Sock It to Me

oops, 2 weeks have passed. yikes, I thought it's only been a week? And to think that I started the year with daily posting ambitions. But then again, it's been a busy month+. Hopefully things will be better from here on out, but I guess I shouldn't hold my breath, given our tendency to just ... keep doing more lol.

Quick accounting of what happened in the past 2 weeks:
- last last Tues I didn't go to mock trial, but I still had to drive the other teacher to mock trial, which led to a very hectic post-meeting hustling. But child was appropriately picked up, yey!
- last last Wed and Thurs were all days involving a lot of lesson prep and running around. Including a bonus trips meeting at lunch.

- last last Fri had the parent teacher conference, which went ... better than I'd expected. It seems like the math teacher is finally on the "Miss R has challenges and needs accommodations and support" train, instead of the "Miss R is underperforming due to unfathomable defects" train, so that's good. (note to self: send follow-up email about possibility of getting another evaluation earlier -- Kaiser says we're not allowed to retry until May, but the teacher said they may be able to move up that time frame?)
- oh yeah, last last Fri was also when the Mock Trial drama dropped, which was that the Mock Trial county organizer accused us of rostering in bad faith. In fact, we were just rostering in ignorance -- we didn't know about a rule that the Varsity needed to be staffed with 18 distinct people (last year was the first year of our team and there were barely enough to field a JV, double-rostered). Anyways, a lot of terse back-and-forths, as well as a lot of last-minute scrambling to rebalance our rosters and slot people into new roles at the very last minute (as in, the day before the trial)

- last last Sun was the taiko workshop, the last one in our current location! (Sad that we'll be moving, but there's thankfully both a new interim location and a new long-term location lined up. The new interim location probably won't be able to have Saturday AM classes, which means that we probably won't be going to taiko for a bit. But honestly that's fine -- mom is headed to China anyway, and we can have some chiller Saturday mornings. (oh wait, I just checked the slack channel, and we ... might be staying in our currently location until the new long-term location is set up? Which would mean no interim??)). Anyways, yes, taiko drama, but thankfully lots of competent people are on it. :)

- last Tues was Mock Trial, which of course meant I got home around 11pm. Really proud of the kids, though -- we got to semi-finals! Despite the last-minute re-rostering! Which, on the one hand, go team! But on the other hand: more time spent at Mock Trial practices, etc. Mock Trial has taken over my Tues/Wed/Fri afternoons for the last 3 weeks, aiyah.
- last Wed was our school's annual MLK day celebration. I ran a workshop about Confucian vs. Hollywood expectations re: "Asians", which was actually pretty fun, but also: tiring.
- Friday I was gonna have a chill day to catch up on stuff, but then Miss R didn't want to go to the all-day aftercare, so I had her along with me all day.

- Yesterday (Saturday) was long, but fun -- Miss R attended a friend's bday party, which meant Spouse and I got to eat some momos for lunch and do some grading at a different boba shop. Then, after Chinese School, I went to the birthday party of the Mock Trial coach. It was the first time in over a decade since I've gone to a party with adults who I don't know, so that was pretty exciting. Everyone prepared powerpoints to rant about their various pet topics, so that was very fun. After some thought, I decided to talk about the history of Chinese Romanization, which led me down some very fun rabbit-holes on Friday night. Watched a lot of people get very drunk, learned about Filipino monsters (and the fuckability thereof) and eggnog as a tiki drink. There were some very funny presentations about polyamory, the diversity of desserts, a loving roast of someone's shorts, and goats as the superior species. But also: got home at midnight.

Basically it's been back-to-back full days until basically today, sigh.

But hopefully things will even out! I don't foresee our Mock Trial team winning County (the top-ranked team in our country was 2nd in State last year), so Mock Trial stuff should end next week. I've already drafted a plan for next year to make Mock Trial more sustainable for me (main goal: I personally need to stop being at mock trial by 4:15pm so that I can get my post-school day downtime.) Taiko drama seems to be mostly evening out, and there doesn't seem to be any new major events for the next few weeks. I re-re-re-drafted page 3 and 4 of my Yamashita comic, so now I can re-enter the inking stage, which feels good. (phew! finally!) I want to power through a bunch of it in the coming week, which will hopefully mean I'll be caught up on my 1-page-a-week goal. (Currently I just finished page 3, and it's week 5??? of the new year).

I think the big thing that's been really draining lately is just the amount of executive function energy and teaching energy it takes to herd Miss R through her homework every day. This morning, it took her from 9:30am-12:30pm to do 1.5 pages of math problems. It was about 20 minutes of actual doing of math, and the rest is just ... focus challenges. And there's going to be more tonight. And it's a thing where the more tired I am, the more snappish I get, which then leads to Miss R shutting down more. I think we need to have a clear talk about this, and come up with some better recognition of what's going on, to wit:
- a way for her to clearly evaluate and indicate her level of spoons at any given time. Right now, sometimes she's able to focus for 5-10 minutes, but sometimes only 1-2 minutes, and that sense of "backsliding" is very frustrating to me.
- once we figure out her level of spoons, maybe there's different methods that trigger at different levels? Like, if she's only able to focus for 1-2 minutes, she really needs some non-screen-time rest so that she can bulk up to 5-10 minute focus chunks.
- also, we need a way to shortcut the avoidance/resistance chunk of time. Like, that time could be much more productive on both our parts -- I have better things to do than sit there and wait for her while she curls up in a ball or does all sorts of avoidant behavior. Maybe a "you clearly need some time to ramp up to this. How many minutes do you need?" And to make it clear that that time isn't spent avoiding, but rather doing something else??