Covid

We’ve spent the last two years avoiding Covid and we’ve done a great job of that. However, Covid finally found us and it’s made the last three weeks super fun…

I got home from Oregon on Sunday night. Monday, Yen texted me to tell me that she’d tested positive. Lovely. After negative tests on Tuesday and Wednesday, I tested positive on Thursday. That out the entire family, except for Bella, in quarantine. Gabe tested positive on Sunday and Pat tested positive on Tuesday. Luckily I was out of quarantine on Wednesday and celebrated by going to the grocery store, which doesn’t sound overly exciting, but it definitely was. Pat and Gabe were out of quarantine on Friday, so they were able to go back to work on school on Monday of this week. However, Josy was still negative, which meant that he had to do an extra five day quarantine after everyone else was done with theres. So he and I planned to be home through Wednesday when life would go back to normal and we would always wonder how that kid has been in a home with active Covid for two weeks and not gotten it.

Then on Tuesday, day 4 of his final quarantine, he finally tested positive. So he and I are now home for another 5 days. If his antigen test comes back negative on Monday then he can go back to school and I will be able to go back into the office for the first time in three weeks.

Bella still can’t gotten it. But she’s within her six months of vaccination and she has an immune system of steel, so that doesn’t really surprise me. Also, she’s perfectly happy avoiding us, so she isn’t quite as exposed as everyone else.

We’re fine. We all got the very mild version of this. Josy has slightly glassy eyes. Gabe had two days of feeling “seasick and like his head is getting pinched.” Pat and I both felt “not good, but not terrible.” And now we’ve all recovered just fine. But it’s been a rough few weeks. Since I can work from home, and work is crazy right now, I’m trying to work as much as possible, which makes it hard to figure out how to balance working and parenting and being sick. Then yesterday I spilled coffee on my laptop and that answered that question…

Needless to say, we’re all ready to put this episode behind us and to move on to normal life, where we don’t have to figure out who is allowed to leave the house on what day and how to balance things like dropping off my laptop at work with a kid in isolation in my car and getting a new one configured when I can’t leave him long enough to do the configuration process and the only person I can leave him with is Bella, who really needs to be at school. She’s still upset that she hasn’t gotten it, since she would like to skip school for a week…

But I will say that all of this quality time at home has been really good for Josy’s language development. His speech therapist is going to be really impressed. He’s still speaking in his halting one-word-per-sentence way, but he’s adding a lot more filler words and his vocabulary is increasing a lot. His pronunciation is still of and he definitely has to be interpreted, but I feel like he’s making a lot of progress. When he’s about to cry he’ll say “Mommy. I’m. Sad!” and then burst into tears. He was looking for his firetruck and asked me where it was and I told him it was probably upstairs. He replied with “No. It. Down. Stairs. Someere.” (Somewhere) We were looking at a picture book and there was a picture of a dress, so I asked him what it was. He said “wear dat. Go dancing.” He just told me that “Gabey puzzle. ABCs. Upstairs. In. My. Bedroom.” (Which is true. Gabe’s ABC puzzle is in his room because he was doing the puzzle by himself the other day and doing an amazing job. The kid is really good at puzzles!) And he clearly told Pat the other day “No call me Jojo. I Josy.” While I was in isolation (attempting to keep people from having to quarantine for forever…) I was watching a show on my laptop. He came in to say goodnight and looked at me and said “You. Watch. Those. Guys. On. Your. Com. Puer.” And he’s started saying I don’t know, but it’s all one word: Iano.  I wish I could write down all the adorable things he says, but I miss so many of them. Needless to say, he’s developing in leaps and bounds right now.

He also really likes Bluey, and we had this conversation while dropping off Bella at school:

J: Watch Buey.

M: Okay. Would you like to eat pancakes and then watch Bluey or watch Bluey and then eat pancakes.

J: Watch. Buey. On. You. Com. Puter.

M: No, you can’t watch Bluey on my computer.

J: Watch. Buey. On. Your. Phone.

M: No, we watch Bluey on the tv.

J: Watch. Buey. On. Dada’s. Com. Puter.

Then when we got back from dropping Bella off…

M: Are you ready for Mommy Josy time??

J: No. Watch. Buey.

Meanwhile the other boy is going full on into the Revolutionary War. At one point he told me he didn’t want a haircut because he wants his hair to look like George Washington’s wig. He asked me which general did General Cornwallis replace. I have no idea…

Then this morning…

G: What was the war after the Revolutionary War? Was it the Civil War?

M: I think it was the War of 1812.

G: What was the War of 1812?

M: I don’t really remember, but we fought the British again.

G: Who was the general?

We went on a walk the day before all this chaos started and someone insisted on collecting ice chunks. Luckily he didn’t insist on bringing them in the house…

This one has gotten into the Revolutionary War. He really wants a blue jacket, rather than red, but I told him that he should have started looking the Revolutionary War before his birthday and Christmas and then maybe he could have gotten a blue jacket…



Daddy has a very tall work truck.



I lost track of how many Covid tests we’ve taken in the last three weeks… Josy liked them because “Daddy. Tickle. My. Nose. Covid. Test.”



Lucy has decided that this is her new favorite place to sleep.



Gabe desperately wants a parrot. There are many reasons why this will never happen, but one of the more easy-to-understand-by-a-six-year-old reasons is that Lucy is a very good hunter. A parrot wouldn’t stand a chance. Gabe came into my isolation room all mad because “Lucy got my bird!!!” Sure enough, Lucy attacked his fake bird that was inside a cage. This just clarifies the fact that we will not be getting a parrot.



“Goin Cosco.” All excited to go to Costco, just like his Daddy…

We escaped off of the house, finding an isolated beach with no other people, just to get out of the house for a while. We all needed it.





Doing the ABC puzzle.



“Mommy. Pay. Pano.”



We took a nice long walk out to the glacier, which everyone enjoyed way more than this picture would indicate.



“Cheese. Diasor.” (Dinosaur)





Catching up on school work.



Ready to sneak attack the British.



When you’re out and about and forget a clean diaper, you have to be creative in order to make sure that you can make it home nicely.



Snuggled up for Bible reading.



That used to be our shed. The house may have survived all that snow, but the shed did not.



Josy and I went to the park. We were the only ones there, which was handy for us (since I wouldn’t have gone if there were people since he was in quarantine), but it did surprise me since the weather was so nice.



“Go sleep. On couch. Goodnight. Seep good.”





I lost Josy. No idea where he went.



And that brings us to today and who knows what today will bring?? Currently Josy is whispering because he thinks there’s a lion in the house and he doesn’t want the lion to hear us, so it could be an interesting day…