The Journey vs. The Destination

I started rereading a book in which the main character dies at the end.  I didn't love the book the first time around; the tension and uncertainty kept me from enjoying the story and the writing. This time, I know the end, and even though the end is sad, I can still enjoy what leads up to it.

That's the problem with this whole quarantine/death virus situation. I don't know how - or when - it ends. Minus the virus thing, this is actually a pretty cool time for an anxiety-ridden introvert like me. All my people are home - no car accidents or school shooters to worry about. The kids aren't stressed about school. We're not darting from one activity to the next. I'm getting enough sleep for the first time in 12+ years. We're cooking at home every night, and eating together as a family, which only ever happened on weekends before.

Last night, we went out for a walk after dinner, all 5 of us. We saw swans on the water, beavers swimming and slapping their tails, ducks, and a beautiful sunset.

We never have time, energy, or ambition for things like that regularly.

I'm crocheting more again (now that my hands stopped hurting for the time being) and maybe will actually finish the blanket I started like 2 years ago (pre-hand issues). The house is slowing getting purged of all our accumulated junk.

It's all good - except for the fear of any of us leaving the house and catching a virus that could kill us. There's no real rhyme or reason as to who is ending up in ICU and who is dying, not really.

I can't enjoy the journey because I don't know the destination. There's no end point. There's no flipping to the end to see what happens - preferably that we all come out of this ok - so I can relax. There's all this good around me, but it's blocked by the fear and uncertainty.

My goal is at least to acknowledge the good, even if I can't fully enjoy it, so when I look back on this time it's not all bad. Just like I took thousands of pictures of the kids when they were babies, and when I look back on that I don't see the busy, exhausted, stressed-out, vomit-covered life we led, but the smiles and the cuteness, and the thousands of moments of good sprinkled in every day.

On that note, I should probably charge my camera and start making a point of taking more pictures of now, too. So when we finally get wherever this leads, I can look  back and see that it wasn't all bad.

Score!

This morning, I decided to perform the futile task of searching for grocery delivery times. I check multiple sites every day.  The one with the most openings is also the hardest to use, and the other two have been booked solid.  So imagine my surprise when I snagged a delivery time - for two weeks out!

It feels like such a score.  Because this is life now. You get the most points for the least amount of human contact in a week. If we don't have to go to the grocery store (albeit 2 weeks from now), that's one less infection vector in our lives. And since we don't go anywhere else, SCORE. (Of course, 2 weeks from now, we'll be heading to IVIG again, so ... yeah.)

And then tonight, I randomly checked another service and found a time for grocery pick up next week.  DOUBLE SCORE.

So now we have two weeks worth of groceries dealt with (and we just went yesterday) with *no human contact*.

I mean, of course, we'll have to disinfect all the groceries, because somehow this is the world we live in now, where your fruit can kill you. Or your mail. Or what you ordered from Amazon 2 weeks ago that finally came. Or basically anything that has been touched by human hands.

Seriously, can this nightmare end now?

But in any case: got grocery delivery times for the next 2 weeks. Score.

Good Days, Bad Days

I take a medication that gives me really wild and vivid dreams.  Every day I wake up hoping this is just one of those dreams and I'll tell everyone about it and they'll tell me how crazy it is, like they do with my other dreams, and we'll laugh and then make plans to go out shopping and for dinner.

And then I wake up and nope. Here we are. This is somehow actual real life in 2020.

Like everyone else, we're having our good days and bad days. Yesterday we were all pretty grumpy and short tempered. The kids all did some schoolwork, but there was enough frustration and lack of patience that I didn't push it. Today went a little better on that front - I worked 1:1 with N for his stuff, and the other kids worked mostly on their independent research projects that they chose to do.  Then I finally went ahead and bought them a course to learn to program Roblox games, and the hope/goal is that they'll all work together on it, to combine their various strengths. We'll see.

I'm having trouble finding the motivation I had last week to get things done. I spend most of my patience and energy on getting them to do schoolwork of some sort, and by the time that's done, I just can't seem to convince myself to do much more. This is always my coping strategy during stress though, to spend my time doing mindless things on the computer or reading, so I don't actually think about the rest of the things. Don't look too far ahead, or think about all the anxiety-causing things out of my control.

Even on the best of days, everything starts coming to a head between dinner and when the kids to go bed. The daily testing numbers are released, to fuel anxiety. We take stock of what we have and how long until we need to venture out into the world again. The kids get all amped up, and most nights (like tonight) I end up putting on my headphones and listening to music way too loud so I can block it out. It's no one's fault, they're not being bad or even different than they were earlier in the day, but 12 hours later my nerves are fraying.

Another day down. Another day when all my people are safe.  But who knows how much longer this will last, and if we'll all still be here and safe at the end.

How do we ever go back?

Today we took a "scenic" drive, just to get out of the house. I took my camera along, just in case we happened upon actually scenery without people, but we didn't.  There were people everywhere it felt like.

There are two things that strike me about all this.

First is how people, even people who think they're doing a good job, still don't understand how serious this is. Things like going to visit your elderly and fragile parents isn't a reasonable activity, actually, and that sucks.  But unless you're not even going to the grocery store or pharmacy, you're being exposed, and even if you've been a total hermit, it still hasn't been long enough for most people to say you're fully in the clear.

I mean, there is the flip side, people who are so freaked out they can't handle it. The "I need to cry now" and "I can't listen to the news anymore, it's too much".  And I get that it's overwhelming, honestly. I think I'm just jaded, because this isn't my first rodeo with making choices and sacrifices because someone I love is literally at risk of dying. If I don't listen, or I get too emotional, I'm going to make bad choices. I've lived with this responsibility for what, 12 years now?  With it's companion feeling of waiting for the other shoe to drop, literally every day for like 13 years or more even.  So I'm used to it, and trying to be patient with people who aren't  - while hating everyone who still blows this off as no big thing.

Second though, is how do we ever go back from this? How do we trust it's safe again?  (Even if safe is only ever "safe" anyways.)  Like normal people are now looking at things in new ways, and germophobes like me are spraying the mail with Lysol before it can come in the house, and on our drive we saw some rocks that would be fun to climb on maybe and were empty but all I could think was "but people have *touched* those").

I'm struggling with the facts of our cruise. I don't see how we're going to feel safe in July to go, even if the ports and borders reopen and the cruises are running.  I want to go so badly, but not if it's going to be a miserable time of "don't touch anything at all ever" and suspiciously eyeing ever person we come into contact with. If we cancel in the next 2 months, we'll get all our money back, so no harm there - except our airfare, which is non-refundable. The airline changed it to get a credit to fly by next March, which does us zero good, and even if they extend it a credit out to next summer like ... who's saying 2021 is gonna be better? So we might just be out that money, which sucks, or we can maybe try to finagle a refund from our travel insurance.

How do we get back to where we were before, in terms of comfort with being around people, and travel, and going places?

That's one of the scariest uncertainties for me.

Foooooood

So I mean I lied about how the personal space issue is going to be the hardest.

I'm dying for takeout food. Anything we don't have to cook ourselves.  But we feel like it's maybe too big a risk.

Is it paranoia?  Maybe. But I don't know how to think it's safe, and so here we are getting ready to cook our own pizzas, which will not be anywhere near as good as take out pizza.  We're running out of meal ideas, and already put in the grocery order for tomorrow but I wish we had added more lunch ideas.

I wish my hand/shoulder didn't hurt so much because there's things I'd like to be doing, but I know if I don't just let it rest for awhile it will get worse and then I won't be able to do anything with it. So, more stupid games on my phone, more books to read. Nothing strenuous.

Maybe I'll spend some time looking up other meal ideas and find something worth trying.  I was also thinking about maybe digging out the Aerogarden and starting to grow something again, and maybe starting some seeds for the summer.

Speaking of summer, we did get the good news that our cruise final payment date is pushed off a month, so we have more time to figure out how to handle that. It seems impossible that we'll get to go, which is really sad, but if we can't go we'd at least like to get as much of our money back as possible. And now we have an extra month to see how that might play out.

IVIG

Well, we had IVIG today.

I don't think I've ever been so nervous about it before. Not even the first time.  The entire hospital was a ghost town ... except the infusion center, which was hopping. I have to hope that since everyone there has a vested interest in staying healthy, that it was safe enough, but who can really know?  Luckily we got a room, and we kept the door closed, and only had close contact with the one nurse so - fingers crossed?

I hate feeling like going out in the world is risky now. I hated driving home seeing all the people who were out like there was no reason not to be.

I know the benefits of going outweigh the risks.

And hey brightside - we're now fully done paying the OOP costs for all our healthcare for the year. Yaaay ... ?

Day 7

Has it really only been a week?

Today I spent some time reviewing pre-algebra concepts with D, because it was really frustrating to me that he didn't seem to understand the basic concepts of what he was supposed to be working on (leftover assignments from when school was actually open).  Then I went ahead and pushed A ahead into geometry. I signed N up for Khan Academy and ordered some flash cards.

It's hard to be motivated, really, but at least if I keep them up in math, and they keep reading, and we do the occasional other project, it will seem like we did something.

They all want to learn how to program actual Roblox games so I'm going to look into that some too I guess. We'll see how that goes.

I finished organizing the last piles of crap in the kitchen. We keep a stunning amount of useless stuff.  It's gone now - along with all the dust, dirt, hair, and yuck.  But now my hands are starting to hurt so it's probably time to lay off the projects and let the monthly inflammation fest run it's course.

St. Patrick's Day

Growing up, we always had St. Patrick's Day off. Technically it was for Evacuation Day (obscure Revolutionary War holiday), but it always felt so special.  The whole extended family would get together, just like it was a "real" holiday - we'd use the china, and even the little glasses with the shamrocks.  There's be corned beef and all the holiday veggies - and we'd dye the mashed potatoes green. Then there were always Entimenn's cupcakes with candy shamrocks for dessert.

We never missed a year, and even after we all grew up and didn't get March 17th off, at least we'd still do something with just our smaller family.

Except this year.

I refuse to put my mom in jeopardy with this stupid virus, and because it can take so long to know if you've had it or not ... I just refuse.

We're still making our own corned beef. I will still dye the potatoes. But it's just not the same.


The kid started some independent research projects today.  I kept cleaning the kitchen. Finishing consolidating the half-empty hand sanitizer bottles into the bigger bottle. Ho-hum.

Day 5

A's appointment got cancelled for today. Can't say I'm sorry. Everything is just moving so fast now that other people have started to pay attention.

The kids spent the day doing various bits of schoolwork, making new YouTube videos and banners, and coming up with other projects for themselves. They're being really good so far - less fighting than average.

I spent the day starting in on my great kitchen organization project.  I'm so used to having alone time that sitting in one room with 3 kids all day is going to make me lose my mind faster than anything else, so I may as well take this time to finally get rid of all the random crap and get the kitchen organized. I made it through like 2/3 of the table (aka the dumping grounds) today, which was actually a lot because it's where all the paperwork is stored. Oh hey no we do not need a math worksheet from last year, or an appointment reminder card from 2017.  (I'm not alone on this hoarding habit, right?)

I really think the hardest part of all this is going to be the lack of alone time and personal space. Watching whatever shows I want (however many times I want) without judgement. Having a snack without everyone wondering what it is and can they have some too.  The constant chatter and questions. None of them are big fans of going off and doing their own thing, so it's like 14 hours of constant togetherness.

On the bright side: I don't have to get dressed like ... ever.

Day 2: The World is Closed

Well, we're surviving. Early days yet.

Yesterday I notified school that my kids weren't coming back until this is over. I called and rescheduled all our appointments (except IVIG obviously), and pushed them out until May, and we'll see if we can even keep those.  The kids vaguely did some schoolwork, and we ran down after school to pick up D's Chromebook and a couple other things they put together for us, so now we have what they need to catch up.

Today was a scheduled day off of school anyways, so that's good. We had a quick orthodontist appointment for D - he was scheduled already, and a bracket fell off, so sort of had to go. Moved A's appointment to Monday (from next Friday) to see if we can fit that in before things blow up. Other people are finally starting to get it that this is no joke. Other school districts closed yesterday.  Finally ours just announced that we'er closed for 2 weeks . Cute guys, thinking that 2 weeks is going to be enough. At least now I get a reprieve from having to try to officially homeschool for now.

Really glad we went and bought more toilet paper and Lysol last week, because there's none to be found anymore.

It's 2020, and people are fighting over toilet paper. It's a crazy world we're living in.

School's Out

Tonight we made the very difficult, but necessary decision to pull the kids from school. We've been debating of the timing of it, and even agreed with the pediatrician a few hours ago that maybe first we try more social distancing at school for D. But then the news rolled in that we have 2 positive cases in our town, and so we've decided we're just done. I can't take the chance with his immune system that he'll catch this, because we just don't know how bad it could be for him.

And thus begins our adventures in quarantine.