Got the e-mail this morning about my daughter’s gymnastics resuming practice next week. Long e-mail detailing the various precautions they are taking.
One of the parents sent an e-mail to the rest of the parents to see what everyone was thinking (forgot to remove the coaches from the message - oops!). So far, nobody is sending their kids back to practice. I’m certainly not.
So a few notes from being home with a 3 year old for the last two months fulltime.
I hope everyone’s doing OK. We’ve been having a lot of ups and downs.
On the one hand, I feel quite grateful for this time. I haven’t spent this much time with my daughter (4 y/o) since I was a stay-at-home dad 3 years ago. We go on walks, do crafts, cook, etc everyday together. I feel she is slipping out of “little kid” and into “little person”, which is both exciting and a little sad. I’m really going to miss this little person when she’s a big person. So in that sense, I feel very lucky to be able to work from home and spend so much time together as a family.
On the other hand, I worry she is going to be a bit scarred from all of this. We try to have a pretty regular routine (she finds this calming/reassuring), mix up free play, structured school-ish activities, outdoor time, exercise, and screen time. But no matter how hard we try, there are things that none of us can mitigate. Not seeing any kids in person for months on end is going to have an effect. She is probably going to grow up a germaphobe, right?
TL’DR: Hope you’re all doing well. These are tough times.
By the way Wow in the World is an amazing kids podcast. My kid also likes Little Stories for Tiny People and a couple others. She picks up so many animal and science facts from these incredible shows!
My brother set up a Zoom meeting this Saturday for his daughter’s graduation. He has a web site set up with a 3d tour of the house. In two of the room you can enter Zoom chats. One of them will be a general hang-out. The other will have his youngest son hosting a Roblox game of some sort. At some point everyone will convene to one room where there are some prepared remarks and a slideshow.
My daughter turned 16 last month and got some drive-by cupcakes from two friends and my wife made her put her BDay card in the oven (I suggested 450F; my daughter had just finished Fahrenheit 451 so that was my birthday gift to her.)
One of us is a sucky dad.
She’s not going to be scarred or have her development materially affected by not seeing other kids for a few months. Kids with a secure and loving relationship with their parents can handle much, much worse things than this. Indeed, having a concentrated dose of parental attention, especially at that age, is probably better for her long-run than hanging out at preschool.
