Week 7 of Distance Learning Due to COVID-19 (May 11th – 15th, 2020)

Well, this week in our distance learning episode we continued with the party theme because my son’s birthday was on Thursday. My son is an early bird and is usually up every morning just before 5 am. So, in order to set up our surprise, we had to get out of our bed around 4:30 that morning. True to form he wakes up on time just as we were adding the finishing touches to the room decorations.

He was all smiles staring at the sea of balloons across the floor of his room. We sang the birthday song, prayed together, then presented him with gifts, and allowed him to enjoy those for a bit. This proved to be a valuable distraction as my wife and I crept downstairs to set up the breakfast table with his favorite colors. Once breakfast was prepared, we ate and took a few pictures, you know, for keepsake.

As I have stated in my previous post, our family tradition is to have the birthday dinner celebration on Sunday before the birthday. So we did have that celebration on the Sunday which landed four days before our son’s birthday. His sister made the birthday cupcakes herself along with a J shaped cake, which is the first letter in his name and surname. He really enjoyed those because it was made with his favorite flavor, chocolate.

Home school was let out early on my son’s birthday to keep the trend going that was started for his sister’s birthday a week before. Or as my son would say “It’s only fair,” and he is right. We all know how siblings do it, if one gets something then all should get the same. But that point does not always hold up as I have to remind my children, one of you is a boy and the other is a girl, one is now 13 years old and the other is 9 years old. There will be differences.

My son’s teacher and his classmates treated him to a virtual birthday song on his special day which had him blushing on camera. That along with the outpouring of love and the many birthday wishes from family and friends made his day. We did not have much school work to complete this week because my kids have been completing some of their work a little ahead of schedule. This was by design so that their birthday week would contain more free time for them to enjoy as they wished.

I realize that for the past two weeks my posts have not focused completely on distance learning, that is because of the special days that fell in those weeks. Distance learning has been a blessing in disguise in that respect, we were able to spend the entire day together on their birthdays and most importantly to my kids, they got to leave virtual school early on those days. The lesson here is that we can always find positive in a negative situation.

Truly, Julian R. Johnson (Daddy Sidekick).