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-- Something Insightful Random Thoughts… And A Little Extra Menu Skip to content Home A Year in Pictures Live Love Learn | 2013 Through Their Eyes | 2012 About Books 100 Books Meow! Offspring Allison Andrew Photography Isolation | Part 2 of ? Leave a reply This morning I got woken up by a small person at 6:20am. I realized that on any other Thursday morning I’d be up, dressed, yelling at kids, making my lunch, pouring coffee, you know basically doing normal morning things. Instead, I rolled over and attempted to go back to sleep. We’ve been in quarantine in our homes for the last 18 days. The first 14 were for everyone else’s sake. Since we went to Disney World on March 15th (the last day it was opened) it seemed our exposure risk was very high and as a result we stayed safely tucked away from all family. Now, 18 days later, healthy by the grace of God, we are tucked away because our city and finally our state have ordered us to do so. That’s fine. Where would we go right now anyway? The outside world seems pretty scary, invisible enemy everywhere. The thing is, I’m grateful for so many things right now not just our health. I’m grateful that I could roll over and get more sleep this morning instead of getting up when it was still dark (raise your hand if you’re like me and not sleeping well.) I’m grateful that I’m not putting 2000 miles a month on my car. I’m grateful that hubby isn’t driving 183 miles A DAY for work. I’m grateful that we don’t have to eat dinner at 7:30 every night- the normal time we eat since Andrew’s swim practice goes until 7. I’m grateful that I can sit and drink my coffee slowly in the morning, while sitting at my breakfast table. For that matter, it’s nice to eat meals at my table and not at my desk or in the car. There are some definite perks to life right now and it would be wrong not to acknowledge that. I feel like everything went from 100 miles an hour to, like, maybe 5. I don’t feel a constant sense of being rushed. That’s a good thing. Sadly, all that has come at a price and that’s the price we stay for being safe right now. I don’t love eating meals at a work desk but I do love being able to go to work. I enjoy being able to get more sleep but not for this reason, that’s for sure. I love being able to eat dinner earlier but I hate that Andrew isn’t swimming, and that there’s no meet this weekend where I can cheer him on. I hate that my kids miss their friends and that I miss mine. So I come to the idea of BALANCE. I see the need to slow down but that means sacrificing something and right now I’m still not seeing exactly WHAT that should be. There is nothing right now that I wouldn’t trade to have our normal life back. Not even the extra sleep. Right now Allison is doing a virtual dance class while on FaceTime with her friends. They are having a hard time syncing up the video with each other but they are figuring it out just like, when all this is over, we will have to resync our lives, putting things back into the little time slots we carved out for them with a new found appreciation for why we are doing them in the first place. This entry was posted in General on April 2, 2020 by EMB . Isolation | Part 1 of ? Leave a reply On Monday I told the kids I wanted them to do an assignment. They loudly complained since it is technically their spring break right now but I told them I wanted them to keep a journal which will be a primary source document for future generations as what we are living right now is one of those things that will shape their future and something they will one day share with their grandchildren. After hearing what I wanted them to do, they all actually complied. I figured it’s probably not a terrible idea to do the same. Someday I’ll still share this with my grandchildren and maybe someday they’ll share it with theirs. I hope decades from now we’ll look back on this knowing we did the best we could and got through it with a sense of hope and understanding and not with the horror of someone recounting say, their experience in war. I can’t help but thinking over the last few weeks, that I’ve read this book. I spent a lot of time about a decade ago, immersed in post-apocalyptic genre novels. Many of them were for young adults/teens. There was one, one of the more juvenile of the books I read, where a virus kills all the adults on earth leaving the children to fend for themselves. Even though the characters weren’t particularly appealing, it was one of the books that stuck with me and has at times made me more driven to teach my kids survival skills, not in a scary way but in a “hey let’s learn how to cook a meal” kind of way. And here we are now, facing a virus that seems to impact most every age group EXCEPT young children. That book, by the way, is part of the Toucan Trillogy and is called Night of the Purple Moon, you know, just in case you want to read mildly terrifying fiction that now mimics real life. There was another book I read, again having to do with the moon, where an asteroid hits the moon setting it off its normal gravitational course and closer to the earth. Global chaos ensues as tsunamis take out all the coastal cities, the electrical grid, access to news, access to food, etc. I remember the mother in that book taking her children out of school, giving them each a fistful of cash, and each of them filling a shopping cart to the brim with food as everyone else in the town does the same. And in the beginning they are okay and they eat fairly normally. Then volcanic eruptions block out the sun, winter starts in August, and they cut down practically the entire forest behind their home to keep a wood burning stove going to keep from freezing to death. Last night we got take out and had dessert too and I told the kids, I think we will look back on this as one of the really good meals we had before everything just kinda stops. I hope it won’t come to that. But who knows at this point. That book, is part of a 4 book series called Life As We Knew It. By the way the 4 th book sucks and I don’t say that lightly. It made me so angry. If you opt to read this series do yourself a favor and stop after the 3 rd book. Ok moving on. So life is imitating art right now and I think what strikes me the hardest is how normal things were last week. Yesterday was Wednesday and except to go get a prescription filled I didn’t leave the house. Here’s what a normal Wednesday is like for us: Everyone up at 6, dressed and ready for school. Leave for school at 6:45 at the latest. Andrew has (had) Model UN team at 7:20 so we had to get to school by then. Drop everyone off and sign them into HOST. Leave for work and hopefully arrive by 7:45. A normal work day for me is a class of math followed by a class of religion then break, planning, “Math Lab” which is additional math enrichment where we do life skills math (we were talking about income taxes) and then lunch. I have lunch duty on Wednesday so I sit outside at the picnic tables with the 32 kids in my department. We don’t have a cafeteria at my school so we eat outside. Students have the option of getting food delivered. After lunch I teach my highest level math class and they are doing an Algebra 1 unit on Linear Equations. Right after that class I have my pre-algebra group and then two more religion classes. After work is my weekly PLC. We’ve been having conferences lately. After the PLC is over (and sometimes I have to leave early) I rush across town to the dance studio because I keep Allison’s bag in my car so she doesn’t have to carry it around school all day. Her classes start at 5:30 on Wednesdays. If by chance Andy is back from work early enough he takes Molly to swimming but most of the time we just sit at Barnes and Noble and wait for class to be over. After dance Andy takes the kids home and I go to choir at church. It’s over by 9 and I’m usually home by 9:30 after being gone almost 15 hours. Wednesday is by far my busiest day. It exhausts me. Last Wedne...