Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

Things facebook has made me feel guilty about in the past 20 minutes: *Not doing enough school *Complaining about being stuck at home with my kids *Going for a drive *Eating too much *Complaining about eating too much *Complaining about educating my kid at home when I'm not working *Spending too much time on screens *Worrying about my kid spending too much time on screens *Seeing people...at all...ever...even from a safe distance outside Argh!!! Seriously...I'm so beyond done with all of this. The messages are so confusing. Yes, you should hike! But no, don't hike more than a mile from your house! It's fine to go someplace if you don't get out of your car. But no, you should not do that, what if your car breaks down? You absolutely cannot see relatives if they don't live in your house. But hey, you should check on your dad, he's alone, bring him groceries or something. Say it with me: I'm doing the best I can. I'm doing the best I can. I

Just after Christmas 2016 my dad was hospitalized for what we initially thought was a heart attack but what was discovered to be bilateral pulmonary embolisms and spent 5 days in the ICU. He worked really hard to make a recovery and that August was watching my stepbrother's son play in a baseball tournament and watching baseball in Fenway Park. I was so proud of him. His health has never been the same since, but every day we have had him since then has been a gift. My grandmother died of a pulmonary embolism at 67 and I never got to meet her. My Max, who was born in 2018, has gotten to know and love my dad and yells "Bump-ba!" when he hears Grandpa's voice on the phone, because of course we haven't seen him now in over a month. During the stress of Dad's illness, James was also an energetic 2.5 year old. I remember, probably after the big fear was over but in the middle of that stress, not knowing what else to do, I climbed into the bathtub with him one afte

Shoutout to my cousin Valorie who helped me fill in some details about the family after yesterday's post, thank you Valorie, glad you read it. When this is over I'm adding road trip to finally meet Valorie and her mom to my travel list. I think I'm gonna keep this kind of short tonight but I just wanted to say I joined the ranks of people who have done virtual happy hour with friends and I'm glad I did. Chatted with some mom friends...got to hear how everyone is coping and not coping. A little bit of venting, a little bit of laughter, a little bit of actual fear, kind of the normal combo for these times. I have a love hate relationship with technology but I am grateful that we can connect in all these ways now. My dad really can't...the tech is beyond him...and I feel for him because I think the isolation has been that much harder for him as a result. Today we indulged in one of Daddy and James's favorite pastimes, which is walking on abandoned railroad trac

My Other Aunt Marge has been close to my mind and heart these past few weeks. I really wish she were here. Both of my grandmothers died before I turned 2, so that grandmotherly presence in my life was largely my great aunt. She was my father's aunt Marge and when we were very small my sister and I nicknamed her Other Aunt Marge to distinguish her from my father's sister, also named Marge. Growing up, she lived a few hours south of us in Portland and my family visited her there a couple of times a year. She had her own children and grandchildren living near her, but my family also had a special place. I think lots of families have a designated storyteller, someone who likes to gather people around to tell family stories. Other Aunt Marge, or OAM, which is how she signed cards and gift tags, was that person in my family. She was a chatterbox, she was opinionated, and she liked to spin a yarn. I remember once calling her on the phone for a class assignment when we had to inter

I was totally fine until I went to the grocery store. From my perspective as a stay at home non healthcare worker (a place of privilege I acknowledge,) nothing feels like the end of the world until you go the the grocery store. The grocery store feels apocalyptic. Josh, who was our designated grocery store runner until they started closing at 8, said it first...the place just started to have bad vibes about a week and a half ago. Like, it was under control...no one is rioting for toilet paper (today there wasn't any, but I have seen it within the last 2 weeks, it does exist) but it feels like it wouldn't take much to start one. When you are out in the woods, on a walk, in the yard, the other places we are allowed to go, people smile. They wave. The Chinese food people offer my kids extra fortune cookies when we pick up takeout. No one smiles at the grocery store. A few people wear masks. There is always someone stocking, A guy was wiping down freezer handles. They had mos

I almost wrote Day #33. Ye, gods. We'll get there. This is a marathon and not a sprint. My family are baseball people. It's how we relate. It's how we share memories. It's our language. I got 2 text messages this morning. The first was from my sister to the group text we have set up with us and my dad reminding us that today should have been Opening Day. So that had me feeling blue. But the second, after last night's blog post about our friends at the hospital, was an invite to dial in to their virtual class this morning, on the day that would have been our shift. What a lift it was even to just listen to the class remotely. No, it's not the same, but the guest speaker on coping with emotions and anxiety in this time and then the voices of our instructors, repeating their often told stories and phrases...nothing could have been more soothing. I mean, yes, thank goodness for my mute button because I was wrangling my kids at the time, but it was a beautiful

I'm still not sure how exactly I managed to swing it, but I took like a 2 hour nap with Max this afternoon and it was amazing. It felt like the first real sleep I'd had in ages because my nighttime sleep has been so rough...why is it that when babies finally start sleeping through the night suddenly mom can't? I dreamed we were back in the hospital volunteering and our wonderful program lead was drawing pictures and writing notes for James, like she does. But also my friend who is a NICU nurse in another location was there and somehow we got to help in the NICU as well. And there were baby cuddles. And no virus. I felt warm and fuzzy when I woke up. The hospital has oddly become my home away from home. I have thought once or twice over the years about nursing school. If it had occurred to me as an undergrad maybe I would have done it but I didn't have the temperament for it back then. I think if I had started a nursing career later in life I could have done it but b

Things got better after 2 p.m. James is a morning person in a family full of night owls. Which means he wakes up at 7:45 no one else wants to deal with him. I generally have a plan for what we are going to do with our morning, which generally gets shot down by him before 8:30 while he begs for television. Today my plan was to pitch pop up tents in our living room and read books. James LOVES books and crawling in forts. I thought it was a sure winner. He said nah, he'd rather watch TV. I'm not against screens but put him on one all day every day and he becomes really difficult to deal with so I've been trying not to do it until the afternoon, but eff it. Tomorrow we are flipping the script and doing Movie Morning. Maybe after waking up and watching a movie he'll be ready to do other things without whining at me constantly about TV. It's worth the experiment. The best thing we did this morning was our math lesson, where I dumped all the clean socks on the floor

Nothing slid into place today. Some days are like this, where either you are out of step or the world is or both. The world for sure is. The numbers stuck in my head today. They are starting to get very real. We now have over 2,000 people in Washington state confirmed to have this disease and over 100 of them have died. In less than a month. That's pretty staggering and it is not going to get better anytime soon. So I had trouble getting those numbers out of my head and being in the moment today. Kid entertainment was a bust today. We did our typical walk in the woods and struggled again with the social distancing. We weren't in a place where there were a lot of people but the few people we did run into one of two situations played out: me desperately trying to keep my kids from getting too close to people or people wanting so much to introduce their dogs to my kids that they got too close to us. Trying to be forgiving of ourselves and others, it's hard. Then we went on

I was kinda tempted to call this one "Ugly Crying," but let's stay upbeat today, shall we? I almost wrote "this morning" there. What day is it again? Oh, yeah. Today is the day James woke up and decided out of nowhere that he needed to throw the dog a birthday party. The dog is a rescue, we got her 11 months ago and have no idea when her birthday is, but James decided today she needed a birthday party. Now, lest you think I am the coolest mom ever and am planning all these great quarantine activities, I fought him on this big time. My morning mostly consisted of me yelling at James about how we couldn't have a dog birthday party right now while I had coffee, did the laundry, and tried to be reassuring to Max. Max has all of a sudden out of nowhere started sleeping through the night, which is staggering, but makes him quite clingy in the morning. James, not being easily deterred, spent that time creating party games (mostly pin the tail on the doggie,)

The overwhelming message everywhere and by everyone is to stay home to stop the virus. Which is driving me insane because we get outside every single day. And we're supposed to. What the authorities mean by stay home is don't have birthday parties, don't have play dates, don't get your neighbors together for a picnic, stay away from others. And I get it. Their messaging has to be simple. This is not the time for nuance. They need to express how urgent it all is. And it is urgent. I took my youngest for a road trip day today. Daddy got to help James clean his room, a gargantuan task, and my job was to take Max and GET OUT OF THE WAY. Mother Nature seems to be in this weird mood because at the same time she is throwing this horrific deadly pandemic at us, she is also giving us the most beautiful early spring. Sunny early spring isn't uncommon for us, but it has lasted an unusually long time, although I think we are seeing the end of it now. So Max and I headed north

Lord in heaven, I never thought I would go back to blogger. If I could remember the URL of my old blogger address from 2002 I would go back and look at it. Nah, probably not. Today was Day #17 of social distancing from the epicenter of the coronavirus in the U.S. If you're living where I am right now, that requires no explanation, but in case you've been living under a rock or are reading this from some Martian spaceship in 2386, here's a quick backstory on that. (If you are in the here and now, skip the next paragraph.) The coronavirus, and I'm not a medical expert so I'm gonna screw this up, is a new mutation of a virus that spread to humans from some kind of animal in late 2019...the basic point of that being that it is new to humans so no one has any immunity to it. After causing widespread illness and death in China, spreading to Italy and causing widespread illness and death there as well, it arrived in my county of the U.S. in late February. On February 2