Kris's Covid Pandemic Blog

Oh, man, was it beautiful today. Weren't outside as much as maybe we should have been but long enough to play with bubbles and pick lilacs. James and Daddy have taken on this gemstone hunting science kit thingy James got for Christmas, so while they were whacking away at that after dinner Max and I took a little toddler sized walk up the street, just to see the neighbors' rhododendrons. It's supposed to be full on hot this weekend. I don't know what the school assignments were...I was supposed to avoid the crafts portion because it was all about Mother's Day so after whatever happened on Zoom happened we bailed on school for the day. We have been doing letter of the day to practice number and letter writing and my sister who suggested it to us said to take one day off a week and just let him write about something fun, no critiquing of his handwriting, just all about content. So he invented a game and wrote directions for it.  It lacked cohesion as a playable board...

Many years ago, before kids (he claims it was actually before we were married, that's not how I remember it,) my husband and I took an off season weekend trip to a quaint little town to get an Air BNB and be away for a couple of nights. It's something we used to do a lot pre-kids and even a bit with James but haven't done really since Max joined us and now feeling just a bit blue because we can't. But anyway, we went on this trip, and we had a huge fight. In the middle of the night. Neither of us can remember now what we fought about, but it was bad. Like, I just remember hysterical ugly crying in the middle of the night in what turned out to be not the world's most comfortable rental (I just remember it being really cold.) It was rough. Obviously, we made it through, this is something that happens in relationships, and it was so vitally important that neither of us can remember now, but it was a rough night. What I remember now, though, is twenty four hours later...

Yep. I know. My family history is exciting only to me, not even to most of the other members of my family a lot of the time. I get it. But one thing that I have been really wanting to do is more writing...I'm just not sure *what.* I think I want to do a novel, but do I want to do one about this current situation? Or tackle the Spanish flu and do historical fiction? Or meld the two together? Or just scrap the whole thing and write a middle grade fantasy? Not sure. But I know as a writer one of the things I have to do to get beyond this stuck place is to start to get some of the various things swirling around in my head out and since I have this space and am gonna write in it anyway, I'm gonna do a little of that here. I hope you'll indulge me. Or feel free to skip ahead. I've been wondering for while if I should do some kind of novelization about my family's experiences in 1918 and beyond and so in my few spare minutes now that I have an actual office to work in ...

My sister spent all day worried about Dad because she hadn't talk to him since Sunday. At 4 p.m., she sent a group text to a few neighbors. They all had seen him today, talked to him yesterday, and kept asking don't we text him? So communication is a good family strong point. He called her around 5:30 and was surprised to learn she already knew he mowed the lawn today. Today was freaking gorgeous. It's not supposed to be as nice tomorrow, so I'm glad we went into the forest. The closed signs are still up, we almost turned around and bailed on the whole adventure, but talking (from a safe distance) with a few other people we were all under the impression DNR sites reopened today, so we went in and enjoyed ourselves. Well, most of us did. After 5 weeks of complaining about the forest being closed, James has now decided he's scared of it. He spent all last August terrified of outside after he got stung putting a stick down a hole that turned out to be a hornets' ...

James and I are driving each other insane because we are so damn alike. In particular, helping him clean anything makes me a crazy person. I have to have his dad help him clean his room or we will kill each other. He likes to hoard things, gets distracted by progress, will play in mess. He's so much like me and especially like I was at his age. I mentioned that we recently did a big desk swap around here. We all feel fortunate now that we did it before all this because as it turns out everyone has a better workspace now.  Basically what happened is Josh got a good deal on a workbench, which is a better fit for him than a desk anyway. A year or so ago, he picked up this lovely wooden desk from a friend of his, his friend's grandfather's desk, and we moved it into my office to make an L-shaped working space for my typewriters and such. But it was never a good fit for my old desk which was small and bought for me for the old room under the eaves in the old house. So t...

When we bought this house, we were expecting James. We weren't expecting him quite so soon...he arrived 7 weeks early and about 6 weeks after we moved into our house, so we didn't have a lot of time to prepare our nest before we were dealing with the ups and downs of new parenthood. This house was a huge upgrade for us. We moved from a 3 bedroom 1 bath Craftsman that had a bedroom that barely qualified legally to be a bedroom, a little attic room that could only be access by what I used to refer to as "the suicide stairs." You also could only get to said stairs by going through the laundry room, which didn't have heat and was freezing in winter. The whole house was heated with baseboards and was ridiculously expensive to heat. Now, I know big houses are an American thing and a privilege. I can remember washing dishes with my great aunt in what she used to call her "one butt" kitchen and she'd look around and say I don't know how I ever raised...

Cheery title, no? It's still early as I write this but it's a rainy day where everyone is for the moment occupied so I thought I would write now while I have the time. Rest assured, by the time you get to the end of this it will be late. We are now more or less two months into this thing. March 1 was our last truly normal day. March 2 was a day off school while the district planned what was then supposed to be a temporary closure and then March 3 was Wednesday, which is an early release day so they did that and celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday. March 4 was our first day without school and the day we transitioned my husband to working from home. So we are about two months into abnormal and will mark our more or less official two month mark on Monday. The death toll continues to rise. I feel lucky that it has not hit close to home yet. I know people who have lost people but I and my family have not directly lost anyone. Yet. We don't like to talk about death so much ...