Quarantine - Day 2

Posting this just after midnight! It was super sunny this morning, which helped me feel a little less doom-and-gloom, although both Alice and Will were up and ready to start their days before 7:00. We played for a bit, had breakfast, and joined the Facebook Live for Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten again. Alice was much more engaged this time! My favorite part about it is all the new kid-friendly songs I’m learning. After “school” was over, she played by herself while I cleaned up the house a bit and made lunch. Something puzzling—she almost always does a good job eating her lunch, but we often struggle at dinnertime to get her to eat more than a few bites of whatever we’re having. One contributing factor could be that lunch tends to be less of a “real” meal and more of a snack plate. Today was, for example, was carrots and cherry tomatoes with salad dressing, sliced pear, cheese, and veggie straws on a plate. But I’m not sure whether the difference is because of the food we eat or if she’s snacking more than I realize before dinner. ANYWAY.

Will was already snoozing in our bed by Alice’s naptime, so I tucked her in with him and told her I was going to take a shower. By the time I came back, she was asleep! It was amazing—usually I have to lie down with her to get her to go down and half the time I fall asleep myself. But today I was clean and then had more than an hour to read and putter around with both of them unconscious. Win!

We had planned a playdate with her swim buddy before the social distancing recommendations got so strong and I didn’t have the heart to cancel it, so he and his mom came over for what will likely be our very last social interaction for some time. It’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on, and I’m expecting many, many questions about why she can’t see her friends. Ugh.

Matt came home, realized he forgot to vote and went out again to take care of that, and then he and I tuned in to a webinar by my investing guru Phil Town while Alice watched a show. Chicken stir fry for dinner, a long, drawn-out bedtime that resulted in me falling asleep in Alice’s bed again, and then some anxious social media scrolling rounded out my evening.

The only thing I did to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day was to take a picture of Will in the same onesie Alice wore three years ago. Who wore it better??

Quarantine - Day 1

This weekend included a wild trip to the grocery store with insanely long lines, cleaning the laundry room (and enjoying our new dryer!), band practice, helping my mom test her work-from-home capabilities, and voting. And now we’re heading into at least two weeks of self-quarantine and social distancing.

With all schools closed in Illinois, activities canceled, and social distancing highly encouraged, we’re entering a weird period of “figure out any and all potential fun stuff to do at home.” Yesterday (Monday) wasn’t too bad. Alice slept in until nearly 8:30 and then we had breakfast and tuned into a Facebook Live event at 9:00—Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten, which was a fun school-like hour, even if the content is a little advanced for a three-year-old. Will snoozed on the couch through most of it, so I was able to focus on Alice and do the activities and songs with her. Then we played Barbies for a bit before I loaded the kids up in the car for a quick trip to the bank drive-through to deposit a check. Then lunch and nap (I fell asleep with them despite wanting to read instead).

When I woke up from the nap I had a bunch of texts on my phone from a neighborhood group thread with rumors that Illinois will go into lockdown soon in similar fashion to San Francisco (there has not been any confirmation of this yet). I freaked out and texted Matt, who had heard the same thing from a different source. Imagining the absolute madness of the grocery store after this potential news breaks, I got the kids back into the car and went to our small neighborhood grocery store, hoping to avoid the massive lines that have been standard at the larger stores around here. I was able to get a good amount of stuff, including eggs, milk, and bread alternatives (pretzel rolls, focaccia loaf, etc. because they were out of regular sandwich bread). So now we’re pretty well-stocked. Then I had a really frustrating text conversation with my mom, who is still in the denial/this is all ridiculous/there’s no way we could go on lockdown state of mind and insists on taking the commuter train to work even though she could work from home. Gah.

Matt came home and wanted to get quarantine cigarettes as a treat for himself (gross). I was dying to get out of the house by myself, so I went to the tobacco store/hookah bar, which was completely empty of course. The store owner was obviously stressed about the current situation and had a lot of questions for me about where I worked and whether my business was still open. When I told him I work in book publishing he looked at me quizzically and asked, “How do you make money”? I was like, well… we publish books and people buy them? It was odd. But he had roll-your-own American Spirit tobacco, so I bought the cancer leaves and went on my way. Picked up A&W for dinner because I needed to eat some feelings, and it was delicious.

It wasn’t a bad day, but definitely different from what our Mondays looked like a month ago, which included story time at the library in the morning and swim class in the late afternoon. Alice has only been going to school Tuesday through Thursday since I’ve been on leave, so today (Tuesday) will mark the first true disruption in that she will be home when she was supposed to be at school. Matt’s work is still open and will continue to be, I think, even in the case of a lockdown, since plumbers are on the list of essential workers. I’m happy he will still be working because $$$, obviously, but having him out of the house all day every day means all the childcare falls to me. Being confined to our house and yard makes this more challenging than it would be normally (and will become extremely challenging when I go back to work on April 6th). Because he’s going on jobs, I think his risk of contracting COVID-19 (and bringing it home) is fairly high. We’re not able to completely self-isolate the way families with both parents working from home are, and that means we really shouldn’t have contact with anyone else because our household isn’t a closed system. So that sucks—both the risk of contracting the virus and the social isolation our potential exposure necessitates.

I hope we don’t get sick (or if we do that we have only mild symptoms), I hope we’re all doing enough social distancing to slow the virus’s spread. I hope in four or six or eight weeks things will get better and we’ll look back on this time as super strange and temporary. Fingers crossed!

A little Peppa Pig to help get us through the day