Day 17, late morning

For the last two days the boys have been having their “spring break”, which means we have completely suspended anything remotely academic.  We have been, however, trying to keep ourselves entertained in other ways.

One of them: an exercise regimen led by yours truly.  I rush to assure you that any psychological benefit we gain from the workouts is dwarfed by the stress of trying to organize said workouts.  Still, here is the evidence:

Notice how Zev’s facial expression changes through the set

Ben and I are working too.  For the record, Alla does participate, but she is behind the camera as much as on the floor.  Alla did decide to support our drive towards healthy living:

Sabotage!  Delicious, delicious sabotage!

We are also trying games.  Some are played solo:

Pretty sure Ben is winning

I have decided that the kids are old enough to be introduced to a classic: Risk!

In this game: Zev and Ben has taken control of a continent each; I am gambling on trying to hold North America and Alla is curving her way through Europe and Asia.

Not surprisingly, your humble narrator was eliminated first.  Alla and Zev fared slightly better.

Predictable result.  yes, Ben's army is so huge that pieces of one color were not sufficient.

Day 13

The unequivocally good thing about today is that it is close to over.  There was definitely yelling and screaming and crying today.  At the same time some math was learned and some English homework was done too.  Alla cooked delicious things and cleaned the aftereffects of the cooking.  And cleaned most of the downstairs, in fact.  My achievements are much more modest: kids learned material that I planned to go over yesterday and, after several iterations, completed the assigned homework.  Somewhere along the way Zev was given (and, hopefully, learned) the lesson about not throwing notebook in frustration when asked to redo whatever part of homework he got wrong.  And then about not escalating and not talking back to his parents.  Somewhere along the way the shouting started.  On the plus side we made it through most of two episodes of Mythbusters and through all of the homework and the boys played some music, and we had a delicious dinner (thank you, wife!). 

Oh, by the way, this was a workday and both Alla and I attended meetings and got work done.

If you will excuse me, I think my wife needs wine and I definitely need scotch.

Official restarting of the blog - Day 12 of quarantine

Hello, everyone!  Your humble narrator has decided to re-start this blog.  It is not lost on me that activity of this blog appears to correlate with some awful health-related disaster, either personal or global.  Case in point: we are back to counting days.  This time: we are at Day 12 of isolation.  Yes, this is a personal blog, so I am counting since Friday before last, the first day that Alla and I were both told to work from home.

So, Kaplan house this morning: the kids are doing academic things (for some pretty wide margins of “academic”) – Ben is reading, I hope, and Zev is programming visual effects of a dancing alien singing “Thunder” by Imagine Dragons.  I hear giggling, “pineapples”, “dabbing”, and “floss”. 

Last night, with the last of the free-ish movement, I borrowed a pressure washer (thank you, Smotkins!) and sometime today Alla will be doing something she predicts will be therapeutic.  The amount of actual therapy that Alla will get – or everyone else will need – as a result will be spelled out in subsequent posts.

The kids outside my door have switched to scheduled play time and are off to clear a dungeon in Munchkins: I hear of doors, warriors, and helping – they are learning, hopefully, that a small amount of cooperation makes for a better game.  I give it about 45 seconds.

My parents have been in self-imposed isolation for several weeks now.  Last night I was able to stop by.  I proceeded – responsibly, through the outside – straight to the back porch where I enjoyed a small pre-arranged scotch while at government-approved social isolation distance (do I sound 1984-ish enough yet, comrade?).  I rush to inform you, my reader, that my parents are fine, both physically (for present day values of “fine) and mentally.  In fact, they are so fine mentally, doing so well at the whole “stiff upper lip” thing, that it makes me wonder if they are somehow British.  On the other hand, the barrage of medical and near-medical instruction I receive from them provides a comforting reassurance of our Semitic origin. 

Alla’s parents are fine as well, active and loving as ever.  Their degree of social distancing has been a matter of some debate.  Our degree of influence on them has been about the same as on my parents – none whatsoever. 

With that, I am going to log off for now and do some work.  And, perhaps, prepare a math lesson for the boys.  The key here is to have two approaches ready: if the peace holds, compliment both and parley joint dungeon crawling into individual math lessons.  If the cooperation goes to heck, then use their desire for individual time for private math lessons, like it is their idea.  Wish me luck!