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.

 

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

Fine 2020, take our tree yet too.

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

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

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

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

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

The biggest to-do that week, anyway.

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

Eyeball pong was a hit!

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

Tent, Arthur Tent.

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

Snug.

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

Lake fog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Masked bandits!

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

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

Puddle stomping never goes out of style.

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

Maya busy doing all that second grade schoolwork.

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

Nox is helping Ian study

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

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

Scooter ride with Dad.

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

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

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

Pumpkin hay bale at the Zoo Boo.

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

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

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

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

Raccoon at the ground feeder.

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

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

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

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

Socially distanced vacation, FTW!

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

Origami hummingbird.

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

Swimming at Emma Long

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

Dragon fruit

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

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

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

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

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

Dragon girl in her dragon shirt with her dragon sculpture

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

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

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

There were bunk beds. The kids LOVE bunk beds.

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

The Maya

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

Fishing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

A little catfish!

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

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

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

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

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

First time out, wearing their masks.

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

SPARKLE!!!!

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

Maya tells me this is a Diamond Dragon.

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

Maya and her cicada pet.

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

Happy Father’s Day!

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

Pistachio Cake

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

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

Poor Hank

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

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

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

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

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

Look, Ma! No teeth!

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

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

Sean’s T-Rexes.

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

Gray fox, we think.

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

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

Rock squirrels are pretty sure they own our back yard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Behold, the unicorn helmet.

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

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

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

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

Our budding actor

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our 20th anniversary dinner spread.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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