We’ve survived our first week of school. Well, I’m being optimistic, since I submit my column earlier in the week. But we just finished up open house for elementary and middle school, and the brand-new high school student assures me that he’s got everything under control and is ready to begin, so, I’m going to hope that by the time this column runs, it’s a sunny Saturday, and we are enjoying our first weekend of the school year.

After the past few days, I truly hope my optimism isn’t misguided. Since I am continuing to work from home, and we opted to keep all three kids home for now, the Wonderful Husband and I realized that we had to make some upgrades.

The WH is the fastidious researcher, so he found what he thought would be the best option for an upgrade to our wireless router and added a few boosters so that everyone could comfortably sit in their “school” corner and be connected, while I still maintained my home office on what used to be our kitchen table.

The WH did the research, and I did the installing. Everything worked great! We had a good strong signal in every corner of the house, and even outside for a decent amount of area around the house. I think I was able to double my productivity as I no longer had to wait for my programs to work because someone else was hogging the Wi-Fi watching yet another rerun of “The Office.”

This lasted for all of three hours. I’d postponed the inevitable. It was time to get the kids’ Chromebooks fired up and start getting them logged in to their virtual classrooms.

“But mooooommmmmm, school doesn’t start for two more days. Why do we have to do this nowwwwwwww?”

Well, it’s a darn good thing we got a head start. Two out of three Chromebooks refused to connect to our internet.

Not a problem, I thought. Over the past few months of working from home, I’ve had to act as my own tech support on more than one occasion. Additionally, I set up our wireless printer and managed to connect it to my phone, and that only took me about half an hour. So, I’m practically a tech support genius! (I am being completely sarcastic here, I am not a tech support genius. If you ask me for technical support, you should probably do the opposite of whatever I say.)

I started with the most basic of all troubleshooting skills: I rebooted. Everything. Every device. Unplugged them all. Sat around and waited for them all to cool off and reset. Started everything back up again. And … nothing.

So, then I started Googling the error messages I was getting. In the meantime, the WH asked all his co-workers if they ever had this problem. Soon my phone was buzzing with suggestions. I worked through them all. The best part of that is when I interrupted the internet service in the middle of A’s online video game playing. “Mom!!!! I was in a match.”

I reminded him that he has great plans for building his own computer, and that learning how to get all our devices back online would be a great start for his future programming and troubleshooting development and he quickly retreated back into his gamer lair.

As the panic started to build, I kept reminding myself that I still had two days to fix this, and that if worse came to worst, they were still able to log in through their tablets, or our home PC, and it might take us longer to get through all the work, but we still had options. It would be OK.

But, by the time the WH got home that night, I threw the stack of “simple fixes” I had printed off at him and ran out of the house crying. Yes, things got that bad. After several hours on the phone with the internet provider, the router company and the school district technical support, we had made absolutely zero progress. So much for trying to keep a positive attitude for the school year.

The next morning, the technical person from the school district was able to help create a temporary fix to the problem that will get us through maybe the whole year if we need to, or at least until I can get to the root of our connectivity issue. In the meantime, all the fixes that we tried caused more than a little havoc between the rest of our devices, as passwords had been updated and security certificates had been changed. Remarkably, though, everything is finally working again, and still in one piece.

I realized that it wasn’t the silly internet that had caused my breakdown. It’s the whole big picture that finally seemed to come crashing down. I can’t believe we’ve been in this zone for over five months now. It still feels like everything is either so completely beyond our control, like this awful virus that remains unpredictable, or so completely under control, like my three kids who have been essentially in lockdown for months, and are pushing the boundaries as hard as they can.

I hope with all my heart that our teachers and students head back into school and we have no incidents and within a month or two, we can really start to feel like things are normal again.

On the other hand, as more schools go back, and we hear more stories of outbreaks, and as I continue to see people refuse to take precautions, it is hard to hold on to the optimism that normal is anywhere near. At the very least, our family, and our extended village, has one week behind us. In one way, shape or form, we made it. It was different, it was hard, and here we are, we made it.

Maybe your school hasn’t started yet. Maybe you’re fighting with your Chromebook or your internet or maybe your kindergartner’s sock just didn’t fit right today. Maybe you, like me, just need to have a good cry, throw something and then get back to work. As for me, I’m just really glad I don’t have to wake up tomorrow and be tech support. I think I’ll catch up on some “Office” reruns.

Liz Pinkey is a contributing writer to the Times News. Her column appears weekly in our Saturday feature section.