It’s been very tricky to find time to get our sessions in lately. We had a family trip this month, lots of transition in both my and my partner’s jobs, and a move for our family coming up in a few weeks. I keep adding our session to my to-do list and then moving it to the next day. Either I do not have the energy I need, my daughter does not have the energy she needs, or there just aren’t enough minutes left in our family’s evening to both make dinner and do a lesson together. Needless to say, we haven’t had a session together at all this week. This is what I call the reality of “post-pandemic life.”

But tonight was Sunday and I was bound and determined not to let another week start without a lesson. I know how much my daughter needs this support to set her up for success. She loves school, adores her teacher, and is one of the most creative and curious individuals I know. And yet, I can already see the weight of her struggle with understanding what all these letters mean sitting on her little shoulders.

It was already 6:00 pm and I needed to make dinner, so I knew a little multi-tasking was what I would have to do. My daughter sat on the counter while I made blueberry muffins from a box and cut up whatever produce we had in the fridge. She held her little whiteboard and her purple marker and I called out words.

“The first word is bud. Cause you and your sister are buds.

How many sounds are in the word bud?

That’s right, three. So please make three lines on the whiteboard.”

She proceeded to make three vertical lines on top of each other, so we talked about the difference between horizontal and vertical lines and practiced making them with our arms. She also took a break to lick the blueberry batter from the spoon.

Once she had changed her vertical lines to horizontal lines, I asked her which letter made the first sound /b/. She said the letter name out loud and then wrote it on her first horizontal line while repeating the letter sound /b/ several times.

When she had found each letter to represent each sound that she had tapped out in the word bud, which probably took about 3 minutes total and required several prompts to check her sound notebook as well as immediate error correction, I asked her to read the word back to me. She was able to do it and exclaimed: “I’m reading!” while she erased the board clean.

We only got through four more words and we were interrupted by requests from her brother, complaints from her sister, and annoying barking from our dog. I think I yelled at least once somewhere in there. Also, the muffins burned. And yet, I’m glad we squeezed it in.

She packed up her stuff while I dished up burnt muffins into bowls. When she took her bowl from me, we high-fived and she said, “Thanks for the lesson, mom.”

Tonight reminded me that even when I’m not able to give her an ideal version of what I want for her, I can still give her what I can. And it can be enough for this moment.