Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

 "The autumn is a time that makes one think there is no time like the present, and the present is very pleasant." --from The Journal of Beatrix Potter, October 1894 Guess who is starting her blog post after 10:30 because she wanted to squeeze in just a little more reading time? This girl. I have been using reading as avoidance so much...I may need to scale back just a bit. I'm not sure if I agree with Beatrix in that quote or not but I like the quote and I like the idea of the quote. I don't know if I'd feel that way in an ordinary fall, which of course this is not. So Kelly Yang, who is the author of the Front Desk books which I adore, now follows me on Instagram and I feel low key famous. I mean, I have a TINY Instagram following of like 500, it is very much a hobby of mine, but she saw a booktalk I did there on her YA debut from last year which I think I may have written about last week who knows, but it is called Parachutes and it is EXCELLENT.  So she follows

 I woke up the first two days of this week early in the morning FREEZING. I haven't really figured out what blanket/jammies combo works best for this weather so I'm not either hot or cold. Working on it. I'm not, as it turns out, good at blogging on Thursdays so last week I missed entirely and this week I'm a day early. I'm a work in progress. Fall is in the air for sure. The peaches and pears are both gone. We checked today. It's been bordering on sweatshirt weather although I still get plenty sweaty on the walk to and from school. It's middling season and I'm not sure my body is handling it super well. School has been a smash success so far. He loves it and it is already helping him in more ways than I can describe, both academically and otherwise. We've been doing a pretty good job of coming home and having a nice afternoon routine...coloring, snacking, reading Harry Potter, trying not to do all screens all the time. Max is...demanding when his br

So I'm reading the Journals of Beatrix Potter right now...it's super interesting...and at almost 500 pages I'm going to be reading it for awhile so you will likely hear more about it. But the thing about diaries if you've never read one is so much of them is the mundane day to day of whatever world the writer is living in. So there's lots of little asides and anecdotes about politics and famous people and just this 1880s world she exists in. And it occurs to me...most of us are NOT qualified to talk about the politics of the time we live in. We aren't subject experts and there's a lot to keep up on. But we do it anyway because we are simply trying to deal with the world in front of us as we see it right now. So here's what was happening in my world and in the big world (Betsy Ray in the Betsy-Tacy books calls it the Great World which is fabulous) this week. First of all, it was back to school yesterday. I don't know what to say about that that hasn&#