The Great Pandemic

We are living in strange times right now. I've never experienced anything like it.  We first heard about the corona virus when we were getting ready to go to Florida in January.  It was in China, and we didn't think it would affect us at all.  Now it's here, and the shelves are empty, and almost everything is cancelled or closed.

The governor required all public and private schools to close for at least the next two weeks (I predict they won't open for the rest of the school year).  Since Noah is a senior, and we can see the finish line, I'm especially thankful that he's homeschooled, so we can just continue on with his work as usual.  He has only four classes to finish.  Today we found out that his internship is also cancelled for two weeks, which will give us extra time to work on the academics. We introverts are perfectly happy being home, so being confined is no problem for us.

Sarah, on the other hand, is very sad.  She likes getting out of the house and being with people, so she likes going to school.  She misses making the announcements every morning and singing with her choir and B Naturals groups.  She was also in her second year of track, and this was her first season as a high jumper and long jumper.  All practices and indoor track meets have been cancelled.  She was very excited to have gotten a part in the spring musical ("Big Fish") too.  She was a singer, tap dancer, and even had a speaking part as "Lady with Orange Cat".  They were practicing every day, and now she despairs of ever being able to perform it. She's in winter color guard, and they've put in a lot of hours of practice for their big performance, which probably won't happen now.  Also, yesterday she turned 16.  She moaned, "I don't want to spend my 16th birthday quarantined and surrounded by toilet paper!" (There is a curious lack of toilet paper in all the stores, for some reason, but I always have an ample stash). Aunt Kathy was in town and had planned to take Sarah shopping and spend time with her on her birthday, but the CDC is telling us all to stay home and practice "social distancing" in order to prevent the spread of the virus.  All this piled up on Sarah and made her cry.

We tried to make her birthday as special as possible.  Our church was the only one in the whole town that wasn't cancelled, so we went to church and then we took Sarah and a friend (Krystle) out to lunch at Sarah's favorite place, Lin's Buffet. I'm glad she got to do that, because the governor has since required the closure of restaurants. We gave her some gifts and my mom made her a cake.  She seemed happy and said she had a good day.

The only thing Noah is sad about is the lack of sports.  All sports are cancelled and baseball season is delayed.  This would be a dream come true for me if Noah wasn't so disappointed about it.  Mike still has to go to work, so he's the only one leaving the house.

So here we are, the three of us together all day long, just like it used to be.  The only difference is that now we really can't go anywhere.  I'm working on getting our new schedule running so we don't just sit around at loose ends all day.  I gave an inspirational speech today about how we can look at this time as an opportunity to start some new good habits.  I said I personally am going to try to stop overeating, because it's not responsible to eat more than necessary, especially at a time like this. And I'm going to try to eat healthier to boost my immune system.  I'm hoping to brainstorm with them about achieving  daily goals in several areas: mental (school work), physical (going for a walk outside, ideally, or at least getting some form of exercise), spiritual (we used to have devotions every morning; hopefully they'll still be willing), cleaning (clean/organize some little area every day).

I did regular school work with Noah this morning while Sarah slept late.  I made apple pie oatmeal for breakfast and bean/quinoa/vegetable soup for lunch.

But then I had a piece of birthday cake, so I'm already not doing it perfectly.  Sarah taught me a Tik Tok dance (I don't even really know what that is, but I played along).

We played volleyball in the kitchen with Sarah's birthday balloon, and the kids somehow rammed their toes into each other's toes and both yelled "Ow!" and started blaming each other.  I had a flashback of the horrible times when they were both crying at the same time. Fortunately they didn't cry this time.  Sarah kept talking about going to "the bank" to deposit her birthday money, and I kept correcting her by saying it's not a bank; it's a credit union. As a former credit union employee, I know how sensitive they are about that terminology.  After at least the third time she said "bank", Noah said, "If you say 'bank' one more time...."  He didn't finish that sentence, at least not that I heard.  Another lowlight from our first day of isolation: I spent a lot of time cleaning up after Sarah, and I made an extra effort to be gracious, but I couldn't sustain it.  Finally I gave her lecture about how she has to clean up after herself, ending with, "This is not a castle, and you are not a princess, and I am not your maid."

Since I'm sure this is going to be a memorable time in history, I'm including some documentation below.

Lines at Costco. Limit of 2 packages of water bottles and paper towels.  The toilet paper was long gone.  People were pushing and yelling. 

Line to get out of Costco. Parking lot was full. Only four carts left when I got there.  They were handing out plastic gloves at the door.

Empty shelves at Aldi.