| I will start by saying I had the easiest possible situation to start with, and 100% acknowledge that privilege. My wife is a stay at home mom and I've worked from home for five years, and have an office with a door (and we have a yard). Also neither kid was in formal schooling yet in March. One was in preschool, which just shut its doors March 18th and gave us refunds, and the other is only three. During the summer we enrolled the five year old in weekly art camp (all over Zoom). She had fun doing art and it kept her busy for a good chunk of the day. The camp was only an hour but then she'd spend a bunch of hours afterwards finish the project. She's enrolled in their after school program now which starts in a couple weeks. She was supposed to start Kindergarten this year, but since we're in California, that's all remote over Google Meet. Right now she has a 1 hour Meet in the morning, and that's it. Starting next week there will be three meets throughout the day, once with the whole class and then two small groups with the teacher or a parent. So far it's working out. The kinder teacher is embracing online learning and has good activities that work over Meet, and she's totally cool with younger siblings joining in (because apparently 1/2 the class has a younger sibling). Beyond that, the kids just play with each other all day, and sometimes I take a break to play with them. My wife gets to work on her own projects but has to take frequent breaks to mediate their playtime or help them transition activities. We have a rule in the house of no electronics when the sun is up. Sometimes we let them break the rule to play educational games, especially right now during the heat wave when they can't even go in the yard. But the rule is a good fallback when they want to use electronics: "Sorry, sun's still up!". Also we're super lax about cleaning up toys, so I can't walk in a straight line in my house anymore. There are toys everywhere. But it's a small price to pay to avoid the daily clean up arguments! |