What an absolute batty time in our world right now. I’m oscillating between such insane emotions as I’m sure is true for many of you – grateful one second just to be alive and healthy and the next second absolutely panicked and angry and fearful and ready to smack someone. Gates and I are both lucky to still be employed – he has transitioned to working from home full time but currently is on temporary furlough. He is a stress cleaner though so our home has never been so shiny. I’m still marching off to help the masses as our clinics are open but we have recently started to be able to offer virtual visits hoping to reduce some of the foot traffic through our doors. The amount of stress I am feeling thinking about the extra importance of my income while Gates is furloughed but knowing the risk working with the public carries is keeping me up at night. Obviously I am being as careful as I can when at work but that constant fear that I could be bringing this home to my family is so awful. The upside to this is that our kids aren’t really having to deal with a major change to their schedules, besides Olivia no longer attending preschool and not being able to do some of the usual fun stuff we do on my off days like going to the zoo, playdates, or bopping around the libraries (I physically ache for the library… until we meet again my friend). Weekends are a little sadder without venturing out to try new restaurants or seeing friends and family but we’ve got it so much easier than so many people right now so we are absolutely not going to complain about transient cessation of our extracurricular activities. We are being super careful with social distancing recommendations because of my work and physical contact with many who live in some of the areas hardest hit with the virus in our state. It’s just not worth the risk to be anything but diligent, as much as we would love to see people. We have been enjoying surprising friends with quarantine care packages and meals and writing cards and letters to send to family and friends who live too far away to be able to at least wave through the car window at. Gates and I have been trying to support a local restaurant and order take out once a weekend – we will be happy if the biggest thing to happen to us because of all this is the Covid 19 pounds we are on track to gain. This whole thing is so frustrating and stressful – but putting in the work means lives will be saved. Happy to be doing our part.

Now on to unrelated and unimportant updates!

THE CHILDREN ARE WALKING! Thank goodness. I’ve been awaiting this time with a giddy anticipation, even knowing how annoying it will be to have to chase them going in separate directions but we NEED to get outside and breathe fresh air and I could only deal with the two of them crawling on their hands and knees through mud and slush and grunge for so long. SO GLORIOUS! They are both super unsteady still but a few nose dives to the concrete will help with that in no time. Lessons learned so far: Sasha wants to run. She can’t, exactly, due to being very compact and wobbly, but she tries and she is fast as a little beetle in those magical split seconds where her momentum is up but before gravity takes hold. So I spend a fair amount of time corralling her back towards the group and also scraping her off the ground after she melts into a whiny puddle post-tumble. Spencer, knowing his even wobblier limits, hasn’t done as much spastic breakaway attempts as Sasha, instead much preferring to put anything and I mean anything into his mouth for a little taste. Rocks, bugs, chalk, muddy puddle water, dirt, plants, etc. One of the last times we were outside he was chewing on something and I did a quick swipe into his mouth trying to avoid getting chomped on and fished out a big old ball of black hair. YUM!

The babies seem to spend the majority of their time bickering which is both hilarious and maddening. Any toy or book or crumb that Sasha picks up is quickly shanghaied by Spencer, with the intent to irritate her. She is starting to stand up for her stout little self more and more though and will retaliate by screeching and grabbing onto his face with her claws and squeezing until she draws blood. She also bites. When he’s had enough of that he will just knock her over and pin her head down with his body weight and casually leaf through a book or eat a Cheerio whilst she screams and struggles to free herself from under him. But then I will randomly catch them fetching eachother’s little stuffed animals and bringing to the other, or taking their pacifier out of their own mouth and trying to jam it lovingly into the other’s. Very sweet. They definitely speak their own kooky language, especially at “nap time” when I will hear them babbling gibberish and laughing manically at each other over the monitor for hours. I try to let them wear each other out which works exactly 0% of the time so I will haul myself up the stairs to holler “lay down” at them an insane amount of times before we are actually successful at “napping”, which still happens so rarely we can recall specific days that included some sleep with them with a wistful fondness. The best part of all this though is when we yell “lay down!” we startle them like BUSTED and they throw themselves backwards or face plant into their mattresses so quickly it brings me much hilarious joy. I surprised Sasha so much the other day she ran face first into the side of the crib. She’s fine, don’t worry. So it is ok that I cackled. Every once in a while they will have a great nap and an above average night of sleep (2-3 wake ups vs a dozen) and we will cautiously mention the shift to each other in hushed excitement… only to have them be absolutely batsh*t banana sleepless dodos for the next week. Keeping us in line, that’s for sure.

Olivia is an endless little tornado of questions and energy and owies and grand plans with little follow through due to a v short attention span. Very interested in schedules right now and demands to know what is planned for the day (literally nothing) so she can make suggestions or refusals in advance.

She and the babies continue to be the pickiest little eaters. Someone recently told me how great it is that we don’t really serve the kids highly processed foods and let me just set the record straight that this isn’t a choice from a healthy eating standpoint. The kids are so picky they literally won’t eat all the nom nom naughty foods that I pictured myself getting to finish off their plates. Mac and cheese, fries, chicken tenders, any fast food, etc they have no interest in.  We spend a lot of time licking cream cheese off of various carby vehicles though, so don’t imagine them as having healthy diets. They also will not touch a single vegetable, including canned ones which barely count in the first place.

Our basement is finally, finally in the last stages of being finished and I’ve never been so happy to have another area of the house to escape to with the kids with the weather being so unpredictable lately. They are loving being able to throw and kick and bounce balls around the room and chasing each other, but most of all SCREAMING at the top of their lungs to enjoy the fun echo-y noise of it all. Olivia’s favorite thing to do is tool around on her little tricycle trying to casually bump into the walls we’ve repeatedly asked her to stop hitting and then immediately shouting “it was an accident, so it’s ok” as soon as making contact. Sneaky. She also has been quite the parrot lately and has had to be told that we just say “the dog” and NOT “the damn dog”… that one is my bad. Other  little sayings she has picked up from us: “yikes”, “absolutely”, “no problem”, “sure do”, “sure is”, and “I’ll wait”. Hilarious. Her constant chatters almost make up for the fact that the babies are still hardly saying anything and communicate strictly by regular whining, intense wining, or extreme XL grande whining to convey all of their needs. Not at all annoying.

Olivia has graduated from watching only Peppa to watching the same 15 min episode of Elmo’s World over and over (“Playing Ball”). Elmo yells so many times “ELMO LOVES BALLS” and I am a 9 year old boy so I get many chuckles from this on the daily. She also will watch 3 episodes of Pete the Cat on Amazon (the “party one” (about NYE), “too bool for school” (too cool for school, but she can’t pronounce for some reason lol) and “Bob hurt his foot”, (Bob the cat suffers minor ankle injury).

Speaking of ankle injuries. I’m good. Healed quickly. Suspiciously quickly, actually.

But honestly I just couldn’t deal with the crutches and the boot for longer than 3 weeks. So I decided it was healed and limped about for a little while but now all is well. Mostly I was motivated not to have to wear the boot around Florida and get all sweaty and sandy. Joke was on me though because when Gates got down to join me after my conference temps dropped to 60 with winds so strong the waves were up to 10 feet. We still had a blast – I bought some new sweaters and jeans to bundle in as my optimistic for warm weather packing left me with exactly only swim suits and sun dresses – and we did a ton of walking and snacking and sipping. It was glorious. Oh also – I think I was seriously one of the last lucky people to get to go to a theme park before all the shut downs began when I took the afternoon off from one of the conference days to take myself on a little adventure to Universal which was such a blast. The “single rider line” meant I hardly waited for any ride, and got to scream my head off on all the big roller coasters to my heart’s content. We came home the weekend before things really started to get crazy with the virus and honestly feel guilty we were able to get to sneak in our fun while so many people had to cancel their trips not even a week later. I have more than one friend that was planning a trip to Disney with their kids that had to cancel and I feel so terrible for the disappointments so many are dealing with right now. Trips, celebrations, weddings, opportunities, graduations, etc – wish I could fix the sadness and loss that people are dealing with during this crazy time. Hoping everyone starts following the rules soon so we can start to get back on a path to normalcy! Beyond shocked and disappointed by so many who seem to think the recommendations don’t apply to them… Sending a gigantic thank you to every one of you who understand the risk and are committing through your actions to flatten the curve! You are amazing and people like my family with our concern for my super high risk dad thank you from the bottom of our hearts. You’ll be the first on my list for a hug once we are out of this mess.

Coming up – Wisconsin’s greatest season! Even if this craziness drags on throughout the next few months I am fully confident that the sunshine we so rarely get to feel on our faces in this part of the world will heal so much of what ails us. Excited to garden, ride bikes, have bonfires, walk, pick ticks off each other, avoid snakes in the backyard, grill, not see our breath in the air when we breathe, and hopefully just continue to be thankful for all of our incredible blessings. 6 feet apart is a whole lot better than 6 feet under.

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay home!