Shelter in Place – Week 2

This is the second week of us being at home. Here is California, we have the shelter in place orders. We can only go out for groceries and emergencies. Week 1 was generally okay. Schools are closed and we are working from home. I always work from home, so that’s not new to me, but having everybody home while I am working is a bit unusual. So far, not too many complaints.

I like some aspects of it where I don’t have to abruptly stop my work to pick up the kids from school. I am working past my usual time in the evenings. I also like that I don’t have to wake up early. Mostly, I still do because I like that quiet time in the morning and also it is the best time for me to work. But, if I do want to sleep in a little, I can 🙂

Last week, we religiously started our Monday with the assumption that the kids will be at their desks according to school time and they will work according to school schedule. We realized pretty quickly that is not a viable option. So, now we give them some math to do and may be some writing assignments once in a while. Otherwise, they are free to play or watch/read interesting articles.

Last week Sanjay spent a couple of hours learning how to draw a Star Wars character using a tutorial in YouTube. I thought that was time well spent 🙂 Today Sarath learned Photoshop a little. The kids are working on their programming without much pressure. They are doing at their own pace with guidance from Somu.

They do fight a lot, but I guess that is expected when they are cooped up inside. The weather did not cooperate for the majority of last week. It was raining and no chance of us even going out for a walk. It got better over the weekend. We have been going to the school playground which is right across our place. We walk and the kids play there. That really helps.

Yesterday, the kids wanted to do a workout from YouTube and so we did not go out. They did really good with the workout and were exhausted by the end. But, not getting that fresh air did make a difference. Sanjay felt so restless that he wanted to go for a walk outside at 9:30 pm. Somu took him into the yard for a few min and that made it better. So, today even though it was a bit cold, I insisted that we go to the playground.

The kids have their online school from tomorrow. That should hopefully help a little bit. Also having some assignments from school makes a difference. They are both excited that they have online meetings like we do for our work 🙂

The weekend was especially boring even though we watched a couple of movies. The kids are playing more board games than usual. They love listening to audio books on Kindle. So, they play while listening to Harry Potter.

Since we are not ordering food from outside, I decided to make pizza at home. I used to make pizza regularly, but for some reason, I stopped. On Saturday, before I started, I realized we didn’t have any Yeast for the pizza. I found a recipe online for pizza without yeast. I followed the recipe well, but the pizza ended up bad. So, that was a disaster. Luckily, I made less pizza than usual. So, we had some soup and some of the pizza. The soup really helped.

So far, it has not been too bad. Today is Ugadi (our New Year). Since all of us are home, I made some yummy food and we had fun.