Groundhog Day

By now, my life in many ways feels like a real-life version of Groundhog Day. Wake up, feed the animals, make the coffee, feed the cat and the guinea pig (ha ha ha), unload dishwasher and clean up anything still left from night before, go for a walk if weather is okay, take a shower, start my workday, break for lunch, activity with Seth (bike ride or ping pong or walk), more work, more quick breaks to interact with William and Seth as they begin to get restless, quit work sometime between 4 and 5, more interacting with the boys, make dinner, eat dinner, clean up dinner,  watch a TV show with the boys, read with Seth, boys to bed, zone out with TV or Twitter or Insta or Sudoku, bed.

The weekend was a break in that routine. And next week will be spring break, so that will take some creativity. Things are still pretty good though. Today the boys and I played Clue and Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza and ping pong. We started watching an old season of Amazing Race. I canceled the rental car and hotel rooms that we had booked for spring break. I finished sorting through my huge collection of recipes and managed to pitch more than half. Now I just need to organize them.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll get a little crazy and clean the bathrooms and change the sheets on the bed. Maybe I’ll even do a load of laundry. The possibilities are endless.

Somehow, I’m still super tired by the end of the day. Go figure!

Two Weeks (Feels like Two Months)

We’ve made it through two weeks of social distancing, online school, teleworking.  And it definitely has been a long two weeks. But honestly—it has not been nearly as bad as I feared. I know—there’s still plenty of time for break downs and freak outs. But so far, it has not sucked.

Today I took William fishing at the Georgetown Waterfront and our friends met us there. We sat 6 feet apart and the boys fished and it was nice. The weather wasn’t great, but it’s always soothing to be by the water and to chat with a friend.

The weather finally turned nice in the afternoon and Seth begged me to go bike riding down this hill near our house. Before Corona, I probably wouldn’t have done that. He probably wouldn’t have asked me to because he would have been with friends. But today, he asked so off we went. We rode around and went up and down the hill several times. It was fun. Then we rode around a little more and he asked if I could ride with no hands. He has just recently acquired this skill and as I watched him practice and grow more confident, I could so clearly remember my 11-year-old self watching older kids ride with no hands, and wishing I could be that cool, and then learning to ride with no hands, and then feeling so cool and confident when I mastered it. So I took my hands off the handlebars and got the hang of riding with no hands again, and Seth and I cruised down the street, feeling pretty darn cool.

So my bike ride with Seth and my fishing session with William and having friends to chat with are two things today that I feel grateful for. The third thing I’m grateful for is the sunshine and warmth that came out this afternoon.

As we head into week 3, I just hope things continue this way. I know it sounds really corny, and I know we have a way to go, but I’m actually enjoying spending times with my kids and my family. What a crazy time!

What's Different?

Now that we've been through one full week of work/school, I'm reflecting on how things are different now (other than the obvious--that we're all home!)

For one thing, I haven't blown dry my hair since this all started. I'm just working in some kind of curly hair product and letting it air dry. Another thing--I've been making my bed every day. I have time, and my "office" is the sitting room off the bedroom, and a made bed makes a bedroom look SO MUCH BETTER, so it's kind of a no-brainer.

Something else that is different is that I'm making lunch for the boys almost every day. Some days we've just scrounged, and some days Ed has gotten them situated. But for the most part, we are all breaking for lunch around the same time and I'm preparing something or putting things out to eat.

Another different thing is that I'm doing a LOT more puzzles. I don't know what it is about puzzles that I find so soothing, but I'm happy to have periods throughout the day when I just zone out with the puzzle.

Here are things I'm not doing, that I really should be doing. I'm not reading as much. I attribute this to trauma, and hopefully, I can overcome this soon. I'm also not exercising, which I attribute this to just plain laziness. I'm also not cleaning/organizing as much. I'm wiping surfaces a lot (door handles and things we touch all the time), but I have yet to mop floors or organize the pantry or go through recipes or photographs. There's still time, though. This is a marathon, not a sprint! And it's not like I have TONS of free time. I am still working full time during the week. And the boys still require a good amount of my time.

Still, I will feel like a dolt if I don't get at least a few significant projects done. So on that note, I'm off to sort through my recipe folder! (Not only does it need sorting, but I need to get back into menu planning. But that's a thought for another post.)

Routines

Now that I have a considerable amount of time to read, I can't seem to read anything other than texts, tweets, and news headlines. In all truthfulness, this has been a trend for a while. I'm spending way more time scrolling through online newspapers, Instagram, and Twitter than I am reading actual books--even Ebooks. The dopamine-charging effect of smartphones is no joke!

Anyway, we are almost through week two and I feel like we've established a little bit of a routine. We wake up, Ed usually showers, I usually head to the kitchen to clean up and make coffee and feed animals, Seth usually begs me to make him something to eat that he can easily make for himself (like a bowl of cereal, for example), and then I go back upstairs to shower or change or just start working. I'm taking a wait-and-see approach to the shower-every-day thing. If I exercise and get sweaty, well then--duh, I'll shower. If not, and my hair doesn't look terrible (like today), I'll just put on clean clothes and call it a win.

My boss established "core hours" from 10:00 to 11:30, when everyone in our office should be at our computers and available. The boys are usually doing their school work at this time, although some days they have finished by 10:00. Regardless, they manage to keep themselves occupied in the morning. By 11:30, though, they're starting to get bored. So I've been breaking around then or noon and we've all been eating lunch together. The best lunch we had was when I made grilled cheese sandwiches using the homemade bread Seth and I made. Those were awesome. Today the boys had sandwiches and I had leftover pizza. We all ate standing up in the kitchen. Seth and I went outside to throw the football around, and then we went for a bike ride to deliver a puzzle to the Hills. Weather was nice today so I wanted to make sure we took advantage of it.

The afternoons have been a mix of working and trying to get the boys to do creative things while they complain of being bored and ask for screen time. Good times. Now that the Senate is out of session, I can knock off at 4:00, so today, I took William fishing at the Georgetown Waterfront. A lot of people were out enjoying the weather, but the steps were pretty empty, so it was a very pleasant hour or so. Then we came home and I made dinner. I've been cooking but we've also ordered in a few times. Gotta do our part to try to help our restaurants stay in business! I'd like to get the boys to take some responsibility and cook a meal, but neither one is even remotely interested. Not sure if it's worth the fight I'd have to undertake to get them to do it. Tonight I had a much-needed "happy hour" at 6:30 with my book club friends, so the boys ate dinner without me.

After dinner, we've been watching an episode of The Mandalorian. Tomorrow night will be the last episode of the season, so I'm not sure what we'll watch together next, but I hope we keep up with this ritual. It's a good way to end the evening and signal the bedtime routine. We have kept to the 9:00 bedtime, which is really nice. (Although William has been staying up later to read, and I'm all in for that! My biggest failure as a parent is that my kids claim they don't like to read!)

I'll end my with my three bits of gratitude for today. I'm grateful for this beautiful spring.  I'm grateful for Winston, our cat, who is such a nuisance but so precious. And I'm grateful for sharing the bike ride with Seth today and the fishing time with William today.

Life in the Time of Covid-19

We're halfway through our second week of social distancing/teleworking/homeschooling. I felt a little less panicked today. I had a pretty specific and monotonous task for work that kept me occupied. And I didn't pay a lot of attention to Twitter or the news, so that helped. It rained most of the day, so that wasn't great for the boys. They were done with school by late morning and then they were bored. They both had virtual music lessons, so that took up a little bit of time. Ed is pretty adamant about no screen time on school days (other than their obvious screen time for school, and texting, face time, Spotify, or news apps). I know it's ultimately a good thing, but they're really struggling to find things to do. Maybe it will get easier as the weather gets nicer. Things might also change again when they stop doing review lessons for school and start actually learning new things and engaging more with their teachers.

Now that I'm sitting here blogging again, I'm remembering why I quit in the first place. By the end of the day, I am spent. I don't know how I kept it up so long when the boys were so little. At any rate, I will do my best to keep this going. And I will end with small gratitudes. I'm working on a cool puzzle (Disney Pixar movies); the grocery store had almost everything in stock that I was looking for; I got to face time with Tina and Morgan and got a Marco Polo from Heather.

We're Still Working It Out

Well, it's taken a national calamity to get me blogging again. As a historian, I know that accounts of what it's been like to live through the Covid-19 pandemic are going to help tell the full story of this time. And I've been trying to put pen to paper and record my thoughts, but I've been too sporadic and unmotivated at the end of the day. And then I remembered this old thing! So here goes nothing.

So, what's it like to live through this Covid-19 pandemic? Let me see if I can reconstruct my timeline. We started hearing about this novel coronavirus showing up in China in January. I can't remember when cases started showing up in Washington State and California, maybe early February. A bunch of cruise ship passengers from a cruise out of Japan started getting sick and all of the passengers had to be quarantined. By the middle of February, people in Italy and Iran started to get sick. It hit a nursing home in Seattle really hard and at the end of February or the beginning of March, and then there was the day (March 11) that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson announced they tested positive for Covid-19, and the NBA canceled its season when several players tested positive. After that, things seemed to suddenly get real. The boys were out of school on Friday, March 13, for a teacher workday, and over the weekend, the superintendent made the decision to close schools until after spring break (April 15). We had to go to the school to pick up their laptops. They would be off Monday through Wednesday, March 16-18, and then they would begin online learning on March 19. The teachers prepared 10 days worth of review lessons that they posted to Schoology.

Meanwhile, restaurants, malls, movie theaters, bars, churches, parks--basically everything is closed. Grocery stores and pharmacies and Targets/Walmarts are open, but other than that, we are basically sheltering in place. We saw this happen in China and Hong Kong and Italy--the idea of "social distancing" and "flattening the curve." I can't say that I really thought about what it must be like when I read about it happening in those places. It completely tanked the stock market and has severely slowed the gears of the economy. The House and Senate are desperately trying to pass legislation to alleviate the fallout--cash payments to individuals, loans and bailouts to businesses, increased unemployment insurance, free healthcare, etc. etc. etc. As always, the devil is in the details.

Yesterday, March 23, Virginia's governor announced that schools in Virginia would close for the rest of the school year. Even though I think we all kind of expected that this would be the case, it still seemed to catch everyone off guard, kind of like a punch in the gut. Until now, I guess there was a small part of us that thought, maybe, maybe we could still salvage something of "normal" for our kids. But maybe it's better to rip off that bandaid and get on with figuring things out.

As for my own situation, I am now telecommuting full time. Fortunately, our office had started a telecommuting pilot program in November, so the transition has not been too bad. Our office had three laptops that we shared among eight staff members. Last week, we weren't sure if we would all be telecommuting, or taking turns as skeletal staff in the office, or if we'd just have pandemic leave and only work once in a while, trading around the available laptops. Our IT people managed to pull together enough laptops for almost all of us to work from home, so for the foreseeable future, Ed and I both are juggling work and kids.

The boys are adjusting pretty well. They enjoyed their three days off last week. Seth was still playing outside with a few neighborhood kids. I took William fishing several times--to the tidal basin and Georgetown Waterfront. Thank goodness the weather was gorgeous! They seem to be fine with doing their schoolwork online. It doesn't take them much time at all. We are trying to stick to the no-screentime-on-school-days regimen, which is really, really tough and requires much more of me. We've been doing some game playing (we LOVE Taco Cat Goat Cheese Pizza), baking (Seth and I are figuring out how to make homemade bread), lots of walking and riding bikes, making fires in the chiminea, puzzles. And we are making one exception to the screen time rule. After dinner, we started watching The Mandalorian. I fear that all of these diversions will quickly lose their charm, and we will all be at each other's throats in no time.

William got really sad today because I let the boys know that we will most likely not be able to go to Florida for our spring break. We're supposed to go to Anna Maria Island on the Gulf Coast of Florida for the week. We rented a house with a private pool about a block from the beach. I booked a fly fishing guide for William. We were really, really looking forward to it. And we were thinking that since we were planning to drive anyway, and the house and pool are private, and the beach is just a block away, and we can bring our own food and eat at home or order takeout, and we can just as easily social distance there as here--that maybe, just maybe, we could still go. But as I'm reading about traveling right now, it just isn't a good idea. No one wants tourists right now, using up valuable resources like groceries and toilet paper and God forbid hospital supplies if they get sick while they're there. We can hopefully get a credit and do it all again next year. And there's a slight possibility we can rent a yurt in Virginia for a few days instead so William can get his fishing on and we wouldn't be putting anyone out. But I don't want to promise anything this far out. We just have to take a "wait and see" position.

But man, breaking that news was hard. I think it really hit William what this all means. There have definitely been some really nice things about this togetherness, this slowing down, this culture shock of not having the social outlets and the "business" that we are all so used to. I know that if I can remain positive and calm and empathetic and creative, the boys will follow my lead. I know there will be moments when I crack, but I just hope I can hold it together in their presence. They need to not see the panic I sometimes feel welling up inside of me.

And then I start to think of the kids and the wives and the husbands who feel trapped, who no longer have the refuge of school or the office or the house to themselves during the day. How many people will suffer horribly during this time? And it breaks my heart. That's when I start to cry--when I think about the unbearable stress that so many people are dealing with out there. This is all unprecedented and who knows what we will be on the other side. I can't do much more than pray for people right now. Make donations where I can. Spend as much money as I can to help the economy. Look out for neighbors and others in my community. And good Lord--reach out to my friends and family, as often as I can.

I started this blog 13 years ago, and at the time, I really was working it out. I'm not sure if I realized then that I'd probably always be working it out, but as it turns out, that was a really good title for my blog.