We are dealing with the longest bout of fever that I could ever have imagined. The days, weeks, and now months are starting to run together. M's fevers started in May! I continue to have intermittent fevers. T has them almost every single day. She has had 5 fever free days during the last two months.
Overall, we don't feel awful. T feels fine pretty much all the time although yesterday she had two headaches for the first time in her life. M feels fine about half of the time. I feel fine most of the time. Our fevers are not high, and our symptoms are not horrible... they just won't go away! We are at a point where I think the Dr's are sort of done testing for things. I think they are just hoping that whatever we have will go away. Of course we are hoping this is the case too. We currently have no appointments scheduled and no course of action planned. The consensus is we are infectious and not yet diagnosed or environmental. We are traveling to a cabin in the woods later this month so we can have 4 days away from our house. This should help us rule out some of the obvious environmental options, or focus in on them if the fevers go away while we are away and return when we come home.
On Tuesday we received some good news. M's blood levels are not as concerning as we imagined them to be. Apparently, Ethiopians have lower levels of white blood cells and neutrophils. American charts have them appearing Neutropenic when they are not. This is great news. This means his blood levels are not as scary as we imagined them to be. I find it mildly concerning that they are lower than they were when we started our appointments, but even as they lower it is comforting to know that it would just be infection related and not connected to any type of cancer.
We have talked with all three of M's Children's Drs about the fall school plan. One of them was very straight shooting in his opinion that M should NOT do in person school. One of the Dr's said he would be a "good candidate for virtual school" and a "poor candidate for in person school." Our most recent Dr. had a different approach. I don't think I will actually type out what she suggested. I do not see her suggestion as a viable option as it is unsafe and untruthful.
On Thursday morning I talked with the virtual school rep. She explained that we don't exactly know which virtual school we would be using, but that we need to sign up soon to be a part of it. I called Brandon and we decided that the time had come. I registered M for the fully virtual option. I emailed T's school and told them I would be un-enrolling her to do homeschool. It was the hardest email I have ever written and I cried and sobbed my way through the email. We LOVE our elementary school. We are so blessed by Tehila's IEP and her incredible IEP team. We will desperately miss them this year. As hard as it was to send the email, it was wonderful to feel some peace about a major decision being made!
I think I have chosen all of T's curriculum for the fall. I am thankful that Grandma Judy has agreed to fully take over the Science teaching. She will zoom teach twice a week. I ordered the Math curriculum that Lincoln uses so she will be able to track right with her class in Math. We will also use worksheets, games, and videos to reenforce concepts. I was able to dig some of the Classical Conversations things out of the basement and will use that for History/Geography, and a little Art and Math supplement too. I am going to use an English/Language Arts curriculum that seems to follow very closely to state grad standards and has a 180 day plan that we can work our way through like Math. It is already downloaded and ready for a massive printing and hole punching session. Beyond the curriculum, she will continue to read books on her own and I will read to her each day. Spelling, Handwriting, and Typing will be the same curriculums used at her elementary school and available online or through the school. Art will be a combination of things found in Classical Conversations, her ELA curriculum, her History curriculum, an online Art History class, and seasonal projects we pin or she imagines. She also has Art Therapy once a week where she gets to meet with a very talented artist. PE/Health will be a combination of online learning, moving outside, daily OT activities, actual OT sessions and more. Music will be woven throughout and integrated into the day. There is a possibility of her beginning Music Therapy and piano lessons this fall. Social Skills/Mental health will be a primary focus of our homeschool. We have the special year to work on many things with her therapy team and we are going to make mental health a priority.
Writing all of this out makes the year feel very daunting. I think once we get into a rhythm it will feel less daunting. The tricky thing is trying to figure out how long each thing will take and how many times a week to cover different things. She isn't going to thrive with 10 hour school days so we need to find a balance. I am someone who wants to do everything well and I realize there will be a couple of weeks of figuring things out as we transition to a school at home model.
In the last couple of weeks we have been figuring many things out for the fall ministries at church as well. It isn't quite time for me to share about them on here, but I am sure I will one day soon. I will just say that planning has taken many hours of blog time away from me recently.
It is hard (almost impossible) to believe that we have been home from Mexico now for 5 months! Wow! When we were going though customs in Chicago I was nervously telling the officer that I was going to be home with the kids for 4 weeks and we laughed about that hard job. Oh the ignorance of March! Here is a a tiny COVID update about our county and community. To rewind a bit, on June 29th our county had cases 223 and our community had 29 cases. On July 23rd we had 440 cases in our county and 77 cases in our community. Today, on August 15th we have 757 in our county and 117 in our small town. Cases sure have been rising this summer.
Between church stuff, school stuff, health stuff, and daily living I am left with very little time to blog. Brandon took the kids fishing so I am hoping to get a few posts written and scheduled today. We will see how much I can get done!
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