The house looks like a bomb hit it. Everybody is exhausted. There's shouting and screaming, tears and tantrums - and that's only me, never mind the kids. Welcome to homeschooling hell.
support the decision not to rush children back into the classroom until more of the vulnerable are vaccinated. We've come too far to squander the advances made in the battle against coronavirus.
But at the moment it feels as if the working world is divided into two species: those with school-age kids, and those without. The latter just don't understand the pressures that the former are under.
Of course, we're lucky to have jobs when so many people have lost, or will lose, theirs. Covid has hit certain groups in society very hard. Those in care homes, locked up for a year with no visitors, are paying a huge price, as are people who live alone.
But life for parents with kids not at school can also be one of quiet, or sometimes not so quiet, desperation. Family yoga, nature walks, and bonding over baking may be happening in other households. We just about manage to get through the day without killing each other.
My youngest daughter is the gentlest, sweetest little girl you could meet. But the first few weeks of homeschooling saw massive meltdowns.
She's in P6, so we don't have the option of skipping work with the transfer test looming. Her school uploads work on Google Classroom, but the answers are attached. The temptation to just copy those down understandably proved too much for a nine-year-old, so now we print out 20-plus sheets every day. Heaven knows what parents without printers do.
The moment most mums and dads leave the room, the work ceases. So, if you want it done, you have to stay there. Then there's the marking and explaining all the stuff not understood or wrong. Thankfully, there are lots of online resources. I've watched 100 times more maths videos than movies this year. The angles of polygons, properties of 3D shapes, nets of a cube - been there, done that, got the T-shirt.
Parents do all this before or after their normal working day, so it makes for colossally long hours.
A hands-on approach lets you see the gaps in your child's learning, and there are magic moments when they master something that they previously struggled with.
But in between there's bribing, cajoling and hectoring in order to get stuff done. I took my eye off the ball with my eldest, reckoning that at 12 she was old enough to get on with it herself.
A phone call from her school showed that was a major mistake, and mid-term has been spent completing a double-digit number of missing homeworks.
Like most kids, my daughters won't return to school until after Easter at earliest. The big question is, what has Peter Weir done to make it safer for teachers and children with vulnerable family members?
Throwing kids back into the same classrooms and hoping for the best would be massively irresponsible.
Hiring more teachers and using extra buildings to reduce class sizes, improving ventilation and laying on more buses would help.
Children will have missed seven months of face-to-face teaching, and the minister's catch-up plans as so far outlined don't sound convincing.
In the meantime, it's up to parents to do the best job they can. Last month, I was struggling to meet a deadline for a 1,200-word feature on Michael Stone. The kids were unusually quiet.
I found them in the kitchen, with the eldest conducting her own scientific experiments with a jumbo box of matches, and her wee sister tasked with waving a tea-towel over the smoke alarm. It will make for a funny family story one day but, in that flame-filled moment, the kids met the mother from hell.
