Not a Good Day

Today sucked.

It wasn't quite as bad as before my new meds, but it still sucked. I was so tired all day. I think I went to bed around 1am and got up at 6:30am. I've been doing that for a while so maybe it's catching up to me now or something. Then I had to argue and fight with the 10yo to get him up and ready for school. His anxiety was through the roof so he didn't want to do his Zoom meetings.

It was hard because I thought he was already getting over the anxiety. He freaked out the first day of school, but by Friday, he was much more chill and just laughing along with the class. I thought he was okay, and by the end of the week, we would try turning his camera on. Instead, the day started with tears and him begging me to let him do the non-Zoom option which would mean I would have to be way more involved in his schooling.

I finally got him into his Zoom meeting where he just sulked and talked to me through most of them because he got bored when the stream would lag, forcing him to miss chunks of text. I actually listened to the first hour of meets, and even I was getting a headache trying to decipher what was going on when the audio would cut out every few seconds.

While that was going on, I was emailing the school counselor about what we could do to ease his anxiety. After I declared my own frustration with the lag, she said she'd let his teacher know that the best option might mean for him to go offline and just do independent work.

I just don't know what to do. On one hand, that would ease his anxiety, but on the other, it's going to further isolate him. He's already so lonely. His only interactions outside of the family (which is minimal really--his siblings barely acknowledge he exists and it's usually just to yell at him about something) is the chatbox on Roblox. I was hoping, he'd start to relax and then do the small group meetings to chat with his friends. Now he's saying he doesn't even have friends in school anymore. He doesn't remember what it's like to talk to other kids. It's been six months since he's been in school.

Then after classes were over, doing his independent work was just as frustrating. He hates reading so didn't want to do any of the assignments. One needed him to highlight sentences but it was too difficult on the iPad so I suggested using the PC. I didn't know they had broken the mouse. Again. This is like the third or fourth mouse they've gone through. Just like all the others, it's randomly double clicking. Or unclicking while he's trying to click and drag to highlight. I bought a completely different brand of mouse, and they managed to break it in the same way. I don't think I've ever even used this mouse so it wasn't me. They broke it in less than a year. Ugh.

Luckily, I remembered the trick of placing the cursor then holding shift while placing the cursor at the end of what you want to highlight. He managed to get through the assignment that way. But we were both frustrated.

On top of that, I told him I would make pizza for lunch, but the site with the pizza crust recipe was down. I hadn't written the recipe on paper because I could just go to the website. Until I couldn't. I eventually found a copy on the Wayback Machine but also forgot I already used the jar of pizza sauce. I ended up using spaghetti sauce we had in the fridge that I was going to have to throw out soon if it wasn't used. And my dough didn't really rise. The pizzas tasted fine, but the whole process gave me a headache.

By the time the 10yo was done with his school, my head was killing me, and I could barely keep my eyes open despite drinking a full pot of coffee. I ended up crashing into bed at 2pm because I couldn't stay awake anymore. I slept until 4pm (minus when my husband got home and started talking to me despite me obviously trying to sleep). I woke up with my head hurting even worse than when I laid down and just as tired. I ended up having two more cups of coffee just to make it through the night.

I'm not sure what tomorrow will bring. I have no idea what my son's schedule will be like. Is he only excused from his grade-level class or his special classes, too? He has his counseling class (something new they added to help kids cope with everything going on) tomorrow so that teacher already knows about his issues so I doubt she will expect him in class. Not sure about the others.

I'm not sure how it's all going to work without him having the live classes first as the independent work builds off of the live stuff they do. He didn't even get to do his math today because he doesn't have the workbook. We didn't do their drive-thru open house thing because the 14yo was sick so we were isolating ourselves as much as possible. My husband is going to call the school tomorrow and see about getting any workbooks he needs.

This year is going to suck. He's going to fall behind and every day will be a struggle to get him to do his work because of his aversion to reading or spending any time on things that don't interest him.

Then tonight, the 14yo was trying to catch up on her schoolwork now that she's feeling better only to have the program delete her entire assignment. Now she has to start over, and apparently there's no way to save except when you are done and turning it in. Which is just dumb. What if we lose power or the internet goes out? That's not fair to the students. She thinks she got logged out for inactivity and it didn't save any of the work since she didn't turn it in. Again, a dumb design flaw that just hurts the kids. I told her to start saving the text she writes to google docs so if it tosses her out again, she at least doesn't have to rewrite everything.