Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

I'm really tired. And I'm sure I've had too much sugar and not enough water so that doesn't help. James was up at 6:45. Turns out our Hulu free trial includes Sesame Street so that killed some time until Max woke up at 7:30. Make biscuits from a can for a special breakfast. I'm a rock star mom. It was a tiring day. How come birthdays are exhausting even when you don't do much? Video chatted with family, opened some presents, ate some lunch, didn't make time for Max to nap, that was a mistake, made a lemon cake that for sure is going to be added to my baking repertoire. What will I remember? Balloons. Kids are funny little animals. They are amazingly resilient and have built in coping mechanisms but they are also fragile and vulnerable and feel things deeply. All at the same time. And sometimes, when things are rough, like when you don't get to see any friends on your birthday (even our trusty neighbor Emma wasn't in her yard a safe 6 ft away ...

One of the tough things about challenging myself to do this every day...ish....is that one day is kinda a lot like the next. We don't have a lot of variety to our lives these days. Today was a bit different. Today I actually sat with James during his kindergarten zoom meeting because today they were celebrating his birthday (they don't do a zoom meeting on Thursdays, his actual birthday is tomorrow.) Yesterday we made a crown (there was glitter glue, we survived) for him to wear and we prepped answers to the questions kids get asked when they are the birthday VIP person. Of course he went off book a little when actually asked the questions, but we made it through okay. Of course then he freaked out and started crying when he didn't have the right paper to write on during the math lesson that followed, so, you know, nice to be normal. After zoom, we watched some Mr. Rogers Neighborhood. James and I read a picture book biography of Fred Rogers in late February and that ma...

Did not sleep at all well last night...the good news I guess is my husband hasn't been a great sleeper through this and is a night owl anyway so there was someone to hang out with. I'm surprised we haven't played more video games...in the days pre-children when we had time to spare we'd play video games or board games. Life changes a lot after kids. We didn't even have our first pandemic Scrabble game until last week, that is so unlike us. But we watched a documentary his dad sent, that was cool, and we've been watching Community, there are many seasons of that and it's nice to have a show to share. Been trying to get more one on one time with James, even just to read a little bit. We broke out some mail order craft kits I had been sitting on today, there was one about space, that was fun. We made a little model solar system and a solar oven. He LOVES project learning like that, that's one thing remote school does not have much of. I went back to the...

Yesterday was supposed to be Seattle Independent Bookstore Day and my BFF and I were going to take James to kick off his birthday week. Had this plan for months. I was so looking forward to it. The event has been rescheduled for August 29. I hope it happens. It is so fun to be raising James to be a book lover. He will even lean in and smell new books. He's definitely mine. You've gotta love a kid who thinks of a trip to the bookstore as a big treat (although, to be fair, he's also a big fan of the little toy rack they have there.) I have never done Independent Bookstore Day but I was in a favorite bookstore a few years ago and heard some customers mention to the owner that that was how they had found her bookstore and they traveled back because they found it so charming. I thought, one of these years I am going to do that and this year James finally felt old enough. The last shift I worked before the library closed I was on their website during some free minutes at the ...

Max is 20 months old and obsessed with his shoes. I've never seen a toddler who liked shoes so much. He likes to talk about shoes (it sounds like "foo" with extra emphasis on the f,) he likes to wear shoes, he likes to bring other people their shoes. The Easter bunny brought him Sketchers that light up like his brother's (or like his brother's used to, they were a back to school present from Gramma, they have been loved and don't really do that anymore.) When he wants to go outside (which, let's face it, is pretty much all the time, outside is the best,) he will say "shoes, gock gock (socks,) doggie!" So this morning when James was in his Zoom meeting (which is the only school we did today, oh well,) he started talking about shoes and then he kept saying wa-wa (walk,) doggie (this one meant Daddy, it's a subtle difference,) mama. So we asked Daddy if he could beg off work for a bit and go on a long walk with us, to downtown to get some lunc...

Got a code today to listen in to the remote version of the new parents class we have volunteered for for...well, James is almost six so about 5 years now. Haven't done that in a couple of weeks. These ladies were infinitely more soothing than remote church will ever be...and I like my church. You have to understand, I have been hearing these wonderful women give the same advice on baby sleep, postpartum mood disorders, feeding babies, and all things new parents week after week for years of my life now and the advice is always basically the same: trust your gut, find your village, trust your baby (in my head I use the word kids now to replace baby, it still tracks,) and this too shall pass. Honestly, it's good parenting advice but also good life advice. I think those are the people you want to listen to in moments like these: the people whose advice for coping in life really hasn't changed all that much. The people who know that grounding is important, your feelings are vali...

The coffee shop is down to a skeleton staff these days and whenever I drive through there I see one of two baristas. They recognize me because I am a tired mom who comes through a couple times a week and because usually I have my kids in the back and my kids are cute. So when I took Max for a drive today in a vain effort to get him to nap, I got the one who always smiles and says "Do you have big plans today?" This. This is my big plan for today. This drive I am taking right now to get out of my house and wind through neighborhoods with houses I could never afford and water views, this is the big plan. Especially on a drizzly damp day like today. Which, I seriously couldn't complain, is one of the first truly miserable days we've had since this started and this started in MARCH. Never in my life have I seen such a gorgeous March and April here. It could be way worse. We could be doing this in November. Shudder. So no one I know is sleeping well. No one who lives i...

So I told you I gave up facebook for 72 hours but I don't think I told you why. Not that it is hard to guess because facebook can be soul sucking. But it really came down to a meme. One of a billion covid-19 related memes, but this one had a picture of an early 20th century parade and said in its tag line people in 1918 got tired of social distancing so they took to the streets to celebrate the war's end and launched a second wave of the epidemic that killed more people than the war did. This is real, this is not a joke. Well, it's a nice theory but the history didn't actually play out that way. Yes, the epidemic was more deadly than the war and yes, the second wave was more deadly than the one from earlier in 1918 but it had nothing to do with the war's end. The second wave started in August, the deadliest month in America was October, the war ended November 11, and the second wave wound down in December. The epidemic, which lasted over a year and had three disti...

I just finished the L.M. Montgomery biography I've been reading this week...it was so lovely and such a good read for right now. I'm always struck by how much her story parallels my grandmother's. I didn't know my grandmother, she died when I was four days old, but I was close with her younger sister my great aunt Marge. My grandmother was seven years old when her mother died, the second of four. Their father took off, moving eventually to Portland but I don't know how much wandering he did in the meantime, and left them in the care of their mother's parents who were in their late 50s at the time, so not incredibly old. Edda, my grandmother's mother, had been her parents' only child, and neither of them were from Montana so I don't think they had any other family around except for their grandchildren. The kids lived primarily with those grandparents but would occasionally be with their father or his parents for a time. As adults, all of the kids ende...

Know what's generally not an awesome course of action? Fighting with your husband about second wave feminism in the middle of the night. I convinced him to watch the first episode of the series Mrs. America on FX with me last night. It's a historical period drama focusing on Phyllis Schlafly and the fight against the Equal Rights amendment. I thought it looked interesting. I maybe should have watched it alone. I've always considered myself kind of a bad feminist. Maybe it comes from being a fan of Ainsley Hayes, the Ann Coulter-esque character in early West Wing episodes. I mean, I consider myself a feminist. I believe in strong laws against sexual harassment and marital rape, I'm a fan of women voting and holding political office, and I've become very pro choice in my middle age, although I was raised fairly religious and didn't really start out that way. My parents weren't crazy religious conservatives, they were Reagan Republicans and my mom was a sta...

After writing most of last night's blog I went to have date night and spend time with my husband. He wanted to make sure that I was clear that he is not being paid *just* to blog but there are a lot of other things involved in his job. I don't think I made it sound like he isn't working hard but just so that is clear. The other thing that happened today after writing yesterday is I got my email from GoDaddy that my domains are going to renew. Two years ago I bought the web domains for my name and my podcast name. There was a sale. I didn't have anything to put on either site, but buying the domain names felt like a statement that I was making to myself that I was going to do something and I wanted to claim my little corner of the Internet. Well...it's now been two years and I've done nothing. I mean, it wasn't a short term plan...I was pregnant at the time and knew that I wasn't going to do anything with either domain in the short term. But it's no...

This whole thing has created an identity crisis for me. Or maybe exacerbated one I already had, I can't tell. I have to start all of this with a HUGE DISCLAIMER. I know there is A TON OF UNCERTAINTY for A WHOLE LOT OF PEOPLE right now. People aren't working, people have been furloughed, essential workers are afraid of getting sick...I have in my past been furloughed, it's rough out there, and I would like to acknowledge the PLACE OF HUGE PRIVILEGE from which I speak right now. I am not trying to oh poor me when the world is falling apart. I created this only as a place to speak my truth and I am trying to do that. My husband has a really weird job. He writes software for vintage computers, like machines from the 1970s. Why he does that, why they pay him to do that, that's a conversation for a whole other place, but that's what he does and since March 4 he's been doing it from home (March 4 was also the first day my kiddo had remote school, so that's why ...

I'm kinda between audiobooks right now so I've been listening to one of my favorite podcasts The History Chicks and they did an episode just recently about Typhoid Mary...talk about your timing! So I just listened to that and it was just eerie. It was kind of a gut punch because the reality is over the next couple of months we are all going to be dealing with a reality of how much do you/can you confine people who aren't sick to protect others. Mary was imprisoned on an island for twenty years...now, granted, she received that imprisonment because after first being imprisoned and released she broke the rules and did not come back for further testing and went back to her previous job as a cook. But the reality is she was confined to one place for twenty years and she was never sick. There are hard decisions coming. I am not an infectious disease specialist and I am grateful for it because the decisions are not mine, but I will tell you the three things I am sick of. 1) I a...

I didn't post last night because I fought a bad headache most of yesterday and it turned out that going to bed at 10 rather than 1 really helped with that, huh, who knew? But yesterday, headache aside, was actually pretty good. Why? Because we did basically no school. Kindergarten Zoom meeting was optional yesterday and of course there was no way my kid was going to choose to do it so we did not, and there were other things we were supposed to do, but as stated before we aren't really doing much so we did nothing. I sat on the couch and read my book a lot. James played on the computer and with his brother. We learned that when we put the bubble machine on the grass it makes a pretty epic mound of bubbles. In other words, Mama had a headache so we kinda took a sick day, although you for sure do not want to say those words out loud in the age of coronavirus. And you know what? There were no meltdowns. There were no tears. We actually liked each other most of the time. And the...

So spring break is over and we had to return to whatever the hell school is today. His Zoom meeting (Monday is language arts) was at 9:30, so we did morning things. He made breakfast, he played with his brother, mama tried to stay in bed as long as possible, you know, the usual. Decided to put him on the laptop today because on the iPad he constantly forgets that he has to hold it in such a way that he is seen. I thought Zoom was installed on the laptop. I was wrong. So at 9:28 I tried to install it which necessitated yelling at my husband for the password while he was in the shower. Got logged in at 9:36 and was told by Zoom that the host had yet to start our meeting. Until 9:50. By that point, he is crying, I am crying, he doesn't want to wait, I don't want to risk closing this meeting and getting kicked out again, he still hasn't eaten breakfast (why?) and my husband, who gets to WAKE UP AFTER 8 AND SHOWER BY HIMSELF, I feel like this is important to point out, says, w...