August wasn’t my favorite month ever. Yeah, it was hot, and I know I’m always whining about the heat, but that wasn’t it. For essentially the entire month, we agonized about the kids and school.

Our new series: Nox sitting on stuff.

Early in the month, with COVID cases ramping up again, we applied for virtual school. It sucked, I cried, we began preparing. We bought Ian a desk for his room and started looking for a vaccinated caretaker who could spend at least a few hours every day helping to keep the kids focused on school. I hated everything about it. Last year, Ian basically did kindergarten-lite. He’s told me over and over again how he was looking forward to going to school and making friends. Maya, who desperately needs to learn how to deal with social situations, had been largely deprived of the opportunity for a year and a half. Our jobs have suffered. Our mental health has suffered. This was, we felt, a necessary but terrible choice.

We listened to a Zoom presentation the school principal gave on all the safety measures at their school. She couldn’t guarantee mask compliance, but they were doing so many things to try and keep the kids distanced. Outdoor classes sometimes, improved ventilation, outdoor lunches, regular hand washing. Plus, we learned that the virtual option was being provided at the district level – they wouldn’t have teachers from their own school. And we (understandably) had to commit to a full semester – no popping back to in-person school if vaccines became available in the fall. In the great state of Texas, the schools were forbidden from mandating masks, and the delta variant has been so terrifically contagious. We wanted badly for our kids to go in person – THEY wanted to badly to go in person – but we just weren’t sure.

Hank and Lumos.

And then the AISD superintendent decided to mandate masks at her district anyway. Given the political climate here, we decided we’d have to behave as if that mandate could go away at any time. After so, so many conversations over the risks versus the benefits, we eventually decided to level up our kids’ masks (they had been using surgical masks; Sean supplied them with KF-94 masks instead), and send them for in-person school. And to be perfectly blunt, I have been second-guessing the wisdom of that decision ever since.

So, we all got brave and masked up to attend back-to-school night in person. The kids met their respective teachers in person. Maya saw some of her friends, who recognized her even though she was wearing a mask. It was so weird. And good. And nerve-wracking.

Fancy camping. That cabin is air-conditioned.

On the last weekend before school started, we packed up the Outback with all the camping and swimming supplies we could possibly want (and still had a little room to spare), and we spent the weekend at Inks Lake in a little cabin right by the water. We reheated or reconstituted our food. Maya and Ian caught bugs and little fish to their hearts’ content. Sean and I parked our butts in lawn chairs in the lake and sipped beverages while the kids played all day long in the calm water. One of my favorite things was that the little minnows (or whatever) would nibble at our feet as we sat. Poor Maya wanted so badly to have them nibble her feet too, but she has such a hard time holding still. Ian was pleased at how far he could swim out while wearing his life jacket.

The kids had one last day on Monday with their beloved summer babysitter, Oriana. She and the kids had planned a Dragon City party (some iPad game they all play), and they painted and played games and had WAY too much junk food and generally gave Oriana a nice send off.

Back to school, 2021.

Then on Tuesday, for the first time in a year and a half, our kids went to school in person. Ian finally got to use the backpack and lunch bag we had bought for him before kindergarten. For a whole variety of reasons, we have chosen to pick the kids up right away after school rather than have them hang out in after school care. To differentiate our white car from the dozens of other white cars in the pickup line, we stuck some fun stickers on the back passenger window – an octopus for Maya and a guitar for Ian. They tell me it helps them see our car, so I guess it’s working.

By all reports, the two of them are so happy to be back. Maya has been good about saying hello to her old teachers (something she used to refuse to do #reasons), and she talks about playing with some of her friends from earlier grades. Ian has been learning the ropes and seems to be making lots of friends and adapting well.

Our long-haired, pink-purple-rainbow-sparkles loving boy has already been bullied once. He was shoved off the running track by some boy who accused him of looking like a girl. Sean and I were both expecting it at some point, but not already in first grade and during the first week of school, no less. He has bounced back with a quickness though and says that boy doesn’t bother him any more. Maybe I can assume it was a good teaching moment and now that other kid is a more open-minded soul.

Monarch caterpillar systematically devouring all the leaves from a tropical milkweed plant.

Around the house, we have enjoyed some new wildlife. I have three different kinds of milkweed planted around the back yard in hopes of attracting monarch butterflies. We have had a couple of them flying around from time to time, but this month, we actually have had a caterpillar! They are so interesting looking. I’ve hunted around a little for a chrysalis, but I haven’t found one so far. We have also had a tiger swallowtail butterfly and a cute little green anole lizard in the back yard as well. The kids were excited to find a cicada on our mailbox who was actually freshly emerging from his shell.

Sean and I have tried a few date nights over the summer – just little things – meeting a pair of friends for an outdoor dinner, a masked and socially distanced movie. In August when things started getting bad, we decided we’d keep it small. Just us, a quick shopping trip since we were both needing clothes, and outdoor dinner. We went to sort of an outdoor mall. To our surprise (especially to me – I don’t get out much), everything closed earlier than expected – we’re assuming due to either staffing shortages or stores trying to manage their expenses in a tough economy. It was kind of weird. And then we went to a restaurant with outdoor seating, and other than the hostess, not a single soul was wearing a mask. We couldn’t figure it out. Don’t they watch the local news? We had nearly canceled date night given the horrible case counts and the full-to-capacity ICUs. Out on the sidewalks it was like a ghost town. And inside (or outside on the patio), it was all business as usual.

The covid statistics are just straight up terrible these days. Every time I look at them (daily), I rethink this back to in-person school decision.Percentage of US population that has been fully vaccinated (49.5% as of 7/31, 53.8% as of 9/15). Travis County – 07/30 89,433 cases and 900 deaths – 09/15 111,361 cases and 1038 deaths. Texas – 08/01 3,142,184 cases and 53,296 deaths – 09/15 3,890,444 cases and 60,830 deaths. United States – 08/01 35,002,148 cases and 613,224 deaths – 09/15 41,535,666 cases and 666,598 deaths. The World – 08/01 198,283,776 cases and 4,224,015 deaths – 09/15 226,321,414 cases and 4,658,267 deaths.

One of the first things we did in July was to adopt a new cat! This whole notion started a few months ago. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had an affectionate cat again? We really loved having a siamese / mutt cat; I wonder if we could find one of those again? Wouldn’t it be funny if we had a Lumos to go with our Nox?

Lumos, hiding in my desk drawer.

I had gotten into the habit of occasionally finding cats that were up for adoption and texting photos to Sean with the simple caption, “Lumos?” All of this was safely just a funny notion until he showed one of these photos to the kids, and then as if by magic it became, “We are adopting a new cat!”

Still, we took our time finding just the right one. I scoured the Austin Pets Alive site looking for a cat with the personality we were after. It took probably a solid two months between “We are adopting a new cat!” and “Hey, we found one we might like that hasn’t already been adopted!” She was known to her foster person as Blanca. She had just had kittens, who had just been weaned whenever we came to meet the cats. The kittens were adorable, of course, but after spending a few minutes with Blanca and having her roll around and purr and present herself as an absolute sweetheart, albeit a very nervous one, we were sold. She was definitely the cat for us.

Once at our house, Blanca became Lumos. She spent a couple weeks sequestered from the other cats back in our bedroom and bathroom, getting used to us and recovering from her spay surgery. The kids would make a visit or two each day to get in some pets and see the new feline resident. We’ve let her have the run of the house for the past couple weeks, but she still feels safest back in our room. One of her favorite places to snooze is in one of my desk drawers. She, and Hank before her, learned that you could climb into the drawer from the back side and enjoy a very peaceful siesta.

Maybe starting to be friends?

Lumos wants to be friends with the other two cats in our house. Hank is mellow, but I think she came on a little strong, even for him. Especially at first, she would follow him around the house a lot. Now they more or less seem to put up with each other, and I have a notion that given a little more time, they will learn to play together peacefully.

Nox, though. She was always going to be a tough sell, and wow has that proven true. Early on, while Lumos was at the vet, I tried to take Nox back to the bathroom where Lumos had been largely staying, so that Nox could get used to the smell of her. I had barely crossed the threshold into the room before she had turned into a panicky ball of hissing, growling fury. I still don’t know how I managed to not lose any skin. Since then, Nox has calmed down to the extent that she will only turn on her low-rumble growl and occasional hissing if Lumos comes too close. And Lumos really wants to come make friends with the pissed off black kitty.

Maya’s favorite firework, which she’s please to have not used.

We didn’t do too much for our second annual crappy-tacular stay-at-home Fourth of July. Our summer babysitter’s family owns a restaurant and food truck in town serving Venezuelan and Mexican food. It’s called Aleida’s, and for lunch on the fourth, we stopped by and tried it out. The kids liked the sodas, and Sean and I very much enjoyed trying some dishes that we hadn’t before (check out the cachapas).

Maya is off-screen, pinching her nose and complaining about the smell of fire.

Sean tried, at the very last minute, to find a few small and hopefully innocuous fireworks with which to entertain the kids later. He found a little purple dragon for Maya that had fireworks in its mouth and its pooper, which promised to be hilarious at ignition time. Once it got darker, we played with some sparklers and threw the rest of our poppers and lit some relatively quiet fireworks that we had from the previous year.  Then we tried one of the new ones – an ice cream cone. The guy who sold it to Sean, upon being questioned about the noise level, assured Sean that it only crackled a little. We didn’t want to spook the neighborhood dogs or annoy the neighborhood neighbors, so we were trying to make good choices. We lit the ice cream cone and were treated to a glorious volcano of lovely sparkles. It was so pretty! And then suddenly it sounded like heavy artillery in our front lawn. It was so boisterous, we actually started making for the house to take cover. That was kind of the end of our fireworks for the evening. The next day, I asked Maya if she felt sad that we didn’t get to light up her dragon. She told us she was kind of relieved that we wouldn’t be destroying him.

Going on a hike! In July! In Texas!

We had been taking morning walks together throughout summer vacation, just to get our housebound kids (and grownups) a little more exercise. We decided to go to Palmetto State Park for a longer hike one weekend. It got us away from the house for a little while, and we were able to assemble a pretty flat 3-mile hike, that even in July was manageable. Maya, ever the wildlife spotter, took joy in finding all manner of bugs and snails and toads and lizards along her hike. We saw the most amazing giant walking stick bugs all along the trail. A couple of hapless armadillos bumble-hustled through at one point. And Maya found a little green lizard (green anole?) toward the end of the trail. I had visions of stopping in Lockhart for barbecue on the way back, but we were all so terribly hot by then that it just didn’t sound enjoyable. Next time, for sure.

Art camp owls.

The week of July 12th, the kids did art camp at their elementary school. They joined a class of about 20 kids, all of them in masks, and spent mornings for a whole week making various kinds of art. Maya created more artwork than she could carry. Ian made multiple new friends, taught several kids how to make origami stars, and secured a playdate with one of his classmates.

Gray fox loved the peanuts we put out for the squirrels.

I nearly forgot! Art camp week was also a good week for the critters around our house. Maya managed to catch a toad in our yard, with her bug net of all things! I actually left a work call a little prematurely to rescue the poor toad and make sure it got safely away. One evening, as the kids were getting ready for bed, we saw a little gray fox in the back yard. We had seen one only a single time last summer as well, so it was exciting to have another sighting. It seemed to be enjoying the peanuts we chuck out there for the birds and squirrels.

Sean coaching Maya.

Back in May, I had booked us a 2-hour swim block on a Wednesday afternoon toward the end of July at Jacob’s Well. It is a 137-foot hole that leads to an underground cavern system. The site is beautiful, the water cool and clear. The thing to do here is climb up on the rocks to various heights and jump into the big hole. Sean did this immediately, with zero hesitation, though it was clear from the look on his face when he surfaced that the plunge into the 68-degree spring-water just about took his breath away. Maya wanted to jump, but she had some trouble climbing up. Once she was up, she clearly had to talk herself into taking that first leap. After she jumped in and paddled herself over to where her feet would touch, she had barely stopped before she was shouting, “Again!”

Ian is cold and would like to get out.

Ian wants very badly to do all the things his sister does, but he is a more cautious fellow. He had me take him over so Dad could jump in with him, but in the end he decided against it. He was upset with himself and explained to me that he wanted to jump but he wasn’t sure he was ready yet. Also, the water was very cold to Ian zero-percent-body-fat Woods.

On a less happy note … how did we get here? At the beginning of the month, Sean and I were happily making vacation plans and getting the kids kitted for back to school time. In the middle of the month, we were pleased at how well the kids did with their masks and friends and art camp. Now at the end of the month, we’re AGAIN evaluating whether to go with virtual learning. The current COVID caseload in Austin is insane AGAIN. The ICUs are full AGAIN. I suspect I’m not alone here – I have spent this past week on a downward spiral of emotion.

Anyway, here are our monthly coronavirus statistics. Percentage of US population that has been fully vaccinated (47.0% as of 6/30, 49.5% as of 7/31). Travis County – 06/30 84,728 cases and 881 deaths – 07/30 89,433 cases and 900 deaths. Texas – 06/30 3,000,069 cases and 52,337 deaths – 08/01 3,142,184 cases and 53,296 deaths. United States – 06/30 33,666,198 cases and 604,718 deaths – 08/01 35,002,148 cases and 613,224 deaths. The World – 06/30 182,303,080 cases and 3,948,970 deaths – 08/01 198,283,776 cases and 4,224,015 deaths.

What do you do when you purchase a brand new car (I think it had 9 miles on the odometer when we bought it)? You immediately drive it four hours to the coast for a beach trip! We had about a week to kill between the last day of school and our first day at the beach, and then it was off for vacation. I won’t lie – the new car was much easier to pack than the old car.

Our home for eight days

After our bubble family’s success at this exact same beach and rental house last fall, we decided to all spend a week in June with Chris, Holly, Ruby, and Herbie at Surfside beach on the Texas coast. The house we stayed in is built up on stilts, and its front half is actually in the water. You could feel the house sway slightly as the waves beat against the front pilings. A good scattering of boulders seemed to help mitigate some of the abuse, but there’s no doubt, maintenance on that guy must be a constant concern.

Pocket beach next to the house

The house was just about perfect for us. There were two bedrooms for the two sets of grownups, and there was a third bedroom full of bunk beds for the kids. There was a little pocket beach basically right at the base of our stairs that we could just walk out and play in. It was a little treacherous because of the currents and the rocks, but it scratched the itch when the adults were too worn out to walk to the big beach.

The big beach was maybe a five minute walk from the house. There we could set up our beach tents and spread out a little. The kids could take their boogie boards in the water. Maya spent a lot of time hunting for crabs and catching them in a net. As with all animals, she likes to name them. She had lots of really great names, but the only one I can remember is Clinky Claws. Ian spent a lot of time hunting for seashells along the shoreline because obviously the ocean was lousy with crabs.

Crabs!

Speaking of crabs – Chris brought along a crab trap! And it worked! He managed to capture several blue crabs and even the odd stone crab (which Ian hilariously referred to as a “stoned crab”) in just a couple days. Maya in particular was fascinated by the whole business. I didn’t realize it till after the fact, but she apparently talked Chris into releasing his largest crab because it was so beautiful and blue, and blue is her favorite color. I’m not sure I could have been as nice as he was.

Ice cream truck at the beach!

Holly had guessed that there might be an ice cream truck visiting the beach at some point during our week in Surfside, and so on the day it actually did, she was prepared. She and four eager kids walked up and placed their orders for frozen treats. Then, coated in half-dried seawater and barefoot in the sand, they quickly consumed their ice creams and popsicles. Our kids are still talking about the ice cream truck on the beach – it may be one of their best things from that vacation.

A deck on the ocean side of the house was the perfect place to sit in the morning while the rest of the house woke up or in the evening after feeling worn out from being on the beach. I could sip coffee, watch the sun rise, see pelicans and other water birds going about their feeding. And best of all, sometimes we would see dolphins. One afternoon, a fair ways from the house, we saw a congregation of birds in one particular spot and surrounding them, periodically appearing dorsal fins, sometimes in pairs, regularly surfacing. The consensus view was that there was likely a school of fish out in the ocean and the birds and dolphins were feasting.

Ian on the bunk beds

Because of all the rain that had originally been forecast for our beach week, I had been neurotically checking the forecast a couple times a day. We had arrived on Friday and had been enjoying increasingly calmer waves when the kids played in the ocean. Just like every other day, I had checked the forecast Tuesday and (as I recall), there was no rain of any kind predicted. Well, mother nature didn’t care.

Maya approves of the shower curtain

Chris and Sean had gone into town to pick up takeout dinner. I just checked back through my texts. Sean had told me they’d be home in about 20 minutes. I told him that it looked like it would like to storm. By the time they arrived, it was hard to stand upright. We hustled to pull all the stuff in from the deck. We were about 95% successful at getting things pulled in. Sean and Chris were down below the house trying to put all the beach stuff in the cars and make sure the kayaks were secured. In trying to help me locate one of my shoes that had blown off the deck, Sean literally had the glasses blown from his face. It was bonkers.

For as much as the house seemed to sway during normal day to day operations, I was surprised to find that even in that heavy storm, the house movement didn’t increase substantially. Once the majority of our stuff was secured, I think everyone felt reasonably safe staying in the house.

The ocean got a lot rougher toward the end of our trip

For the rest of the trip, it felt like the ocean activity was ratcheting steadily upward. I’m not sure it had so much to do with the rain we had just had as with the tropical storm that was developing in the gulf. On Thursday, our last full day, we decided to have one final big beach outing. The waves were rough. It felt like a workout just standing out in waist-deep water, watching the kids. Ian got over his crab aversion in time to go play in those big waves, often diving into them instead of jumping over them. He was so proud of himself. For my part, I was beat. I think we spent three hours on the beach that day, and maybe only half that time battling the waves, but I was worn out.

The seashells in Surfside were pretty great. The kids came home with bags and buckets full of a beautiful assortment of shells. I had my eye out for some little conch shells that hadn’t been half obliterated by waves, rocks, or birds. Both times I found one intact, it turned out that a hermit crab had gotten there first. We took the crabs to the house and let the kids examine them and let them crawl around on their hands a bit before finally releasing them back on the seashore.

The sand dollar

Maya’s seashell quest was different. She had the goal before we even left Austin of finding a sand dollar while she was in Surfside. She didn’t search rigorously, but every day she was at the beach, she would keep her eye out for them. By the last day, she had not yet succeeded, and Herbie told her that if he found one, she could have it. Then, as we were walking home from our last beach visit of the trip, he found one! It was only about 3/4 of a sand dollar, but if anything that was even more interesting because you could get a good look at its internal structure. True to his word, he gave it to Maya.

I think this was the one named Chompy

On our way home Friday, we stopped by the Brazoria National Wildlife Refuge. We drove around the loop, checking out crocodiles and various ducks and other water birds. I wish we knew our waterfowl better and my resident bird expert (Maya) was only half interested. Had we been out walking, I think she’d have been more engaged. Later on, when we stopped at the visitor center and walked the little boardwalk trail, she was in full wildlife spotter mode. We saw a little purple gallinule family, a very fancy red-winged blackbird, and as we were leaving, Maya saw what she thought was a snake in the water. Turns out, it was actually a very small crocodile. (The crocodiles we spotted were given names too: Little Snap, Chompy, Fireback.)

Galaxy

Two days after we got back, we celebrated Father’s Day. All of us were pretty worn out, so it was low key. We placed a delivery order with Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream. I grilled our home-grown shishito peppers and some ribeyes. The kids used their bounty of Surfside seashells and some canvas and various other materials and made Sean two really neat looking pieces of art. Ian wanted to make a galaxy; Maya wanted to make the big beach at Surfside. I think they both succeeded.

Surfside

For the week before we went on vacation, the kids had become acquainted with their new summer morning babysitter. She’s had her COVID vaccine, spends lots of time doing projects and playing games with them, and apparently is incredibly patient. When the kids got back from vacation, they planned a little back-from-the-beach party with her. They made decorations, ordered up snacks from us, planned out their activities. It kept them busy for a couple of days and softened the blow of vacation being over.

That very next weekend, my parents came to visit. We hadn’t seen Grammy and Grandpa in person since December of 2019. Just as with Lolli and Pop’s visit last month, as soon as he knew they were on the road, Ian began his “when are they going to get here” offensive. They arrived on a Friday afternoon, and it seemed like ten minutes later, Grammy and Grandpa had given them the gift of crafts and they were gathered up at the kitchen table painting sun-catchers.

Craft time with Grammy and Grandpa

They played together and visited for a while. We had Texas barbecue for dinner. Maya and Ian taught them all about their favorite ipad games. Ian showed off his origami skills. Maya told them all about the birds that visit our yard.

The next day, after more visiting and crafting, Maya made breakfast tacos for lunch. Ian, for his part, arranged a lovely fruit tray for everyone to share, complete with some mint sprigs from the back yard. They talked their way into visiting Grammy and Grandpa’s hotel so they could swim in the pool for a while. It was awesome – much warmer than even just a month ago, and we all but had the pool to ourselves. After a good long swim, the kids changed into dry clothes up in the hotel room. Maya apparently talked Grammy out of her sack of cherries. She enjoyed them so much, we had to cut her off so she wouldn’t make herself sick.

Here goat, nibble my finger

That afternoon, we all drove down to Jester King Brewery for the weekend’s special event. After our disappointing not-visit with the goats over spring break, when Jester King offered a ticketed visit with the goats, I sprung for it. For a full hour, we got to learn about and hang out with their little herd of Nigerian Dwarf goats. The kids were thrilled. I’d love to tell you it was all about them, but I was pretty thrilled too.

This is the closest we could get to a group shot

There were so many goats! We saw lots of baby goats, which Maya and Ian really loved. They’d climb around on the kids and chew on their hair and clothes and fingers. Both kids had what we were calling their “goat lock” – a little goat-spitty dreadlock, one per kid. The bigger goats would sidle up to you and kinda lean a flank into you as if to say, “scratch me now.” You’d run a hand along their backs, and their faces would go all blissed-out and mellow. Toward the end, Maya and Ian each had a chance to bottle feed one of the babies.

And then, when all that was done, we got to go have pizza and beer! Plus, for June in Texas, the weather was fantastic. I think it was in the low 90s and there was a breeze. We really couldn’t have asked for better.

The next morning, there was more random hanging out. Maya and Ian got it together to provide a little piano and guitar concert from their grandparents. Maya hastily wove a fresh potholder for Grammy and Grandpa, and after she was done, they started their long journey back to Missouri.

Ian lost his first tooth!

This week has been pretty quiet so far, with the exception of some big news: Ian has finally lost his first tooth. I’m not sure why, but our kids hang on to their teeth for a while, apparently. And unlike his sister, Ian wasn’t in a big hurry to yank is kicking and screaming out of his head. He basically nonchalantly wiggled his tooth with his tongue for a week or whatever until it was looking so dangly, I thought he would swallow it. I told him I thought he could pull it now, and with no effort it all, he plucked it out of his mouth. He is ecstatic. As I write this on June 30th, his tiny little tooth is tucked safely under his pillow, waiting for the tooth fairy.

Here are our monthly coronavirus statistics. Percentage of US population that has been fully vaccinated (41.9% as of 6/06, 47.0% as of 6/30). Travis County – 06/04 83,910 cases and 873 deaths – 06/30 84,728 cases and 881 deaths. Texas – 06/06 2,962,934 cases and 51,719 deaths – 06/30 3,000,069 cases and 52,337 deaths. United States – 06/06 33,326,471 cases and 597,627 deaths – 06/30 33,666,198 cases and 604,718 deaths. The World – 06/06 173,197,944 cases and 3,726,107 deaths – 06/30 182,303,080 cases and 3,948,970 deaths. We’re moving in the right direction, but please oh please GET VACCINATED.

 

I know that I shouldn’t complain. We have been under drought conditions for a while now. Our winter, snow-and-ice-mageddon aside, was pretty darn dry, and spring wasn’t shaping up to be much better. Then May happened. It started with a rained-out camping trip the first weekend. Haha, we said, what were the odds? And then it rained for darn near the whole month. Austin had over 12 inches of rain in May.

With all the moisture comes the fungus.

The nice thing has been the really mild temperatures we had throughout the month. I write this on a 90 degree afternoon, which is more typical, so expect the whining about the heat to resume soon. I have managed to sneak in some gardening, between the raindrops. We haven’t had to water much of anything, so that’s been nice.

I wound up spending a certain amount of Mother’s Day weekend installing plant life. The kids also made gifts for me, and we ordered a sushi picnic dinner.

The new palm tree

Now that a certain corner of our yard had turned very sunny with all the limbs we lost during the freeze, and since we also lost the palm tree we had growing in the back yard during said freeze, we decided to convert the sunny corner into a tropical-ish bed. We thought we’d go to a nursery in town that had palm trees for sale. Turns out their “for sale” roughly matched our “holy crap, that’s expensive,” and that’s the story of how I ordered a 7-gallon palm tree from a grower on Etsy.

The upside of a 7-gallon palm tree is that it’s a decent enough size that maybe the animals and kids won’t accidentally destroy it. The downside of a 7-gallon palm tree is that now I’d need to dig a 7-gallon hole in our very rocky soil. I spent a couple days digging, and the kids wanted to help too, believe it or not. With all the rocks and roots to work through, our method was to dig the softer stuff and smaller rocks up with a cultivator. Once we hit bigger rocks, we used the pickaxe to break them up and pry them out. Sounds weird, but I would bet you that anyone in central Texas that regularly gardens has a pickaxe in their arsenal.

Cotton candy at Dolphinfest

Mid-month, the kids participated in a socially distanced Dolphinfest. The kids – all of them, not just ours – have had to give up so much this year, we decided to give it a try, explaining to the kids we would bail out if it felt unsafe. Several families offered up their yards to host games, and the kids biked, scootered, or walked from house to house, participating as they went. Maya and Ian seemed to really love it. Several kids said hello to Maya, having recognized her from previous years or from Zoom classes. Impressive, seeing that she was masked.

Bird-watching trip with Lolli and Pop

On the 20th of May, Sean’s parents, Lolli and Pop to the grandkids, arrived at our house. We hadn’t seen them since Christmas of 2019. The kids were thrilled. From the moment they let us know they were on the road from Alabama, Ian in particular was on us *constantly* to find out how close they were. They played games together, went swimming in the very cold hotel pool (Lolli was the only grownup brave enough to get in), relaxed together. The kids showed them their cascarones from Dolphinfest. One afternoon, we took a little bird walk at Mills Pond and saw turtles, rabbits, a blue jay, and even the famed wood duck. Lolli crocheted the kids little stuffed animals – Ian received a unicorn and Maya received a dragon. All in all, it was a really good visit. Maya and Ian, of course, didn’t want them to leave.

Ian and Ms Carver

Ian’s kindergarten teacher chose to retire after this crazy year, and so we wound up going up to school to help her celebrate. This is the only time Ian has ever seen his kindergarten teacher in person, and since she’s retired, he won’t see her roaming the halls next year. With mask on, Ian ran and played tag with a group of kids his own age. It was yet another little punch to the gut, thinking of all the things he has missed this year.

Sean and I kind of took it easy for our anniversary. We ordered a meat, cheese, and goodies tray from Antonelli’s Cheese Shop and a bread and cracker plate to go along with it. The meal was top notch, the cheeses interesting, the accompanying fruit, olives, mostarda, and peppers delightful. With the bread and cracker tray, it was easily enough to feed the four of us that night with leftovers for Sean and I to enjoy the next morning for breakfast.

The best car-washing help!

We really did very little over Memorial Day weekend. We had a vaccinated friend over for dinner (hooray, we can do things like that now). Sean and the kids cleaned up the Prius because we were trying to get it traded in for a larger car. One day we all donned our masks and went over to the outdoor mall to get ice cream cones from Jeni’s Splendid Ice Cream. With our cones already dripping, we hustled to an unpopulated outdoor spot to sit down, remove our masks, and eat ice creams like semi normal people. The kids were an unholy mess by the time their cones were eaten, but it was a nice outing. Also, sweet cream biscuit and peach jam ice cream is incredible.

On the Wednesday immediately preceding the kids’ last day of school, I took Maya up to campus very early in the morning for a face to face meeting with her teacher. It’s the only time so far that Maya had been around her in person. It was very kind for her to make time for us to come see her, and Maya for her part was thrilled.

Maya and Ms Markos

And then on Thursday, just like that, school was over. We now have a third-grader and a first-grader living at our house. And then over the weekend, we traded in the Prius for an Outback. We bought the Prius while I was pregnant with Maya, so it’s been our car her whole life, and Ian’s too. At first, we weren’t allowed to buy a new car (Maya). Then, once we got our hula lady from our trip three years ago to Hawaii off the Prius’s dash, we could move on. The kids were weirdly thrilled with the new car. The dealership, the car, the smell, the soft ceiling <shrug>, they loved it all. Each time I change cars, it feels like a new era. The Prius has seen two new kids, several vacations, and a pandemic. It has worn amniotic fluid, vomit, and blood … and probably more boogers that I want to think about. Who knows what the Outback era will bring.

I keep posting these statistics to remind myself that while things are definitely improving, coronavirus is not over yet, not that I really could forget, since it still factors into so many of our decisions. Percentage of US population that has been fully vaccinated (34.2% as of 5/08, 41.9% as of 6/06). Travis County – 05/09 82,901 cases and 858 deaths – 06/04 83,910 cases and 873 deaths. Texas – 05/08 2,914,504 cases and 50,643 deaths – 06/06 2,962,934 cases and 51,719 deaths. United States – 05/08 32,707,359 cases and 581,752 deaths – 06/06 33,326,471 cases and 597,627 deaths. The World – 05/08 157,946,278 cases and 3,288,638 deaths – 06/06 173,197,944 cases and 3,726,107 deaths.

After Easter, we had kind of a quiet month. The big thing to look forward to was our friend Ruby’s birthday. Poor kid has now celebrated two birthdays during a pandemic. Her parents rented an inflatable water slide though, and in a year with very little playing in the water, this was A Very Big Deal. Maya played in the water nearly the whole time she was there. Ian played in the water until he was chilled through and then switched to sword-fighting with Herbie and eating WAY too many cookies.

Bouncy water slide! Happy birthday, Ruby!

We watched parts of our garden come back to life, and we also had a few things we just had to give up on. We finally left our palm tree for dead. During its long and neglectful life though, it had established one hell of a downward root system – so much digging! On the other hand, a 15-foot tall bay laurel tree looked deader than dead, and so I finally cut it down. As I was clearing leaf litter from its base, I notice little pink buds. Not long afterward, bright green branches popped out. By now, we’re back to having a small bay laurel bush again.

The little bay laurel that could

Maya made a kente cloth in her art class. They spent WEEKS on this project painstakingly weaving. Seeing a tedious project all the way through can be tough for our girl, and so Maya was quite proud of herself when she was finished.

Starting in March, we were on bluebonnet watch. We drove by our “normal” photo locations. Heck, we even watched the highway medians (not that we were out driving much). Except in a few drainage ditches here and there, we weren’t seeing much. We had heard over and over again that our big freeze shouldn’t have any impact on the bluebonnets. But it turns out our very dry fall probably did.

They spent most of their time catching ladybugs

We were starting to get desperate and began seeking locations outside of Austin. In poking around, we found out that Muleshoe Bend puts on quite the bluebonnet show. A quick hour-long drive out, and we were there. We didn’t have to wait in line, but certainly they were doing a hoppin’ business. On initial glance, it seemed horribly crowded (go figure), but having camped there just last fall, we knew that there were pretty views up ahead and hopefully less traffic. Jackpot.

The kids were much happier here than at our normal spot. Instead of wall-to-wall bluebonnets, these grew in little clumps. Maya and Ian were able to run around between the clumps catching ladybugs and grasshoppers and didn’t have to suffer their parents telling them to be careful not to step on the bluebonnets a hundred times. We cajoled Ian into wearing jeans (which he hates). Maya, you may notice, chose her own outfit. At any rate, the tradition remains intact.

We were there too!

The big news this month has been that Sean and I both received our final COVID vaccine doses. Sean unfortunately was laid up for a few days after his second dose, having suffered a pretty fierce reaction. I lucked out and didn’t have much beyond a sore arm and possible tiredness that could have been blamed on a dozen other things (I’m always tired). We are still wearing masks when we go out, but at least now everyone in the house has had a haircut. We are doing our part to limit COVID spread, and that is a good feeling.

Apparently, there’s finally enough going on that I haven’t managed to be as obsessive about COVID case counts, though I’m watching vaccine percentages like a hawk. For our first vaccines in late March / early April, we had to drive out of town, demand was so high. By late April, we were both able to schedule second doses in town. I hear supply is finally outpacing demand. That is not a good thing if the reason is that demand has slackened. C’mon people, if you’re able, please get your vaccine.

Anyhow, here are comparative numbers from yesterday, since I failed to grab them at the end of the month. I’d like to breathe a sigh of relief, but as mentioned, vaccine adoption seems to be foundering, and the state of things in India is pretty damn scary right now. Percentage of US population that has been fully vaccinated (16.6% as of 03/31 according to the data Google compiles, 34.2% as of 5/08). Travis County – 03/31 79,217 cases and 817 deaths – 05/09 82,901 cases and 858 deaths. Texas – 03/31 2,791,910 cases and 48,252 deaths – 05/08 2,914,504 cases and 50,643 deaths. United States – 03/31 30,460,837 cases and 552,073 deaths – 05/08 32,707,359 cases and 581,752 deaths. The World – 03/31 129,006,800 cases and 2,817,932 deaths – 05/08 157,946,278 cases and 3,288,638 deaths.

March was a sleeper month for us. We spent so much time waxing and waning on whether to plan any kind of socially distanced trip for spring break that we ultimately just wound up staying home, trying to chip away at our giant backlog of house projects, and finding local entertainment to break up the week off school for the kids.

Maya and Ian are still doing virtual school, and will continue to do so through the end of the school year. The kindergarten parents did manage to organize a fully-masked play date at the kids’ school one afternoon in March, and by all accounts, Ian loved it. He is a social creature and is really feeling the pain being stuck at home with three people who have much less time on their hands than he does.

Early March daffodils

Last fall, we had planted a bunch of bulbs, largely because Maya wanted to have daffodils. Well early in March, she had them. We had bought a package of 15 multi-colored bulbs. In the end nearly all of them bloomed, and every one that bloomed was yellow. It didn’t matter to Maya; she explained to me that when she thinks of daffodils, it’s the yellow ones she imagines.

Yeah, I don’t think it’s coming back. What’s left of our palm tree.

The freeze has definitely taken its toll though. I’m still holding out some hope for a few of the natives to sprout, but we have had some truly glorious weather so far this spring (though maybe less rain than we might ought to have going into summer) and many plants are still showing no signs of life. There’s a palm tree that we planted pre-kid that had managed to survived the years of neglect post-kid and pre-pandemic. It even seemed to bounce back from having been all but dug up by our friendly neighborhood armadillo squad. Welp, I think the coating of ice and snow and more ice and 5-degree low and the week long sustained freeze may have finally done it in. We also have a bay laurel tree that was so vigorous it seemed like it was trying to outgrow our house. I basically had to cut it back to the ground. We scalped our primrose jasmines and our turk’s caps and our various tropical salvias. I’m juggling some lingering wait-and-see feelings with a desire to fill in the dead spots before the horrible heat sets in.

Titmouse Santa

Our bird population seems to be thriving. The bird feeders and bird baths are getting regular action from squirrels and birds alike. We even have a hummingbird visiting us again. But my favorite customer thus far has been Titmouse Santa. It visits the feeder, sure, but what it seems most interested in is unique nesting material. We have a few things sitting out back waiting for our trash service to do their bulky item pickup. One of those things is a fluffy old dust mop with a kind of a cottony head on it. This titmouse lands on the dust mop and spends several minutes at a time diligently yanking for all it’s worth until so much fluff is gathered in its beak that it becomes a little birdy Santa Claus. We have caught it in action many times now, though I really wish we could find its fluffy little nest.

At the drive-in

We tried to plan a few small things for spring break, though as I said, Sean and I mostly intended to spend a lot of time working on our disaster of a house. The first weekend of spring break, we took the kids to see a drive-in movie at Doc’s Drive-in in Buda. We watched “Sing,” which is certainly not a new release, but we hadn’t seen it and the kids seemed pretty into it, so win! We had to wear our masks except when eating, and we were far away from everyone except our bubble family friends Chris, Holly, Ruby, and Herbie, so it seemed like a pretty safe outing.

On St Patrick’s day, Ian had asked me make pancakes … with chocolate chips … and green … and in the shape of clovers! I tried my best, but I was yet again reminded that I’m an engineer, not an artist. Luckily, Ian is six, and he seemed pretty pleased with the end result. Last St Pats (you know, the beginning of this stupid COVID mess), I had corned a 5-pound slab of brisket. Knowing that we’d wear out on it before eating all 5 of those pounds, I only cooked half and stuck the other half in the freezer. The benefactor of this foresight was 2021 April who wasn’t really thinking too hard at all about St Pats – certainly not about food. But we got to have nice corned beef and grainy mustard. Maya is crazy for Irish soda bread with currants, and so we had some of that as well. We spent the windy afternoon taking a nearly-birdless walk around Mills Pond, our normal birdwatching spot. We did get to see a few turtles, so that was nice.

So tie-dyed!

That Friday, we had a play date at our bubble family’s house. The kids tie-dyed shirts, scarves, and tote bags. Holly spread out a big tarp on their front patio, and the kids just went to town. There were also foam sword fights and water balloon fights to round out the evening. We washed and dried all the colorful items the next evening and the kids swathed themselves in their tie-dyed clothing and accessories. Maya would now like to tie-dye our boring white COVID masks for us.

Always the *most* colorful kid

The last item on our entertain-the-kids list was to eat with the goats at Jester King Brewery. They have a huge property and eating is outdoors and very well distanced. You order your food and drinks with your phone and you pick it up when its ready. We reserved a table by the goat pen, hoping we’d get to see some of the baby goats that had recently been announced. We made a tactical error. We got there and placed our food order right away, figuring we’d have a while before it was ready. We had hardly walked to where the goats were hanging out when we learned our food was already available. No worries, we could go see the goats more closely after dinner. The pizza was, as always, incredible. The crust was so flavorful, the sparingly-applied toppings so well-balanced. The perfect weather was bliss. And then, while we were eating, they led all the goats out for grazing (I’m assuming). All. The. Goats. At least the kids got to pet the very friendly dog that had been guarding the goat herd. Plus we went home with a 4-pack of chocolate babka beer (they call it their liquid bake sale), so all was not lost.

Kitties

In between all this fun we tried to have, we worked. Sean took I don’t know how many trips to the Salvation Army to donate things. He took nearly as many trips to Home Depot to fetch me compost and fill dirt and mulch so I wouldn’t have to slow up on my Dead Yard Reclamation efforts. I cleared so much dead plant life. At one point, I think we had a dozen refuse bags piled in front of the brush pile that’s been in our yard since the freeze broke a bunch of tree branches and our tree guy had to come do emergency work. We emptied and reorganized a hall closet. Nox helped. The office Sean and I work in is far emptier than it used to be. You could nearly fit an actual car in our garage again. In short, we’re slowly making our house livable again.

Toward the end of the month, Sean finally broke down and got a haircut. Our normal haircut person emerged from her COVID seclusion and started taking some very careful appointments again. I pestered him into taking before and after photos, just because I knew it would be drastic. The last time any of us had haircuts (we think) was January/February of 2020. The next most uncomfortable person is Maya, so we’ve scheduled her for a mid-April appointment. Then maybe Ian and I will finally go.

Sean got a sticker. I did not.

On March 15th, Texas opened COVID vaccination to anyone age 50 and older. We were fretting that we still weren’t eligible, but were glad things seemed to be progressing. And then, much more rapidly than I was expecting, they announced vaccines were open to all on March 29th. We had been trolling various sites, trying to get our game plan together. Friends of ours had recently driven all the way up to Burleson to get their Johnson and Johnson vaccine. I woke up stupid early on the 29th, hoping to find something open. HEB had nothing close. CVS had nothing close. After some mad scrambling, I found an appointment for that Friday at a CVS in Waco, about an hour and a half away. I had sort of made up my mind, that for a two-dose vaccine, I’d try to keep it within 100 miles, and Waco *just* snuck in. That left Sean free to refresh the HEB site until something popped up that he could deal with. It just so happened that he managed to snag an appointment in College Station, about about an hour and a half away, for that very afternoon. So on Monday, March 29th, Sean got his first Moderna dose and on Friday, April 2nd, I got my first Pfizer dose. It’s a relief to be doing something other than just waiting.

The Crew.

We celebrated Easter this past weekend with our bubble family again! The kids and Sean dyed eggs together during the week. The kids and I decorated egg and bunny-shaped cookies after I got back from Waco. On Saturday, our friends came over, and we had a mad-dash egg hunt. I swear, those four kids fairly burst out of our front door. I could *feel* the anticipation mounting beforehand. Knowing that not everyone loves the dessert decorating and the crafts that we often do, I took a crack at arranging a few silly little games for the kids to play together out in the yard. I think it went … ok. We had a human ring toss with some duct-taped pool noodles (thank you, Internet). We did a beach ball and fly swatter race (that Maya won – she was so proud – it’s not the norm for her to win races). And finally, we did a spoon-egg relay. We also took a few short minutes cracking FIVE DOZEN cascarones onto each other’s skulls – so colorful! All told, I think some goofy fun was had and there weren’t *too* many hurt feelings.

Human ring toss and confetti hair. Holding what Chris calls “vacation water”

Now that we’ve had a full year of this coronavirus isolation, I keep trying to think of something profound to say. Some deep lessons that we’ve learned. Some life-changing perspective shift. I’ve got nothing. Honestly, I’m just tired. I won’t speak for Sean, but I could barely muster the effort to be excited about Easter celebrations with the kids. I’m thrilled that we’re on the path to vaccination, but how long will it be before our relatively young children will be able to do likewise? We’re fine. We’ll be fine. We’re just drained – like everyone else, I suspect.

The case numbers are looking less startling than they had over the holidays. I’m hopeful with all the vaccination going on, the trend will continue. That new strains and relaxed guidelines don’t ruin the dampening effect. Percentage of US population that has been fully vaccinated (7.2% as of 2/28 according to the data Google compiles, 16.6% as of 3/31). Travis County – 02/28 75,636 cases and 743 deaths – 03/31 79,217 cases and 817 deaths. Texas – 02/28 2,653,013 cases and 43,697 deaths – 03/31 2,791,910 cases and 48,252 deaths. United States – 02/28 28,605,523 cases and 513,091 deaths – 03/31 30,460,837 cases and 552,073 deaths. The World – 02/28 114,065,230 cases and 2,530,712 deaths – 03/31 129,006,800 cases and 2,817,932 deaths.

I sometimes think that I’m funnier than I actually am. When referring to something unlikely to happen, rather than saying that it will occur when hell freezes over, I jokingly replace hell with Texas, a hat-tip to the god-forsaken summer temperatures here. Har, har, right? Well, possibly a lot of really unlikely stuff is about to happen.

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

February started out innocuously enough. We quietly celebrated my birthday. There’s still not a lot of celebrating going on in general, but I baked a cake I’ve been wanting to try. Sean ordered us some fancy sushi takeout. The kids bought very thoughtful gifts for me. As pandemic birthdays go, it was just fine.

We were gearing up for our cool pseudo-camping trip at Lake Bastrop over Valentine’s Day weekend. We were renting airstream trailers complete with plumbing, heat, stovetop, a TV. The kids had Friday and Monday off school, so we were going to make a fun long weekend of it. As we watched the weather app on our phones predicting colder and colder temperatures, we kinda thought, “Well, at least we’ll have a warm trailer.” But through the week, precipitation warnings were becoming ever more alarming.

No denying, the ice layer is beautiful.

Then on Thursday the 11th, the freezing rain came. The trees were coated in a gorgeous, glistening layer of ice. We watched as the limbs on our trees sank slowly over the course of hours under the weight of that accumulating ice. Around 1:30 in the afternoon some of those drooping trees around the neighborhood must have finally gotten into the power lines. We lost power and were more off than on through the rest of the day. I remember thinking that we were like 9 or 10 hours without power, and that it was by far the longest outage we’d had since living in Texas. Around 10:00 that night, the tree limb hanging over our bedroom crashed down to our recently replaced roof. We were already in bed trying to stay warm in our power-free house. We later discovered that it appears to have caused little damage, but it was tough to relax again after it happened.

We were supposed to leave on Friday for our trip, but Friday morning, while Sean had no trouble driving around the city, the more out of town roads were treacherous. We made the decision to cancel YET ANOTHER TRIP. The kids were really torn up, and honestly, I was disappointed too. But a winter storm warning had been issued for the entire state of Texas. Really. It seemed foolhardy to attempt the trip.

Maya’s dragon afghan.

Friday afternoon and Saturday were largely uneventful. We had intermittent power outages. The kids received valentines gifts from Grammy and Grandpa and from Lolli and Pop. Lolli, it turns out, has been filling her pandemic time with lots and lots (and lots) of crocheting. Over the past year, she’s made each of her four grandchildren a personalized blanket. Maya’s is green and blue and has a dragon on it. Ian’s is pink and purple and features unicorns! They are incredible.

Ian’s unicorn afghan.

On Saturday, the kids spent some time outside examining icicles and peeling vein-embossed ice layers from leaves. Another thing our Texas kids finally got to experience: ice-coated trees and icicles.

I apparently had some sense that things could get bad with the storm Sunday evening, though of course I had no way of knowing how bad. I managed to bake a heart-shaped pan of brownies for Valentines. I made a double-batch of Ian’s favorite butter chicken. I made sure Mom and Dad had a good stock of gin punch cooked up. Sunday long after the kids had gone to bed, we watched as the snow came down hard. Not the usual sputtering you see around here, but real, heavy snow. And from the cold temperatures the previous few days and the ice layer, the ground was good and cold, so that snow wasn’t going anywhere.

Like frosting on a cake

We woke up Monday to no power to the house, 5 degree temperatures, and a 6-8″ layer of beautiful, blinding-white snow covering everything. We checked the city’s outage map and discovered that the power had blinked out just before 2:00 a.m. and it stayed that way all day. We learned later in the day that this was part of the rolling blackouts that needed to occur to account for the state of Texas’s monumental, unprecedented power demand. Only one of our thermostats is battery-backed, and the lowest reading it registered that day was 58 degrees. It was definitely colder on the bedroom side of the house, but we had no good way of knowing how cold.

I joked that we were well prepared given all our canceled vacations this past year. Sean had bought a couple of backup batteries that we could use to recharge devices as needed during our Disney trip (March 2020, canceled – attempted reschedule for October 2020, also canceled). We had stocked the kids up with some extra thermal clothing layers for our Moab trip (December 2020, canceled). And we had just picked up from the grocery store a bunch of easy-prep and cold foods to take on our Lake Bastrop camping trip (February 2021, canceled). That first day, while we were cold, it could have been worse. We boiled water on our white gas backpacking stove for tea and hot chocolate. We had packets of cereal and pop tarts for breakfast. We had cold-cut and PBJ sandwiches for lunch and dinner. We had a couple of lanterns. Before it got dark, we had the kids pooling their resources and gathering flashlights and other illuminating devices.

Eating by lantern-light.

At some point that evening, AISD had the good sense to cancel classes through Thursday. I don’t remember when, but they later extended that through Friday.

The other thing that helped us a lot during this mess is that we have done some backpacking trips in the past and have taken the kids camping a couple times. We had four good warm sleeping bags that we spread out on the beds and then topped with our normal blankets. The warmest we had been all day was snuggled up in those sleeping bags that night. In fact, it was almost sweaty-hot.

We woke up the next morning (Tuesday) to a power-free house. It was 7 degrees outside, having only gotten up to the teens at the high point the day before. The warm side of the house was at 51 degrees. We were supposed to have started back to work that day, but of course, that wasn’t going to happen. Sean’s management is in Texas and was in the same boat we were in. My management had been in our situation before and was likewise understanding. We were very fortunate to be able to focus only on keeping everyone safe and fed, and not have to be concerned with work and school.

On the previous Wednesday, we had gone around and made sure all our outdoor spigots were as insulated and covered as we could make them. We had been leaving the water trickling at taps throughout the house. We were lucky to never have lost our water and we don’t appear to have sustained any damage to our pipes. However, our water pressure had dropped considerably. One of our neighbors reported being without water entirely. Given all that, we filled all of our water bags (hooray, backpacking!) and a few random jugs with water, just in case.

We set up a card table in the garage so we’d have an easier time cooking with our camp stove. On one hand, we couldn’t use the electric garage door opener with no power, but on the other hand, the garage door wasn’t frozen shut, so score!

Maya playing in the snow.

Then, at 11:08a, the power came back on! The thermostat on the cold side of the house sprang to life and reported a temperature of 47 degrees. We hustled to get all the devices and battery backups on chargers. We made a super-quick lunch of hot dogs and macaroni and cheese – ordinarily not my favorite thing ever, but it was hot and I had cooked it inside. No complaints here.

Ian playing in the snow, adding some much needed color!

We let the kids bundle up and play out in the snow for a while, since the house was finally heating up. I had been apprehensive about letting them out the day before, because I didn’t figure we’d have any good way to warm them back up. Sean snuck outside and snapped a few photos of the yard before the kids went out so he could capture the unmarred snow. It’s a good thing too, because the kids seemed to be on a mission to cover the yard in footprints. I wished like crazy we had had sleds or toboggans. We watched some of the neighbor kids try to find good things to use as sleds. Apparently small inner tube shaped floats were a nope, but boogie boards were a yes. Alas, we had neither.

None of us believed that this power would last, and so we behaved exactly as if it wouldn’t. While the kids and Sean played in the front yard, I went in the back yard and cleared away enough snow so that I could 1 – get my grill out from under the awning so I could cook safely and 2 – so I could make some piles of seed for our starving birds along the rock wall in the back yard. We had so many bird visitors during this mess. (New birds at our feeders and water baths: robins, cedar waxwings, yellow rumped warblers, and pine siskins. There may have been more, but it was hard to tell.) I had been keeping the feeders full, but once the ice made that impossible, I had been making piles of seed on the ice. And once the snow made that impossible, I felt I needed to clear some of it out so we could keep them fed.

So many birds! Lesser goldfinches and pine siskin featured here, we think.

The power had been blipping on and off some, but it finally shut down for good around 2p. We have gas water heaters and the house had warmed up some, so Sean took the opportunity to hustle the kids through a hot bath both to warm them up and to get a few days worth of stink off them. The power did not come back on.

We wound up reheating butter chicken and rice on the camp stove for dinner, and it was glorious. Gin punch, by the way, tastes just as good cold as warm.

Maya is a wiggly sleeper and seemed to have had some trouble negotiating her sleeping bag on her big tall bed the night before, so for sleeping arrangements Tuesday night, we inflated one of our smaller mattresses and let her sleep on the floor in Ian’s room. It kept her from falling out of bed and they both enjoyed the slumber party novelty of it.

Sure, sure, a layer of ice on top of everything else sounds fiiiiiine.

I woke up early on Wednesday to no power and a 53 degree house. I had brewed my normal 3-cup ration of tea the day before during our power up, so I drank cold tea and let my stiff body wake up a bit. I looked out to find that we had been blessed with a thick sheet of ice overnight. I didn’t go measure it, but it was at least 1/4 inch thick and looked well on its way to being a 1/2 inch thick. The beautiful fluffy snow became treacherous with that thick crust of ice, and there were even more tree branches sagging and broken. I wound up placing a second layer of bird seed on top of the ice on the rock wall. I had to hack away some of the ice in the back so I could safely cook with the grill.

It was honestly kind of fun.

I wasn’t sure how well the old charcoal kettle grill would work in the 20-something temperature. I loaded up my trusty chimney starter, and it wasn’t long at all before I had a good set of hot coals going. I managed to grill several sets of burgers (some for storage) and a pot of beans. I even had leftover heat to boil water for a nice cup of tea. I grilled Ian a couple hot dogs since he’s not a fan of burgers. Maya, staunchly refusing grilled food even during a days-long power outage, settled on another PB&J.

We spent the afternoon playing board games and card games with the kids, trying to conserve device battery life for after dark.

I had given up entirely on the power coming back on that day when at 5p, it came back on! We had our steps down pat at that point. Plug in devices. Cook up a fresh batch of gin punch. Cook a very truncated version of chili. Use the plug-in pump to inflate a second mattress. And then the power went down at 5:50. We were disappointed, but we had gotten a few good things done. It would have to work. We turned on our lantern and ate dinner in the semi-dark, appreciating the warm meal, but wishing the power had held out just a little longer.

After dinner, we moved down to what had become our standard huddle under the covers in the living room formation. We let the kids have their devices and we settled in to read. Then, like a gift, the power came on at 7 and stayed that way till bedtime.

Slumber party! Maya enjoyed it so much that she asked if they could just sleep out there like this every now and then.

After the second layer of ice had coated everything and broken a few large limbs in the back yard, we started worrying about the limb that hangs over Ian’s room. It looked ok, but we figured we’d err on the side of caution, and set out the two inflated mattresses in the living room and let the kids have their sleeping bag and blanket slumber party there.

At 9:15 that night, a city-wide boil water notice was issued; we received both text messages and phone calls about it. A treatment facility lost power for a while. Between that and water main breaks and leaks all over the city, reservoirs were more or less drained and there was concern over the quality of the remaining water. We wondered how we’d boil water if the power went off again.

When the power was out, we decided the outdoors was our refrigerator.

Since we still had power when Sean and I went to bed, I figured there was half a chance I’d get to work the next day, so I set my alarm for 6:00, like normal. I was sad to find the next morning that the power was off again. Sigh. But then, around 6:20 it came back on! I puttered around the house for a bit just to see what would happen. It stayed on for a while, so I took a crack at working.

In between trying to dig myself out of my work backlog, I boiled water and made sure we had sanitizer in the bathrooms to use as needed. We used the water I had bottled up earlier in the week for drinking and used the boiled water for cleaning dishes and washing produce.

We discovered the day before that the refrigerator in our garage appeared to have shut down. Once the power had come on Wednesday night and stayed on for a while, I went ahead and relocated as much of the stuff from the garage freezer to the inside freezer as I could. I spent Thursday and Friday trying to cook through the rest.

Sean noticed some fallen branches in the middle of our street. We had initially assumed they were ours, but it turns out they had fallen from the neighbor’s trees. We took a crack at walking out to retrieve them, but it was way too slick on that hill, and the memory of my broken wrist was a little too fresh for me. Sean wound up strapping on crampons (hooray backpacking!) and walked out to move the branches from the road.

With the pandemic going on, we have been largely getting only curbside pickup for our groceries (supplemented with monthly in-person trips to Costco). We knew the temperatures were supposed to go up over the weekend, so we attempted to place a curbside grocery order on Sunday. There was nothing available, anywhere for a week or more. We were doing fine. We had proteins and grains and plenty of fresh fruit, but we were about to run out of kid-approved vegetables and a smattering of convenience foods.

Alabama guy, living in Texas, digging snow.

Friday was hectic but ok. We felt we no longer had to worry about power. We had to boil our water, but at least it was still running. Our normal tree service managed to come out right away on Friday, and we were astonished and relieved to find out that they’d be able to come take down damaged limbs already on Monday. A lot of the ice melted from the street, but our driveway was still heavily coated in ice and snow. Sean dug a path out from behind the Prius so that if we would be able to get out and buy food if we needed to the next day. We had a freeze again overnight (27 degrees), hopefully our last for a while. AISD announced that schools would be off Monday and Tuesday of the following week so damage from the freeze could be assessed.

On Saturday, we finally turned off all our trickling taps. The temperature got up to 54 degrees. I took all the plants that had been living inside for a week and a half back out. Sean braved in-person grocery shopping at a couple stores and replenished our supplies.

The garage refrigerator managed to come back to life as well! It turns out that it’s equipped with a temperature sensor that tells it to shut off if the outside temperature is low enough. Unfortunately that sensor is calibrated for the refrigerator’s temperature, not the freezer’s, so that stuff started to thaw.

We reasoned that everything in the back yard had had a chance to thaw and no more limbs fell from the trees, so finally on Saturday night, we moved the kids back to their rooms.

It was 73 degrees on Sunday. Any remnants of snow and ice were gone, gone, gone. We were still boiling our water, but pressure was starting to return. It almost felt normal again.

The start to the kids’ spring gardens. Maybe now they will stop “planting” weeds and sunflowers (from the birdseed) in my planting beds.

Finally Monday around 3 in the afternoon the boil water notice was lifted for our particular area. The tree people did their work, finding extra stuff to trim out. They were meant to haul everything away, but hadn’t planned on the bulk from the extra broken limbs, so we will have a brush pile in our front yard till probably early April, whenever the city does their large brush pickup. By the following weekend, we had deemed it warm enough and safe enough for the kids to build their little spring gardens. We deemed ourselves mentally recuperated enough to have our bubble family friends over for dinner.

One thing that left me a bit speechless through all of this was how many people reached out to us and offered help. “You could come to our house and get warm.” “You could sleep at our house.” “We have a four wheel drive; is there anything we can bring you?” “Are you ok?” So many kindnesses. I’m happy our house held up as well as it did. I’m very happy we had that old, half-rotting tree removed last fall. I’m pleased that our kids weathered the inconveniences with a minimum of whining.

Icicle fringe on our bushes

Now, back to our normal program of pandemic concern and vaccine tracking. In late February, Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use. It’s a single-dose vaccine that doesn’t have the same stringent refrigeration requirements that the two mRNA vaccines do. I have found myself frustrated at the slow roll-out process thus far, and I’m so hopeful that this changes things. Sean and I still aren’t in the groups that are currently prioritized to get the vaccines, and none of them are approved yet for the kids’ age group, so regardless, we probably have a while to wait.

Coronavirus numbers have been looking less terrible, probably now that we’re well past the holidays and are starting to see folks becoming fully vaccinated (7.2% as of 2/28 according to the data Google compiles). Travis County – 01/31 68,731 cases and 655 deaths – 02/28 75,636 cases and 743 deaths. Texas – 01/31 2,376,344 cases and 37,074 deaths – 02/28 2,653,013 cases and 43,697 deaths. United States – 01/31 26,185,357 cases and 441,319 deaths – 02/28 28,605,523 cases and 513,091 deaths. The World – 01/31 102,944,487 cases and 2,227,568 deaths – 02/28 114,065,230 cases and 2,530,712 deaths.

It is rare for a real snow to fall in Austin. Ordinarily, our frozen precipitation comes in the form of sleet, freezing rain, or even hail. On January 10th though, we were gifted with a real honest-to-goodness snow.

When it first started snowing, they’d scrape the snow off the cars to make their snowballs.

Rarer still, it snowed enough to actually accumulate. For several hours, fat fluffy flakes of snow fell, sometimes only a sprinkling, other times quite hard. We kept going out and taking photos and playing in it, fearing that it would be gone all too soon. Maya and Ian chased each other through the yard, lobbing snowballs as they ran. Early in the day, they had built teeny little driveway snow-people. I was impressed that we had enough snow even for that. By the afternoon, a good 2 to 3 inches had accumulated. Sean and I went out in the yard with them, helping them roll up the snow into a good base and body for a more normal-sized snowman. Sure there were leaves in the snow, but who cares! We got to build snowmen with the kids in friggin’ Texas. Maya and I even attempted to build a snow cat, thought its “teeth” kept falling out.

Snow family!

School had started back the week before. It went about as well as one might have expected for the first week back after about three weeks of fun and freedom. Austin has been in Stage 5 of coronavirus hell for quite a while now, and the district was kind of on-again, off-again about where they wanted the kids to do their learning through the first part of the month. I don’t feel like hearing myself complaining any more about the school and work thing, so I won’t. But the situation has not in any way resolved.

Luckily, there are fun things to look forward to still. Over MLK Day weekend, we went cabin camping with our bubble family friends at Black Rock Park. This was so much fancier than our tent camping last November. The cabins … were HEATED. That was my favorite thing. We had to use a communal bathroom and cooking was still a little complicated, but at least we were snuggly warm while we slept.

Herbie and Maya and the pretty sunset

We packed more things into the Prius than we could really manage easily, so if this is going to be part of our life, sigh, we’re probably going to have to upsize the car. We learned a lot of things on this trip from our more camping-experienced friends. 1 – Bring or purchase firewood; when camping around a near-treeless lake, you can’t count on found wood. 2 – Hammocks. 3 – Remembering the fuel-line for your camp stove is mission critical. Yeah, we forgot ours. Luckily, we were able to borrow our friends’ stove as needed and we had brought our small backpacking stove as a backup.

Note to self: purchase a camping hammock

The best part of the trip was how much the kids could just run far and wide and play, play, play. Sure there was a fair bit of drama, a few hurt feelings, a kid trying to get run over. But generally, it was very positive. I like that the kids get to play with their friends, and to do so in a place where they could semi-safely experience a bit of freedom. Crazy Maya is impervious to cold; she actually got in the lake and played for a while. (Ian got suited up to play in the water, put one toe in, and then gave it up as a very bad idea.)

So much art!

By the end of the weekend, the kids were feeling sad that it would all be over soon, so we hastily made plans to have dinner together the next weekend. After trudging through another hell week of virtual school and two full time jobs, we drove out to their house. I think they had fun. They got to try out Ruby and Herbie’s trampoline. Maya rode bikes with Herbie – her first time riding around in a neighborhood. The kids all made gigantic bubbles with Holly. They art-ed with Ruby.

Woody the Wood Duck is very photogenic

The last weekend in January, I took the kids out to Mills Pond, mostly to give Sean a break. The pond is local-famous for hosting a wood duck, who we hear is called Woody. Maya has, since she first received her Big Book of Birds however many years ago, wanted to go on vacation to see a wood duck. She and I had been to Mills Pond earlier in the month to try out the nice binoculars she got for Christmas, and while we saw some different ducks, we weren’t graced with Woody’s presence. Not so on this visit. He paddled right up to the doc we were standing on, presumably looking for a food handout (which is not allowed). Both kids had their cameras out snap, snap, snapping photos of ducks. And after a good walk around the lake, we headed back home.

Coronavirus numbers were the worst they’ve ever been this past month – nearly 100,000 people died of COVID-19 in the United States alone. The number of new cases has been trending down a bit lately, and hopefully now that the holidays are behind us and especially as more and more people are vaccinated, those numbers will continue to improve. Right now in Texas, we aren’t eligible for a vaccine. Groups 1A (front-line health workers and residents at long-term care facilities) and 1B (people age 65 and older and people with certain high-risk health conditions) are the only ones able to right now, and even at that, I think demand is far exceeding supply. We are hopeful that by this summer, the grown-ups in the house will be able to get vaccinated. And then hopefully by the fall, the vaccine will be approved for kids Maya and Ian’s age and they can be protected too. Travis County – 12/31 50,595 cases and 549 deaths – 01/31 68,731 cases and 655 deaths. Texas – 12/31 1,766,307 cases and 27,944 deaths – 01/31 2,376,344 cases and 37,074 deaths. United States – 12/31 19,968,087 cases and 345,737 deaths – 01/31 26,185,357 cases and 441,319 deaths. The World – 12/31 83,424,446 cases and 1,818,116 deaths – 01/31 102,944,487 cases and 2,227,568 deaths.

To the kids’ disappointment, Sean went out by himself and got our Christmas trees the Saturday after Thanksgiving. Yes, trees, plural. We never have enough room for all the fun ornaments we have amassed over the years (and continue to collect), and so this year we figured we’d just go for it. Fear not, I assuaged their disappointment by letting them put up their little fake tree and decorate it while Sean was out.

Maya and Ian’s tree

We spent the weekend procuring the extra things we’d need to accommodate our extra tree: tree stand, more garland, more lights. We didn’t manage to find a second tree topper that was epic enough to stand up to this turd of a year, and having only one topper for the two trees seemed weird so we left them bare. Sean and “Santa” went a little overboard this year on keepsake ornaments, so we very nearly managed to fill two trees plus the kids’ little tree. The house was looking pretty festive, at least from the inside.

The trees were up, December had arrived, and the kids were so, so excited about all the Christmas things. We each chose our own Advent calendars. Ian’s was filled with fun unicorn and Christmas related items (barrettes, stickers, stampers), Maya’s was Harry Potter Lego, and Mom and Dad’s was full of beer. Because 2020.

Made it through the whole calendar!

We celebrated Sean’s birthday later in the week. Thanks to COVID-19, we’re still avoiding going to restaurants, so this year for his birthday, I instead ordered Imo’s. Neat, right? They don’t have Imo’s in Austin, but thanks to a service called Goldbelly, I was able to order frozen pizza, toasted ravioli, and provel bites from Imo’s and have them shipped to our door. The dry ice they were packed in was fun for the kids to observe, and the pizzas and toasted ravioli were a fun surprise for Sean. And of course, I made his favorite chocolate malt birthday cake to go with them. Plus, we have a new musical instrument in the house now! A bass! Because our house needed another guitar!

That weekend, we headed down south to see the drive-through Christmas light display at the Circuit of the Americas racetrack. After the hour and a half wait, during which Ian whined nonstop, and even Maya fussed a little toward the end, the kids were swept away by the big, beautiful light displays. In any other year, I’m not sure whether it would have been worth it, but since we weren’t seeing Santa or going to our usual music and lighting event at Mozart’s, this was what we had.

Our Christmas lights for the year.

The next day, we all masked up and headed into town with Flat Santa to take a few holiday photos, in hopes of scoring a good one for this year’s Christmas cards. The kids were fidgety and Sean, who had hurt his leg while on our beach vacation in late November was short on patience so it was tough to get good shots. Plus we were on high alert to our proximity to other people, so it was kind of stressful. But Sean did manage to trick the kids into a few cute photos.

That next week, we had our roof replaced. For two solid days, there was nothing but banging, pounding, scraping awfulness, while all four of us tried to do our jobs and attend meetings and school zooms and not go completely bat-crap crazy. With the old tree removed and the roof replaced though, we should be well positioned for winter storms and spring rains heading into the new year.

Our Suzuki Book 1 graduate!

The morning of December 12th was a big one for us. Maya played a solo piano concert as her Suzuki Book 1 graduation celebration. She played every song in her book with all her grandparents and Anna in attendance via Zoom, and she did great. We gave her flowers to further the celebration and her teacher sent her a lovely trophy to mark the occasion. To say we are proud of her would be an understatement.

The first time Sean used the term “fuck-it protocol,” we were lounging at a beach house and he was looking at fun art to hang on the walls. We have since used it liberally. Not enough Christmas tree to hold all our ornaments? Fuck it, we’ll buy two this year. Dad doesn’t get to go out for his birthday? Fuck it, we’ll order pizza on dry ice from several states away. Our trip to Moab got canceled and the kids won’t get to see snow this year? Fuck it, we’ll rent a snow machine.

70 degrees and snowy!

Our friend Holly has all the good ideas. Elephants, Beach trip, snow machine – all Holly. I’m good on execution, but I’m often lacking in ideas. When she suggested we invoke the fuck-it protocol and split the cost of an overpriced snow machine rental to have for the kids at our bubble family Christmas party, I’m not sure even an hour had passed before the rental had been secured.

Much like our two-family Halloween party, we had a two-family Christmas party. Chris, Holly, Ruby, and Herbie came to the house around mid-afternoon, and we loaded up the little plastic snowman snow machine with patented “snow juice” and played in the fake snow and the bright sunshine in our shorts and t-shirts. I accidented upon a box of fake snowballs that one of us had received during some sort of holiday game at the last Woods family Christmas. They were perfect. The kids belted around in the yard through the “snow” firing cotton snowballs at each other. The grown-ups hung out and drank and laughed at our lunatic children. We all did a secret Santa gift exchange. The kids used window paint to holiday up our windows (some of that paint may or may not still be up), built gingerbread houses, painted ornaments, and then had another round outside to play in the night snow. Sean made his Mamaw Sharp’s punch for the kids (which they devoured). We had cured meats, fancy cheese, nice bread, smoked salmon, and oddly, Dominos pizza on our holiday menu. There were veggies and fruit too, fear not. And some hummus and olives and pita chips. Maya decorated a bundt cake type thing with way too much fondant, and Holly brought a delicious assortment of homemade cookies. It was a really, really good spread, and we had lots of leftovers.

Our dude is 6!!!

The very next weekend, we celebrated Ian’s birthday. He wanted a unicorn themed birthday party, which, when you have in the past tried to theme things around octopuses and dragons, is kind of a relief. He wanted to be involved in his cake decorating, so I just purchased from Amazon a little decorating kit complete with flowers, eyelashes, and a shiny golden horn. As Ian specified, we made a round confetti cake with white icing, applied fondant circles around the outside in colors of his choosing, and loaded it up with the unicorn stuff and six tall, glitter-flecked candles. He was proud of his handiwork.

Celebrating!

Birthday dinner was restaurant ramen (which it turns out he didn’t like nearly so well as the stuff we buy from Costco). His grandparents “attended” via Zoom, and we all sang to Ian and watched him blow out the candles and open his presents. Poor Maya was assaulted by the smells of ramen and burning candles, neither of which she handles well, but she tried to be a good sister regardless.

Ian’s birthday was also the last day of school for the year, and I’m not sure who was more relieved, the kids or us. Virtual school plus full time jobs is an uphill slog that feels less like succeeding and more like managing degrees of failure. And it was nice to let the kids play and fight while we sort of got to work like normal-ish people for a week or two.

Sean thought the cat butt cookie cutter was hilarious. So did the kids. I found that it expressed the side of me I might like to show to this past 9 months.

The week leading up to Christmas still managed to be kinda crazy. We spent a few evenings baking different kinds of cookies – roll and cut cookies for the kids, Santa’s Whiskers for Sean (and Maya, apparently), and some peppermint cookies for me. Sean put together the goods for his “Rhum Arrange” which we will get to enjoy in sometime like six months. We spent several evenings wrapping mountains of gifts that we had ordered and that had been sent in by generous grandparents, great grandparents, aunts, and uncles. On Christmas Eve, Sean made his “traditional” shrimp scampi much to the delight of three-quarters of our household.

Maya was worried that Santa would be upset that we had hung up more stockings than there were people in our house. She had put a couple up for Hank and Nox, the two cats, but she thought Santa would think they were trying to trick him into giving them extra stuff. She explained it all to Trinket, their elf on the shelf, but just to be sure, she left Santa a letter as well. She left it out with the cookies that she and Ian had selected for Santa and the carrots they had left for the reindeer.

Happy Maya and Ian

The next morning, the kids were up at the crack of 7, so terrifically excited about the bounty under the trees. And their stockings were full, to boot! I had cinnamon rolls all ready to pop into the oven to bake and eat once the unwrapping had occurred. We spent some zoom time with Lolli and Pop and Aunt Darci, AP, and Steele. And later on we Zoomed again with Grammy and Grandpa. The big-deal gift this year was a Nintendo Switch for the kids. We whiled away some time in the afternoon playing Mario Kart and some of us may have napped. That evening, Ian helped Sean make some more of Mamaw Sharp’s punch, and I made some fancy crap dip pies that only the grown-ups were willing to eat.

Family selfie!

We had already been planning to take the week off between Christmas and New Year’s anyway for the Moab trip, so we just kept the time off and vacationed around the house instead. The day after Christmas, I made a big British meat pie that had been half on my mind since our trip to London years ago. The day after that, I participated in some hitchy Face-timing with my parents, my siblings, and their families back in Missouri. We all settled in to enjoying our gifts and working our way through all our rich-food leftovers. We celebrated as hard as we could, but it just wasn’t the same as seeing everyone. The kids in particular felt the absence – they really look forward to seeing their grandparents, and at this point, it’s now been a full year since they’ve seen any of them in person.

We were going to go hiking on the 28th but after fully prepping for hiking and picnicking, I went to load up the car and found that the battery had died. Instead, the kids and I “hiked” to a neighborhood park and played there until I felt that even with our masks on, it was starting to feel too crowded. I think we mostly spent the rest of the week slowly trying to undo the mess the house had become with all the celebrating, relaxing, and playing with the kids. On New Year’s Eve, we let them stay up till midnight to ring in the new year with us. Maya made it, but I have photographic evidence that Ian may have drifted off around 11:30, though he heartily insists otherwise.

Stupid shirt didn’t even arrive in time for me to wear it on NYE.

The coronavirus case count and death toll have been gross to watch. I remember when I thought the first million US cases was shocking. That is now a distant memory. But on December 11th, Pfizer’s COVID-19 vaccine was approved for emergency use. A week later the Moderna COVID-19 was likewise approved for emergency use. It’ll be a long road for sure, but maybe there’s some relief in sight. And while I should probably save this for a later post, also momentous was the storming of the US capitol building on January 6th. After a year so radically changed by this stupid virus, to have 2021 start out with such a jarring event was almost too much to take in.

I know it’s already January 11th, but I thought I’d end this post with the December 31st, 2020 coronavirus numbers. Travis County – 11/29 38,045 cases and 483 deaths – 12/31 50,595 cases and 549 deaths. Texas – 11/29 1,225,118 cases and 21,843 deaths – 12/31 1,766,307 cases and 27,944 deaths. United States – 11/29 13,385,494 cases and 266,887 deaths – 12/31 19,968,087 cases and 345,737 deaths. The World – 11/29 62,829,641 cases and 1,461,049 deaths – 12/31 83,424,446 cases and 1,818,116 deaths.

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.