watervole | life with coronovirus around

So long since I last posted...

I think it's a combination of feeling I have nothing interesting to post about - which is actually rubbish, because I know I can if I make the effort -and partly tiredness.

Oswin's back at school, but it has it's ups and downs.

She's in a different classroom; some children have left; some new ones have arrived. It's different and that's throwing her.

Yesterday, she was really upset - it only came out after a quiet discussion about why she'd screamed at her friend, Sam, in the middle of a Minecraft game and broken down in floods of tears.

they had music for the first time this year. Oswin adores her music teacher and they allowed her to do both the morning and afternoon session (probably because she already knew everything they were going to teach that wasn't music....).

But the bad news is that the music teacher will only be there five times in the rest of the school year.

It's not just missing her teacher. Oswin enjoys music. She loves singing - and Covid has put paid to the weekly singing assembly that she enjoyed.

I sing with her when I can - and my voice has almost recovered from Covid now, so we're starting to get back to where we were before Xmas. She loves the old folk songs I teach her: Widdicombe Fair, Ilkely Moor, Molly Malone, Lily Marlene, etc. She loves the songs, also the stories behind some of them them.

(What kind of stupid font has upper case I and lower case l looking identical? Ilkley Moor doesn't read properly.)

eg. Lili Marlene leads us into a discussion of the war and what a soldier's barracks would have looked like and why he had to leave his girlfriend behind, etc.

Ilkley Moor allows us to discuss death in a non-serious way - and I can also tell her that it's a song I learnt from her Great Grandad who went to school in Yorkshire.

Songs are living history if you start to explore them.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I sure wish I had had a grandmother like you!

Thanks.

I wish I'd had either my mother or my mother-in-law around when my children were small. I never realised how much difference it makes until we started caring for Oswin.

I think back to the days when I was stressed to the eyeballs and just needed a break for an hour or two, or a day off.

But they both lived half a day's drive away. It simply wasn't possible.

My paternal grandparents had died by the time I was 5, my maternal grandmother was in a home with dementia, my maternal grandfather disappeared decades before. Also, until I was 9 we were living 3 miles from the nearest neighbor. From age 9 on we lived closer to the neighbors (though separated by at least a city block) AND we began making long trips into Mexico where the isolation was different, social and linguistic rather than distance. The social stuff was both in Mexico and in USA where most of my classmates had never been further than about 35 miles away. All in all I would have been a very, very different person had I had a grandparent who was able to be involved.

Sounds like an incredibly isolated upbringing.

I'm lucky enough to have had good contact with three of my grandparents. Two lived close by and we went to see them every Sunday. I have many fond memories of my grandad in particular. He was a kind, gentle man, who loved model engineering.

My other grandad was a widower but we saw him usually twice a year - once when he visited us, and once when we went to Somerset. I was his first grandchild and we were always close. He had an incredibly dry sense of humour - you really had to be alert to catch the joke.

He was a woodworker by hobby, made many toys and a climbing frame for us.

I never knew either of my grandfathers, and both my widowed grandmothers lived too far away even for a day trip to be practical -- I don't know how my mother felt about it, but to us it was very weird and rather déclassé to have granny-round-the-corner popping in for tea. Proper grandmothers lived at a distance such that a visit to them was a grand expedition involving changing trains and carrying suitcases and were only to be seen as part of a glorious summer holiday or extended stay -- not prosaic beings who did baby-sitting like the teenagers next door ;-)

This thread - so much.
Didn't live far away from neighbours (not physically anyway) but, like you, never knew 3 grandparents and the fourth only until I was about 10 and only rarely saw her even then (then dementia also & she died a couple of years later).

Poor Oswin. Is there any way to record her and let her sing with herself? Like singing rounds with herself?

She wouldn't be able to manage a round. I've introduced her to the concept, but she can't yet sing different words from the other person.

I've set up a playlists of a lot of her favourite songs, and she's starting to sing along with some of them now.

Worth it, even if she did play Trelawney about 20 times non-stop. That's one of her uncle's favourites too. It has a very good chorus.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KRDP680VgE

life with coronovirus around

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