I keep hearing fragments of news items like social distancing will continue for two more years and we’re heading into another Great Depression and we won’t be allowed to shake hands or hug people in the future. As the saying goes, I can’t even.

I actively avoid watching or listening to the President speak because most of what he says is false, damaging, and hateful. But I hear plenty of commentary on social media and it all makes me sick. I can’t even count the number of times during this administration that I thought, “this behavior is disgusting/appalling/illegal/shocking/impeachable/fill in word or expression of your choice here. Surely our country will not let this stand.” And then nothing happens. I remember when Trump was authorizing the government to steal immigrant children from their parents and put these children in cages and mistreat them and I thought, “how can this get any worse? This is the lowest of the low.” Clearly a failure of my imagination to make the leap to pandemic in which hundreds of thousands of lives are at stake because Trump doesn’t want to look bad and doesn’t want the economy he benefits from to suffer.

Please don’t tell me to limit my media consumption, because right now it’s already at a minimum, but it’s essential to me to stay connected to people I care about and to see cute videos of babies hugging and everyone’s new puppy. I can’t bear to isolate myself any more than I already am.

The return to homeschool today went ok. Midmorning I texted Zeke’s kindergarten teacher (even though he’s in first grade now) to ask her to 1) give Zeke a pep talk and 2) help me with strategies to get him past his refusal to write. She was, as always, extremely kind and enthusiastic and helpful. We’ll see whether Zeke decides to cooperate tomorrow. I offered the incentive of an extra 30 minutes of screen time if he does his writing work with a good attitude. I also realized that he’s really good at finding effective ways to communicate and record things without writing. He’s making a Kahoot for his birthday, which we did for Zoe as well. A Kahoot is an online quiz you can create about anything, and then invite people to take it. He asked for help coming up with some of the questions, but instead of trying to write them out, he used the dictation feature to speak the questions aloud, then went back to edit them by hand if there were any mistakes. He did this with near 100% accuracy (not including punctuation or capitalization, which are not super important in an online quiz). Also he added images to the quiz from both my photo gallery and the Getty images gallery included in Kahoot, which I didn’t even know existed. He basically did the whole thing himself, with minimal assistance. He and Zoe both use voice recognition or Siri to find things online that they want to watch, or look up information. And it doesn’t always work–which is usually funny–but often it does and they never had to write anything at all. Maybe I’m worrying too much about this. It’s not that Zeke needs to be writing pages filled with beautiful prose. I just don’t want him to freak out when asked to write a word or a sentence. Teachers have a lot more patience than I do, as well as that whole degree in education thing. I’m looking forward to second grade.