Covid

Tuesday, 9.15.2020

So, the world has been in a wee bit of turmoil for the past six months.  Coronavirus, covid19, quarantine.  The world totally up-ended in mid-March with very little warning.  The kids' last day of school was March 13th and slowly the weeks off added up until school was eventually cancelled for the remainder of the year.  Sure they did digital learning, but I'll be honest, it was pretty painful and I'm not sure how much they actually learned.  And thankfully that fully finished on May 8th, a few weeks earlier then the traditional school year would have.  The second half of March and all of April were pretty much in lock-down.  In May, we slowly starting re-emerging.  By maybe mid-June, we were pretty comfortable going back to stores, and the kids were doing summer sports practices.  And our county gained national attention [I'm not kidding] when we started back face-to-face in person school on August 1st.  Parents were given options, and about 25% went virtual.  We chose in-school and as of mid-September, we have zero regrets.  Macedonia is still at zero reported cases [!!!], and Creekland - Ryan's middle school - has only had a handful of cases, but none near him.  Instead of closing whole schools, they are only quarantining kids that were in close contact.  There are seating charts for everything - classes, lunch, buses, etc - to aid in the contact tracing.  

Oh, and Coleson has been working from home this entire time too!  It's really been nice actually :)  We were able to work-from-home from other homes over the summer.  It was nice to get out and travel a bit, but not use a ton of vacation.  He worked from Augusta for a few days while we explored the city.  That was a really nice few days, a change of scenery and visiting somewhere we'd never been before.  He's worked from home from Tampa.  He's worked from home from the car while I've driven places.  And he's always here, so I can run out anytime I need to.  He's here for the girls' bus at 2:30 if I'm not back.  And perhaps the best is that he's here for the evening sports.  I don't think there's any way we could do what we're doing this fall if he was in the office and had a commute.  This sport season might just be the busiest one yet, but it doesn't feel that way.  I think a huge part of it is that Coleson is here all day, so we can eat lunch together and sometimes sneak out on a dog walk.  It's not like before when I wouldn't see him until 8:00 at night.  We can have snacky dinners together at 4:30 [eekk!] before we head off our various ways for practices.  Busy and yet low stress, pretty nice.

Anyways, during the early days of quarantine, I tried real hard to write about what was going on in our lives and in the world, and I tried really hard to get the kids to write stuff too.  It didn't work quite as well as I envisioned.  And honestly, I thought it would be a short-term thing, and it'd all fit nicely in a shutterfly book that they could share with their kids one day to say, look, we were living history.  But this whole chaos is still going on.  I don't think there's going to be a nice, clean end date that would allow me to make a cute, little book.  Honestly, the country has gotten pretty ugly, and I'm not sure when or if we'll ever go back to "normal" again.  The country is very, very divided right now on so many, many issues.  There's so much confusion, anger, miscommunication.  Social media - and media too - is so opinionated, and no one knows what to believe anymore [or at least I don't!].  Do we quarantine?  Do we go out and build herd immunity?  Do we wear masks or do they not really do any good?  Nobody seems to truly understand the virus and how it spreads.  But everyone sure thinks they do.  And then there's political issues, and the economic fallout of the world shutting down, and black lives matter, and back the blue, and coin shortages, and the election in a couple of months.  There's rioting and violence, and I'm not sure when or if we'll be comfortable walking the mile to and from Atlanta United games again - of course, there's no fans attending any sporting events for the foreseeable future anyways.  It feels like so much has returned and reopened, and yet I struggle with feeling like it's the things that make us human that are still being kept from us.  Churches, concerts, sports.  Hugs, handshakes.  And of course not everyone is like that, but the ones that are just kinda ruin your day.  When you automatically go to shake someone's hand and they look at you like you've got the plague.  People everywhere in masks - it's really hard to see smiles and facial expressions, and I feel like most people just walk around with their heads down.  I miss making eye contact and smiling and seeing friends in the stores.  

Okay, anyways, I digress again.  The original intent of this post was to be an introduction of sorts.  I have writings and pictures and power points and emails and I don't even know what saved in lots of different places that the kids and I worked on, mostly in March and April.  I need someway to organize them effectively and in one spot.  So this is my introduction to what I imagine will be quite a few, totally random, out of order posts from six months ago.  This just seems like the best place to store everything safely.  And perhaps one day I will decide to organize it all into some sort of book, and this will hopefully make that a whole lot easier if and when that day ever comes.