🍎 August Update 🍎 (Part 1)

Haaaaaloooooooo! Woooooow!

It’s been a looooong time since I have been able to update Isaiah’s blog. So sad, because I know I will not be able to remember everything that has happened or how Isaiah has been these last 6 months. 6 months 😱. I’ve decided that August is going to be a two part series because oh. my…. so much has changed in our life this past year that it is overwhelming! I literally haven’t had a free hour to sit down and write a blog post without knowing I had more important things to do. But. Guess. What. Today is the first day that both Trinity AND Isaiah are physically in a school building… since MARCH 12. Today is August 17. I think the time period since March 12 until Augustish was in my top 5 “difficult seasons”. It was HARD! So what happened?! Well, COVID happened…. school shut down, we stayed home because everything was closed, Chase worked from home full time, church cancelled, vacation cancelled, everything on the calendar cancelled, looked for homes, we moved into a new house, we rented our previous home, I got pregnant (yay!), and 8 weeks of intense nausea (nooo). Wow 😳

In this post, I wanted to talk mostly about how no school or out of the house activities affected Isaiah from Mid March – beginning of June

On March 13, 2020; spring break started for both Isaiah and Trinity. No biggie. But, the uncertainty of if it would be an extended spring break was definitely already there. School across the nation were already closing down in the beginning of March due to the rise in COVID 19 cases. I started to watch closely as things became more and more uncertain. Poor Isaiah, I didn’t know what to tell him when schools extended spring break until March 30th. Sorry buddy, “people are sick” so “school is closed” is what I would tell him. I was seriously praying that after two weeks of no school, school would reopen. Nope. Then came April and school was still extending the closure. Then, “Online school” started. The days of trying to get Trinity doing her online kindergarten work (that was assigned and decided by someone else) and getting Isaiah to be socially interactive on an app called “zoom” where he had to pretend like a person was right in front of him teaching AND wrestling a 15 month old AT THE EXACT SAME TIME while “being quiet” because my husband was working from our master bathroom in our 1400sq ft home. Every day, I thought to myself… “I don’t know how I’m going to do this again tomorrow”. I have never in my life been so stretched and demanded upon. Not even in college, juggling 5 classes.
Isaiah did not thrive in “zoom” lessons. I had to physically sit next to him and repeat everything that the instructor said. There were so many distractions… baby fussing, lag in the zoom, sessions cancelled, inconsistency, lack of materials, lack of focus. Isaiah does not respond to a computer screen. Period. For him, it is NOT a substitute. I was so sad for him. We make so many sacrifices for him to be able to attend a private school that specializes in children with autism using ABA therapy techniques and it was ripped out of his life without any warning. There was no music class that he loved. No art class. No “peer to peer” interaction. No social skills being practiced. No way to be able to hold the American flag during the Pledge of Allegiance… Well let me just stop there. I think you get the picture.
So, I pretty much did all the lessons with him. Then school was cancelled for all of May. I counted down the days until I no longer had to homeschool. Finally, both kids finished their online schooling on Thursday May 21.
Then we started to participate a little more in life. I was finally able to take control of my schedule and no be forced to comply to the online school schedule. Playgrounds started reopening. So we went on daily outings of either a long walk at a park or a playground or someone’s pool. Isaiah so desperately needed to be out of the house and doing much more physical activity.
Screen time had increased drastically because of this economic shutdown. Isaiah was in bad shape. Meltdowns daily. Disobedience. Anxiety through the roof. Always wanting to know what we were going to do. Always getting an answer of “stay home”. Everyday was a struggle. Super hyper active. Poor participation in his zoom lessons. Not saying the correct answer when I knew he knew. Always begging for his iPad. And me not having enough arms or strength to give him constant one on one attention… he got the iPad. A lot. His communication decreased. Progress was halted. And I had to no way to prepare and nobody to help.

It took him 6 months to get used to it.

Church also shut down for about two months. Not going to church and tuning in online was very difficult for Isaiah. Oh how he missed his old life. He missed the routine of going to church. Unfortunately, because we had no childcare, church was on the tv but about as effective for our family as zoom academic sessions are for Isaiah. 😐 Rough times. On June 7th, we all went back to church as a family after I think it was 8 weeks of no childcare.