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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.