“Good Morning! Wake up, get dressed. Eat breakfast, let’s go! I’ll see y’all downstairs!”
The schools were open for two hours, allowing the kids to drive-by and pick up their work. The elementary school was open earlier than the high school; so we would go to my son’s school first, go to Target for school supplies, then drop by the high school on the way home.
“What day is it, we should keep a calendar to mark off the days until we go back to school, “ my son said as he ate his cereal. “I’ll mark the calendar and put it by your side,” as I moved our Las Vegas themed calendar from above the stove to the wall above his side of the kitchen table marking the days off to show him we were on Wednesday, March 18th of 2020.
My daughter came downstairs shortly to negotiate her homeschool hours with the knowledge she collected from her friends a few minutes earlier about North Carolina school cancellations being extended beyond the month we’re told in South Carolina. “Let’s just go based on what we’ve been told by the school so far, if things change – we’ll change our plans,” I said in an attempt to keep a sense of normalcy in her complex teenage mind.
We drove to the bus loop of the elementary school and were met by a 5th grade teacher,”Here’s your packet of online assignments, here’s the information for the specials, and do you need school supplies? Oh yea and do you want to take home a little aquarium?” She said as she walked back towards the school to grab the aquarium and supplies we didn’t agree to but she knew we would. “Yes, thank you so much,” I said as my daughter passed the aquarium and supplies back to my son. “You guys stay safe and we’ll see you in a few weeks!” She said as she walked away waving quickly to us as she approached the car behind us.
We walked by the grocery section for snacks and noticed the bare isles of meat, eggs, bread, and toilet paper at Target after picking up school supplies. We grabbed a few things from the frozen section and made our way to check out. There were two open cashiers available but a long line for the self check registers. We went to the cashier – she looked happy to have some sort of activity going on in her space to break up the boredom of her day.
People were starting to prefer machine interaction over human more; fearing anyone near them could possibly give them the Coronavirus. I avoided the machine because no one was wiping them clean from person to person, the cashier was clearly keeping her area very clean to protect herself and others.
We stopped by the high school for my daughter to pick up her instrument to record her practicing for her band director on the way home. I got them organized in their new homeschool spaces before going into my office.
“Good Morning and welcome, I hope you all had a great weekend. It’s 11am my time, I’m going to go ahead and get started. How’s everyone doing?”