I have had all the material to write this post for several days now, and I keep putting it off hoping I will exit this funk that I am simmering in. It’s a missing family visits funk, a look at all the sick people and overcrowded hospitals funk, a canceled plans funk. Maybe looking at cute and happy photos will turn it around.

Maya, almost but not quite 8.

We were wondering how school photos would be managed this year, especially for the kids who were virtual learners. It turns out that several time slots opened in the evenings immediately after school. We could make none of them. We had started to hunt around for a traveling photographer who would maybe take decent photos in the front yard when the school opened up some Saturday morning slots. In a year full of weirdness, our kids had weird school photos as well. They wore masks on site, stayed in our car till it was their turn to see the photographer (we weren’t allowed to get out with them), and only removed their masks when the photographer told them it was time to take their photo. Masks were reinstalled and back to the car they came.

Ian, age 5

None of us has had a haircut in a really long time, and Maya’s smiling and eye-contact are often kind of a hit-or-miss thing, but honestly I think the photos turned out great. I also think that it’s hilarious that our kids went out of their way to match their masks to their outfits. The big irony here is that matching clothing is rarely a priority for either of them.

We struggled with how to make Maya’s birthday memorable. We spoil the kids rotten and give them a party every year, but this year that’s just not an option. By now they’re used to the coronavirus protocols and don’t really even act surprised when we deliver more bad news. And that’s how we wound up with a bunch of How to Train Your Dragon decorations in our kitchen, possibly too many presents, and a Zoom session full of grandparents.

Birthday girl and her dragon duck cake!

Maya helped me decorate her cake this year. We decided to convert her rubber duck cake into a rubber duck dragon instead. We bought fondant to use as eyes, spikes, scales and tongue, with Maya actually doing most of the shaping and installing. I had noticed that the cake baked a bit lop-sided, and I tried like mad to keep it upright, but in the end, after being fully iced, the poor thing dumped over anyway. No worries – we propped it up with aluminum foil and enjoyed our dragon duck cake anyway. In deference to Maya’s fire aversion, the number 8 candle was never actually lit.

We had just a couple more days of working and virtual learning to make it through after Maya’s birthday party before the Really Big Thing happened. Our bubble family friends had rented a beach house at South Padre Island for the week of Thanksgiving, and had invited us to come vacation along with them. We only stayed from Saturday to Wednesday, but that time was the most relaxed I have felt since this whole stupid pandemic business started.

The playground, every day while on vacation.

This was our schedule – kids meandered out of bed, quietly playing with their devices till everyone was awake. This was followed by a leisurely breakfast. And then the kids would play in the property’s heated pool and hot tub until lunchtime. Some set of grownups would lounge around the pool in the perfect weather, sipping coffee or wine or beer. Lunch would then occur and kids would chill out for a while to rest up. Then in the afternoon, some set of us would find a relatively unpopulated portion of the beach and play in the sand or the waves.

Beach girl beaching

Maya and Ruby seemed to be impervious to the cold water, spending as long as we’d let them in the water, waves crashing into them. I went out once with Maya, but I can’t ever quite relax with her playing in the ocean. Usually, it was the two dads, Sean and Chris, out in that cold water, keeping the girls from drowning. Ian and Herbie, the boys, seemed to have an ambivalent relationship with the beach. Neither of them has an ounce of body fat, so I’m sure that cold water chilled them through quickly. Mostly they wanted to play in the nice heated pool back at the house.

Ian in the nice warm pool.

Maya apparently has a weird talent for finding hermit crabs. She at one point came staggering out of the waves clutching what she believed to be merely a “cool shell.” On closer inspection, we discovered that it was occupied. We made a little saltwater pool out of a sand toy and placed the shell into it. It wasn’t long at all before translucent legs spidered out of the shell and the little crab started scuttling around looking for its exit. Figuring it was a fluke, we enjoyed the crab for a little while before releasing it back into the sea.

Beachcombers

The next day was even more amazing. At one point, she had our makeshift observation pool loaded up with five hermit crabs and I don’t know how many of these weird little mollusks with flappy protrusions that seemed to both cling them to rocks and wavily propel them through the sand. (Hermit crab video: 20201124-IMG_1663.) When asked how she found them, she exclaimed, “Look with your hands, not your eyes!” Sounds like our future marine biologist is going to need good medical insurance. We also found several jellyfish and pretty blue Portuguese man-of-wars (men-of-war??) in the water and on the beach. We even had a brief sighting of a tiny blue dragon with its impossibly blue frilly body before a wave swept it away.

Oh captain, my captain

Sean managed the cocktail program, at least for our portion of the vacation. In several small bottles, he batched up the goods for four different Tiki drinks for the grownups. That, a bottle of rum, and a little juice and soda water turned into several lovely drinks to cap off our evenings. He even brought or bought the stuff to make mocktails for the kids, which Maya or Ian (I can’t remember which) explained didn’t have quite as much alcohol as the grown-up drinks. [None was the amount of alcohol the kids’ drinks had, just so we’re all clear.]

Gamerzzzz

It was nice getting to spend time with friends in such a relaxed setting. We could have random conversations without needing to schedule a zoom meeting. Ruby and Ian traded cat stories and followed each other around trying to solve some mystery only they understood. Maya and Herbie could bond over Plants vs Zombies 2 (PvZ2 to the hip kids). The characters / defensive weapons / whatever in PvZ2 are hilarious – Maya has recently introduced me to the wonders of Bloomerang and Bonk Choy.

Probably a month or more ago, I had the idea that if we weren’t going to get to see Santa in person this year, we’d buy a life sized cutout of Santa and take him around for photos. To that end, we have an weirdly astonished Santa Claus hanging out at the pool with us. He came out for an obligatory tourist shot as well. It’s possible he’ll make a few more appearances in the coming weeks – we’ll just have to see how much we feel like getting out and about.

Flat Santa and the kids

Our bubble family friends, who we have known for many years now, had planned a trip to Moab, UT over Christmas break. Again, they invited us along. We were wary of the long drive with our kids, but we were all really looking forward to the trip. The intention was to chill out at a nice vacation house away from people and go hiking in Arches National Park and Canyonlands National Park during the day. As the pandemic has worsened and the caseloads have climbed and hospitals have filled, it has become increasingly clear that we would be borderline irresponsible to make such a trip right now. What if someone got hurt and needed access to a hospital? What if someone got sick while a 2-day drive from home?

The COVID-19 cases have been insane the past few weeks, and everyone is holding their breath to see if Thanksgiving gatherings will further drive the numbers up. The kids’ school has moved back to all virtual learning for at least the first week following Thanksgiving break in hopes that anyone who was exposed to the virus will have a chance to show symptoms and not accidentally expose fellow students and staff. Here are the numbers – it’s been a shorter interval than usual since my last post. Travis County – 11/8 33,168 cases and 457 deaths – 11/29 38,045 cases and 483 deaths. Texas – 11/8 990,930 cases and 19,184 deaths – 11/29 1,225,118 cases and 21,843 deaths. United States – 11/8 9,962,900 cases and 237,567 deaths – 11/29 13,385,494 cases and 266,887 deaths. The World – 11/8 50,327,258 cases and 1,255,490 deaths – 11/29 62,829,641 cases and 1,461,049 deaths.

 

I was so excited when the weather finally cooled off. I had been steadily working to improve our back yard, even throughout the heat of the summer (though admittedly, in smaller doses). But once the cooler weather in September arrived, I was ready to get some things accomplished. As mentioned in the last post, I planted a bunch of grass plugs in this shady, difficult part of the yard. I had also purchased several waves of shade-tolerant plants to fill in some bare spots and maybe even recondition one of the remaining planting areas. And, I scheduled our tree guy to come see what needed taking care of.

Fine 2020, take our tree yet too.

It turns out, there was a lot to take care of. I had him look at this big ash tree in the back yard whose bark was showing signs of stress. He took a look at it, thonking it with his mallet, checking it from all angles. He started making phone calls, looking increasingly agitated. Eventually he carefully explained to me that the collapse of the tree was imminent, that we really needed to have it removed as soon as possible, and that he was scheduled out for something like ten weeks. This tree, which we all loved, had lots of big, sprawling branches that drooped gracefully toward the house, shading us from the worst of the summer sun, which meant that there was only one direction it was going to fall once it did finally come down.

He redirected us to another person right away and made sure they knew what was going on. I busied myself UN-planting a bunch of the stuff I had planted throughout the year, in hopes of it *not* getting crushed by felled tree limbs. I hurried at this task, thinking the tree was going to be removed in the near term. It wound up taking more than a month to finally, finally get the House Crusher removed from the back yard. Because it wasn’t safe to climb up in the tree, they wound up using a man lift to cut down the upper part of the tree. All told, things are much brighter in our back yard now. At the moment, I’m enjoying it; it seems less dreary. We’ll see how we all feel come next May.

I think it took all of Maya’s effort not to hug Anna.

Thanks to the current pandemic, we haven’t really seen people socially in person in a very long time. After so many months of this dragging on, I think it’s clear that COVID-19 isn’t going anywhere anytime soon, and so we have been working to mentally shift from the lockdown-as-much-as-possible-all-the-time mentality to one that has us developing strategies for living with the virus instead. To that end, we’ve done a couple of things differently lately. First, in honor of our now long-standing tradition, we asked Anna if she’d be willing to come over to draw the kids’ halloween pumpkins for them, and she said she would! We all wore masks and hung out on the front porch and had a really nice in-person visit for a change. She drew a dragon for Maya (of course) and a silly jack-o’-lantern face for Ian.

In the spirit of the season, Sean sprung for some fun Halloween doughnuts from Krispy Kreme. Maya was in love. Ian still to this day mostly just picks the icing and sprinkles off whatever doughnut he eats. In deference to the coronavirus, we both went and voted early. Maya in particular was ON US to go vote – we’re assuming they were talking about it at school. I mean, honestly kid, we just wanted to get past the rush the first week. They’re old enough to pay attention to what’s going on these days, and I would liked to have take them along to vote this year. I just couldn’t justify the risk.

The biggest to-do that week, anyway.

At the kids’ school, they have an annual fundraiser called the Big To-Do. We haven’t ever gone in the past. We just donated money to the PTA and called it good. This year though, they were doing a little Hawaiian feast that you could purchase and that would be delivered to your door. In 2020, the year that just keeps on giving, we often find ourselves saying eff it, why not. And so, one weekend in late-October, we had delivered to our house a big container of Hawaiian chicken and rice, a couple tubs of macaroni salad, fixin’s for pineapple upside down cake, a couple cans of piña colada mixer, and some cute little leis and hair barrettes and fun little things to hold up for photos. Because it was Something Different for a Change, the kids were ecstatic.

Eyeball pong was a hit!

Then on Halloween, we did the most amazing thing. We went to our friends’ house and had a small two-family Halloween party! They have similar coronavirus protocols to us, and after some hemming and hawing (mostly from me), we decided to go for it. The kids were tha-rilled. No coronavirus masks? Nope. No 6-feet of distance? Nope. We haven’t experienced this much *normal* in ages. And while we helped a bit with supplies and set-up, most of the party planning was done by our friends. There was “Eyeball Pong” (think beer pong, but with plastic eyeballs to throw and no actual beer). The kids made slime. The bashed the hell out of a ghost-shaped piñata. There was also some Halloween cookie decorating, and a very fun glow-in-the-dark egg hunt. They ate too much candy, sure, but they also had skull-shaped calzones and meatballs fashioned to look like creepy eyeballs. At the end of the night, they rested and watched a movie.

Tent, Arthur Tent.

Because the kids had the day off school on November 3rd, and because we had already voted, we thought we’d test out camping with the kids. We acquired the giantest family tent I think I’ve ever been in, loaded the ol’ Prius to the gills, and headed out to Muleshoe Bend, which is all of an hour away, to camp along Lake Travis. As we were setting up the tent, Sean (I think it was Sean), decided its name was Tent, Arthur Tent in homage to Arther Dent of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy fame. Tent, Arthur Tent was going to be excellent for our clear, cool evening because its rainfly could be left off, and we could all lay cozily in the tent and stare up at all the lovely stars. It was beautiful.

Snug.

At least it was until the fog rolled in. Around two in the morning Sean nudged me awake (or alerted me to the fact that he was awake anyway, since I wasn’t really sleeping well) to let me know he was getting dripped in the head with water from the roof of the tent. It wasn’t raining, but sure enough, the slow and steady pat-pat-pat of water drops splatting the tent floor could be heard. A quick look outside made it clear that what was happening was that the fog from the lake was condensing on our tent (and our car, and the couple things we’d left out on the picnic table) and dripping on our faces. Luckily, we were able to install the rain fly and more or less get the inside of the tent dried enough to be sleep-worthy again. Incredibly, the kids slept through all of it: the drips, the rainfly installation, the lights of the car blinking when I relocked it, us crawling out of and into the tent.

Lake fog.

We cooked our breakfast and warmed up a bit and then went and hiked a couple miles. After lunch, we let the kids play down at the lake for a while before dismantling our tent and heading back into town in time to catch Ian’s guitar lesson. The biggest lesson we learned from this experience was that we should have unearthed our wool socks for the trip. Those half-damp cotton socks were the absolute pits around 2:30 in the morning after installing the rainfly and crawling back in our sleeping bags to try and warm back up from the 37-degree evening.

Our coronavirus cases since even the end of October have been climbing at an alarming rate. Here are the numbers from what I screen captured on Sunday evening vs. what I had recorded for our last post. Travis County – 10/4 29,799 cases and 429 deaths – 11/8 33,168 cases and 457 deaths. Texas – 10/4 790,194 cases and 16,320 deaths – 11/8 990,930 cases and 19,184 deaths. United States – 10/4 7,420,779 cases and 209,821 deaths – 11/8 9,962,900 cases and 237,567 deaths. The World – 10/4 35,078,236 cases and 1,036,104 deaths – 11/8 50,327,258 cases and 1,255,490 deaths.

Not too many weeks after our little Seguin trip, and just before school started, I was hurriedly cutting cabbage and chilies for slaw when I had my first-ever kitchen injury that required medical attention. My big, shiny knife slipped on the cabbage and right down onto my unsuspecting pinky finger. As is my habit, I cussed at the interruption to my progress, wrapped my finger in a paper towel, and hustled to the bathroom for some antibiotic ointment and a bandaid. The damnable cut wouldn’t cooperate and stop bleeding long enough for me to actually install the bandaid so I could get back to work.

We bought Ian a new lunch box and backpack, even though he seems unlikely to use them much this year.

I finally had to give up and admit that I’d need to go somewhere and have it stitched. Sean helped me hunt up a place that was open on a Sunday afternoon (apparently the “urgent” in urgent care can only happen during normal business hours), while I finished cutting and storing my slaw one-handed. (Yes, really. I’m an idiot.) A quick three-stitches later, and I was back home and ready for business. A week later, I had the stitches removed and cautiously resumed normal behavior. Even for as much as I’ve been cooking during this pandemic, I had had essentially zero kitchen injuries before that one. After The Slaw Incident, I proceeded to cut myself twice and burn myself with splattered grease once. <Shrug>

One of the events leading up to the weirdest school year of our lives was school supply pickup. Earlier in the summer, we had ordered boxes of pre-assembled school supplies for each kid. Also, because distance-learing was mandatory for the first four weeks, we had to pick up books and worksheets and whatnot so the kids could have school at home.

Masked bandits!

We all masked up and drove through the parking lot at the kids’ school. As we approached the second grade area, they loaded all of Maya’s textbooks and take-home materials and her box of school supplies, and let us drop off a couple library books she still had in her backpack from last school year. As we approached kindergarten, Ian’s teacher loaded the car with his bag of school materials and his box of supplies. Each masked kid got to wave from inside the car at their masked teacher – the closest they’ve been to them so far.

They had neat back-to-school signs up on campus, and we were going to get the kids’ photos in front of them but it started raining! I was worried they’d be taken down right away, so we went back that afternoon even though it was still raining and grabbed a few photos of the kids.

Puddle stomping never goes out of style.

It wound up raining a lot and the storm knocked a big limb down from one of the trees. But it also left an entirely-too-enticing puddle in the back yard. The kids went out and jumped and splashed till the puddle was completely dispersed. We don’t have a lot going on, so when something like this comes up, we just kinda go for it.

Maya busy doing all that second grade schoolwork.

Thanks to start of school being delayed till September 8th, we actually had the kids’ learning spaces largely cleaned up and ready for action on day one. Maya sits at a desk in her room so that she can shut the door and really focus. Ian sits at a desk in the kitchen and is often visited by the cats as he’s working.

Nox is helping Ian study

School so far has been … well, let’s be honest … it’s barely been manageable. Sean largely works with Ian to get him to his Zoom meetings and help him get his schoolwork in. I mostly try to get Maya to the right place at the right time and keep after her to complete her work. We try to do our jobs in between times, and in the evenings, and sometimes on the weekends too. I don’t mean to whine, but the simple truth is that it’s exhausting. Luckily, the kids seem to be doing well with their online schooling. It’s not all roses, of course. Ian desperately wishes he could make new friends. Maya is indifferent, but really needs to have access to the social situations that school would normally provide. But generally, they seem to have settled into this being the way school is going to work for now.

But things are about to change again. This coming week, for the parents who have chosen that option (or had no real choice but to accept that option), the district is opening the schools up for in-person learning. They are taking a phased approach to slowly ramp up occupancy. If we hadn’t chosen to keep the kids home, both of them would be going back this week, I believe. Ian because he’s in kindergarten, and Maya because she is Ian’s sibling (2nd graders technically don’t go back till October 12th). Maya’s teacher will now be at the school teaching both in-person students and distance learners. (Ian’s teacher will continue to be distance-only due to her own personal circumstances.) The schedules have already started to shift, and while it’s tough on us, I suspect it will be exceedingly difficult for the teachers. As with everything during this stupid pandemic, I’m sure we’ll adapt, but the weariness runs bone-deep at this point.

Scooter ride with Dad.

On a lighter note, we – especially Sean – have been trying to keep the kids active, at least on the weekends. Sean purchased a grown-up sized scooter so he and the kids can go riding around the neighborhood together. Much to Maya’s enjoyment, he’s also been taking them to a nearby school basketball court to ride their bikes on the weekends. Ian’s still trying to gain some peddling strength with his training wheels, but Maya is tearing around like she was born on a bike. Sean thinks it may be time for some around-the-neighborhood rides. Too bad we’re in the middle of ALL THE HILLS.

I have been keeping active this summer largely by overhauling parts of our neglected back yard. My September project was to work on an area that used to be populated by dying St. Augustine grass. It was too shady for the grass, so at some point before the kids were born, I cleared the bed, laid some beautiful flagstones, and planted fancy drought-tolerant “lawn replacement” plants all through the area. That was the year is rained torrentially for days and days and all of the plants drowned. When we started having kids, I let that area lapse along with everything else. This past month, I planted several hundred little dwarf mondo grass plugs. It’s supposed to be very shade-tolerant. It can handle lots of water, but “once established” is allegedly somewhat drought tolerant. We’ll see. It didn’t cost much beyond my labor, and at least for now, it’s holding up pretty well. Now, I just need our local armadillos to stop digging up my plants.

The kids learned recently that we were unlikely to go trick or treating this year. It was not a happy time. And then Ian forgot and I had to give him the bad news all over again. We did get them costumes, and we’ll figure out some way to celebrate, but going door to door during a pandemic will not be it.

Pumpkin hay bale at the Zoo Boo.

This past Friday though, we did drive down to the San Antonio Zoo to participate in their Zoo Boo celebration. We could pay a per-car admission and drive through the zoo. We listened to a guided tour via our phone of the portions of the zoo we were able to see. At various places, masked staff would pop by the car and give the kids little bags of candy. (We had to work out with the kids whether we were talking about their coronavirus masks or their Halloween masks when we told them to get their masks on!)

Traffic was worse than I’d have expected with so many of us working from home, but we eventually made it. The weather was beautiful – perfect for having the windows down and watching the animals. Maya got carsick both on the way there and on the way back, but she perked up while we were driving through and seeing the animals. We didn’t see a lot of the big standard zoo animals – no elephants, giraffes, lions, or zebras, but we did see bears and kangaroos and a tiger and all manner of bird life. Maya has been way, way into birds, so this was great for her. We even saw little hummingbirds (her favorite) just hanging out around the zoo’s various flowerbeds.

Bald eagles at the San Antonio Zoo. Maya was in bird heaven.

The zoo visit felt fairly well-distanced and safe. Our stop to grab takeout and let the kids use the bathroom on the way home did not. That fast food joint is probably the most crowded place I’ve been since March. Once bathroom visits were complete, I scuttled the kids out to the car and swabbed them down with hand sanitizer while Sean finished getting our food, and then we just ate in the car.

Raccoon at the ground feeder.

We’ve had a few more backyard visitors. I can’t remember where we are on the bird list, but we have now also seen a ladder-backed woodpecker, a bluejay, and some kind of hawk. We have seen a couple little rats bouncing around back there with the birds and squirrels by the bird feeders. The other day, Sean found a katydid under the house eaves. I brought it down to let the kids observe it for a bit before letting it go in the yard. And, most fun of all, a raccoon surprised the crap out of me one morning last week. I had just been out to fill our ground-level feeder, so I wasn’t expecting any critters to be out there when I went to check the other feeders. I yelped as I came nearly face-to-face with the raccoon, helping itself to the ground-feeder food.

The coronavirus news just keeps getting more alarming. This past week, President Trump announced that he and the First Lady had tested positive for Covid-19, and now it feels like we’re all caught in this horrible waiting game. How sick will he get? Who else was he in contact with? What impact will this have on the election, the economy, the horribly divided populace?

The numbers are still as sickening as ever. There’s been a lengthier gap since the last time I posted, so that should be taken into account. Travis County – 8/16 24,144 cases and 335 deaths – 10/4 29,799 cases and 429 deaths. Texas – 8/16 555,394 cases and 10,396 deaths – 10/4 790,194 cases and 16,320 deaths. United States – 8/16 5,412,997 cases and 169,860 deaths – 10/4 7,420,779 cases and 209,821 deaths. The World – 8/16 21,593,607 cases and 773,649 deaths – 10/4 35,078,236 cases and 1,036,104 deaths.

Sean at some point in late June, early July looked at me and said, “We all need a weekend that is different.” Every weekend has been the same, usually some form of puttering around the house. Luckily, friends of ours had already sussed out a solid, socially-distanced weekend that was different. They had booked a little house along the Guadalupe River (a dammed up place perhaps over-poetically called Lake Placid). It seemed like a solid idea, but when I finally got around to doing the same thing for a weekend before school started, I was dismayed to find that all the weekends were booked. But we have reached “fuck it” here on so many levels, so we just scheduled a weekday visit instead. What else are we going to use our vacation time for?

Socially distanced vacation, FTW!

We let the kids know about our big exciting vacation. They were thrilled. Let’s fish! Let’s kayak! Let’s swim! When is our vacation? Is it in two days? Is it this weekend? We just had to get through the month of waiting.

Origami hummingbird.

Luckily, we are getting pretty good at occupying ourselves at this point. Continuing the origami trend, Maya wanted to fold her *second* favorite animal – a hummingbird. Other than the super skinny beak, it wasn’t too fiddly, and so we have folded several. The kids have also taken brown construction paper and fashioned it into conical nests so their origami hummingbirds have a nice place to sleep.

Swimming at Emma Long

I know it sounds insane, but we have even less time now than we did before coronavirus. In the juggling of priorities and needs, we decided to continue to have our house cleaning service come, but only once every four weeks. And so the cleaning ladies are coming less frequently but for more time. We’ve opted to just leave the house while they’re here now. On one of our scheduled cleaning days in late July, after thinking it over, we decided on to again take time off from work and take the kids swimming at a local city park. We didn’t *tell* them this was happening, just in case it was too crowded and we’d have to abandon the plan. We felt they had had enough disappointment. Luckily though, we found an open spot at the water a good distance away from any other people and just played in the lake for a couple hours. (This was at Emma Long Metropolitan Park.) The kids were so happy. They found “sea” shells, they rode the waves from passing boats, they raced, they floated. As we were leaving around 4:00 to head back home, we noticed the park was starting to fill up, so it may be a tougher outing after normal work hours.

Dragon fruit

Because our local Central Market had a tropical fruit event, and because Maya has been wanting to try dragon fruit (which ties into her dragon obsession), we decided to make a bit of a thing out of it. We loaded up our curbside cart with papaya and guava and dragon fruit and mangos. Maya has always loved mango, but it turns out, she loves guava too. None of us were too keen on the dragon fruit, though Maya for her part really *tried* to like it. A friend of ours suggested that it possibly wasn’t ripe enough and that we should give it another try. The big surprise though was that Ian liked the papaya! Ian liking a new food item is always cause for celebration.

Not the best picture, but here is a small subset of our flock of grackles.

Our backyard bird habit is still going strong, however, toward the end of July, we were invaded by grackles. Honestly, I’m surprised it hadn’t happened sooner. They’re the ubiquitous central Texas parking lot bird. Some of them are a muddy black-brown. Others are a deep black that shines an iridescent purple-blue in the sun, an oil slick come to life. Anyway, once the first one showed up, their numbers quickly ballooned to a regular crowd of probably 20-30 birds. I don’t mind so much – finally someone will actually take a *bath* in my bird bath, but it bugs me that they go out of their way to run off the littler birds. Additional new bird visitors have included house finches, a female summer tanager, and lesser goldfinches, who seem to have a particular affinity for whatever tiny bug is eating up Ian’s sunflower plant.

To add some variety to our lives, Sean has started doing a family game night every now and then. So far, we have played King Domino, Catan Junior, and a cooperative game called Karuba Junior. The kids are still learning strategy and solid life skills like how to cope with losing and how to be a gracious winner. They seem to actively look forward to game nights though, so hopefully we’re on the right track.

Ian has latched onto American Ninja Warrior. He routinely requests the videos on youtube and has tried to set up a course in our living room. We need to get that child to a place were he can test out these skills. The little dude needs to MOVE and our living room just isn’t up to it.

Dragon girl in her dragon shirt with her dragon sculpture

Maya has been making all manner of dragon sculptures from pipe cleaners, of all things. Our overflowing stockpile of art supplies is full of things to add to them like jewels and googly eyes and feathers, so they are often well decorated. They all have names and stories and, recently, little dragon children as well.

Ian and Sean have a new obsession: Rubik’s cubes. Ian has even cleared space in the shelves in his headboard specifically to house his Rubik’s cube collection. We’re kind of tickled because between those and American Ninja Warrior, finally Ian has some things that he enjoys that don’t specifically revolve around his sister’s interests.

School was intended to start on August 18th. AISD had a board meeting on the evening of  August 6th were they voted to delay the start of school till September 8th. It seemed that despite all assurances to the contrary, our schools and staff simply hadn’t been adequately prepared to handle a coronavirus classroom. The first four weeks after that are, I think, distance learning only. After that, for the families that have chosen to do so, they will transition in phases to in-person learning. Again, we have elected to stick with distance learning for the foreseeable future.

There were bunk beds. The kids LOVE bunk beds.

Finally the day arrived, we packed up our things and headed to Seguin, TX to our little rental house on the lake. When we were first getting ready to leave, Ian had been having trouble finding one of his loveys, a stuffed robin, so Maya helpfully drew him a picture of a robin to act as a stand-in. In the end, all requisite stuffed animals made the trip. The drive was just over an hour long, which is pretty darn close by Texas standards. Our stay promised to be a crisp, sunny 100+ degrees every day – excellent weather for chilling out in the water. The floor dropped out from under me though as we drove up and found ourselves presented with giant red signs in the middle of the river that prohibited swimming. Dafuq? That wasn’t in the advertisement for the rental house.

The Maya

After a bit of research, it was determined to be largely political and completely unenforced, and so our long-anticipated vacation was un-ruined once more. Not too many minutes passed before everyone was outfitted with life jackets and bobbing around in the Guadalupe River. After a good long swim, we baked our frozen pizzas and cut up our fruits and relaxed and watched TV while we ate dinner together. The only sour spot was that Maya managed to lose her goggles in the river, and unlike when she loses them at the pool, we were unable to retrieve them. The water was not even a little bit clear, so we really couldn’t even try. We didn’t make a big deal about the goggle loss, but for Maya it was very upsetting, and it seemed to have put a bit of a damper on her vacation.

Fishing!

The next day, Sean assembled our fishing pole and watched enough youtube videos to have half an idea how to actually *go fishing*. Maya was so excited; Ian somewhat less so. We had also brought along her little bug net to see if we could let her catch some little fish from the water. We tried the fake worms that were included in our fishing kit, but nothing in the river seemed to be interested in those. We eventually upgraded to hot dogs. Sean, Maya, and Ian had caught no fish, but Sean kind of relaxed into it, sinking back into his plastic lawn chair and, after taking a long pull from his beer, proclaimed that he could understand why someone might enjoy fishing. Maya managed to catch a little bait fish of some kind with her bug net, and the kids named it Thorny and housed it in a plastic bowl we had found in the house. When Thorny started to look a bit droopy, they chose to release it back into the river.

OMG, when is fishing going to be OVER?!?!

Ian was pretty bored with fishing. Luckily, he had found his very own pet dragonfly. He carried it around on his arm for quite a long time, trying out several release locations before finally settling on a little clearing under a tree to turn his somewhat battered pet loose.

There were kayaks on the property for us to use as well, and Maya and Ian were both very, very excited to take a ride in them. Maya in particular was excited to try paddling one herself. After lunch (hot dogs and cold fruits and veggies), we all got suited up to go for a kayak ride. Ian and I loaded onto a one-person kayak and Dad and Maya loaded into a two person one. We didn’t go far, up the river a little ways and down a cove that peeled off to the right. When we got back, we let each kid take a turn paddling the smaller kayak. Maya was definitely getting better at paddling by the end of her turn, but it was still a little much to manage for the Ian. Afterward, we spent some more time playing in the water. After Sean showed them how to swing out further before letting go, both kids seemed to have worked out how to use the rope swing – even Ian, who could barely reach it!

We tried out Catan Junior that afternoon. Generally speaking, I think the game was a good one for the kids, but between out-on-the-water tiredness and perhaps some lingering goggle-loss sadness, it was more dramatic than a board game has any right to be.

We relaxed away our evening, watching TV and eating the fruits, veggies, cured meats, cheeses, and breads we had brought along for a no-cook dinner. More drama ensued from the TV watching – apparently Bart Simpson set his toys on fire because he had lost his last baby tooth and was now grown up, or something. This hit several pain points for Maya – fire (which she hates), the impermanence of things (which has been bothering her lately), and growing up (which she does not want to do – ever).

A little catfish!

We decided to abandon the TV and head out to try fishing again. Sean loaded a fresh chunk of hot dog onto the hook and he and Maya waited, watching the pole for any sign of action. There was a hit! After a minute or two of reeling and tugging, they pulled in a little catfish! Everyone was very excited. After all that work, they had finally caught something. Ian was worried we wouldn’t get the little catfish back in the water fast enough for it to avoid death. Maya was worried we wouldn’t get our hook back.

The next morning, we worked in one last kayak ride while the river was calm and relatively free of boats. We managed to see a great heron-shaped bird of some kind and the ubiquitous grackles around Son’s Island, but otherwise, there wasn’t a whole lot of wildlife to be seen. And with that, we cleaned up, packed, and headed back to Austin.

Since our little vacation, the kids have learned who their teachers will be for this next school year, Maya has had a zoom meeting with her soon-to-be second grade class, and we’ve been trying to set up learning spaces for each kid. Maya now has a desk in her room, and on the other end of the house, we’re trying to fix up the desk area in the kitchen for Ian.

The coronavirus numbers below are from screen captures taken last Sunday evening, compared against the last time we managed to post. Travis County – 7/12 14,788 cases and 169 deaths – 8/16 24,144 cases and 335 deaths. Texas – 7/12 262,762 cases and 3,216 deaths – 8/16 555,394 cases and 10,396 deaths. United States – 7/12 3,304,878 cases and 135,203 deaths – 8/16 5,412,997 cases and 169,860 deaths. The World – 7/12 12,878,325 cases and 568,530 deaths – 8/16 21,593,607 cases and 773,649 deaths.

Thus far, 2020 has delivered murder hornets and plague squirrels and of course The Virus, so it feels trite to bitch about the heat, but since I do so every year, I feel obligated. As I write this, we are well into the really damn hot part of summer. It’s been in the hundred degree range off and on for a bit now, and we probably have a good couple months of this to go. My plants are getting crispy, and the kids don’t want to play outside. We won’t take them to the public pool, and we really haven’t sussed out any good swimming holes that don’t run the risk of being overrun with people. Mostly, we have been hiding in the air conditioning, getting on each other’s nerves.

First time out, wearing their masks.

It’s been about a month since I last posted. Of course, we aren’t doing too much, so there’s not much to report around here. For the most part, Sean is the one who leaves the house and runs errands. We do curbside pickup for grocery stores and Target runs. We have our prescriptions delivered. Given the rapid rise in coronavirus cases, our state has dialed back on some of its operating policies and has issued a state-wide mandate to wear masks in public.

SPARKLE!!!!

Ian did wind up getting to have his end of year dance recital via Zoom back in mid-June. He seemed to enjoy putting on his sparkly vest, tying back his ever-lengthening hair, and performing as well as his memory allowed for the crowd. Sean was in the midst of having a deeply unsettling vertigo episode, so he wound up sitting out on the couch, watching the kids via Zoom, which I think Ian was kind of tickled about. Ian followed up with a month-long, once a week Zoom dance class that he couldn’t ever quite seem to get into.

Maya tells me this is a Diamond Dragon.

One of the kids’ rewards for doing their learning tasks and chores and whatnot has been to choose from a stack of art supplies I had purchased from Amazon earlier in the summer. The first thing they chose were these white masks that they could paint and decorate to their specifications. They have really been getting a lot of mileage out of coloring those masks with metallic paint and glitter glue and adding an extra dash of glued on glitter when the glitter glue didn’t sufficiently deliver on the pizzazz front. I think Maya considers all of hers to be different varieties of dragons.

Maya and her cicada pet.

The cicadas, harbingers of summer, are making lots of noise in the back yard. The kids and I happened to find one in our stone bed outside that had just molted! Maya, as is typical, exhibited zero hesitation in fishing the poor creature out of the rocks and carrying it around, petting it. Once Ian saw that she hadn’t died, he acquiesced to hold the cicada a bit as well. We also found a second one that appeared to be in the process of molting. Both of the bugs went into Maya’s bug house along with some twigs and leaves and little cups of water. We watched the one still in its shell climb the wall and begin to pop out of the old exoskeleton. Then everything stalled. We checked after the kids rested, and sadly, both cicadas had died. We are pretty sure they were Superb Green Cicadas. They didn’t have quite the right markings immediately after shedding their old skin, but as they darkened up, that’s the species they seemed to match.

Happy Father’s Day!

Luckily, Sean’s weird vertigo episode had largely passed by Father’s Day. The kids and I made him “ear-savers” to pull his mask elastic away from his ears so it wouldn’t rub sore spots. (By this point, we’ve upgraded our mask inventory beyond the ones rigged with handkerchiefs and hair ties, so the ear savers aren’t quite as useful now.) We purchased some fancy local chocolate and also some art supplies so Dad could try his hand at making oil pastels the way Deepak does.

Pistachio Cake

And I made a cake. That’s an understatement for this dessert, particularly since I don’t consider myself much of a baker. At Sean’s request, I made the pistachio cake from the Momofuku Milk Bar cookbook. This means that we had to source a few oddball ingredients and a couple of new tools from Amazon. I had to start making components about a week ahead of time so I could get everything done in time. I made a crumb, a curd, a cake, and an icing. I stacked it three layers deep. I froze it. I thawed it. It was crazy. It was also delicious. I’m not sure I’ve ever had such a tiny but towering slice of cake before. The kids wound up not liking it, so Sean and I worked our way through the entire cake over the next week. We’re already discussing how we can simplify the recipe so it doesn’t get relegated to special occasion status.

Coronavirus forced the cancellation of most of the big Independence Day fireworks celebrations, not that we’d having gone anyway given the situation. Given that, the weekend before fourth of July, we decided that we should really try to give the kids some kind of celebration anyway, so we drove to a fireworks stand and purchased a few (largely) city-allowed fireworks. Then for an extra-special super treat, we drove to Freddy’s. We figured if it was crowded, we’d get drive-through and eat in the car. We were lucky to find it completely empty, so we sat outside at a picnic table (which I wiped down) and enjoyed our first restaurant since March. Even luckier still, the kids found a big stick bug against the side of the building. It was all we could do to keep Maya from capturing it and taking it back to our house.

Poor Hank

On the evening of July 1st, we noticed Hank, Maya’s cat, acting very strangely, looking panicky and trying to use the bathroom outside of the litter box. We had decided we’d need to see our vet the next morning, but when the next morning rolled around, I couldn’t even find the cat. Fearing that he had crawled away somewhere to die in peace, I searched high and low, hoping to locate him before the kids woke up. Eventually we found him hiding behind the fake logs in the back of our fireplace. Poor dude was covered in soot, and he whimpered in pain when we picked him up. I tried to get an appointment for him at his regular vet. When they couldn’t see him early enough, I tried our “usual” emergency vet. Their office near us was completely closed. Finally we got him into a different emergency vet a bit further from our house.

Sean took him while I stayed home, filled out all his intake forms online, and watched the kids. Thanks to COVID-19, It was a zero contact drop-off. They called us a bit later to let us know what was going on. Hank had a complete urinary blockage, which is apparently common in neutered male cats, but can be fatal. They kept him at the animal hospital for two nights, giving him a catheter and meds and fluids and monitoring his kidney values. HIs kidney values returned to normal range, but ever since Sean went to pick him up on the 4th of July (again, with no direct contact from staff), his recovery has been slow. He finally appears to be back to eating and drinking normally. We reintroduced him into the household yesterday afternoon, but thus far Hank-Nox relations have been … contentious.

Ian loves sparklers. We eventually talked Maya into trying one too.

Because we had just gotten Hank home and he took a bit more care than we had anticipated, our celebration on the 4th was a harried affair. I blew up the pool so the kids could play for a while. We filled some water balloons. We spent some time in the early evening watching ash “snakes” blossom and smoke bombs spew. The kids threw poppers around on the ground, many of which failed to explode on initial impact, and so I was startled by random pops as I accidentally stepped on unexploded ordnance over the next couple days.

We went in to dry off, eat, and let it get a bit darker out. Earlier that day, I had taken a crack at smoking a pork shoulder on my regular old kettle grill in hopes of having pulled pork sandwiches for our dinner. Maya doesn’t like smoke, and Ian doesn’t like pulled pork. So it goes. (For those who are curious, I could never quite get the smoking temperature in the right range using the grill, so after maybe a couple hours, I took the shoulder inside, wrapped it in foil, and finished it in a 225-degree oven. Much yum.)

Look, Ma! No teeth!

Maya, fearsome tooth-puller that she is, has now extracted the teeth on either side of her two front teeth. It’s a wonder she can still eat!

Remember how we were going to see Hamilton? In New York City? For our 20th anniversary? On a vacation without our children in tow for the first since they were born? That plan was corona-ed, but luckily the movie version of Hamilton is now streaming on Disney. Of course it isn’t at all like seeing a production live, but I did finally get to watch the show whose music has been such a source of joy over the past few months. And I’m normally not that into musicals. Who knew?

Sean’s T-Rexes.

One of the kids’ hard-won art supplies was a package of origami paper. Maya especially has been trying really hard to fold some basic swans and bubbles and cranes and frogs on her own. Ian tries to follow along as well. I sometimes help a bit when they struggle with the harder parts. Generally though, their care and accuracy in folding is improving. Maya asked Sean if he could help her fold a dinosaur. Fool that he is, he blindly agreed without really checking into it. And that’s the story of how Sean and the kids spent probably a good 90 minutes over the course of a couple evenings folding three tiny little T-Rexes. Maya proclaimed Sean the *best* Dad. Sean, I think, may have proclaimed himself done with origami forever.

Gray fox, we think.

On one evening, as Sean and the kids were folding at the kitchen table, and the outside light was dwindling but the inside light had not yet been turned on, Maya exclaimed in her nervous/excited voice, “Guys? There’s something out there!”

Sure enough, a small roughly dog-shaped creature was nibbling seeds and nuts out of the ground feeder we had installed for the backyard birds and squirrels. We looked it up and think that it was a little Gray Fox. Evidently, they’re very common in Texas and reports of them visiting suburban backyards are more frequent than one might expect. They’re considered harmless to humans, and so we decided to just not worry about it.

Rock squirrels are pretty sure they own our back yard.

The Woods’ Wild Kingdom that is our yard has brought us a lot of joy this year. Given Maya’s bird-love, we put in a hopper feeder earlier in the year. It has garnered a lot of attention from the birds and squirrels. We don’t really mind the squirrels so much except that they tend to knock the pole that holds the feeder sideways when they jump on it. Then Sean found a little ground feeder, and we installed one of those hoping it would entice the squirrels to spend less time at the bird feeder. This past weekend, we installed a big pole in another part of the yard that holds a tube feeder, a suet feeder, and a little platform feeder. Sean added a bell / baffle thing in hopes of deterring the squirrels. So far, the animals, birds included, all seem to prefer the ease of the hopper feeder over the other stuff, but we’ll see how it plays out over time.

We have seen a number of birds this year. Of course, you already know about the Bewick’s Wren family that hatched their babies in Maya’s bird house. We also have a pair of cardinals that hang out back there. They must have a nest nearby too, because we now see the couple with a handful of juvenile cardinals. We even got to observe the dad feeding them early on. In addition to that, we have now seen: White-winged Doves, Mourning Doves, Black-chinned Hummingbirds, possibly Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds, Carolina Chickadees, House Sparrows, and what we think are Tufted Titmice. Maya is pretty convinced that she’s also seen a Blue Jay, an Eastern Bluebird, some kind of owl, and some kind of hawk. I’m torn. On one hand, she certainly spots things more quickly than I do. But I think sometimes wishful thinking clouds her judgement a little.

Me and this little deer startled the hell out of each other one day while I was working outside.

Our non-bird visitors include green anoles (we think), Texas spiny lizards, fox squirrels, rock squirrels, that one gray fox, and a little fawn we found hiding in our overgrown shrubs in the front yard. We think a raccoon may occasionally be cleaning out the ground feeder at night because on some mornings, the bird bath water is very dirty, as if something has been washing its food in it.

As of Tuesday evening, our school district decided on all-distance learning for the first three weeks of the school year (starting August 18th). After that, unless things change, we can choose whether we will do 100% in-person learning or 100% distance learning. We are choosing the latter for the foreseeable future. Yes, we are very lucky to be able to make this choice; however, that doesn’t mean the school year is going to be easy for us. We will have two smaller kids who will be expected to follow a teacher they’ve likely never met on a screen they can all-too-easily ignore. And it’s still preferable to sending them into the petri dish that is elementary school. Our kids, just like everyone else’s I’m sure, want to go back to school, would benefit from the social interaction they have at school, learn best from a teacher who is physically present. Understand that we want our kids to go back to school, but not like this and not right now.

The virus has ramped up so precipitously in Texas, I almost don’t even want to post comparative numbers this time. Here they are from the last time I posted as compared to this past Sunday. Travis County – 6/7 3,697 cases and 97 deaths – 7/12 14,788 cases and 169 deaths. Texas – 6/7 75,408 cases and 1,841 deaths – 7/12 262,762 cases and 3,216 deaths. United States – 6/7 1,977,899 cases and 112,054 deaths – 7/12 3,304,878 cases and 135,203 deaths. The World – 6/7 6,799,713 cases and 397,388 deaths – 7/12 12,878,325 cases and 568,530 deaths.

I commented to Sean recently that our home life has been relatively uneventful over the past couple weeks. He concurred and pointed out that we’ve sort of settled into a routine. April rolls out of bed at ass o’clock and starts her job before she’s truly awake. Later on, Sean gets kids up and fed and started on their assignments. Sean and April juggle kids through the rest of the morning with April as primary responder. Lunch happens around noon. Sean and April juggle kids through the afternoon with Sean as primary responder. April stops working and starts chores and kid interaction. Sean often works till dinner. We augment with evening and weekend work hours as needed. The kids have too much screen time. As Kurt Vonnegut says again and again in “Slaughterhouse Five,” so it goes.

Behold, the unicorn helmet.

After Ian’s scooter accident, we had to replace his helmet so we let him choose one he liked. Of course the ridiculous thing he chose is bright purple and has a unicorn horn, because with Ian, how could it not? I may have mentioned that he was asking to get back on his scooter the day after the accident happened. We finally let him get back on that horse, helmet firmly in place and took a walk / scooter ride around the neighborhood.

Since we’re stuck at home all day, every day, I’ve been making a point of getting the kids outside at least daily. Often they’ll putter around collecting bugs and dead plant life and sticks and rocks and constructing different scenarios in their sand box. The sand box used to be Bird Land. These days, I think it has become their mini-mall. Portions of it are designated a potion shop, a plant store, a pet store, a texture store, and on and on. What is a texture store, you might wonder? Ian will collect various leaves and things of varying textures. The prospective customer comes to his shop, letting him know what experience he or she would like to have, and he provides a rough leaf or a smooth stone or a soft flower.

These things have been hiding in the garage for way too long.

I have been working on our horrifically neglected back yard off and on while Maya and Ian have their outside time. This past few weeks’ task was to finally get all the mother’s day stepping stones the kids had made for me when they were really little out where I could see them more regularly (instead of being stacked in our garage). I scuffle-hoed the weeds out of a bed close to the house that I had wanted to leave largely unplanted, given the ever-present threat of termites. After a half-assed dirt-leveling, I put down landscape fabric and nestled my decorated cement stepping stones amongst about 900 pounds of smooth bagged stones purchased over the course of a couple weeks from Home Depot. I would not call the work particularly precise, but honestly I didn’t want it to be. And either way, I now get to see their little footprints and handprints with more regularity.

Our budding actor

Maya had been having one whole-class and one small-group Zoom session each week with her teacher and classmates. During one of these small-group sessions, Maya agreed to be in a play called, “The Very Cranky Bear.” She was going to play the part of the zebra and had a little over a week to make a costume and memorize her lines. Here’s the keeping it real part of our post: the only way I convinced her to memorize her lines was to bribe her with chocolate chips. I don’t even care. She did great, and sounded so much more natural than the kids who hadn’t been able to memorize. (Plus, now she knows she can do it.)

Ian – last day of “preschool” at home. He’s now a proud kindergartener.

The day of her play was also her last day of school, May 28th. We took a few photos of both her and Ian to commemorate the day. They’re proudly sporting their coronavirus moppy-headed haircuts. Ian honestly just likes his hair in his face all the time, apparently. And for Maya, we bought some sparkly headbands which don’t work quite as well as I’d hoped, but that she seems happy with … because sparkles.

Maya –  last day of first grade at home. She’s now a very reluctant 2nd grader.

As an end of the school year treat, we gifted our dragon-obsessed daughter with a pair of dragon wings to wear. And we gave our unicorn-obsessed son a unicorn headband to wear. This seems to have added a fun dimension to their games where Maya is a hummingbird dragon and Ian is (you guessed it) a unicorn!

May 28th, which was a Thursday, was also our 20th anniversary. Had coronavirus not happened, last week we’d have been in NYC and our kids would have had their first no-parents stay with their grandparents. When so many people are struggling physically and financially, I feel like a jerk whining about our ruined vacation to NYC. We were going to go see Hamilton. We were going to eat at Le Bernardin. Instead we are here in Texas, at home, just like we’ve been for the past couple months. The kids had a bigger reaction to learning they would not be visiting their grandparents this summer than they had to the rescheduled Disney trip. I’m sure their grandparents are disappointed too. If it makes Lolli and Pop and Grammy and Grandpa feel any better, the kids really do look forward to those visits. 

Our 20th anniversary dinner spread.

On Friday night, we parked the kids in front of the TV, and Sean picked up a set dinner from Uchiko. In the reservation, it asks if it’s for a special occasion, so I filled in the blank saying that it was our 20th anniversary. The fine folks at Uchiko did what they could to make it special. Not only did they slip in an extra dish – a chutoro sashimi – they also included a cookbook, which was signed by the folks at the restaurant. The extra dish I had kind of anticipated – I mean Uchiko does that sort of thing even when it’s *not* your anniversary. The book was a complete surprise and an incredibly sweet gesture. Oh, and did I mention that the food was amazing too? In the restaurant, they’re able to present everything at the optimum temperature and artfully arranged and garnished to what appear to be precise specifications. Obviously that’s impossible to achieve with a takeaway order, but care was clearly taken in the packaging of these dishes. The crispy things were still crispy. The smoky ribeye’s char still had a bit of crunch. We couldn’t have asked for better, especially during a pandemic.

They gifted us with a signed cookbook! Such a kind gesture.

The next morning, Saturday, I awoke just before 6 to watch a building implosion in downtown Richmond, VA. Why would I bother? Well, for about two years of my work life, I endeavored to vacate our presence from that building, which was substantial. I’m not going to go into the boring details of my job, but suffice to say, seeing that building brought to ruin by explosive charges was kind of satisfying. 

Later that morning, we tuned in to NASA’s live channel to watch the Falcon 9 rocket blast the Crew Dragon capsule up to low earth orbit. The kids were WAY into watching the rocket blast off. It was hard to keep their attention though through the handful of minutes it took for the rocket stages to be ejected. (And we couldn’t really gain their interest at all the next day when the capsule docked with the International Space Station.) 

We have decided to keep the kids going with their schoolwork routine through the summer. It gives them something to occupy their time, and who knows what school will look like when it starts back up in the fall. Best not to have summer knowledge atrophy as one more obstacle to overcome. In my head, I’ve been thinking of it as Camp Carona, but now that I type it out, it seems kind of morbid. I spent a fair amount of time thinking about how to structure it and, for better or worse, have built some incentives into the plan. We’re doing our own summer reading program. For a certain chunk of minutes spent reading, we’ll purchase them a new book of their choice. Ian can gain his minutes by being read to. If Maya reads to him, they both count the minutes. One week in, it seems to be encouraging them to read – Maya is nearly at her first goal already. Who knows though how things will shake out over the next couple months.

I’ve also made them sort of a to-do list. It covers academics, some playing, and some chores. Once they both complete their to-do list, they can choose a new art supply from a giant pile I procured from Amazon. Again, we’ll see how this pans out over the long haul, but at least right now, they’re motivated.

The world is not nearly so benign as our house, unfortunately. On May 25th, George Floyd died in Minneapolis. He was black man who suffocated after a white police officer knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes. For the last few minutes, Mr. Floyd was motionless and rather than try to revive him, the officer remained on his neck. Video was captured, multiple videos even. One person interviewed since then called it a kind of strike three. The pandemic already has folks kind of on high alert all the time. The horrifically strained economy and rampant unemployment have compounded people’s uncertainty. And then, not for the first time, a black man was killed by a white police officer. The resulting protests and riots have been severe. The police response has run the gamut from sickening to heroic. I am a thinking, feeling person and so I’m having my own emotional response to all of this, but I really don’t feel like writing about that.

What I’ve been trying to figure out is what to tell the kids about it. I don’t believe they have ever once questioned me about why skin colors are different. Nor have I ever heard them repeating anything derogatory that they may have picked up out and about somewhere. Because they’ve asked no questions and there has been no “bad behavior” to correct, I’ve treated it as a non-issue. But it seems like maybe that’s what got us into this mess – or rather, what’s never actually gotten us out of the mess. I grew up thinking – while in my basically all-white small town and school and church – of course I’m not racist. I do not actively discriminate against people of color and so there is no problem that I personally need to solve. Also, from where I stood in my insular little world, racism was a thing that used to happen. The Civil Rights movement happened, and things were put right. But were they really?

I’ve read again and again that to really deal with systemic racism, we have to make ourselves ask uncomfortable questions, confront uncomfortable truths. Here’s one uncomfortable truth that I’m working through: if I’m being completely honest, I chafe a little at the notion that if I’m not out there marching in protest or writing a strongly worded letter to my representative that I’m part of the problem. On the other hand, one might say that I have likely unwittingly benefitted from a system that rewards me for nothing more than the color of my skin – or at very least, doesn’t punish me for it. And either way, I challenge anyone (myself included, of course) to think deeply about a man, whose alleged crime by the way was passing a fake 20 dollar bill, having the life crushed out of him by people who are intended to protect and to serve and not feel like maybe there’s a bigger solution required here than a paltry “I’m not a racist” attitude. I still don’t know how to talk to the kids though.

Here are my comparative Covid-19 numbers from the last Sunday I posted and this past Sunday. Travis County – 5/17 2,459 cases and 77 deaths – 6/7 3,697 cases and 97 deaths. Texas – 5/17 48,396 cases and 1,343 deaths – 6/7 75,408 cases and 1,841 deaths. United States – 5/17 1,516,343 and 89,932 deaths – 6/7 1,977,899 cases and 112,054 deaths. The World – 5/17 4,710,614 cases and 315,023 deaths – 6/7 6,799,713 cases and 397,388 deaths.

It’s been nearly a month since we last posted on our hip, happening pandemic lives. The kids have been growing a few plants and herbs in the back yard. They have the “coolapeno” we photographed last month. Maya has an Italian parsley plant, and Ian is trying his hand at mint (which he would yank out of our friend Holly’s garden and eat as if it were a kebab last summer). There are some flowers here and there, and even though the area isn’t very sunny, we’re gamely trying our hand at a pumpkin and a few sunflowers as well.

Soup ingredients

Since the first coolapeno developed, Maya had soup on the brain. She wanted to make an all-herb soup plus add the coolapeno … and lime … and ancho chile powder because she dug through the spice drawer and it smelled good. And it should be creamy. She also had been on a mission to develop a recipe entirely on her own. Every time she caught me poking around the web looking for herby soups, she fussed that she didn’t want to make someone else’s recipe; she wanted to make her own. I gently pushed her toward a thai-ish recipe using coconut milk for its base. She wouldn’t let me thin it out with chicken broth, so it was REALLY thick. She added every herb she could think of. Parsley and mint, of course, but also garlic chives, cilantro, and rosemary (because Maya loves rosemary). She added lime. And tasted. And added more lime. And tasted. And added more lime. Then with a flourish, she threw in the peppers and the ancho powder and called it good.

To me, it tasted very limey and too thick for its own good. Otherwise though, it was fine. She ate nearly a whole bowl of it. We discussed how we might change the recipe for next time and she seemed into it at the time, but hasn’t mentioned the soup again.

Our kids are handling the home all the time life pretty well, most of the time. Ian did get angry with me the other day (probably because I wanted him to pick up his crap). A moment later, I overheard him working to convince Maya that they should really go live with Grammy and Grandpa instead because they are so much nicer. He just needed to get his magic wand working since that’s how they were going to travel – by magic. I warned my parents that they may get surprise company, but Ian has yet to materialize in Missouri.

Maya-style

Maya went on a tear for a couple of days trying to fix her hair using what looked like every single hair clip in the drawer. Since we haven’t been getting haircuts, her hair is getting in her eyes (and developing more tangles than she feels like dealing with). She seems to be over her self-styling now and mostly just lets me install a couple or three utilitarian clips to keep her hair out of her way.

Check out that beach-ready hairdo

We had a 95-degree day on the 24th of April, so I drug out the inflatable pool and let the kids play. Predictably, Ian put a foot in and declared the water too cold, while Maya was laying in the water the moment enough of it had collected in the pool to form a decent puddle. Later on I turned on a little sprinkler and they ran back and forth through that as well. Maya dug worms out of the mud and Ian tried to build structures out of sticks and leaves. There was a baby worm named “Wiggly” hanging out for a while, but I think it may have accidentally met its end in the swimming pool.

We have managed a bit of social time finally as well. Sean had a happy hour with his coworkers via Zoom. I crashed the party while the kids had too much screen time. We had FaceTime and Zoom calls with a few of our friends and caught up a bit. It dawned on me recently that this would be a not terrible way to stay in touch with our out of state friends as well. I’m not sure why it’s taken this long for me to work that out. Or why we still haven’t tried it out yet.

Snail on the sandbox

The kids have been spending a ton of time out in the yard, and we’ve been seeing all kinds of critters. We found a big, weird hornworm of some kind crawling on a lawn refuse bag. We saw a green anole (we think) hiding out in a stand of neglected cast iron plants. He could have been a brown anole, but the green ones can change color and appear brown as well, and we thought we had seen a bright green one in the front yard a few weeks before.

We found a brown polka-dotted lady bug that Maya named Cookie. Ian named the aforementioned anole Brownie. The hornworm (wisely) vacated the premises before anyone could think up a name for it. The kids went shrieking the other day because what they thought was mild-mannered dirt turned out to be a largish spider. We’re guessing maybe it was a wolf spider, but who knows.

The kids had been begging to ride their scooters in the driveway and on our sidewalk. Sean backed out the cars and let them go for it. The first day was innocuous enough. The next day, Friday the 1st of May, it didn’t go so well. Ian was zooming super fast down the driveway and along the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front door and slowing to a stop in the yard. He did it over and over again. I was sitting on the porch drinking water and dorking with my phone, letting them run out their energy.

Then I heard a thunk; a loud one. Up like a flash, and there was Ian laid out and crying on the sidewalk, scooter dumped forward on its front. He had a big bloody knee, so I scooped him up and hauled him to the bathroom to inspect the damage and clean up what we could. Then we noticed his forehead. The nose parts of his plastic-framed glasses had apparently sliced upward into his forehead when he landed on his poor little face, making deep cuts.

Ian’s THIRD trip to the ER.

It was clear pretty quickly that one or both of those cuts was going to need stitches. I called our pediatrician, but they don’t do stitches there, so we really had no choice but to take him to the hospital. Maya was panicking about the idea of someone actually sewing (SEWING) her little brother, and her panic was amplifying his panic. It was a little hard to think through all that upheaval.

We decided it was best to not send all of us into the hospital during the coronavirus mess, so we loaded Ian up with icepacks and cloth diapers to hold on his head, belted him into his car seat crying and very upset, and Sean hauled him over to the hospital.

The children’s hospital took good care of Ian, by all accounts, but they were still there for something like 4 hours. They determined that he likely had no brain injury, though we had to keep an eye out for it. He wound up with Dermabond on one of his cuts, around 4 stitches on the other cut, a few scraped knuckles, a very scraped knee, a scraped up nose and upper lip, and one loose tooth. And he had his helmet on.

The difference between kids getting stitches now and Sean and I having gotten stitches as a kid is dramatic. Ian had some sort of topical anesthetic applied to his wound before stitching. No pesky needles to the face. They also gave him an inhalant for anxiety (Versed). Evidently, it went well beyond relieving anxiety; it made the little dude straight up loopy. Sean facetimed me so I could chat with Versed-drunk Ian. What I saw was Ian basically shoving whole Oreos in his mouth like a reverse PEZ dispenser, talking (or trying to talk around Oreo) a mile a minute. I wish Sean would tell this part of the story, but apparently Ian was completely unaware of getting stitched, trying to say “ow” at what he thought were the right parts and failing.

Sean and Ian interacted with only two people in all at the hospital, both of whom had been wearing masks. Sean was wearing a mask. They took temperatures at the hospital. It’s been a couple weeks now since their ER visit and so far, no one has gotten noticeably sick. Ian’s injuries appear to have healed up without incident, though he is kind of upset about the notion of having scars.

Pink Turk’s Cap

My friend Holly and I had gone in on a plant delivery from The Natural Gardener. It was a special thing they were doing while their store was shut down, but Sean and I live too far away for them to deliver to our house, so we had it delivered to Chris and Holly’s instead. The order showed up the day Ian had his scooter accident, so we weren’t able to drive out there to pick up the plants till the next day. We worked it out that we’d leave our kids belted into their seats in the car, and their kids could come out and say hello, social distancing style. It worked out well enough, though Maya and Ian were really sad they couldn’t get out and play with their friends.

Since I’ve been overhauling our neglected back yard and The Natural Gardener is so good for native plants, I placed a kind of huge order with them. I mostly finished preparing the beds throughout the week and put a few of the plants into the ground, but ultimately, I spent most of my Mother’s Day pulling weeds, spreading dirt and mulch, and planting so many plants amongst the rocks and tree roots in our back yard.

Happy Mother’s Day!

Sean and the kids gave me a cookbook and had ordered a birdbath (that finally showed up this weekend). The kids made me little animal keychains out of pony beads, and per my wishes, tried really, really hard not to fight with each other. We had video calls with Lolly and Pop and with Grammy and Grandpa. As a treat to myself, I made sausage rolls for lunch. Otherwise, the day was about like any other. I normally try to make a point of spending Mother’s Day with the kids, but these days we’re around each other all day, every day, so it was with only a little bit of guilt that I basically spent the day on my own, getting things accomplished.

Tonga Toast

I don’t even remember how we got on the subject, but Sean at some point mentioned really wanting to have Tonga Toast while at Disney World. I happened upon a copycat recipe that he confirmed looked pretty accurate, and since we are all kind of intermittently nursing our canceled vacation wounds, we decided to give it a shot. We bought a loaf of brioche and sliced it into very thick chunks – I’d guess in the neighborhood of 2.5-3 inches, stuffed those with banana slices, dipped each bread chunk in a heavy-cream-based egg mixture, fried it, and then tossed it in cinnamon sugar. Oh, and we made a strawberry sauce to pour over the top – that was probably my favorite part. Ian wouldn’t touch it. Maya was in love. Sean and I split a piece, because WOW.

While businesses have been opening up more starting May 1st, we have continued to stay home as much as possible. To that end, we continue to partake of our curbside pickup for  groceries each week. This has lead to a few hilarious mishaps, since we aren’t the ones choosing items and making substitutions as needed. My favorite by far was the week I ordered one shallot and two heads of garlic. The heads of garlic were so tiny that if I had been shopping, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Whereas the frickin’ shallot was so huge, I initially mistook it for an onion.

Holy shallot, Batman!

Every month during the school year, Maya’s school featured a spotlight artist. All the kids can enter facts about the artist and for each fact they enter, their name goes into a drawing for free art supplies. They decided to continue these even throughout our stay at home distance learning. We spent an afternoon looking up facts and submitting them on March’s featured artist, Vincent Van Gogh, and lo and behold, Maya’s name was among those drawn! She selected a package of white, brown, orange, and black clay from a list and it was delivered to our house within the week. Maya shared some of her clay with Ian. With the rest she made dragons, dragon islands, dragon fire, clouds to place around her dragon island. And she made a lizard that was meant to be similar to the anole in the back yard. Ian for his part, was more into mixing the clay to see what sort of color variations he could create.

Spring school photo – Maya, age 7

By the way, back in February, Maya had school photos. Shit has gotten so weird since then, that I keep forgetting about them. They were sent to us only a few weeks ago. They’re her first professional photos with her glasses. She looks so grown up!

Since it’s been about a month, I think I’m just going to compare the coronavirus numbers at the end of our last post with today’s numbers. On April 19th, we had 774 confirmed cases and 19 deaths in Travis County. This evening, we’re at 2,459 cases and 77 deaths. Texas was at 19,408 cases and 500 deaths back on April 19th. Now, we’re at 48,396 cases and 1,343 deaths. The US was at 764,177 cases and 40,591 deaths on 4/19, and now we’re at 1,516,343 and 89,932 deaths. Worldwide, we had 2,402,076 cases and 165,106 deaths on 4/19, and this evening we have 4,710,614 cases and 315,023 deaths.

Here’s our roundup for the past couple weeks. I’m writing this on Sunday, but probably won’t get photos added till Monday. Maya started distance learning on April 6th. The teachers have organized a grid for each week. In each of five subjects, there is a “must-do” lesson and several “can-do” lessons. I’m rapidly learning which subjects Maya loves and which are met with indifference. She also has weekly assignments to complete from her art teacher and her music teacher (and possibly her PE teacher? Idunno. All this has been kinda vague.)

Maya also has a Zoom meeting with her whole class on Monday. And then we schedule her for a small-group Zoom meeting sometime during the week. So far, we’ve only been late for one meeting, so I guess we’re doing ok for two adults who are trying to do their full-time jobs while caring for the kids. Thank goodness those kids have each other. Sure, they fight a lot, but they also spend a lot of time playing together.

If you look closely, you can see a little beak poking out the birdhouse doorway.

We spend some time doing non-school-related things as well. We had one of the most amazing experiences week before last. As you may remember, Maya painted and built a little birdhouse a few years ago, and we hung it off our back porch rafters, not really expecting much to come of it. Earlier this year, two little birds were busily loading it up with all kinds of small sticks and dried grass and things, clearly working on nesting. We tried to identify them using a Cornell Lab bird app on my phone and believe them to be Bewick’s Wrens. Starting in March (I think), they started bringing all manner of bugs and worms to the birdhouse, presumably feeding their newly hatched babies.

Where this birdhouse is positioned, we can see it really well from our kitchen table. We had started seeing the little birds poking their beaks out of the “front door” of the birdhouse to receive the creatures their parents brought them to eat. One day during lunch, I warned the kids that probably those birds were going to leave their nest soon. Maya was convinced that she had seen one of the babies on a stone wall behind the birdhouse. She justified her assertion by explaining that she even saw some gooky stuff from the egg on its feathers. I figured this was wishful thinking and proceeded to explain to her and Ian that the odds of us being in the kitchen at the same time the little birds left the nest was pretty unlikely.

And then, right as we were watching, one of the little birds moved tentatively out onto the perch by the doorway of the birdhouse. It half-fell/half-flew down to the floor below. We watched for several minutes as it wobbled around and tested out its wings with hesitant little 2- and 3-foot high flights before it finally found a low enough spot on the stone wall that it could fly up and wander away. And Maya was right; it did look like the bird had a bit of leftover egg crud on its feathers. We watched one more wobble out onto the perch and fall/fly over to the stone wall before I had to give up and get on a call for work.

If the kids had been in school, they’d have missed seeing these baby birds, which had hatched in *their* back yard, fly for the very first time. Heck, I’d have missed it too – I usually eat at my desk. I’m not sure that’s worth a pandemic, but it’s better than nothing.

Apparently, we have a John Prine mural in Austin.

Then John Prine died on April 7th – the same day we saw the baby birds leave the nest. I knew he had been diagnosed with COVID-19 in late March. I knew he was an older gentleman and a two-time cancer survivor to boot, and that probably the outlook was grim. I was still heartbroken when it actually happened.

I can remember being maybe eight or nine years old. Dad and Carol had given me a little boombox type radio as a gift, and I loved it. It was the only thing we had in Mom’s house that would play cassettes, and I had a great deal of fun recording my favorite songs from the radio. At that point, my brother Jade and I were visiting Dad every other weekend, and Mom had asked if I’d record some of the John Prine records to cassette so we could listen to them at her house.

Dad showed me how to operate his stereo for recording. Showed me how to carefully clean and handle the records. Again, I loved it. Loved flipping through all the albums, looking at the covers, checking out the track lists. He had a handful of Prine records. I suspect I went in with a list of Mom’s preferred tracks and did my best to record those particular albums. While I’m sure I’d heard them before and certainly would have heard Mom singing some of the songs around the house, I’d never really listened to them before I had hunkered down in the basement of Dad and Carol’s house setting those albums to cassette.

He was twangy, which I didn’t care for since I was certain I didn’t like country music. His voice was memorable in the way that Bob Dylan’s or Tom Petty’s voices were – not traditionally crowd-pleasing perhaps, but certainly able to deliver on an emotional level. His words though. The man had a brilliant way with words. His unfussy lyrics could bring tears to my eyes and have me chuckling all in the same song, even as a kid. He had a way of sneaking in nuggets of universal truth into the story-songs he spun. I’m not sure I had ever heard (or noticed) such raw and honest verses before.

Anyway, I promised myself I wouldn’t go on and on. It’s just hit me so much harder than I expected it to. Maybe with everything else going on, the loss just carries more weight than it should.

About the time that Maya was lamenting the fact that the Bewick’s wren babies had left and the parent birds seemed to be through with her birdhouse, a hummingbird came to our feeder. We think we’ve identified it as a female Black-chinned Hummingbird, though it’s tough to tell – they move pretty quickly.

One of the things that seemed to sustain the kids through all they have had to give up for this coronavirus mess was the upcoming Easter holiday. Grammy and Grandpa sent them each some legos to work on (which is PERFECT), and Lolli and Pop send them these cute headphones that are built into soft headband type things. They’re called Cozy Phones and especially Ian loves them.

Decorating Easter eggs!

Sean was smart and had bought all the easter candy, eggs, and egg decorating things pretty early, so we had a respectable supply. The kids had a great deal of fun dying eggs. He had also bought some chalk eggs and it seemed like they enjoyed prettying those up as well. We left everything on the front porch for the Easter Bunny to hide, as we do every year. Then Sean and I surreptitiously loaded up plastic eggs with candy and Sean assembled their baskets.

The kids had taken some pains to make sure E. Bunny knew which basket belonged to whom. And Sean chose egg colors and whatnot that would match the correct kid’s preferences. Then Ian promptly woke up the next morning and chose the wrong basket!

Sean Easter-bunnied outside in the sprinkling rain, while I ran interference with Ian. Maya has almost fully adapted to her later schedule since she no longer has to be at school at 7:45 in the morning, so Ian had to actually wake her up to tell her excitedly about the Easter baskets. She was just as thrilled as he was with the candy and stickers in hers.

Don’t they look pleased to be having their photo taken before they’re allowed to hunt eggs???

We had them get dressed up for the egg hunt, because when else are they gonna dress up right now. And then they went outside and happily hunted for their eggs. The black chalked eggs were particularly devilish to locate, but all in all, their baskets were full and they seemed to be very happy.

I had promised the kids we’d try to make chocolate-flavored roll-and-cut cookies, so Easter afternoon, we decorated those. I let them have full reign over all the decorations we had in the house from rainbow sprinkles, to colored sugars, to miniature chocolate chips. They took their time and carefully decorated their cookies, often coaxing eyes and feathers and fur out of the various creatures they had cut from the cookie dough.

Maya and Ian arranged for the parents to have an Easter egg hunt that evening. They had spent all week stuffing eggs and stockpiling them in their rooms so they’d be ready for the big moment. I love it that they were thinking about us!

Coolapeno – a jalapeno without the heat. I personally don’t get it, but the kids seem happy.

The next week, we were delighted to find that our “coolapeno” plant had already produced a pepper! Way before everything was locked down, we had made a run with the kids to Home Depot to buy some flowers and herbs to plant in the back yard. I don’t remember which kid, but one of they seemed really excited about this plant that was supposedly going to produce peppers that were jalapeno-flavored, but without the heat – coolapenos, see?

Anyhow, Maya now has an elaborate plan for some kind of soup that will use every herb she can think of plus the coolpeno pepper. I’m a solid recipe-preparer, but not much of a recipe developer, so we’ll see how it goes.

Sometime during this past week, we learned that Texas schools would be closed through the end of the school year. Good thing too, since we had no intention of sending Maya back to school even if it opened. I hear talk of them slowly “opening things back up” here in Texas. People have been allowed back to beaches in Florida. Photos have been popping up in the news of happy beach-goers basking in the sun, mask-free and in close proximity. I guess we’ll start to see how all that pans out in 2-3 weeks.

Folks have been protesting the closure of businesses and whatnot with our shelter-in-place, social distancing mandates. Given that Austin is the capitol of a very independent-spirited state, it’s not surprising that there are protests here too. I guess from the rarified air that I breathe, where I am “stuck” at my comfortable house with my healthy spouse and two healthy children working my not-yet-erased job, I can’t fully understand the situation. On the other hand, I see photos of people crowded together demanding to work, some of them wearing their N95 masks, and I can’t help but wonder where the disconnect is. I get that we’re choosing between two shitty options. Cause economic strain and hopefully control the spread of this virus or let people go to work and presumably allow it to spread more freely, sicken (and kill) more people, overwhelm the hospitals. But with the virus still spreading so freely (and with such a death rate) and no vaccine available yet, staying home seems to be the most logical choice.

The kids looking a little disheveled after having to sit for an entire music recital via Zoom.

Just this past Saturday, the kids had their first Zoom music recital. It actually went better than expected, in my opinion. I was worried they wouldn’t take it as seriously since we were just in our house like always, but they both did great. Everyone was respectful, and while the sound quality may not have been the best ever, we were able to hear everyone perform their pieces.

I’m not going to comment on the numbers today, just lay them out so I have them recorded. For Travis County, last Sunday we had 774 confirmed cases and 19 deaths. This Sunday, we have 1108 cases and 25 deaths. For Texas, last Sunday we had 13,748 cases and 286 deaths. This Sunday, we have 19,408 cases and 500 deaths. For the United States, last Sunday, we had 559,409 cases and 22,071 deaths. This Sunday, we have 764,177 cases and 40,591 deaths. And hey, I don’t think I’ve noted worldwide numbers yet. Why not complete the horror. Last Sunday, we were at 1,846,680 confirmed cases and 114,090 deaths. This Sunday, we have 2,402,076 cases and 165,106 deaths.

There’s something about Sunday nights, especially now with all the quarantining and home schooling and so on. I’ve always been annoyed with myself because I have a hard time enjoying Sundays because they really always feel more like pre-Mondays to me. I’m wasting half the weekend dreading the coming week.

Ian and his much-beloved new rainbow sheets.

Anyway, all that to say, my week-in-review is again coming during the following week. Last week was kind of a doozy. It started off innocently enough on Monday. Ian proudly made crowns for both himself and Maya from an activity in one of his High Five magazines. “I made coronas,” he said, because corona means crown in Latin. Both the kids seemed proud of their coronas.

The kids and their “coronas”

Wednesday was a shit show. Sean wound up having meetings all day, so it was nearly impossible for me to make any progress at work. There were repair folks here in the morning working on our AC (yes, in Texas, that constitutes an essential repair). When it was time to pay up, the guy left his clipboard on the truck along with a pen and a pair of disposable gloves and walked away. I put on the gloves, signed the paperwork, and read my credit card information to him from several paces away.

That same morning, Nox the cat started vomiting. First it was just pile after pile of clear spittle barf. Then it turned bloody. Given the situation, we hesitated to take her to the vet right away. We were hoping it was just irritation from repeated vomiting, and so we decided to wait and see. After it happened twice more, I scheduled her visit for that afternoon.

She is super-thrilled to be at the vet’s office

In the vet’s office, I did my best to touch as little as possible. I didn’t sit down on the furniture. I kept my hands clasped in front of me so I wouldn’t touch my face. (I am sooo bad at not touching my face; seriously, I am one giant fidget.) I tried to stay back from people as much as I could, but it just wasn’t possible. The vet wanted to show me the x-rays (which were thankfully clear). I needed to pass the cat back and forth to the veterinary staff. I had to hand my credit card to the person behind the desk. After getting out to the car but before loading up, I swabbed down with hand sanitizer as best I could.

Nox has been doing great. They gave her a steroid and some medicine to suppress her urge to vomit. She’s back to eating and drinking and playing. She regularly sits in the kitchen, stalking birds through the windows, making a chattering/chuffing kind of noise. The kids think she’s hilarious.

The meow wolf and the cat-o-pus are playing chess

Sean has decided to teach the kids how to play chess. Individually though, because otherwise, they’ll just fight. By all indications, the kids are enjoying their lessons so far. I keep finding the chess board set up and various stuffed animals sitting around it getting ready to play.

Groceries have been … confusing. But attainable! We have a curbside pickup scheduled with our local HEB grocery store for April 11th. I spent some time Friday putting together a theoretical list so we could put in another pickup order for April 18th. Pickup schedules had been so full that we were trying as hard as we could to schedule them well in advance. Shortly after I put my list together, Sean noticed that they had just opened up a bunch of pickup times for the very next day. So, I quickly assembled a tide-us-over list to cover some of our fresh food requirements until we could get our pickup on the 11th.

Sean didn’t like his picture with the makeshift mask

By this point, the CDC had finally bitten the bullet and recommended wearing a mask. Save the N95 masks for the healthcare workers, but for the love of Pete, cover your face when you can’t maintain social distancing standards. Sean had two options for his curbside pickup: 1 – use an old N95 rated mask that he had purchased years ago (I think) to snake some oogy pipes or 2 – wear one of my old bandanas which could be fashioned into a mask with the help of a couple of pony-tail holders. I joked that he could choose between looking like Darth Vader or Jessie James. He chose the latter.

Had we not ordered beer, he probably wouldn’t have needed the mask at all. He pulled into a parking spot, texted the number for his parking spot to let them know he’d arrived, and they brought the stuff out and loaded it into our trunk. He had to sign to verify he was over 21 since we had added beer to our order. Otherwise, it would have been a completely touch-less handoff.

We were issued one notice from our school district this past week (I think) that schools would stay closed till May 4th. And then we were issued another notice that said they would be closed “indefinitely.” It’s still up for debate how they plan to handle grades for the remainder of the school year.

Things continue to look grim. Adam Schlesinger died from COVID-19. He was in a band (Fountains of Wayne) that was part of my 90s teenage years, but only tangentially. John Prine has been hospitalized with COVID-19 complications. This one hits much harder. He’s inextricably part of growing up for me, between Dad’s records and Mom’s singing. His funny and sad songs have always hit me just so. Plus, he always reminds me of my mom.

As of screen captures I took on Sunday night, Travis county had 484 reported cases (6 deaths). Texas had 7231 cases (138 deaths). And the United States had 336,958 cases and 9,626 deaths. I keep thinking it might be smarter to stop looking at the numbers so closely. Stories of overrun hospitals compete with stories of better and faster testing becoming available. There are so many places trying to get ventilators manufactured to meet this new overwhelming demand.

In the mean time, the economy is a wreck. New jobless claims were 6.6 million this past week. The week before they were around 3.3 million. The previous record had been in the 600k range. Around 10 million new jobless claims in two weeks and the news reports indicate that people are still having a hard time getting through overtaxed systems to make their claims, so those numbers seem likely to continue increasing.

Finding “Stephanie’s chicken”

There’s a lady who lives in our neighborhood that I used to work with. She and her husband live just around the corner from us, essentially. She has started leaving this ornamental chicken sculpture in various places in her yard so the kids can try and find it when they walk past. The kids LOVE IT. We’ve been by twice now and they’ve been happy to locate “Stephanie’s chicken” whenever they walk by.

The wren babies in the birdhouse in the backyard seem to be growing up. We now see their beaks poking out trying to grab at the worms and bugs their parents bring them nearly non-stop throughout the day. Sean has placed a large, thin corrugated cardboard box beneath the birdhouse just to soften the blow in case some of the babies have trouble with their flying lessons, once those happen. That concrete would make for a rough landing.

I meant to write this post over the weekend, but I just couldn’t quite bring myself to do it. Even today, I’m having trouble. Trying to convert the stew of amazement, fear, anxiety, anger, uncertainty, etc. simmering in my head into a set of words that makes sense has seemed impossible. This post title implies a humor that I’m having trouble hanging onto.

With the increase in COVID-19 cases, we’ve been working toward further decreasing our time going out and about even for basic errands. I made a quick run early last week to pick up Ian’s new glasses from the eye doctor. They were doing curbside pick-up only. When I pulled into the parking lot, I called the folks inside and requested his glasses. I hung up the phone, rolled down my window, and sanitized my hands (after all, I don’t want to make them sick either). An employee came out and with gloved hands, handed me the bag holding Ian’s glasses. With my head turned slightly away from her, I smiled and thanked her, and that was that.

Ian, in his new purple glasses, has befriended a slug.

Ever since Maya got her big kid glasses last year, Ian has been wanting to ditch the rubber-like, strapped glasses that he wears in favor of his own big-kid glasses. Sean has helped both kids choose glasses frames, and he’s really good at it. Ian has some really cute dark purple frames that he absolutely loves.

Sean and I had started back to work on the 23rd, and so we told the kids they were starting back to school. During our spring break week, Sean had bought Ian a bunch of kindergarten workbooks and a bunch of 1st and 2nd grade books for Maya. We’re still waiting for a few of them to ship, but for the most part, the kids have enough variety to keep them occupied for small stretches of time. Sean and I kind of trade off throughout the day so we can each work for a good chunk of time in relative peace. I start my workday now at 6a to try and get a jump on things. We try to get the kids to work on some worksheets, do a few online lessons from Scholastic. For Maya, we try to get her to do a bit of writing work and some book reading.

Maya is working hard.

We’ve had a really loose art period a couple times. Other times, I’ll just let them spend an hour dorking around in the back yard. Maya has been big into bug catching lately. We got a net and a little bug house for her to capture them and observe them. We generally release the creatures at the end of the day, even though she makes sure to provide them with food and water.

On Tuesday the 24th, Austin and Travis County were issued a shelter in place order (they called it Stay at Home – Work Safe) through at least April 13th. Given that we had already ratcheted down our out-and-about activities, it meant very little to us. AISD, our school district, extended their closure to coincide. We start distance learning next week, whatever that winds up meaning for a first grader.

Ian likes doing school like his sister, but I think the novelty wears of faster for him.

We took the step of withdrawing Ian from preschool. There are essential employees who must have their children at day care, so I understand why they’ve chosen to remain open. For us, it doesn’t make sense though. We already have Maya home; there is no point in sending Ian to school. Our gut feeling is that AISD will not resume this school year, and we had always planned to send them kids to a different childcare place over the summer, since Maya is now too old to go to Ian’s school. With any luck, maybe we’ll get to regret our choice if Maya winds up getting to go back to school in May.

On Wednesday, the kids had their piano and guitar lessons via Zoom. Other than the sound quality being pretty terrible, it worked out well enough. Earlier in the day, Maya had gotten to FaceTime with her 1st grade teacher, and she seemed to enjoy that also. On Saturday, the kids each had group music lessons via Zoom too. It was hard to wrangle Maya, as usual, but I suspect it was good for the kids to see faces other than ours for a change.

Maya, catching bugs in the yard.

Grocery shopping has been … strange. Sean had gone once earlier in the week and found very little. Some of our basic supplies were starting to dwindle, and while we weren’t yet worried, we were certainly casting around for reliable solutions. We formulated a plan. Sean would do a round on Sunday morning at HEB, Target, and Costco, and from then on we would try to curbside as many of our groceries as possible (again, to limit exposure). We hit the jackpot. We got flour, baking soda, eggs. We even scored paper towels and TP. It’s astonishing how relieved all that made me feel.

The bug house.

After his very successful run, we set up a curbside pickup at HEB – our first ever. We booked it on Sunday and the earliest pickup we could get was April 12th. It isn’t even our usual HEB (which had no pickup times available). We did a whole lotta guessing about the kinds of stuff we’d need in two weeks, and we’ll see how much of it is actually available on that day.

Over the weekend, the United States took top ranking in quantity of COVID-19 cases. I screen captured a couple sources from yesterday evening. By one source, the United States had 142,402 confirmed cases and 2,497 deaths at that time. More locally, Travis county had reported 200 confirmed cases and 1 death as of Sunday evening. Poor New York City is drowning – about half of the US’s cases are in New York. Will they have enough ventilators when things worsen? Will the curve finally flatten? Much of my telecom job’s work has all but ceased in the NYC area due to quarantining and site access restrictions.

Our kids finally kind of lost it on Saturday. They’ve been remarkably resilient through this whole time. Disney World postponed? Ok, they understand. Can’t go back to school? Cool, we’ll do work at home with Mom and Dad. Can’t go to the playground? Fine, we’ll invent a playground oasis for birds in the back yard. But I think finally after two weeks, whether they really understand or not, they’ve had enough. Maya was emotionally fragile all weekend. There were crying fits and amplified sadness over the mildest of insults or injuries. Ian has been begging to play with some of his friends and has repeatedly asked me for the past couple days when coronavirus is going to be over. They’ve even incorporated coronavirus as a weapon in some of their good guy / bad guy games.

All in all, we’re doing well enough though. Sean’s and my work for our jobs is kind of getting done. The kids are sort of maintaining a bit of an education. They’re getting too much screen time, and none of us are getting enough activity, but we’re working to adapt. One bright spot: we appear to be sheltering a Bewick’s Wren family in our back yard. Years ago now, Maya painted and glued together a little birdhouse, and we hung it in our back yard not really expecting much to come of it. Earlier in the spring, we watched the tiny little wrens bring all manner of grassy material into the house. This past week or so, we’ve watched them over and over and over again flying up to the house with bugs and worms clutched in their beaks. We don’t want to disturb them, so we haven’t peeked in and checked, but we’re assuming they have hungry babies in there. It’s a small thing, I realize, but that and the prospect of Easter in a couple weeks seem to be helping boost the kids’ spirits during such an indescribably strange time.