One Year.

Last year, from February 29-March 3, 2020, I took my last trip to Disney World with Jackie and Jen. Other than Jen telling me that she went to every pharmacy in Manhattan and couldn’t find one small bottle of hand sanitizer, things were pretty normal. There was one family on my plane all wearing masks, more people were wiping down seats than normal, and my flight was combined with another flight because there weren’t enough people to fill two planes from Newark to Orlando (which is probably pretty unheard of). I still had my own row. Somehow, I was still completely unconcerned. Everything at Disney felt totally normal (they closed just two weeks later).

Look at us, in this small room, without masks, touching screens that were just touched by strangers.

On March 6, 2020, we went out for dinner indoors while a babysitter was watching my kids. I know this, because it was my birthday. It was the last time for a very long time. There was some news just coming out that Seattle was seeing some Covid cases, and some people in nursing homes were dying. I remember Jay saying that his Seattle office went from “optional work from home” to “mandatory work from home” in a matter of hours that day as more information came out.

That day I also did my first Bar Method class in a while because both kids were at school. I bought a 10 pack of Bar Method classes as a birthday present to myself because they would both be in school Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday mornings. Hahahahahaha. That didn’t age well.

Speaking of things that didn’t age well, also on March 6, Bettina and I went to Destination Maternity to buy out all or their super clearance items since they were going out of business. We got about $800 worth of clothing for like $100. Well, it all still has tags on it and cannot be returned because, out of business. Hopefully so other mommies will get some use out of it.

Here I am with little Graham Cracker in my belly trying on dresses for upcoming weddings and bridal showers.

On March 7, 2020, I took Landen to a birthday party at…wait for it…Chuck E Cheese. There were at least four parties there that afternoon, and I’m sure a bunch more before and after the one we were at, plus all of the people that were just there to play for the day. The place was packed with little kid germs and everyone touching the same machines and eating at the same tables. Joey did not join us because she had a little fever, so I left her home with Eric. Read that again. Joey had a fever so I left her home with Eric and took Landen to a large indoor gathering in a suburb of New York City which would, just days later, become the first big epicenter of the pandemic in the US.

Mouths open, tongues out, chilling in this small cramped dirty photo booth.

On March 8, 2020, I left Joey and Eric home again and took Landen into the city to celebrate Marissa and Ryan’s engagement and Marissa’s 30th birthday. I was blissfully unaware of how Joey’s fever could have actually meant my entire house had Covid, and I could have brought it to this super spreader event and infected many of my high risk family members. I was also completely ignorant to the fact that being pregnant with Graham, I myself was high risk (a fact that I continued to ignore and/or deny for a while afterwards because, uninformed). I even found this screen shot that I took to prove how not high risk I was. To be fair, this is a pretty compelling statement.

I don’t have any good pictures of this event because we were having too much fun being in each other’s company, touching each other, breathing on each other, and sharing food with each other for what we didn’t know would be the last time in a long long time. I’ll update you when that long long time ends. For now, here’s the bad pictures:

On March 9, 2020, Shannon brought Devin and Sage over to play, and we went to the playground and the diner where we ate inside. And then we walked down the street for ice cream and also ate that inside.

Just look at little Landen with one hand on the milkshake and the other on the ice cream.

On March 10, 2020, I went to another Barre class in the morning. Landen had his last Occupational Therapy session, and they removed all of the toys from the waiting room in an effort to keep it as clean as possible and ensure that the toys were not being shared by the kids. We were also the only people in the waiting room because they had begun staggering appointments.

On March 11, 2020, Bettina and Marissa were supposed to come visit us for the day, and Bettina was going to bring me four large cartons of milk because the shelves in our store were starting to go bare. When I asked her for the milk she said “are you worried?” I said “not really” and she said “I’m not worried about the virus, I’m worried about access to necessities in super markets”. Spoiler alert: She, and the rest of us, quickly became worried about the virus, but ALSO the access to necessities because supermarket shelves everywhere were staring to look like this:

That day, Eric bought all of this shelf stable food at BJ’s.

I’m happy to report that it didn’t get bad enough that we had to resort to chef boyardee. That is still sitting in the basement untouched if anyone wants it. The rest, we ate because we wanted to and then we bought more. Don’t be fooled by the four jars of peanut butter. We have about 10 at any given time. Text me for a picture of our bottled water collection. Side note: The potty did not come with the food but Joey was quarantine trained on it.

Anyway, Bettina and Marissa had to cancel their visit because Joey still had a fever and they both have compromised immune systems (this was completely non Covid related and we planned on rescheduling for the following week). That milk would sit in Bettina’s fridge until May when we in the Northeast had successfully “flattened the curve” and we learned that we could see each other outdoors and at a distance. (Spoiler: The curve did not stay flat.)

On March 12, 2020, I went to my final indoor Barre class of 2020. I remember thinking that maybe I should stop going to Barre classes at this point, as more and more news started coming out and more and more things started shutting down. The Bar Method Madison held on as long as possible though, and they said they would remain open “as long as it was safe to do so”. They lasted until March 17 I believe, when the state mandated that they shut down. On this same day, (March 12, not 17th) Joey’s mommy and me class was canceled “for 2 weeks” because the school that housed this class was shutting down. This school actually shares a building with Landen’s school, so I knew it was only a matter of time before they made the same decision.

As of today, March 13, 2021, it has officially been one year since Landen’s school notified us that they would be closing. Most schools were closing for “2 weeks” so that we could get Covid under control, but since our spring break was three weeks away they made the decision to close until the end of spring break, so April 13. They sent us home with a few weeks worth of letter worksheets for the letters they were supposed to learn over those three weeks. We did them all on day one in about 4 minutes.

And so began our Covid staycation, AKA quarantine. I was not sure I would be able to find ways to entertain my toddlers for a whole month, but at least I had our final ski trip of the year with the Gershowitz clan to look forward to in just a few days.

Sometime in those next few days, we canceled our ski trip. From there, as you may recall, it snowballed. That month quickly turned into 100 days. More and more things closed down. Playgrounds were no longer an option, so we found big parks to go to. Slowly, those began to close as well. Now, one year later, we’re still home. If you want to read about what we did for the rest of 2020, you can read about it here. If you want to read about what we did in January, read about it here. I was going to write about the rest of the year from February until now, but this is getting too long so I’ll save that for the next post.

Instead, I’ll leave you with all of the memes that I screen-shotted those first few days of quarantine to keep myself sane with some humor with the disclaimer that I have no clue where they all came from so I cannot give credit. You’ll notice I took a special liking to the toilet paper memes. Another disclaimer: There are a lot of memes and I can’t put multiple on a line because it crops them weirdly, so if you’re not interested, then thanks for reading to this point and I’ll see you soon on the next post.

To recap:

Here is our first 100 days of quarantine.

Here is the rest of 2020.

Here is January until now.

We’ll be traveling again soon, so I’ll see so this week with an update on the last 1.5 months of quarantine. Let’s hope this year’s memes are all about how vaccines brought life back to normal and next year’s memes are not about Covid at all.