Peanut is also having a hard time with online schooling, but I think it's harder on me. I mean, she's 5, of course she's not going to be super-focused. But having to basically sit on her the entire time she's in school to get her to pay attention and not start screwing around is taking its toll. Also, having to hear 20+ 5-year-olds hollering when they're all chatting is very overwhelming for me.

I know she's lonely, though, and she definitely misses her friends from preschool. I feel so bad, since most of those kids are still in her old preschool, so they're all in a pod, and I have to explain to her why she can't go hang out with them when we see them around the neighborhood.

Matilda has been a great help for us, both for Peanut's creativity and just socialization.

Matilda has been a great help for us, both for Peanut's creativity and just socialization.

It's been good for Matilda too. Getting her out of the house, getting her out of her head and focused on somebody else. And she definitely likes having spending money at the thrift shops.

I’m so glad Matilda and Peanut have each other.

Juliana, you have all my sympathy. Based on just a few zooms I have done with ltc, getting her to do school that way would be impossible.

I’m so glad Matilda and Peanut have each other.

That is wonderful. It was quite amazing seeing all the Buffista sprog present interacting yesterday. Warms the heart.

Glam, I feel this so much. My son has been self-sabotaging by underachieving for some years (MASSIVE low self-esteem issues) and while we've found a good counselor and my husband has come around on how to parent this particular kid, we were all worried that online school would be a trainwreck for him. But it's been so much worse than we imagined.

DH absolutely will not allow Mal to have a smartphone or any screentime (other than school), but I slipped him my old smartphone back around May just so he could talk to his friends (my husband can't understand that friends aren't going to voice call like the 80s, or come over). We've been keeping it a secret since then and I'm miserable as it's the first and only time I've lied to my husband, but it's helped SO MUCH. Mal's turned around his school and is getting all his work in (which is a lot, 5-6 hours of homework a night plus 8 hours Sunday and Monday...like I said, it's been a clusterfuck). He is getting exposed to a lot of radicalization attempts so we constantly have to fight against him parroting MAGA or white supremacist BS that he doesn't recognize as such.

I also got the DH to allow Mal to game on Saturday afternoons. He plays a realistic Civil War simulator where he's part of an established unit (a la The Guild) and they drill for an hour and then play a battle against another unit. Our only rule was that he couldn't play as Confederacy and he was like "God no!" The weird thing is that he's the only USian in his unit, and also the youngest - the others are all Europeans, mostly Brits. There are two Germans, and they chat with Mal in German (so it's like school, right?) and a Finn, who is teaching him Finnish swear words. He uses my computer, which means I can and have checked the Discord logs and I'm very comfortable with this group.

But the only friend group he has that gets together in person are evangelicals, and they aren't following masking or social distancing so we've had to say no to that. They also live next to the synagogue and refer to it as "the mosque" so that alone would have DQ'd them. We're letting him go to tae kwon do, which has been diligent about maintaining good health protocols, and that may be the only thing keeping him sane.

What kills me about all of this is that it's all fixable, should never have been the path we took in the first place, and no one seems to give a shit. Mal's own grandfather, who literally does nothing with his life other than watch TV, told us "If we let kids go to school, I will die. I'm going to stay quarantined for as long as it takes, and if that means his education gets set back a year, that's OK...he'll have time to fix it."

Arrrrrggghhhh I made myself angry again.

That's a tough situation, Volans. How old is Mal now?

I can't decide if I should keep ltc home for an extra week after Christmas break. Her school has been really safe so far, but I don't trust people to do the right thing over the holidays. They're supposed to either get two Covid tests or stay home for two weeks if they see other people over the holidays.

Surely you can trust almost all of them... but it only takes one.

Yeah, exactly Trudy. I’m especially thinking of some of the parents at drop off whose masks are below their noses.

THOSE PEOPLE MAKE ME CRAZY

Yikes, Volans. That’s so hard. I remember there was a really good article in the WaPo I think about a woman and her 12 or 13 year old being radicalized to white supremacism/misogynistic stuff on the internet. And I think about my brother, who definitely is more radicalized than he’d ever have been without the internet (he’s a total troll, too). So hard.