Day #356: Sick Kid

 One of the many things this pandemic has stolen from us: I can't just have a sick kid and stay home and let him sleep and check on him and feed him warm soup and let him get better. I mean...I can...and I am...but I can't do it without the worry of what if and wondering at what point we get a test, etc.

Let me be clear: he's okay. He has a small temperature and complained of his tummy hurting and being dizzy so he went back to bed after breakfast. Where every time I check on him he acts like I am holding him hostage and not like he elected to go back to bed on his own. He has no cough and no other symptoms. If he rallies and feels better this afternoon, which I fully expect he will, I won't worry about a test because it's not like he's going to see anyone to expose even if it were Covid. So we are totally okay. I just hate that a sick day is ANOTHER thing that has to have this layer of crap added to it.

It's been a LONG time since I updated...it's hard...there are things to say but a lot of time it just feels like more of the same. Max has been really into when James is doing school (or even last week when there was no school and I had him doing handwriting practice) he wants to draw so a lot of times instead of blogging I sit at the table while Max draws and James does school and writing in my writing prompt book. It's nice.

Yeah, there was a school vacation last week. It started with a snowed in weekend away. The kids and I (Daddy stayed home) went to an Air BNB with my BFF and got snowed in. It was kinda fun. James loved it...he likes being away...and while being cooped up with both of them was...a lot...it beat being cooped up at home. We got home on Monday and then had a week's vacation from school and honestly it was quite nice. It's nice to just get to be James's mom and not have to be his teacher as well.

He's been back in school since Monday and you can tell he has hit a wall when it comes to remote learning. Monday and the return to school was rough. It has gotten better since. We are not getting writing assignments on the level of what we were getting before the break.

I'm distracted while writing this. Max keeps bringing me pretend food from the other room and of course Josh is trying to work so I'm trying to keep Max from being too loud. So it's a lot of the same. You can see why it's been hard to write.

One of the things we did at our weekend on the beach is some genealogy, a hobby of my friend and I, so I've gotten back into family research over the past week or so. I've actually been talking with my dad over text some about his memories of the family. Every time I ask him, even the same questions, more information comes to light and it is really nice to have something to talk about besides vaccines and the weather, which are our other two main topics. One thing that stuck out to me was that he was talking about growing up with his great grandparents around since his mother was raised by her grandparents after her mother died of the Spanish flu. He told me no one really talked about his grandmother who had died when he was young. They didn't really talk about her until much much later, after his mother died, when his aunts would talk about her some, but they were both young when she died. Other Aunt Marge, the family storyteller, was four years old and didn't really remember her. So I asked him...did her parents talk about her? Because of course they were around when he was young. I know he and his great grandmother didn't always get along very well and she had some bad dementia in the last few years of her life, but I know he had a close relationship with his great grandfather, the only man he ever called grandpa, who lived to be 100 and moved in with my dad's family when my dad was in high school, the last five or so years of his life after his wife died. 

So when I asked, did Grandma and Grandpa talk about their daughter....he said "Not much."

Family research shows that this Grandpa not only lost his daughter in a pandemic but his mother as well. She died of cholera in 1866 in Philadelphia and there was a cholera pandemic going on at that time, with big hotspots in London and New York but waves ongoing. I wonder what kind of impact that had on his life. I think we forget that up until VERY recently, our ancestors were used to epidemics of contagious diseases. But do you get used to that? What words would this old man have had to my father in the 1950s when he was 30+ years on from losing his daughter in a pandemic and 85+ years on from losing his mother? What do you say?

It gets lost to history, but there was another flu pandemic in the middle 1950s, at the time my dad was in high school and his great grandfather was living in their home. It was devastating in China and Hong Kong but didn't have the death toll in the U.S. that the 1918 pandemic did or that this one did in China because a vaccine was developed. I should ask my dad if he even remembers it happened. This whole history of how we've had these waves of contagious diseases go through and how we as a society have dealt with them is fascinating. 

I don't know what to do with all of this, but it's just what's in my head today. I'm so grateful for modern medicine. Modern medicine saved James, who was born at 33 weeks. Modern medicine saved my dad, who had a pulmonary embolism in 2016. But modern medicine has also probably made us unaware and unprepared to deal with communicable disease because we don't think of it as seriously as the people who came before us.

I'm super distracted and need to deal with Max so I'll have to leave it there for today but I hadn't written in awhile and wanted to.

Media consumption: I've started watching Doogie Howser, M.D. on Hulu and am ready for all the 1980s TV shows I can get. I'm reading Moses, Man of the Mountain by Zora Neale Hurston and it is FASCINATING...I think I'm gonna get one of her books every Black History Month.

Today I'm grateful for walks on the beach and adventures with my kids, randomly finding a Lightning McQueen car in Edmonds yesterday, books and kids who love to read, my dad, my husband, my James, everybody who is healthy and hopefully health for James soon, writing, and another day in the sun.