Here I am.

I really have become so disconnected from my blog. I still read all the things you ladies post, and I comment as I can.

I am eagerly awaiting the pictures of BB’s wedding. I feel like she is my relative, having followed Deblet for so long. I remember her first car and when she started working, and now she is getting married.

Liam onto high school. Wow. I still remember the skeleton being built and him starting Grade 1.

My HB is back to school fulltime and he is getting ready to write his last formal assessment tomorrow. I think he is most looking forward to just chilling out for the holidays now. I promised we could have another week at the beach and we would be on the beach everyday. We are hoping to book a fishing charter and get him out fishing in the sea too.

HB has really impressed Hubby and I. He fell into school seemingly effortlessly. Full timetable of extracurricular from Day 1. He has kept up his brilliant academics and has been earning merits furiously. He has played his cricket matches, and soccer and still refuses to do a single gala, even though he practices swimming about 4 times a week. I did manage to get him to agree to the Eisteddfod for music and I am looking forward to see him perform. He is still playing Tennis and refuses to play a single match. We have let him be. He loves anything screen related and will happily spend hours watching it, but still loves being out on the bike too.

My not so new job is super busy, which is brilliant. There is so much to learn, and so much to teach. I am still working between home and the office and I think I have worked out the ways of working between the two. I get different things done in each environment. I have learned to channel my driving Zen and just deal with whatever the traffic throws my way.

Having an au pair is brilliant. I do not have to worry about sitting in traffic and stressing about getting HB. He gets picked up and he gets his work overseen, and by the time she leaves, HB is ready and packed for the next day. I love her and she is such a lovely person. She does morning drop off too, on days I have to be out on site in the morning. Having her has really made our family run smoother. I know having her is a luxury that most families cannot afford, but we would certainly do without other things, just to not have to worry about HB being at school late in the afternoon.

Hubby is all over the place these days, with a heap more travelling. As I write, he is somewhere in the farms of the Northern province. As bad as it sounds, he and I have a way better relationship when we have time away from each other. I think it makes us realise how much we miss each other and we value the time when we are together. I also realise I love him, but I really do need my alone time with just me. HB and I too, have a much more relaxed relationship now that he is back at school. I have been working on letting him do his own thing, but I am such a control freak, I find it hard to let go.

As late as it is in the evening, I must go work on my other job because I still have dreams of running a successful practice one day.

Childcare, again.

I go back to the working world next week. Well the formal working world to be exact. I am not sure what to expect because starting a job while remote working is in place, is new to me. However, I have confidence that I will work it out. I have not totally given up on working for myself, but right now, during this pandemic, I have been struggling to get anything properly going. So back to a formal job, and this time in a corporate environment. New things for me.

The challenge I have been experiencing is what to do with HB when I have to be out the house sometimes. I thought I would have found someone by now, but it is not so. I have had one interview with an 18 year old. I just did the interview because she was the only one. I actually do not want to leave HB with someone who is 18. I know it is wrong to judge her by her age, but she has no references, only has a drivers for 2 months and she is young. I have spoken to just about everyone I know, asking for referrals.

I know I could just use an agency but there are 2 reasons I have not: They are expensive and they offer no guarantees for this exorbitant fee. I do not mind paying for the service if they actually offer a guarantee. Would you spend R9000-R15000 on something with no guarantee? I would not, and this is my child, so I am not prepared to accept maybes. They just say, we will send you CV’s and set up interviews and hope for the best. We check references but we cannot guarantee anything. I have been through almost three months of background checks for the job I start next week, and I am not even dealing with children. I would have expected that they run thorough background checks for childcare positions.

For now, I will have to trust in the goodwill of my friends for baby sitting when I have to be out of the house. I really thought we had outgrown this phase in our lives. When HB was younger we had no one but ourselves to rely on for childcare, so we just relied on ourselves and paid a huge hourly rate for the times we could not be there. Hubby and I became used to never going or alone or together. However, with the pandemic, we can no longer rely on those childcare backups we used to use.

I look at my two sisters who live in Durban and they have no idea what I am talking about. They have grandparents and aunts to watch their kids. This is not an option that has ever been available to us and I must say I am jealous. I sort of grew accustomed to this, but the pandemic destroyed the plan we used to have in place. So for now I will stay up at nights trying to work this out and I know it will work out eventually.

Sad and angry

I think I must finally admit that lockdown has gotten to me. I am so angry. Angry is the only word to describe the way I am these days. Everything makes me feel angry and then I cry. The office asks something and I am insulted and angry. HB does something and I am angry. Hubby does or says something and I am angry and I eventually end up in an ugly cry of snot and tears and I feel I cannot breathe.

To be fair, my life is really not that bad. I have everything I need from a material point of view. Nothing is missing.

I even started crying talking to the call centre agent at the UIF office. What is wrong with me? I could not call there for two weeks after, because I seemed to have been traumatised by that one phone call. I told hubby if I never received money from them, it would be OK, because I can’t call back there. In all likelihood, I won’t receive money from UIF anyway.

Hubby asks me if I want tea and then I am in tears. HB hugs me and I am in tears. I don’t even know why I have all these tears in me.

Some days I feel like I should just stay in bed, because all this anger and tears are starting to make my poor family feel confused and upset.

HB has chosen to come back to our bed in the last week, and I feel too bad and horrible to send him back to his room. My poor child. I am damaging him with my uncontrolled emotions. I hate dealing with people like me.

Is this it?

The new announcements of the lockdowns has not affected my life too much personally. I know it has knock on effects, but I don’t feel it yet.

I am terrified of this whole Covid9 situation. I was not terribly scared before, maybe I have more time to think about it now. I find myself thinking am I living in a Stephen King novel? Will we all be dead this time next year. And then I remind myself to stop winding myself up. I cannot control the virus or other people. Maybe this is the apocalypse and there will be a world of zombie’s next year, but what can I do to stop it? I can only be me now and control me now.

I constantly remind myself that it will be OK, one way or another. Hubby says I should stop listening to the news. I did stop for months, but I don’t like the feeling of isolation, by not knowing what is going on outside the door (which I hardly step out of). I need to know what is going on to feel better about all this, even if it does scare me.

I am fully aware of ho ridiculous I sound. Perhaps all this isolation is making me odd?

In other news I am waiting on a job. I don’t know if this whole Level 4 lockdown situation is going to affect it or not, but it is one the better prospects I have had. I thought it may be time to join the corporate world, and up to now it was looking good. However, I have not heard from them since Friday (which is not that long ago to be fair, and was before the president’s announcements). Anyway, I did the very best I could in the three interviews I had, and they said that they enjoyed the interviews, but now we wait and see.

The job is a bit different from what I normally do, but I do think it is time to branch out. I do like working for myself, however, I find that perhaps I need some other people too, which is one of the reasons I was attracted to this job in the first place. If I am going to work for someone else, I think I want to be an anonymous worker in a corporate. At least they have an HR department, which has been lacking in every single job I have ever worked at, due to size of the company.

Anyway, it is nice that my previous employer took all the credit for my design work, and that it is all built now. My work was good enough to steal. He thought it was good enough to take the credit for it. And while it is his work now, I still feel a sense of accomplishment, but I no longer want to do work that I don’t get credit for. So I am hoping to hear good news from this other job, where there is no need for anyone to steal my design work. My own private work from home is fairly quiet now and I do need money for the foreseeable future, until the apocalypse gets me.

My fingers are crossed and I am trying not to get my hopes too high. Guys to be honest I want this job not for the job. I want it for the money and for my need to be part of something else. This is not growing my career ( I am over that now). I want to do something different, if I can’t do what I love.

Your project, or your mom’s?

HB had to do a science project for the expo. I think most kids have this exercise for years, and this is his first formal one. The requirements are nuts, for a first time, in my opinion.

The actual project HB chose was not complicated. I showed him how to do research and save pages, etc. He made a list of materials and I filled in what he forgot and he bought what he needed. I helped him set it up, I helped him set an alarm to do the observations and had to prompt a few times when he forgot. He did his own observations and now we had to collate the info into the expo board.

This is where it got hairy. I had asked HB over the few weeks to write up each topic by hand in a notebook. I would go through it at the end of the day and correct punctuation and language and we would discuss what he did not understand. However, this whole thing must be typed up and stuck onto this giant board.

I decided to type it up because HB would take forever, and with the large amount of work and study he already has, I felt it would be OK for me to type it out. He had already written everything out.

Then I thought we should set up the entire board on the PC first, so that we had a map as such, that we were working with and we could send it to the teacher, since HB is online.

I ended up doing the whole layout, and this is where I started to have sleepless nights. I was doing his work for him! I was that mom. So I sat down him down and showed him, how to do PC graphics. HB is fairly computer savvy and he is able to work out things quite quickly. However, even for him, it was a challenge to get this whole board set up. We were working with the plan the teacher had given us, but still, to remember every text box must fit within an A4 page was asking too much of him. Asking him to crop every picture to the same size, also took time. I also had to teach him about fonts and visual distance. Then to teach him to add labels and leaders, took time, but he got the hang of that fairly quickly.

I have to say I am not sure if I have under estimated my child, or if there are children out there who are able to put this board together without adult help.

Last night, Hubby and I took three hours and just stuck everything onto the board without HB. We decided that it was too much to ask for HB to be able to line up everything and not get tangled in the double sided tape. I was also not going to allow HB to use a craft knife. I get cut on those things frequently and I did not want to have him cut himself. I printed, because there was no way HB was going to print everything , especially with having to manually feel the cardboard into the printer. Hubby cut, HB oohed and aahed and then went to bed. It took three solid hours to get this board made up. How is a child supposed to do this alone?

The first page of the expo handout specifically asks for an adult to be involved, however, the project is supposed to be for the child, not the parent. I am not getting marks for this, HB is. I feel I was too involved and I did too much. Yes, HB could have put this together all by himself eventually, if he worked on it everyday to exclusion of everything else. He has assessments to study for, plus projects in other subjects. The teacher even tells the kids to go do the project with the parents.

I just feel that I did too much and this is not an accurate reflection of HB’s ability. He has a great looking board, however, I feel his work is overshadowed by my layout. He drew fairly deep conclusions, all by himself, and it is there, but I fear that the teacher is going to think I did those too.

As a parent, do you sit back and let them do it themselves even when you know they do not have the skills? I saw one other board, and the mom told me that they had to do a lot of it. Another mom told me they have not helped at all, but I have not seen what it looks like. Is it OK to teach them the specific skills required. My problem is that while teaching, I found myself putting my ideas into it. HB has a host of new skills by doing this expo board, but again, I did the layout for him and I feel like I have done him a disservice.