Day to Day, Kate, Lexi, William

Mother’s Day 2020

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Lexi, William and Kate,

One of my favorite things about Mother’s Day is ability to reflect on the indescribable amount of gratitude I have for all of the mother’s in my life, the role that I play in your lives and the role you play in my life.

The photo below was taken at 9:00 tonight, in the middle of our bedtime routine. It is far from perfect. But I love it. It represents our life today. Blurry. Everyone focused on something else.  Full of laughter and joy.

The three of you are my greatest blessings, best teachers, proudest accomplishment, biggest challenge and without a doubt my biggest worry. It is amazing how you three little can bring so much joy and fear at the same time.

To my first born, Lexi, who made me a mom. You are blossoming into a kind, fun and adventurous little girl. Your teachers say you are kind to all of your classmates and everyone always wants to play with you. You have an incredible imagination and love love to play with your toys and have taught your brother and sister how to use their imaginations as well. You watch out for them, but are extremely competitive and always looking for an opportunity to beat them. You’re weary of new people and experiences and are gaining courage to explore new things and almost always love them. I look forward to reading together at bed each night–hearing you learn to read and reading to you too. I love to hear how you process things in the books, how you’re feeling or just general observations.

To William the Badger, who made me a boy mom. I’m in awe of how thoughtful, tender and caring you are to your sisters, friends and cousins. You just do things (without being asked or told) to be nice to your sisters, like taking their laundry up the stairs or stopping playing because you were worried about Kenzie getting hurt. You have a heart of gold. You rarely talk back or have attitude and just go with the flow. You love learning and only want to read non-fiction books or watch non-fiction shows. You love to run, play soccer, ride your bike, play with your sisters, draw, do puzzles, play dinosaurs and cuddle at night. I love how much comfort you find in us laying with you while you fall asleep, often listening to you ask questions or process the events of the day.

To Kate, the bookend baby in my journey as a mom. You are silly, loud, confident, demanding and joyful. I love watching you experience joy in the small things of life, like a flower, an extra treat, or seeing your nooknee. Your eyes dance with excitement and it is impossible not to smile watching your expressions. You move a million miles a minute and will not be pushed around by your big brother and sister. You love bunnies (nooknees), the color purple, Lexi, Badgie, and being outside. I love when you snuggle your whole body on mine, pull up your shirt and beg for your back to be rubbed.

And to my own mom who has and continues to teach me how to create a warm, safe and nurturing environment for you three kids to grow up in. She taught me the importance of family, built and exposed me to faith, showed the importance of friendship, instilled importance of working hard, the value of a good education, giving back to your community and so much more. But of all of those things the most valuable was giving me the space and ability to figure out how I bring those foundational values elements into our home and family.

Your grammy is a pretty incredible woman and I owe so much of who I am and where I am to her. I pray that if I can be even half of the mom to you three that she was to me, we should be in pretty good shape.

Thank you Lexi, William & Kate for being three of the most incredible and happy things of my life. I love you more than you can ever know.

Love,

Mom

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, Uncategorized, William

Covid 19–week 8

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Lexi, William & Kate,

Deep breaths are things I often remind myself to do. This week was really, really hard for me and felt I was very close to breaking down. Work is crazy busy right now and the lack of routine is making things a bit challenging. It felt like everything was just unraveling. You three kids were running wild and doing whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. Monday afternoon, I came outside to find you had rattled through an entire box of popsicles. You each ate three popsicles one after another, without asking. Toys, dishes and clothes were scattered throughout the house and the attitude, whining and talking back was out of control and we needed to make changes.

First was the toys. Anything that wasn’t picked up off the floor before bed time became mine. After lots of warnings about picking things up, toys were still all over the place when bedtime came. There were some big tantrums thrown as a result, and I picked up an entire bin of toys that became mine until you could go for a week with all toys being put away each night. But, I haven’t had to do it again yet. You have picked things up every night.

Next was having Daddy or I be near you guys at all times and not having both of us try and work at the same time. This allows one of us to actually focus on work and not be distracted by your constant interruptions. This mostly means Daddy has you for the days and I have you guys at night, since I’m in meetings all day.

Next was sticking to the punishments for talking back, doing things without asking and lying. Lots of timeouts were given and Lexi lost TV for the week for lying about the popsicles and blaming it on Luke.

This isn’t perfect and we still need to work on some sort of routine to help make our days more predictable and figure out a better schedule of work for Daddy and I. But, it is a start.

Considering we are 2 months into quarentene, it feels like you guys are pretty unaffected by it. You definitely prefer going to school and learning from your teachers versus us. You have also made some comments like ‘It feels weird to be driving in a car Mom. We don’t really ride in the car anymore.’ You haven’t been into a store since before we went to Florida. Most stores are asking only one person from a family shops and some stores don’t even allow people under the age of 16 inside. Occasionally, Kate will request that she wants to come to the store with me and says, ‘The Virus is all gone away now. I can come with you’. And William refers to it as the Corony Virus. But given all of the changes that you have gone through, you seem to roll through each day unaffected. You love to play with each other more than ever and have even taught Kate how to play your ‘stories’ and rarely, if ever, complain about not being able to do something because of the virus.

As far as the macro-economy goes–over 36 million people have filed for unemployment as businesses have been forced to temporarily close. More than 80,000 people have died in the United States–with more than 80% of them being 80+ years old. Children have been pretty unaffected–meaning they show very mild symptoms or no symptoms. Our official stay-at-home order started March 27th and is expected to lift May 18th as most business have put plans together to re-open in what the government deems a safe way. This mostly means a limited number of people in stores, closed or limited dressing rooms, employees and customers wearing masks and truly going to a store for a given purpose and not to just shop and browse.

One of the most challenging elements of this whole situation is knowing what to believe and how to navigate as a result. Most of the news outlets are telling the narrative that everyone’s life is at risk, which is different than what the actual numbers reflect. Doctors and people that have different opinions or data than what is being shared in the news are silenced. They post something on social media and their posts are removed in what is being stated as a ‘content violation’. Yet nobody can explain what a content violation is? Or why is it a content violation? Are individuals not allowed to have and share different opinions? There are facts out there stating the US was funding the research of the lab where this virus came from in China. There are rumors out there that big pharma companies are behind this. Politicians are taking advantage of this situation by trying to work their personal agendas into bills that need to pass. Then, there are people who won’t see anyone and think they are going to die if they get this virus, which they might, but pretty unlikely based on the numbers being reported. Then, there are people who think this whole thing is completely over-exaggerated and think we should just continue to operate as we normally do. It is confusing and really hard to make decisions on what is OK and what isn’t OK to do.

Hopefully, our stay-at-home order will get lifted next week and we can start to test the waters by opening businesses up and seeing people more freely and pray our medical systems have prepared enough that they can support the individuals that need the medical assistance.

Love,

Mama

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, William

Covid-19 Week 7

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Lexi, William & Kate,

The highlight of this week was spending a few days with Kenzie at our house. Auntie Sheila and Uncle Dustin dropped Kenzie off on Sunday evening as they were preparing to go to the hospital to welcome your new baby BOY cousin, Lincoln, into the world. The weather was amazing so you guys had a lot of fun playing on the swing set, in the sandbox, drawing with chalk, running, reading books and just caring for sweet Kenzie.

It was so fun to watch you all interact together, but it is amazing how quickly I forgot how much work little kids are, changing diapers, getting them down for naps, the extra messes they make and watching them like a hawk to make sure they don’t get hurt or put things in their mouths they shouldn’t.

As a result of the extra attention Kenzie needed, I became much more lax about the school work and started doing most of it at night while the other kids were getting ready for bed. But it kind of worked. We also found out that school will officially be over by May 22nd. At first, I was stressed about this as they are supposed to go to school for another two weeks. As I sat on this information the more OK and relieved I became. It is one less thing to keep track of, worry about, and lets be real… it is getting harder and harder for Lexi to focus and be motivated to do her work. We started off doing all of these extra things to keep a routine as much as possible but, now 7 weeks in, we are doing the bare minimum.

Work has gotten much more stressful. Projects are starting to kick off, which means a lot more meetings and the kids seem to be interrupting a lot more and I’m just having a really hard time focusing and being productive when I need to be. I’ve worked late several nights this week in an attempt to get caught up, but I just never feel like I can dig myself out of the hole I’m in. I’m working on finding time to go for a walk, do yoga and just get some endorphins flowing to help with the anxiety.

With all that said, we have so much to be grateful for and continue to thank God for what we have and what we do know.

Love,

Mama

 

 

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, William Monthly Updates

Covid-19 week 5

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Kiddies,

I’m a week late in documenting this week, so it is going to be short and sweet. After being off for spring break last week, we moved back into the official distance learning thing again and had to re-learn all of the systems and tools again. By the end of the week, we got into more of a rhythm of the different apps used for different subjects. (Benchmark is for reading activities, classkick is where most of the math activities happen, SeeSaw is the main hub of where you get information and submit most of your assignments)

Although William doesn’t have an official program, he is loving learning and going to school. He is getting really good at identifying his letters and learning those tricky teens.

The Easter Bunny brought him a Nerf gun so we put the teen letters up on the wall and used them as a target shooting practice and it was a BIG hit. He has also gotten very close to having both mom and dad’s phone numbers memorized and loves doing little science experiments.

Kate continues to get into anything and everything she can and has a loud an authoritative personality. You are an observant little monkey and are learning how to role play by watching Lexi and William .

On Saturday, Grammy and Papa came over for an Easter visit and we grilled some brats. They ended up coming inside and eating and hanging out and it felt so good to do something remotely normal, but I kind of felt like we needed to hide what we were doing, like people would judge us for seeing someone or getting together. I hugged Grammy good-bye it just felt good to have that hug in time of so much uncertainty.

Sunday was Easter and that bunny was good to you guys. You each got new helmets, bubbles, chalk and loads of candy. William also got a nerf gun and a Osmo coding game for the iPad. Lexi got an LOL pet and an Osmo pizza game for the iPad. Kate got an LOL pet and a bunny shirt and purple bunny dress. We had a nummy breakfast of monkey bread, fruit, breads and pastries from Grammy. Then, Great Grandma came over for dinner and we had Ham, Rolls, Cheesy hash-browns, and green beans.

Love,

Mommy

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, William

Covid-19 Week 4

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Lexi, William and Kate,

Technically, this week was spring break, but your mean-old mom made you do school work all week. It is easier to keep you on a schedule and you already missed a lot of school from vacation.

I was much more relaxed with things though. Your school days started later than we had been and I let you play a lot more. I also didn’t prep on Wednesday night, so you guys just had Thursday off.

Lexi, you are starting to push back more on doing assignments and showing some pretty big attitude. We took away you watching Decendents as there is a bit of lip in that show and it seemed to help a little. This week we worked on short and long vowels–specifically long vowels that have words that end in ‘e’. (Cub, Cube, Sam, Same, pin, pine) In math we reviewed some addition and subtraction and worked on key-words like ‘sum’ ‘difference’ ‘total’ ‘in-addition to’ and practiced telling time on a digital and analog clock as well as learned ‘quarter-after’ and ‘quarter-to’. You wrote letters to Grammy and Ivy and the Easter bunny.

William, you were busy re-creating your Big Book of Dinosaurs book all week for your journal and then were working on the letter ‘N’. For math, you’re working on identifying your tricky teens and memorizing daddy’s phone number.

The weather was pretty nice this week so we got some good outside hours logged. Bonus Grammy came over for another drive-way activity and did some Easter activities with you outside, painting rocks, decorating rocks as bunnies, eating some treats, reading books and making some foam bunnies.

Supplies in stores started to regulate a bit. Still no signs of toilet paper, cleaning wipes or hand sanitizer but milk, eggs, bread and canned goods are more accessible.

This Sunday is Easter so we dyed some Eggs this week and are looking forward to seeing Grammy and Papa tomorrow for a little visit and Great Grandma might come over for dinner on Easter (even though it is technically not allowed. She hasn’t been able to see anyone and don’t want her to be alone on Easter.)

Love,

Mommy

 

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, William

Covid-19 Week 3

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My three munchkins,

Week 1 of distance learning in the books! I mentioned this last week, but the Governor officially closed schools through May 4th, which means teachers and schools are figuring out how to teach kids at home over the next 4 weeks, but likely through the end of the year.

This really only applies to Lexi as Pre-K has paused for William. On Sunday, Miss. Schwartz sent out a guide for the week of the things you will be doing and then each morning uploads the daily assignments into SeeSaw. She records videos of herself providing the instruction or teaching the lesson and then gives you an assignment to do. SeeSaw allows you to write (handwrite or type), draw pictures, upload photos, and even record yourself asking a question as a way to interact with Miss Schwartz. We’re also using a site called class-kick for Math and BenchMark for reading.

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Monday was rough. The SeeSaw app was overloaded with many of the schools using it, I didn’t know the difference between any of these sites or understand the direction to help Lexi know what she was supposed to do. Things took a really long time. She spent over 2 hours doing math problems!

Fortunately, each day got a little easier and by Thursday we were done with assignments a little after lunch time. We’re also learning what works and what doesn’t work. It is really hard to have all three of you working and doing assignments in the same room together. You each need direction and get distracted by each other pretty quickly. Half way through Wednesday, Lexi came into our room and sat at my desk to get some of her work done. I let her listen to some music and it really helped her focus and get through her work faster. It also helped that I was providing her the direction for her assignments verses Daddy. It’s not that Daddy wasn’t being a good teacher, but Daddy hadn’t been going through all of the different apps and schedules and reading all of the emails to figure out what was going on, where I had. So I didn’t have to try and teach daddy who then needed to teach Lexi.

In fact, Daddy has been a great teacher to William. Last week, you were working on the letter ‘T” and the number 9. This week, you were working on the letter ‘R’ and learned almost all of the tricky-teen numbers and is pretty close to having Daddy’s phone number memorized. William, you are LOVING Sampson School. You are eager to learn each day and never complains about your ‘assignments’ for the day and are turning into quite the little artist.

Kate, you are the sweetest tornado you could ever meet. You are constantly snuggling, giving hugs, kisses and tells me ‘I love you mommy’ BUT turns into tornado mode in a flash as she climbs onto the counter and sneaks food, demands to get her way, throws some epic tantrums and can get pretty aggressive (hitting, biting) your two big siblings.

Overall, the week was decent. We had some nice weather that allowed us to get outside. Grammy came over to play with pipe-cleaners with you. She read some stories and you have a snack outside (you all sat in lawn chairs outside at a socially acceptable distance). You kids don’t seem to mind or even notice that you’re not really going anywhere or seeing people and are perfectly content playing at home with each other. There have been very few times where I hear you complain about being ‘bored’. Wednesday was April 1st, which was also the first day of the 30-Day Lego Challenge. Day 1 was build an amusement park.

Lexi definitely gets what’s going on. You have used the analogy of the virus spreading, like the way ink does on paper when you hold it down. The Dot keeps getting bigger and bigger and that is like more and more people getting the virus. But overall, you seem pretty unfazed about the whole thing.

For me, things got a little better at work. It wasn’t as crazy as the last two weeks have been and am learning how to be more productive. Our stores continue to stay closed and we are paying our retail employees another two weeks, but after that we’ll see what happens. There were also some hints about some things changing at corporate temporarily to help manage cash flow, so praying that mine and my team’s jobs won’t be impacted.

Similar to Mom, Dad is adjusting to everyone being home. He had gotten into a good rhythm of figuring out how to get his work done while Lexi and William were at school/ in the evenings and now he has to get everything done at night–which is a lot harder and mentally taxing. But hopefully with Mom teaching Lexi and Dad teaching William that will reduce some of the chaos and noise and make things a little more manageable

Next week is officially ‘spring break’ so we’re switching back into Sampson school for the week. Look forward to another riveting update of Covid-19 Week 4.

Love,

Mama

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, William

Covid-19 Week 2

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My three little munchkins,

All the days and events are just starting to blur together. The virus, society, the government  and work continue to change at morph speed and you can’t keep up with what is what. Our Best Buy stores closed for customers to enter them on Sunday and we transformed to a curbside only pick-up. Considering I support the mobile business and almost all of our sales are done in store, we had some pretty big changes to make as we modify to helping customers navigate the idea of buying a cell phone online, which is uncomfortable for a lot of people.

Then on Friday–Minnesota officially when to ‘shelter-in-place’, which basically means all non-essential businesses/services are closed. Grocery, gas, connivence, liquor, and hardware stores, daycare and take-out restaurants are open. Everything else is closed and people are encouraged to stay home. The governor also announced that schools will be closed until May 4th, at the earliest. So starting on Monday, we will officially transition to distance learning.

From a ‘Sampson schooling perspective’ I felt like we were starting to get into a decent rhythm. Kids got paint by sticker and do a dot daubers and have been super excited to use them all week. They are fantastic for Kate as she can do little worksheets in her activity book, while the kids are doing their activities. Things we are working on this week: learning our address, memorizing dad’s phone number, learning to write Sampson, telling time, lots of read-out-loud, tons of coloring, spelling words, journaling, each morning, verbs, nouns, prefixes and suffixes, exploding snowman science project, the letter ‘T’ and the number 9, and some good old outside play time.

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Kate’s world has been turned upside down and inside out and she just doesn’t know how to process it all. She is getting the least amount of attention as Daddy and I are focused on learning activities for Lexi and William and she doesn’t understand why she can’t sit on my lap at any given moment throughout the day.  Kate, you have become very attached to Momma and want demand to be carried everywhere. With everything going on, it is hard to stop and remind myself what this looks like from a 2-year-old’s perspective. You’re used to quiet Daddy-time 3 days a week for 6+ hours. To suddenly have everyone home and stealing the attention you used to get can be some tough cookies.

Kate juice

To sum everything up, things could definitely be worse. I feel good we’ve been keeping you on a good schedule and you haven’t been watching a TON of TV–but it is hard to keep you focused and all of you pre-occupied at the same time. It is mentally exhausting to balance working and participating on conference calls, making sure Daddy can work, and you guys do some stuff and don’t watch TV all day.

But, we are healthy, have lots of food to eat, plenty of toilet paper, a roof over our heads and jobs to pay our bills and our faith, which is a lot more than many other people can say. So I’m choosing to be grateful for everything we do have, including the three of you.

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Love,

Mama

 

Covid-19, Kate, Lexi, William

Covid-19 Week 1

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Dear kiddos,

Check Mark. We survived the first official week of social/distancing–which has really turning into social isolation for Covid-19.

Although SVDP, technically had school on Monday–we kept you guys home. It sounded like it was mostly for people who needed to figure out childcare, get assignments/technology or medicine and since we didn’t have to worry about any of that, we kept you home. I went to work for a half day to get a few things and then came home and got things set up.

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Over the weekend, I explained to you and William there is a virus going around and we can’t go to school for awhile because we need to help slow down the rate at which people get it. BUT, that means we’re going to have Sampson school each day. We will do our best to make it fun, have play time, but we’re also going to have learning time and we need them to be good cooperators with it.

Monday night, I looked through all of the items that were sent home and was completely overwhelmed trying to figure out what your day should actually look like and what work we should be giving you. Thankfully, someone I follow on Instagram has a first grader and is a former teacher, so followed a similar approach to how she was structuring her day. For William, I just guessed on a whole bunch of stuff.

I also worked on setting up and organizing each of your work spaces to make it a little bit more exciting. You each have your rack of activities, a cup of pencils, colored pencils and markers.

Tuesday was filled with a lot of excitement and equal parts groaning and complaining from all parties. Nobody wanted to get dressed, brush their hair or teeth, but were excited about their work spaces and the worksheets. Go figure. I did my best to work, but there was lots of interruptions, distractions etc… and I really didn’t get any work done, respond to any emails, was just on a few conference calls. By the end of the day, I felt so exhausted and defeated. I felt guilty for not being very productive at work and discouraged that this school thing was going to be even harder than I had originally thought. BUT, Daddy did manage to help you decorate and build leprechaun traps.

That evening my leader at work sent an email to everyone sharing her Day 1 experiences and talked about how she wasn’t very productive with all the distractions and it was hard and is going to take time for all of us to adjust to this. I’m so grateful to be working for leaders that are so supportive and understanding in hard times like this. It makes the hard things a million times easier.

After the kids went to bed, I went through the school materials again and put together another schedule, that was similar, but tried to mix up activities and what not.

Wednesday morning was met with some pushback on the usual getting dressed and brushing of teeth and hair, but it was a tiny bit better. Overall, the school part of the day went better. I was a little more productive at work and I could see the kids were actually learning. It also helped that you went on a field trip to Great Grandma’s house to visit and brighten her day.

Wednesday night I prepped again and was feeling more confident in the schedule, how to break the day up how much time it takes for things to be done.

Overall, Thursday was pretty good. There was less push-back from you kids, Kate was wanting to learn, Daddy was doing an awesome time keeping you guys focused and helping you through your assignments. I had a lot of conference calls, which made things tough to stay focused in my chair that long and that I wasn’t able to help out as much with some of the school stuff.

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By Thursday evening as I was lesson planning, I felt like I was in a good rhythm. I was understanding the packets of info better and was getting ideas on how I could start to build different schedules out for each day of the week so it requires less planning on my behalf each night. Work that day went a little better too. We started to leverage the web-cam, which felt awkward at first, but made it so much easier to connect with people. We even had a virtual happy hour together.

As I was lesson planning for the Friday, was reflecting on how much easier things got as the week went on. I also felt like I was spending more quality time with the kids, was actually making decent meals, was decently caught up on laundry and the house wasn’t a complete disaster. So despite all of the really hard and challenging things happening, I’m also seeing some great benefits too. It is forcing us to slow down. We aren’t even half or a quarter as busy as a lot of other families, but the fact that I’m not rushing home to quickly make dinner and run to an activity or get baths done is really nice. If the kids go to bed a little later, that is OK because they don’t have to wake up at a certain time, and if we don’t get bathed tonight, we can easily do it tomorrow. I love having the time to play Sorry! together as a family after dinner or time the kids riding their bikes up and down the sidewalk. I’m hoping these aren’t novelty moments and continue as the weeks unfold.

Finally, Friday was not the smoothest. Daddy took you to Great Grandma’s and Aggies for a visit and a few of you were pretty naughty. Work was also pretty crazy. On Wednesday, they announced store hours were being reduced and starting on Monday, they would limit the amount of customers in store. They were also modifying how Geek Squad, Delivery/Install and In Home Advisors reduce their face-to-face interactions with customers. Then today, some governments decided the products we sell are no longer deemed as ‘essential’ and our stores must close. As a result, starting on Sunday, all of our stores will be closed and only available for customers to pick up products at curbside. I spent the afternoon developing new messaging to support this change as well as reviewing all the existing messages we have in place that need to be updated.

Hopefully the work craziness will subside a little next week and we’ll get into a good rhythm of Sampson school.

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Love,

Mama

Kate, Lexi, William

Covid-19 unfolds

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Lexi, William and Kate,

I know you’re pretty young to remember some of this, but this is a moment that will be written into history books and talked about for many years to come. The only other moment in my life that is somewhat comparable to this is 9/11. That was sad and scary–but this one just feels surreal and crazy, at least at this moment (1 weeks in)

We’ll start with the basics of what the heck is going on and then get into how we survived week 1.

First, Covid-19 (also known as Coronavirus) is a virus similar to the flu, but is much more contagious and can have some respiratory challenges. It is most dangerous to the elderly 70+ population. It was first identified in China in January of 2020 and turned their world upside down. Then in late February, early March a few cases were identified in the US, but nobody thought too much of it–at least from my perspective. As the days rolled on, more and more cases were popping up–with the first one in Minnesota in early March. Queue some initial discussion and lots of warnings about washing your hands, not touching your face etc…which basically cleared out hand sanitizer and cleaning wipes from stores. Don’t travel if you don’t have to etc…But for the most part, business was as normal.

Then, on the day we flew home from Florida (March 11), things started to get crazy. This was identified as a pandemic–which is a world-wide crisis (verses just a regional one). The cases in Minnesota grew. Each day hour things got a little crazier. Universities started canceling in-person classes and going to virtual only. Major sporting events were canceled (NBA, NHL, MLB, March Madness) DisneyWorld closed (we barely squeaked that one in!) and concerts and conferences were canceled.

On Thursday, my work declared that Tuesday, the 17th, would be a mandatory work from home day to test things out, if we needed to go that direction.

On Friday, March 13th, Lexi came home with a folder of school work to do, in the event that schools close. On my way home from work, I stopped by the grocery store to pick up a few things since our house was empty from vacation. There was very little pasta and pretty much no bread in the stores.

Things kept getting crazier and crazier. The phrase ‘social-distancing’ was introduced, which means they don’t want people within 6 feet of each other and shouldn’t be in groups larger than 25-50 people. With the West Coast schools closing, I had a gut feeling of where things were going, so I headed to Costco 45 min before it opened on Sunday, thinking it might open early and sure enough it did. Outside of chicken and organic ground beef, they had pretty much everything in stock. Toilet paper, paper towels, milk, bread etc…(these items had become scare over the last few days). While there, Auntie Shelia texted saying the Minnesota Governor closed public schools for two weeks, so I added a few more things to the over-flowing cart to make sure we were stocked up. Then, I headed over to Target. The medicine isle was completely empty, no bread, very little pasta and canned goods. I stocked up the best I could, even getting Easter treats in case the stores closed.

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On Monday, I went into work for a video meeting, got my monitor, other supplies and then headed home. I stopped by school to pick up a packet of work for William and we began our time at home, together.

To further explain some of these drastic measures.

This virus is extremely contagious and has a 2% mortality rate, officials are worried terrified if we don’t take these measures and slow the rate down that people interact with one another and therefore, spread this virus, that too many people will get sick all at the same time and we won’t have enough medical staff, beds, or equipment to take care of people. This exact scenario is happening in Italy, Spain and other European countries. Medical officials are literally having to choose who lives and who dies. It is terrible. Medical and government officials are trying to prevent that from happening here. The challenge is, everyone has an opinion. Many of these people are credentialed or at least sound like it and it is really hard to decipher what is going on. You can find a credentialed person to support whatever you want, which makes it challenging to know what the right thing to do is.

Stay tuned for our weekly survival update.

Love,

Mama

 

family vacations, florida, Kate, Lexi, William

Panama City 2020

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Lexi, Badger and Kate,

Following our whirlwind trip to DisneyWorld that you can read about here, here, here and here, we rented an car to begin phase 2 of our vacation: visiting Grammy and Papa in Panama City Beach.

Daddy took an Uber to the car rental location on Thursday morning and we got upgraded to a TaHoe (we had rented a mini van) and barely squeezed our 2 strollers and luggage in, even though we didn’t bring a lot of stuff.

The ride was about 5 – 6 hours from Orlando to PBC and I was thinking it was going to be pretty brutal. But you guys were awesome and needed very little screen time. You actually didn’t get out of the car for the entire trip. I can’t believe that nobody had to go to the bathroom.

Upon arrival, Papa was of course downstairs waving both arms high up in the air to welcome all of us. We headed up to their beautiful wrap condo and got settled in and shared all sorts of fun stories about Disney.

Overall, this part of the trip was just about relaxing and enjoying the sunshine, the beach, the pool and the golf course. Daddy golfed everyday, which he thoroughly enjoyed. Four rounds at Signal Hills and one round at Windswept dunes. I joined him for 2 1/2 rounds.

William came down with some kind of little bug that had him feeling a warm, pretty tired and just not himself. After about two days of being under the weather, he woke up and complained of not being able to walk, which went on for about 2-3 hours. We were about to head to the Emergency room and he started walking, but had a very funny wobble, almost as if we was trying to walk while sitting on a pole. Dr. Google didn’t have good things to suggest on what this could mean, so around 3:00 we headed to urgent care. The first one we went to wasn’t opened (it was a Sunday) and the second one sent us straight to the ER; which was not a good few hours for your worry-wart mama. After about 2-3 hours they, William started feeling better and even ran down the hallway–so we headed home, un-diagnosed and he has been fine ever since. Very great full it wasn’t something serious and now, looking back makes me wonder if it wasn’t related to corona virus.

Other highlights of the trip were lots of time playing with second cousins Ruby and Pearl, who were just down the hallway from us, Survivor-type challenges on the beach, jumping the waves, feeling the warm sunshine, playing cards, mini-golfing, swimming, sunsets and spending lots of good quality time with Grammy and Papa.

After 5 wonderful days, our week and a half vacation was coming to an end. We left Wednesday morning at 6:00 in the morning, headed to Atlanta and then back to MSP around 1:30 in the afternoon. By this time, things with Covid-19 were just starting to get interesting. My trip to CA had gotten canceled while and most business travel was canceled. The airports were busy, but we were much more cautious than normal about wiping things down, using hand sanitizer.