• Liquid bandage- You know when you have a tiny cut on your hands and it stings whenever you wash them? You know when there’s a pandemic and you have to wash your hands every fifteen seconds? Yeah. Anyway, liquid bandage seals up those cuts so they don’t hurt for another day or two at which time you seal them up again. You want the kind with the brush, not the spray. (You want the spray for when your kids skin their knees.)
• Wet bags. These are clutch for storing your mask supplies if you leave the house. Washable and waterproof.
• Candy. Lots of candy. I recommend Toffifay.
• Hooks. By your front door and by the door you come in normally if they are different doors. Hang your masks on them. Most of them go by the door where you leave and one or two by the front door so you can grab one to answer the door.
• Individually wrapped disposable masks. Hang a few on one of those hooks by your front door. Then practice saying “here, I have a spare mask for you since you forgot yours.” Then if anyone shows up without one, you are ready. (Perhaps this isn’t a problem for you but my air conditioner has been leaking into the wall for four months and I’ve had a LOT of repair people at my house this month.)
• A calendar. Write all your contact tracing on it in case you need it later. I’ve been doing this since about two weeks since this began and I hope to never need it.

I have a psychology degree and I spent a decent amount of time studying Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs (and sat through an hour long senior thesis class where one student said “self ejaculation” instead of “self actualization” every single time and I kept a straight face and if that doesn’t make me an expert, nothing does.)

Basically Maslow is saying that until your most basic needs are met, you can’t move on to meeting your next level needs. So if you need food, water, shelter, etc., you aren’t worrying about making friends or gaining skills or becoming a fulfilled person.

Your very bottom needs are physiological- the things you need to survive the week basically. Next are safety needs. Then you start to get into the more abstract needs, like friendship, feeling like you belong in your community, that sort of thing.

For some children, school is important to their basic needs. They are getting food, warmth, or safety from school. For other children, their basic needs aren’t coming directly from school, but more indirectly. For example, if they aren’t in school during the day, their adults can’t work and therefore can’t provide for their basic needs. So school may be providing for their basic needs just by being a place for them to be for the day.

For a lot of children, school functions primarily in the upper levels of the hierarchy of needs. They are getting socialization, learning, accomplishments- all the things school ought to be providing in an ideal world. (Because in a perfect world, we wouldn’t NEED school to provide the basic needs I talked about in the last paragraph, but in the real world, school does.)

In making the decision whether to send your kids back to an in person classroom, you need to evaluate what needs they are getting from school. Safety- which means not being exposed to a deadly global pandemic or spreading it to others- is very low on the hierarchy of needs. Socialization is above it. And believe me, I feel you. Elizabeth is suffering from this pandemic. She cries a lot, she’s miserable, she’s having a very hard time. But her safety, and the safety of our family and community, outrank those needs. Unless I felt that her safety was being threatened by keeping her home from school, it would be irresponsible to send her to school because doing so threatens her physical safety and that of those in our family and community.

Obviously there are dozens of different factors going into school decisions and nothing is ever this simple. But I have seen so many parents talking about their kids needing socialization and how they just need some time to themselves and everyone is miserable at home all the time. Yes. All of this is true. But we aren’t picking from good choices. We are choosing from a pile of a bunch of choices that really, really suck.

Keeping my kids home (and I am still waiting on options from their school- I’m really hoping that school at home is an option) is both important for them- because their need for safety outranks other needs- but it’s also important for the kids who need school because it provides more of their basic needs. If my kids aren’t there, there is more room for other kids to be there and to be safer being there. There’s less exposure for the teachers and staff who have to be there to provide for the needs of the students who get their basic needs from school.

And as a society, let’s work on getting better so that this wouldn’t have to be an option. We wouldn’t have to open schools because there would be safe and healthy options for kids other places.

• Well. This is something, isn’t it?
• I am really glad we moved before this all happened.
• But I wish we’d moved a lot longer before this all happened. (We got into our new house about a week before everything shut down.) There are still boxes and work and organizing that needs to be done here and that makes me unsettled. I don’t need anything else unsettling.
• I’ve been making masks for family and friends which means my neck and shoulders and back always hurt.
• I’m pretty much out of fabric that’s big enough.
• Ryan loves sheltering in place. He could do this forever.
• Elizabeth needs to see some other people soon because she’s losing it.
• Elizabeth is also not sleeping. She’s been up past midnight every night.
• Alex is fine with all this, her life has barely changed.
• Matt has to go to work sometimes but he’s doing all the calls and computer parts of his job from home.
• I’m really enjoying the lazy mornings and not getting out of bed immediately parts of this.
• I’m not enjoying the constant worry about everyone I know dying.
• Will this be the first time I actually finish setting up a house, putting everything away, and hanging all the pictures before anyone sees it? (Not at the rate I am going, but we will see.)
• I highly dislike the unknown. I like having a plan.

How are all of you? I have definitely been worrying about all of you.

Alex suddenly stopped sucking her thumb a few months ago. She’s sucked her thumb since she was born but only when she was falling asleep or when she was upset about something. Her dentist said he couldn’t even tell she sucked her thumb by looking at her mouth so as far as I was concerned, she could continue forever.

Well, she got a cut on her thumb and then another a few weeks later and apparently that was it. She was done. Which would have been a great way to stop a habit, right? Except that she also stopped sleeping.

Suddenly she was taking two or three hours to fall asleep every night and she was waking up repeatedly during the night. She wasn’t usually just lying there quietly either. She was spending these hours screaming and crying.

Eventually I moved her to the tiny bed in my room and just let her sleep with me. This helped immensely except that my alarm in the morning woke her up. I started putting her to bed an hour earlier to compensate for the fact that she was getting up an hour earlier than she used to. All of this finally got her back to the base level of behavior that we were used to. (Squish is never particularly calm because she doesn’t have that kind of personality but at least she was only yelling at us some of the time again instead of all of them time like she was when she was over tired.)

So now she sleeps in my room. We’ve adapted to each other enough that it’s working. (She no longer wakes up yelling for me to turn the lights on in the middle of the night any more, for example.) She wakes up earlier than I do on the weekends and stays quiet enough for another hour or so.

She also really, really likes sleeping in my room. When she’s awake and I’m in the room with her, she just lies there and grins happily at me. Whenever I get out of bed, she runs around to my side of the bed and arranges my slippers for me. She also whispers “night night, Mama!” in her happiest little voice. It’s not the worst.

• Matt sent me sushi and stir fried udon from my favorite restaurant (he’s at work) because he felt that I needed a treat.
• Ryan leaves me notes by my bed almost every night. They usually say “I Luv Mom Luv Ryan” and such things. Tonight I got five hearts that he cut out, colored, and stapled into a book.
• The second heart in my book was colored with crayon, not marker, because “I had to make it blue and robin’s egg blue is the best blue.”
• He used the scented markers for all the other hearts because obviously those are the best.
• My baby nieces are coming to visit in two weeks.
• I finally got the house cleaned up again after fighting it for five days after getting off schedule.
• We got Christmas pictures taken of the kids already and in the sneak peeks I’ve seen so far, they look like they are going to be great.
• I went to bed early tonight and 2/3rds of the children fell asleep without a fuss tonight.

My best shots for kids technique is known as the Giant Candy Bar technique. It started working for Ryan at age five and hasn’t worked for Alex yet (age four). I get a giant version of their favorite candy bar and tell them they can eat it while they get their shot but only during the shot. So they have to shovel down as much as they can manage while the shot is happening. It works really well because they are so busy trying to get as much candy in as possible that they don’t have much attention to pay to their arms.

I also have a shotblocker (Amazon) and I bring iPads. It’s enough distractions that we manage to do this fairly easily. Alex still needed to be chased down, pulled out of a corner, carried to the table, seated on my lap, and held down by my legs, my arms, and a spare nurse. But we get there in the end.

I knew I was eventually going to have to buy a new dryer but I was mad that all the dryers in the stores were so much more than the google price online. So I just kept not buying one.

And then Matt and I were out doing errands and we drove by a store that we’d never seen before (we were waaaay away from home) and Matt said “hey, did that say Best Buy outlet?”

And it did! And I went in and it was an entire Best Buy with wall to wall washers and dryers. There was a tiny TV section and a slightly larger refrigerator and stove section but almost the entire huge Best Buy was filled with open box washers and dryers. So I found the same cheap dryer that all the stores had except that it was $150 cheaper. We slapped a sold tag on it (I beat some other people by about three minutes- the salesman asked if we really wanted it because if not, they did) and then loaded it in the back of the minivan and drove it home ourselves. We saved $150 on the dryer, $70 on the delivery fee, $30 on the vent kit (used the old one), and $28 on the plug.

Re: the plug. Dryers don’t come with plugs since 2000, who knew? Anyway, I took apart our old dryer and rewired the old plug into the new dryer. And now I have a working dryer and have been coasting on my cheap as hell dryer high since Friday.

So I’ve been shopping around for a new dryer. But the problem is that we are moving in somewhere between a month and a half to two years from now. That house comes with a very nice new dryer. So the replacement dryer is feasibly just for me to use for a month and a half. (The house is supposed to be done in November. We will see. Before they said July.)

Also the garage roof is leaking, I just paid $664 to remove a bunch of my dog’s teeth (she’s fifteen and a half years old, that is like a hundred and fifty in human years, this has been a very expensive year for vet bills), Matt’s car needs work, and I just got new brakes and some kind of expensive system flush on my car. So my willingness to spend money on a dryer right now is low.

Anyway, I’ve been hanging all my laundry to dry. Let me tell you how annoying this is. (Yes, I know this is common. I know other people do this. I do not usually and therefore I do not have the infrastructure in place.) I don’t have anywhere to hang it to dry. There’s nowhere outside and my HOA doesn’t allow it. I have been hanging it in the guest room closet and aiming fans at it. I have gathered all the available hangers and hooks and there aren’t quite enough to hang a whole load. Everything dries unevenly and crunchy. I have to go turn around the hangers and shift the positions of the clothes every so often. Everything is wrinkled. (And it is staying that way, I do not iron.) Everything has a bend in the middle. There’s now this extra time consuming task in the middle of the laundry. (Hang it up, turn it, turn it, take it back down, and THEN fold it.) It is a highly unsatisfying way to do laundry.

Alex is certainly just as fierce and opinionated and strong willed as Elizabeth is. I can’t decide if she is more so or if she just has more territory to compete for. (At Alex’s current age, Elizabeth was still an only child.)

For example, every night I put the kids to bed in age order. The youngest goes first because she needs more sleep than the other two. Tonight she decided she wanted me to come back in her room and hold her in the rocking chair. So she screamed for me the entire time I was putting Ryan and Elizabeth to bed. By the time I came back in, she was so far gone that she started throwing up. So yes, this child is so spirited that she (reasonably often) screams herself to vomit. And it doesn’t even usually register enough for me to bother saying anything about it.

As a side note, Alex (age three and a half) is old enough to throw up into a bucket. But she’s not old enough to know that once she’s done throwing up, she shouldn’t angrily shove the bucket away from her so that it tips over and spills all over her crib anyway. Sigh.

This is a thing my kids do. We generally do not get stomach viruses. We’ve only had one that I can remember. (Ryan and I got it last year and even then, we each only threw up twice or so.) But when my kids get sick with a virus, they throw up once at the beginning of the illness, within a few hours of starting the fever, and then they run a normal fever/cough/flu/justavirus with no more throwing up.

So random fevers make my kids throw up, but only once, and besides that, they have excellent stomachs. And the kitchen floor is a wonderful place to throw up, if you are three and going to do it. It is way better than your car seat while going 75 miles per hour down the highway halfway through a three hour drive. Not that Alex did that the last time she got a fever or anything.