band

everyday life, band, maternity leave, motherhood, quarantine

Quarantine - Day 3

It’s only Day 3 of our self-isolation and the days are already starting to blend together. This is exactly why I’m blogging—to be able to remember my life, especially this extremely strange period of it! We went through our morning routine of breakfast and Camp Kindergarten. Alice and I made a trek to the basement to get our guitars and brought them up to the living room so we could play band together. Then Will woke up from his morning nap and I loaded Elton John and Adele into the CD player. One of my goals for maternity leave was to organize our very large CD collection (we’re so old school!) and it hasn’t happened yet but I think it will over the next week or so. Thinking about what music to put on for the day is a little bright spot, and it’s fun to go through all the CDs and remember forgotten favorites.

Nap was kind of a disaster, after the first fifteen minutes when I laid down between Alice and Will and had many grateful thoughts about how lucky we are to be together and healthy and have everything we need. Both kids were simultaneously asleep for only about 20 minutes and neither of them slept nearly as long as they should have, so I didn’t get to learn the bass part to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” the way I had planned. I’m trying out a FaceTime band practice with some friends tomorrow!

It rained most of the day so we didn’t go outside, but Alice did a great job playing by herself and with me, and the screen time was reasonable, probably two hours or a little less. She cracked me up wanting to play “Miss Megan” from Camp Kindergarten and give me lessons and homework to do. Fish sticks, baked potatoes, and frozen vegetables for dinner, nothing fancy. Matt let her take the longest bath ever but I didn’t fall asleep putting her to bed, so now I get to go read!

It’s supposed to be warm tomorrow and we need to get out of the house (and I need to get some exercise—this is something I need to find a solution for and build into our routine). I don’t know how I’m going to keep Alice away from her friends if we see them in the neighborhood and I don’t think she’ll understand if I try to explain why we can’t go to the playground. UGH. Not being able to see her buddies is going to be the worst part of this whole thing. In some ways I’m glad my kids are so little while we go through this—the social isolation would just be worse if they were older and I would feel a lot more stress about school being closed and feeling the need to do educational stuff at home, but it’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on in a way that’s not scary. And then of course there’s the constant physical and emotional drain of caring for two kids nonstop in a closed environment!

I didn’t do a very good job of staying off the internet today, which is probably why I’m feeling blah. Time to stop computering and go do something else!

band

The band on YouTube

When we moved in together back in 2011, one of the first things Matt did was start begging me to learn bass guitar so we could start a band. I did (kind of), and we recruited Matt’s brother and my friend Tony to join us in a group that was known at different times as Andy and the Frames, the Walter Juniors, and the Three White Pipes. That band has long been defunct, but last week Matt discovered that our cover of “She’s Electric” by Oasis, which we put on YouTube years ago, has over 12,000 views. That’s a lot of people watching my mediocre bass playing and terrible background singing, but I thought it was kind of cool!

Andy and the Frames debut performance 11/24/12

We played a few shows in our basement for our friends and family. The video is from the first one, in 2012, and Matt is wearing sunglasses because he was super nervous and needed a shield between him and the audience. Also notice the plaid shirts we coordinated. So stylish!

A couple of nights ago we went down to the basement and treated Will to his first band practice, with Alice on drums. We’re already counting down until the two squirts can join us for real and complete the family band. Hopefully they’ll turn out to be better singers than their mom!

Official band picture, during the Walter Juniors era

Official band picture, during the Walter Juniors era