Back to School!

 It's late summer!! I know some of my readers call this "fall", but not around here. We're enduring our last heat wave of the year (knock on wood...pretty please!!_) and then hopefully we can have just normal late-summer days....but for right now, I'm hiding in my house. Except, of course, for when I go out to pick stuff like this:

But the big event of the week is school starting! Here's what everyone looks like so far this year:

Most of the kids have been using two computers - one from the school, and one of ours as a back-up, because the internet is struggling with all the stuff they have going on. One of Lige's teachers wanted them to run Zoom and 3 different Chemistry apps at the same time on their little Chromebooks. That didn't work... But things are starting to calm down as teachers, students and parents get a feel for what works.

We have the Junior/Senior High School downstairs in the family room, and the Elementary School on the main floor, in the dining room. We found that 5 people on Zoom in the same room, trying to interact with their teachers, was too chaotic. So we spread out a bit. Marriner is upstairs in his room, where is office is. Jane gets the living room to play (quietly!) That leaves the kitchen and the kids' bedrooms for me :) 

Being quiet isn't as hard as I thought it would be - if Jane doesn't have anyone to play with, she doesn't feel a need to scream. Hmmm.... :) But we do use a lot more sign language than we used to, just so we don't disturb people. Today I realized that this is actually really good for Jane! So I've been taking the opportunity to coach her on how to respond in sign language, and we've sorta go our secret code going on. That's the best part of ASL - it feels so secret-code-y!!

Of course, our attempts to be quiet don't always work. Today, I realized I needed to grind wheat to make sandwich bread (and no, don't give me any of that "why don't you just make white bread" stuff. Only wheat bread will do for me today. Jane even suggested we make cinnamon raisin wheat bread. Yum!) So, I waited until 2 kids were on break (that's the maximum number at any time. Have you guys seen my schedule yet? I must show it to you, it's exciting) and told everyone else they couldn't make any comments for a few minutes. It worked out.

(Here's the schedule. It's great. I love how nobody has a break at the same time. I also love how the middle school kids have way more breaks than the middle schoolers. *sarcasm)

I've got one more good ASL-related story from the start of school. Martha had a one-on-one meeting with her teacher yesterday. Mrs. Elumba was quizzing Martha on her letters and numbers, to see what she knows. I guess the teacher said to hold up the number of fingers of the number she saw on the screen. I saw Martha say, "two" and hold up two fingers. "Five, " and 5 fingers. "Six," and hold up her three middle fingers...a pause..."Well, Mrs. E, that's the SIGN for six!" Fortunately, her teacher had already heard that she knows sign language, so she got what she meant. Made me chuckle, though. And Martha was pretty funny trying to figure out how to put up 8 fingers, instead of signing 8. Turns out, she doesn't actually do that much. But my mom-self was laughing that it would have been just as hilarious if she'd tried to sign 8, because she can never remember the difference between 7 and 8, anyway :)