Jeremy and I have been figuring out our new routines without Vince around and with Edda’s homeschooling schedule. Our Edda-care did get compressed and rearranged a few times during the pandemic, but has remained steady for most of the summer and into the fall (although it is about the change again now). Edda has care for most of the workday (9-5), but it still is about six hours a day shorter (6-8) than we are generally used to in the normal running school year. The thing that is hard for both Jeremy and me is our ability to get enough sleep. We have the time, but neither of us sleeps as well as we’d like. Jeremy can’t fall asleep and I can’t stay asleep, though my inability to stay asleep is less severe than Jeremy’s inability to fall asleep. For me, the new thing I’m doing is I’m trying to get up at the same time every day. I had gotten into the habit mid-summer to “sleep in” on the days that I wasn’t working at the hospital. If I was working, no matter how bad the night of sleep was, I’d get up at 5:30 am. But on the days I wasn’t working, I’d try to sleep in until about 7 am to make up for all the bad sleep I was having. And this wasn’t working that well for me. So now I’m trying to get up by 6 am at the latest on the days I’m off. It’s better, though it means that I’m getting up earlier than Jeremy (who is trying to sleep in from not falling asleep until 1 or 2 am). I know lots of married couples have out-of-sync bedtime and waking routines, but not Jeremy and me. We’ve always gone to bed at the same time and gotten up at the same time (save for a few Sundays here/there).
Vince reported back that he got a 90 on his math midterm and the average was a 70. He is “feeling good”. Academically, Vince’s college experience has been eye-opening for me. It’s only now that I realize how brutal my own college academic experience was. Vince’s classes all have weekly quizzes to check on progress and comprehension. They’ll drop the lowest couple of quizzes. Two or three exams, no final. Maybe dropping the lowest exam. They tell you about the help you can ask for. Now there are so many resources, anonymous youtube teachers willing to walk you through a diff eq problem. On the other hand, my class experience usually concentrated down to a single midterm (maybe there were 2 exams and not just a single midterm) and cumulative final, each worth half your grade. I’m not sure what happened if you had a life crisis and couldn’t make that test. I never found myself in that situation or I never acknowledged myself to be in that situation. Oftentimes, I couldn’t figure out something and I was too shy to admit I didn’t know how to do something and then struggled a million years to figure it out. When I think back on the school part of college, I mostly think of it fondly because of course, I was competitive and I wanted it to be difficult and to work hard against a high standard, but I also remember pockets of being depressed a lot, having GI issues for weeks/months, and having a low grade cold all semester. I’m sure it was from not resting enough, or being too stressed out or whatever. I could recover from it all so well then! I had only myself to think about. I don’t think my heart was broken then, but my heart now is broken in a million pieces and I’m not sure I could survive now if you dropped my back in my old college routine. Maybe I could. Maybe I would be fine by taking it all less seriously than I did then and have a better time.