers were supposedly checking email regularly to answer questions, but she went days without getting answers about some assignments.

I don't really blame the teachers for this. The fact is, teachers are stretched to their breaking points. This seemingly neverending pandemic has called on them to do more and more with less and less. Teach remotely. Teach in person with masks. Enforce mask wearing. Don't enforce mask wearing even though we know it's effective. And on and on. I do, however, wish the government had invested more in schools from the beginning. If every classroom were equipped with mics and cameras, students who had to isolate could participate via zoom. But apparently no one who has the resources to do it has thought about that. Or they decided it wasn't necessary who knows.

Early in the pandemic I was relatively chipper. I figured this couldn't last forever and we just needed to make the best of it. However, as it drags on, I find myself getting weary. I'm incredibly frustrated, sad, and even angry that so many people in our country who could be vaccinated have chosen not to be. I'm not talking about people who are "anti-vaxxers" in general. I'm talking about people who are generally accepting of vaccines but are suspicious of this particular vaccine, despite all the evidence being put forth that it's safe and effective.

It breaks my heart that so many people are dying or being permanently disabled by a pandemic that could have been tamed by now. An old friend, who was Squirrelboy's godfather, lost a month long battle with Covid earlier this fall. A high school student in our district died a few weeks ago. Sometimes it just feels like too much. I'm incredibly sick of telling my kids. "No, you can't do that thing." Or "Yes, you can do that but you have to wear a mask." Pandemic parenting is even more challenging than regular parenting.

All I can do, however, is to keep doing what I know is right. Keep masking in public indoor spaces. Get Kittygirl vaccinated as soon as it's approved for her age group. Keep saying no to some things I really want to say yes to. And keep praying that this plague will not actually be endless and that even those who make choices I disagree with won't have to pay the ultimate price.

And to end this on a lighter note, I recently got a pumpkin cat house for our kitties. Here's Shadow being the perfect Halloween cat. Happy Halloween!

In Which I Break Topic (Mostly) to Share My Love of Halloween

I love Halloween. I really, really love it. I'm not your run of the  mill Halloween lover who goes to all the haunted houses in the area and hosts and amazing haunted house on Halloween. I don't love blood, guts, monsters or vampires (well, I did read and enjoy the Twilight books). These pictures of my Halloween decorations should give you an idea of the version of Halloween that I love.

Ghosts and skeletons only make it into my Halloween bubble if they're cute. Black cats and bats are already cute, so they're good as far as I'm concerned. Evil witches, not so much. Cute kid witches, come on in. And witches from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the more the merrier.

What I love most about Halloween is the permission to dress up. This is especially true for kids, but even adults can get away with it, especially if they're parents coordinating with their kids. When I was growing up in the 1980's, Halloween was one day. You chose a costume. In my case my mom then slaved over a sewing machine for quite a few evenings making said costume. You wore it a school  on October 31st for the Halloween parade. You went out into  your neighborhood that evening and trick or treated. Then it was over.

Over the years, Halloween has crept its way backwards so that at this point it has basically taken over the whole month of October. I think this is awesome, because that means there are a lot more opportunities to dress up. Squirrelboy has never loved picking a costume and dressing up on the level that I do. Every Halloween he chose a costume, often a pretty creative one, wore it on Halloween and possible to one other event, and called it good. This year, his first year in high school, he has decided that he's done with trick or treating and will stay at our house to hand out treats. I suppose it's an inevitable part of growing up, but I trick or treated through my junior year of high school, so it makes me a little sad.

Kittygirl, at 8, is nowhere near being done trick or treating, and she's a girl after my own heart when it comes to her love for costumes. She attends at least one Halloween even every weekend during October, and she wants to wear a different costume for every one. So far this month she has been Ginny Weasley (this is what she'll use on Halloween), a black cat, Anne of Green Gables, and Squirrel Girl. This is costume week at gymnastics, and this afternoon she'll go as an elf in the following ensemble:

This is just Christmas clothes with the addition of a Santa hat. Her favorite Christmas themed costume of mine was when, at five, she pulled together a Christmas fairy outfit. She used a Christmas dress and wings with Christmas decorations taped to them. It was awesome.

Mr. Engineer is even less into dressing up than Squirrelboy, but we've managed to talk him into participating in a handful of family costumes. The two main ones were the two years we attended Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party at Disney World. The first time was ten years ago when Squirrelboy was 4 and Kittygirl was just a dream. Squirrelboy was obsessed with a Playhouse Disney (now known as Disney Junior) show called My Friends Tigger and Pooh. In the show, Pooh and Tigger run a detective agency with a little girl named Darby. They call themselves the Super Sleuths. In my version of the backstory, Darby is Christopher Robin's daughter, but that's actually mentioned in the show. We found a Tigger costume at a consignment sale and added a t-shirt from Goodwill with the Super Sleuth symbol on it. Yet again, with the help of Goodwill, I found a yellow outfit I could turn into a Pooh costume for Mr. Engineer, again with a secondhand Tshirt with the Super Sleuth symbol. Darby was the easiest. I just had to find some clothes that resembled her typical outfit. Everyone knew who we were and it was a ton of fun.

On our second visit to Mickey's party, Kittygirl was four and Squirrelboy was six. That year we veered from the Disney theme and had two pairs of historical literary characters. Kittygirl and I went as Mary and Caroline Ingalls, thanks to my  mom's great seamstress skills. Mr. Engineer and Squirrelboy's costumes need a bit more of an explanation. There's an amazing series of graphic novels about American history by an author named Nathan Hale entitled Nathan Hale's hazardous tales. In the first book, the spy Nathan Hale is on the gallows and speaks his famous last words, "I regret that I have but one life to give for my country." In doing so, he inserts himself into the history book, quite literally. The gallows turns into a big history book, swallows him up, and spits him back out having imparted the knowledge all future American history to him. The rest of the series is Nathan  Hale telling the hangman stories from American history to delay his execution. They're amazing, especially for reluctant readers including dyslexics who can read but get overwhelmed by a lot of text on the page (see there, I DID tie this into the theme for the month :)). Squirrelboy, of course, dressed as Nathan Hale and Mr. Engineer went as the hangman.

The one thing I do not love about Halloween is spending large amounts of money on costumes. Given that Kittygirl wears anywhere from 4-8 costumes every October you might presume that that's exactly what I do, but you would be wrong. I limit the costume buying to one costume per year, and everything else needs to be pulled together with things we already own. This year for Kitty girl I bought a red wig (actually intended as an Anna wig from Frozen II) and that was all. To be Ginny Weasley Kittygirl is adding the wand we bought at Universal Orlando this summer and a Gryffindor robe Squirrelboy wore to be Harry Potter at her age (that year, incidentally, was the best sibling match year ever - two year old Kittygirl was a Hogwarts owl). The cat ears and tale are from her costume bin, bought cheaply one year after Halloween. She used the red wig and wore an old fashioned looking dress to be Anne. Squirrel Girl was accomplished with a brown dress, brown boots, a furry brown best, and squirrel ears and tale that were Squirrelboy's main costume a couple years ago.

I've always loved Halloween and dressing up. However, it has taken on even more meaning during my years of parenting, and especially during my struggles parenting kids with invisible disabilities. Halloween, and the whole Halloween season, is one more opportunity to seize joy and to help my children have beautiful memories of their childhoods even amid the struggles they've also had.

These two memes sum up my attitude really well. I don't always do it as well as I usually do in October, but I want to not let our challenges make me or my children bitter. A big part of doing this is to choose joy.