Goodness it has been a while. Definitely the longest I’ve ever gone without writing in this space since I started this blog back in 2007. Seriously, I went back and looked. Longest I’ve ever been away. Leave it up to a world pandemic to jack everything up! And I miss writing so much. I miss documenting and story telling and rambling. I miss you guys. I miss it all.
I left off at the end of February when toilet paper wasn’t a rare commodity, school and carpool pickups were still a thing, being around actual human beings was cool and parties weren’t a thing of the past. Then March hit and our world went nuts and then pretty much caught on fire and burned to the ground. 🙂
I’ll give you a quick recap. We sold our house and bought a new house and then had to have our entire house packed up and ready to go before we left on a family trip to Ethiopia in early March. Tornados then hit Nashville right before we left. While we were in Ethiopia the world went nuts with a pandemic, the last two days of our trip was cancelled due to a Level 4 travel alert issued by the US State Department and then we…along with every other US citizen & green card holder in Ethiopia…rushed to fly out of Addis back to the US…people were literally wearing hazmat suits and full on respirators…like nothing I’ve ever seen or experienced…more on that later. 🙂 We made it home and the next day had our final walk-thru on our new home and finished packing, the next day packed up our house in a Uhaul & celebrated Amon’s 8th birthday and the next day we closed on both houses and moved solo with 6 kiddos in tow all thanks to COVID 19. I have never been so tired in my entire life. Jet lag and moving with just Josh and myself was INSANE!!!! Then school was cancelled forever and ever and ever and Josh has been working from home and I have been feeding and refereeing and schooling all the childrens along with processing sadness, grief & depression. Oh and ALL OF THIS really rocked Leo’s world so he hasn’t slept in 64 days so we are also zombies.
I know so many of you can relate x 1000 because this pandemic and quarantine has been so hard on so many people for so many many different reasons. We are 64 days into this thing and I still don’t feel like I have my footing. I know some of you can relate to this too. I thought I’d found a routine and then I didn’t. This has only highlighted my grief like putting a big spotlight on it and quarantine has made me feel pretty alone and isolated. Everyone misses what we used to call life and we miss our people. I miss hugs the most! I’m a total hugger and what I wouldn’t give to squeeze a human not named Josh Kelley, Harper, Hudson, Solomon, Amon, Winter or Leo. 🙂 And with 3 kiddos…2 complex CHDs and 1 with asthma…we’ll be sitting tight for a while longer. My brain just doesn’t understand how all this shakes out.
When we first got home from Ethiopia we would watch the news every morning. We were about 2 weeks behind the rest of the US so we went into a bit of a pandemic shock upon returning home. I mean we only had 2 rolls of toilet paper back at home!!!!! I made Harper put whatever rolls of toilet paper we had left in our hotel room in Ethiopia in her suitcase to carry home. We’d heard what we were returning home to, but we didn’t really fully understand it until we were immersed in it.
On our last plane ride home we were 8 of 14 passengers on board. We closed on our house in our car. They placed the papers outside their door in a closed envelope with two brand new pens and gloves. In our car we put on our gloves, signed papers as they went over them via speaker phone, placed the papers back in the envelope & sealed it, then threw away the gloves and pens and placed the envelope back outside the office and returned to our car. WHAT IN THE ACTUAL WORLD. Hudson and Winter got strep throat right when we got back and I was for sure they had coronavirus. Hudson was convinced as well. My state of anxiety has never been higher.
Shortly after moving I had to get groceries for the first time. I was so nervous and sweaty. I also had not thought through how wearing my mask with my glasses and breathing would cause my glasses to remain foggy the entire trip. I went right when Kroger opened up on a week day morning and by the time I got my groceries there was a long line down the center aisle to check out, but hardly anyone in self check out. So I took almost $300 worth of groceries through self checkout. I got called out immediately because I had two 6 packs of toilet paper and didn’t know there was a limit of one per household. I pleaded my case as a family of 9, but no go. A kind lady grabbed them out of my cart and bought them for me and insisted I not pay her back. Her treat. I cried. When my total was around $260 my machine froze up. The kind self checkout cashier tried helping, but alas. So we started filling my cart with my bagged groceries and she moved me to her own machine. As she was scanning the last of my produce I dropped an entire container of blueberries all over the floor by one of the exits. Blueberries everywhere. At this point I had sweated through my shirt and in my foggy glasses was frantically trying to pick blueberries up off the floor. I finally paid and left ripping my facemask off in the parking lot and tossing it in a trash can. As I was loading my car I found two 6 packs of beer I had not paid for hidden under all the bags. Normally I would have gone back in and paid for them, but I took one look at that beer and then back at the store and then at my sweaty pit stained shirt and said to myself, “No way in hell.”
And that about sums up our quarantine experience so far. Hahahahaha. We are staying home and Josh or myself are only going out for groceries or for Leo’s blood draws. We’re ordering groceries when we can. And even after 64 days I still get stressed and anxious if I have to go into a store. Even more so when I have to take Leo out. He’s the only one who has weekly medical appointments we still have to attend and what I really want to do is stick him in a bubble. We are doing all the things we are supposed to do, but it was very sobering to hear his cardiologist talk about the precautions we should be taking with our children. Even though Leo’s little heart got a great report I still sat in my car afterwards and just cried. It feels really heavy and hard and sad right now. It just feels like a lot.
So I’ll wrap it up with a few numbers. We’ve taken approximately 1,564 walks/bike rides. We’ve gone through 822 individual bags of chips, 32 family sized bags of peanut butter M&Ms, 10,000 pieces of bread and Harper has made 170 batches of chocolate chip cookies. We’ve watched 389 movies and our kids have spent 800,000 hours playing video games or on the iPad watching brainless youtube videos. We’ve downloaded 65 new educational apps and used 2 of them them twice. We’ve logged onto 243 zoom calls and I’ve cursed 605,893 times…there’s been a lot of cursing. And the tears, how do you even keep count of those. And we’re still here. Still making it. Still holding on tight. Still feeling crazy. Still waking up each morning baffled by how we got here. Still angry. Still sad. Still in awe of the beauty around us. Still knowing we’re the luckiest. Still jaded. Still stubborn hope holders. And still looking for those bright spots in the darkness because they are always there.
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