Since we are no longer under a stay-at-home order, I can’t call this series Lockdown Days anymore, so am switching to CoronaLife, since even with the state reopening, our lives are irrevocably changed and often still restricted by the coronavirus.
Biggest news this week is my daughter is finished with remote learning for this school year! Although I usually am sad when school ends, this year I am glad. I never wanted to be a teacher, and these last 3 months have cemented that.
This year summer does not include the summer camps by daughter has attended in the past. Some are simply not operating this year, others are operating with restrictions, and in any case, my daughter does not want to go to any of them. She is nervous about the virus, and I am not confident that proper social distancing can be maintained in any case. So we are staying home.
That’s not to say my daughter will be spending all her day staring at the computer screen watching YouTube and playing Minecraft. We will be continuing to take our daily exercise, of course. And we want to institute a 2 hour “creative time”, and a one-hour “together time.”
The 2-hour creative time will be time for her to work on non-computer-related creative pursuits like drawing, writing, composing, or even just playing an imaginative game. I will use that time to work on my creative writing, which has fallen woefully into the background. No blogs, no social media, just whatever creative writing project I want to work on.
The one-hour together time will be split in half. I will read to her from a book of my choice for half an hour (my daughter is notoriously scared to venture into new authors or series, this way she can make the leap with me), and the second half we will do what she wants—reading, drawing, etc.
I start off every summer with good intentions, but somehow my plans rarely work out. Hopefully this year will be different. My daughter is old enough to hold me accountable, so maybe that combined with having talked about it here, will make it happen.
We did get COVID tested on Thursday last week. An efficient if not entirely pleasant experience. But, hey, I had a baby via C-section, discomfort from a nasal swab barely registers on the pain scale. My daughter, of course, will tell you it was torture.
I got my results back (negative), but we are going on 7 days waiting for my daughter’s. It’s a frustrating wait, because we got tested so we could safely go see my parents, who we have not seen since February. So the waiting feels painfully long.
Any of you have summer plans? Stay safe, see you next week!
Illness in the Time of COVID – CoronaLife Day 572
So on Friday my daughter started complaining of a sore throat, stuffy nose, headache. I had all the same symptoms, too. In a normal year, we would have just shrugged it off as a back-to-school cold making the rounds.
But this is not a normal year.
For all that many activities have begun in a more-or-less normal fashion, this year is still not normal. It is normal-ish. In many ways, having an “almost normal” year is more disconcerting and disorienting than having a wildly divergent year, like last year was.
When things are nearly normal, there is a tension you never escape. You cannot relax fully, as you could if things are truly normal, yet you feel like you should be more relaxed than you are. But this normal-ish environment keeps throwing small bumps and curves in your path and there are still challenges to be met and managed. It is almost more exhausting living in this so-near-and-yet-so-far zone than when everything was upside down. Or maybe it’s just differently exhausting.
So we both had colds—but all these symptoms are also Delta COVID symptoms. We took an over the counter at home test, which are not terribly accurate for non-symptomatic cases but should register something if you are actively symptomatic, as we were. Completely negative. A relief.
For school, though, if you have COVID-like symptoms, you need to get a negative PCR test (the really accurate DNA-based type you have to send into a lab). It was impossible to get one over the weekend, so I got one on Monday. Then we had to wait to see how long the results would take to come in. Even in a normal year, I would not have sent her to school on that Monday, because she was not feeling great, and on Tuesday I probably would have kept her home, too, just to let her recuperate. But I was worried that she may end up having to stay home feeling fine while waiting for the test results.
Luck was with us, and we got the results on Tuesday. Negative, so back to school on Wednesday!
This is illness in the time of COVID, especially when you have an unvaccinated person involved. Schools have to be extremely careful to avoid an outbreak, since most of their population is still vulnerable. In five weeks of school, we have had 3 (unrelated) cases. I am thankful for the precautions our school is taking, and also thankful we live where testing is easy to get and free of charge.
Here’s hoping we don’t need to do this again anytime soon!