Day Four: (Tuesday, March 17th)

Today I decide to put on makeup. I don’t really know why since I have been wearing the same clothes for three days.  But even though I am doing my part in conserving detergent, somehow the laundry is piling up.  How can so many clothes be dirty when WE AREN’T EVEN LEAVING THE HOUSE?? I call a family meeting to discuss laundry rules: Pajamas can be worn more than once.  Pants can probably be worn twice.  Shirts and underwear go in the laundry at the end of the day.  People pretend to listen.

Speaking of rules, it has only been four days and the “stockpile” of food I wrestled for last week is diminishing faster than you can say, “Who ate the last apple?” Which happens to be exactly what I say when things come to a head.  Like some sort of combat warlord, I start telling the kids they can have only one non-water drink a day.  “These Gatorade and ICEE’s and La Croix are expensive and not meant for casual drinking!!  I show my proficiency for homeschooling by inserting division into everyday conversation. If we have a total of 30 cans and bottles, at four people having two a day, we will be out in FOUR DAYS, people!”

Meanwhile, Franny has continued to keep her earbuds in non-stop.  Even while doing homework she is talking to her friends.  Most of the time I can’t tell if she’s talking to me or them.  When she doesn’t have the earbuds in, she is face-timing with them.  I make a mental note to make sure I am always dressed when I walk into her room after I see a friend’s dad in the background of one of the calls.

Day Five: (Wednesday, March 18th)

By Wednesday I have lost track of what day it is.  Are we at the weekend yet?  Is it still March?  Did I miss a big holiday or anything?  It rains all day so being stuck inside is making things worse. And even though the days are long, for some reason the evening always seems to arrive too quickly with my kids asking, “What’s for dinner?”

Menu I made to make things seem more fun around the house.  Notice all the meat crossed out as my attempt to be funny!  It did not work. They tossed it aside and asked for plain waffles.

Did I mention we are fasting from meat for Lent?  As if it weren’t bad enough to be sitting around eating all day with nowhere to go, we are surviving on carbs and junk food.  I started out with high hopes that I would create a meal plan of 14 healthy and varied meals and rotate through them three times leaving some days for leftovers and eating out. Unfortunately, eating out is no longer an option. And “left-overs” don’t really exist with four people in the house.  Add that to the fact that my kids don’t want to eat anything with eggs, tuna, or beans in it, and we are down to a rotation of pizza, pasta, and soup and salad every three days.  Not even kidding.  I am like Fat Bastard over here shouting at everything in my line of sight, “Get in my BELLY!”

Day Six (Thursday, March 19th) 

It’s raining again.  If it weren’t for this being another e-learning day, I would be huddled in the corner in the fetal position.  This is the day I hit my low point.  (But remember, I am blogging a week behind here, so hindsight has shown me I am nowhere near my low point).  Adding to my irritation,  Ted has been randomly quoting The Shawshank Redemption to anyone and no one.  I finally reach the end of my patience and yell “Just so you know, the more you talk the more you end up in the blog!  Anything you say CAN and WILL be used against you!”

But those stories I will save for next week. 🙂

Day Two (Sunday, March 15th)

Day Two starts much the same as Day One, except we don’t sleep in as late.  I refuse to give up my routine of my daily Starbucks. At this point, the stores are still open and I can drive-thru and just spray down my drink when I get home.  It’s a sunny day and we go for a family walk with the dog and wave to the rest of the neighborhood from six feet away.  Franny builds another fort in her bedroom and Teddy and Ted drive around a bit so Teddy can get credit for some Driver’s Ed hours.  We finish our Monopoly game and start Risk.

I peruse Facebook to see that even though it’s only been two days, people are taking advantage of the free time and using Facebook for what it’s truly meant for: making you feel bad about yourself.  One person remodeled her entire bathroom yesterday.  Another one painted her living room.  Someone taught herself to knit and has draped the entire neighborhood canine society in scarves.  Don’t forget about the lady who made a scavenger hunt inside her house for her kids.  My feed is filled with Rube Goldberg machines made voluntarily.  What on earth?  Coloring and art projects and homemade applesauce.  Here I am feeling good about the fact I have taken over Europe in Risk, meanwhile, Next-Door-Nancy has already sewed 400 face masks for the local senior citizen home!  Not even a pandemic can stop the competition.

I decide to start MY big project for the day which is cleaning the refrigerator.  It ends up taking me five days.  Pop quiz: How soon after you clean the doors of the fridge will the handles become sticky again?  Answer: About five minutes.

This is pretty close to how it went down:

3pm: Wipe down handles                                                                                                       3:15pm: Notice they are sticky and wipe them down again.                                          3:20pm: Notice they are crusty and wipe them down again.                                          3:25pm: Notice they are sticky and wipe them down again.

You get the picture. For a group of people who are supposed to be washing their hands diligently, someone in this house is cutting corners.  I stop JUST SHORT of checking hands to find the culprit.  This goes on all day until I give up.

Side note: You may be wondering why I was opening the fridge door every 5 minutes.  SHUT. UP.  That’s why.

Day 3 (Monday, March 16)

Ted goes in to work!  I mean, Ted goes in to work.  (See blog from 10/18/18 “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” to see how I feel about Ted working from home).  It feels more like a normal day so I pretend it is. The kids and I take a long drive to go get my contacts (a necessity for sure) and stop at Target on the way home.  I make the kids stay in the car while I get the necessities. It turns out the necessities are Pringles and crackers and trail mix and coffee and chocolate chips and Cinnamon Toast Crunch. I also catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror and realize I don’t have any makeup on.  I hadn’t even realized.  It only took three days for me to let myself go.

Later that day, e-learning emails start to arrive. Apparently, the superintendent told the teachers to send things in triplicate.  They arrive via email. And Seesaw.  And Twitter.  They arrive for each child.  They from every teacher.  I mean EVERY teacher.  Don’t forget to practice your instrument! Art projects are due on Tuesday! The gym teacher says play dodgeball with your siblings! The music teacher says sing sing sing! The soccer coach said practice your skills 30 minutes a night!  The band teacher sent you trombone BINGO!  Much to my children’s dismay, there is even VIRTUAL SUNDAY SCHOOL!!

And let’s not forget the suggestions from social media resources.  There are virtual museum tours and free scholastic websites and online national parks tours and don’t forget to watch the otters getting fed at noon and Josh Gad is reading to kids at night and also Mo Willems is doodling at lunch…😂😂  SO MUCH FREE TIME!!!  This quarantine is going to be soooo relaxing.  I think I’ll go refinish my floors.  

It seems March 2020 has been canceled. (and yes, spellcheck just informed me I spelled canceled wrong.) This whiteboard, which is usually bursting with color-coded activities, is blank. We even made a paper chain to get us through the next three weeks because quite frankly, the only way I can cope is by thinking in terms of three weeks.

Every generation has their world life event that they look back on and remember with extreme clarity.  For my parents’ generation, it was JFK getting shot.  For me, the tragedy of September 11th is ingrained in my memory.

I hope my children don’t have too many of these events in their life.  But I know that this quarantine will be one of them.  Someday, they will look back at their life and count this as a surreal point in time.  And we are just beginning. How I felt Friday is completely different from how I felt Tuesday and how I feel today.  Things are changing so quickly that I have no idea what will be going on in the world next week or tomorrow.

DON’T STOP READING…IT’S GOING TO GET FUNNY!!

First, let me start by issuing a disclaimer.  I am taking this virus very seriously.  My intention is not to be flippant about the severity of what’s happening.  But we could all use a little humor and let’s face it, staying at home with all of our family members for an unlimited amount of time is going to be HARD.  That being said, being at home with all of our family members is also going to be HUMOROUS.  Even if it is the kind of “I want to strangle you right now but someday we will look back on this and laugh” sort of humor.

So please enjoy my online journal as I document my time as a mother, cook, maid, laundress, mediator, and now, homeschool parent.

Side note: It’s too bad that I used the intro to the Real World when I blogged about my summer vacation last year because honestly, there is no better description right now than those words: This is the true story, of four family members, stuck in a house, living together, working together, except we can’t leave.  Find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.

Day One: (Saturday, March 14th)

No one gets out of bed until noon.  This is not a lie.  It’s almost as if we live in the southern hemisphere and have no idea if it’s day or night with nothing to do and endless amounts of time to do it.  It is day one and the kids are happy.  They both texted me from school yesterday excited they had so much time off.  Franny spends most of the day making a fort in her room.  I can hardly believe it. Maybe this will be a time for renewed creativity?  Back to the good old days before technology!  Nope, it turns out, she has been face-timing with all of her friends the entire time.  And when I say face-timing with her friends, I mean SEVEN GIRLS are talking to each other at the same time in their respective forts.  Good thing we are past the days of shared data plans.  She asks if she can hang out with them.  Ummm…you ARE hanging out with them.  And also…UMMM…NO?  Why do you think there is no school? We are supposed to be staying AWAY from people.  She spends approximately 8 hours on the phone with them, but she is keeping herself busy and she isn’t on traditional electronics so I’m ok with this virtual “hang.”

Teddy also asks if he can hang at his friend’s house?  UMMM NO?  I am not understanding why everyone thinks this is some fun vacation.  He is MAD.  He decides that if it’s too dangerous to hang with four kids at a house, then certainly 100 are too many to be with tomorrow at church.  He announces he will NOT be going to church for safety purposes.  Unlike his sister, he has not made any sort of a fort and I assume is not talking with his friends since as far as I am aware, he DOESN’T SEEM TO KNOW HOW TO ANSWER TEXTS OR PHONECALLS.   He settles for playing Xbox all day.

Later that night church is canceled.  It’s an unprecedented move and stunning to the church metropolis.  I can tell from my kids’ faces they are torn between fear (things are bad if church services are canceled) and masked glee (we are getting a vacation from church!)  I guess they have momentarily forgotten their dad can find an online Divine Liturgy faster than he can sniff out the last banana.

We end the night playing Monopoly.  A game I usually groan at, but since we have all the time in the world and still like each other, it seems appropriate.  I am out sooner than you should be while playing Monopoly, even WITH houses on all the yellow properties and Boardwalk.

Today has seemed ok and like a regular weekend.  We order pizza and still hand cash to the driver with a shared wink, haha, this will be over soon and see you next Saturday.  (oh, yes, hindsight tells us that next Saturday I will be choosing between “contactless delivery” and “curbside pickup”.)

Day one is in the books and we still have hope.  I can DO this for three weeks.

Post note: I realize I am a week behind.  Believe it or not, I have been busy with all this “time off” and so I am playing some catch up here. But honestly, does it even matter?  At this point, I don’t even know what day it is.  And let’s face it, how much stuff can happen within my four walls?  Also, my mental health may get to a state where these diary entries might get ugly.

When I was in high school I tried out for the Cheerleading/Pom squad three times. If you are one of my children you know how this ends. I did not make the team. Not the first time. Not the second time. And certainly not the third time where I was laughing so hard at the absurdity of it all I could barely get through the “original routine” part of the tryout.

I guess no one wants to see a short Greek girl hopping around to Huey Lewis’ “Back in Time,” complete with hand motions that included pointing to my wrist where a watch would be in order to illustrate the “time” component.  It was horrible. And awesome. And funny. And I tell this story all the time.  So often, in fact, that when I felt stuck last week and asked my brother what I should write about he said: “Make it about the Pom squad.”  You would think after two years of writing this blog I would have exhausted my embarrassing stories, but I guess not. In my defense, I had to be talked into that third try-out.

Here’s the thing: I am not graceful.  I am not delicate.  I am not even athletic.  Once, several years ago, I tried to hit a baseball during Teddy’s batting practice. I just wanted to see if I could do it.  Someone videoed me, and honestly, it was painful to watch.  And not just the batting. If you are in the least bit clunky, I do not recommend watching yourself run to first base. You can never unsee that image.

Of course, none of these challenges stopped me from entering the Jr. Miss contest senior year of high school. I am laughing just writing this. What business did I have participating in a beauty pageant? (I would imagine in this day and age this contest does not exist anymore or is called something else).  I am not sure if I simply had unwarranted confidence or if I was just “too dumb to doubt,” but there I was, in my formal gown, sashaying to Aquarius by The Fifth Dimension.  We actually had a detachable cape that we used as a prop for our choreographed poise and appearance routine.

Next came the physical fitness routine.  I’m sure you can guess how well I did, so I won’t bother to elaborate. I seem to remember jumping around in a sparkly leotard and tuxedo jacket with tails.  The third category was talent. While the other girls played the piano, sang, or did gymnastics, I chose to dance.  Nope.  Not what you’re thinking. It was GREEK FOLK DANCING. And there is nothing elegant about it. I mean, how much worse can it get than me stomping around in a costume from the 1800s while everyone else is prancing around in sequins and sparkles?  Once again I will ask myself the question I have asked myself almost every time I write a blog.  What were my parents thinking?  Why didn’t someone put me in piano lessons when I was 7 or 8 like the other parents’ did? Why not a tap class here or there?  I wasn’t even in Little League. I did try church basketball once but my contact fell out during my very first game and that was the end of that.

Back to the pageant. So even though I struggled through the dancing and the tumbling and sashaying, the joke ended up being on all the other girls.  And you want to know why? Because the SCHOLARSHIP portion of the contest counted for FIFTY PERCENT of the total score!!  YES!! And everyone knows you can’t be pretty AND smart!!  (Just kidding, just kidding).

While all the cool kids were playing sports and taking dance classes and going to the beach and having friends and generally just having fun at parties, I was at home reading and doing homework.  Well, I’m sure you can guess how that paid off.  (HINT: Not socially).  But I ACED that 50% of the Jr. Miss pageant. Bumped me right up to third runner-up.  I don’t think anyone in my family (let alone me) could believe it.

Side Note: The winner of Clarkston’s Jr. Miss 1987 was my then (and still now) BFF Mary Ellen.  This was not a surprise as Mary Ellen singlehandedly disproves the “you can’t be pretty and smart” theory.  She is also kind and funny and totally deserving of winning blah blah blah. Someday I will write an entire blog on how Mary Ellen Wins at Life but then I will have to let her write a rebuttal probably titled,  “You guys I’m not perfect” so that day is not today.

Here is where there is usually a “lesson learned” wrap up. And I won’t let you down. Years later, when I was in sales, I used to read a lot of motivational training books.  One of these offered a somewhat novel point of view for the time.  It recommended that you forget about practicing hard on what you’re NOT good at.  Instead, just work harder on what you ARE good at and get GREAT at that.  Reading this book was liberating. Forget about “I think I can I think I can”…maybe just accept I CAN’T! Why should I try to throw a frisbee or toss a ball?  Everyone knows I’m not going to catch it back. Why keep trying to make intricate cakes? Time and experience have shown me I CANNOT decorate a cake! This philosophy gave me permission to quit.  I was DONE trying to iron shirts! Done trying to swim laps and only make it halfway across the pool!  No more guilt over getting that cleaning lady…I can’t help it if I am no good at scrubbing toilets.  From that point on, I started to focus on the things I WAS good at.

So if you need me, I’ll be at Starbucks focusing on getting GREAT at things like telling jokes, making fun of people, speaking impulsively, playing the Yahtzee app, relaxing, scrolling the internet, and curating an entire Twitter feed of dog videos. Wish me luck.

Happy New Year!  It’s been a while. I took some time off but I’m back with a new entry.  And appropriately, this one is about what I learned last year.  Specifically, what I learned last year about the small community I live in.

And what I learned is that a heck of a lot more people in Downers Grove own turtles as pets than I would have guessed.  Yep, that’s it.  You know what else?  I had no idea how often and seemingly quickly these suckers can escape.  Last year there were a bunch of lost tortoises running (very slowly I’m thinking) around town. What on earth could account for this new trend?

I think it all started with the coyotes.  Like many small towns, we have an app/website called Nextdoor. It’s an electronic bulletin board for neighbors to use for communication. You can sell things, buy things, recommend businesses, ask for recommendations, and in some cases, simply complain. At its best, this is a place to buy a second-hand piano or sell your treadmill.  At its worst, it is a place where people who apparently don’t want to go to Target ask an entire community if “anyone has any extra scissors lying around” so they can avoid spending any money. I mean, geez lady, go to Jewel and get the damn scissors!!

So about a year ago people started posting on Nextdoor about the coyotes they were seeing around the neighborhood. I cannot overemphasize the sheer amount of posts about the whereabouts of the coyotes in our town. Did someone have trackers on them that we didn’t know about it?

I’m going to assume that for those who check email incessantly, these notifications may have been helpful. Like a Life360 for wildlife. You could find out, say, if you were walking your dog on 59th and Washington, if there was a coyote snooping around there. But for those of us who don’t read emails at the moment they arrive, these posts seemed silly and pointless. Why do I care that there was a coyote down the street this morning while I was at Starbucks work? It was becoming an epidemic. Not the coyotes, the reporting of them.  No matter how often and commonplace the coyotes became, people kept going on about them as if they were a novel occurrence.  Nevertheless, they persisted. Again, the reporting, not the coyotes.

And then came the comments.  Always the comments.  The same ones.

“We are taking over their habitat, not the other way around!”

“Leave them alone they won’t hurt you!”

“Put your small dogs inside!” (not much of a help when it was posted at 9am and you are checking email at 4:30pm).

“Stare them down, wave your hands and make a loud noise and they will run away!”

“What are they doing out during the day?”

“It’s coyote season!”

“Is it sick? Is it rabid?”

“Don’t feed them!”

“That one’s a male! This one’s a female!”

“I saw some pups!”

“They are looking for food!”

Unless you’re getting this information in real time, at a certain point it seems a bit ridiculous. Finally, it seemed it was over.  The coyotes had raised their pups and moved on.

But no.  Then came the foxes.

At first the reporting didn’t seem much different than the coyote reporting. But it was. This time there were supporters. There are very few coyote fans, but boy do we suburbanites love our foxes. The coyotes had become boring. Residents had a new and interesting animal to muse about. Plus, foxes are much, much cuter and not nearly as scary or threatening. The fox fan club was out in full force.

“Foxes don’t hurt anyone!”

“They eat the mice.”

“They kill those pesky rabbits.”

“They won’t hurt your pets!”

I have to admit. The foxes WERE cute. I may have even stopped once on my way home from school drop off and taken a picture of one myself. He was trotting up someone’s driveway and literally went into their flower garden, dug a little hole, and buried whatever he had been carrying in his mouth. I sat in my car watching him for a while.

But I digress. 

Which leads us to the turtles. Or tortoises. I’m not sure what they were quite honestly. (For the purposes of this blog I will use the words interchangeably.) The tortoise notices started getting posted mid-summer. And they were of another realm altogether. These people could have saved the world the way they worked together and supported each other. Once in a while there was the random angry person who needed to remind the others that this turtle you rescued was NOT in fact a lost turtle but a SNAPPING turtle and put that poor thing back in the creek before it dies or bites someone’s finger off! But in general, they were happy, helpful folks.

It would start with someone saying they lost their tortoise. Now how on earth someone can lose an animal that moves .13 mph (I googled it) is really the million-dollar question. But it can happen. And apparently it can happen often.

Now for the second dilemma. How do you know if it’s YOUR turtle that has been found? I mean, it’s not like they wear collars. I don’t want to offend turtle owners, but there is no way I could pick a turtle out of a lineup. A turtle is a turtle.  Not to mention the fact that there are WILD turtles just walking around the earth too, so what if you accidentally “rescued” one of them instead? And when you are reunited does your turtle recognize you and then run (slowly) to you and snuggle you like your dog might? Who knows? All good questions I would like to find out some day.

There was this lady who described her lost turtle to a potential rescuer.  It wasn’t him, but luckily, she had an offer from a guy who was more than willing to give up his own turtle that looked similar enough.  Can you imagine?  “I’m sorry you lost your schnauzer, but we have one we are tired of that looks a lot like yours. He’s had all his shots but we find him boring. You can have him.”

One lady found a lost turtle but the consensus was that it was just a snapping turtle. Someone recommended she put it back the way it was “originally headed.” Another woman saw one “headed north.”  There was a suggestion that in the future owners tape a balloon to the backs of their turtles in case they escape. I think this is a terrific idea and I would LOVE to find what I thought was a loose balloon only to find it attached to a tortoise.  One person chimed in that all these lost tortoises are bordering on negligence. Fair point. I mean, honestly, how long do you have to be gone for your tortoise to get lost? Going .13 miles per hour that’s like only 686 feet. How long did you look away?  Plus, how are these guys getting out of their houses/crates/cages/hutches?

It had all died down by September.  I was a little sad to see the entertainment end.  There is a silver lining though.  Thanks to the internet and Siri and Alexa and Google and Facebook and everyone else out there tracking my every word and thought and listening to everything I say and possibly being aware of everything I’m even thinking, this popped up in my twitter feed just days after I started writing this blog.  What a great solution.