One-Day Weekend

I realllly needed this weekend, mostly to deal with house stuff that just isn’t getting done during the week (good thing the children and I don’t need to put on real clothes to go anywhere because the laundry situation is out of control). But I stayed up late Friday night to watch a documentary I needed to see for work, then got up at 4:30 on Saturday morning to try to get some editing done. By the time Will was ready to go down for his morning nap around 9:00 I was totally exhausted. I slept for a couple hours, went on a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood (big mistake), and lay on the floor next to Will for an hour until Matt took him and Alice outside. Then I slept until dinnertime. So nothing got done on Saturday!

Today was much better and we had a nice, uneventful day hanging out at home. I cleaned up the kitchen. Matt fixed the lawnmower. I took my tomato seedlings outside so they could get some extra sunlight. We’re running a little low on food so I’m probably going to have to go to the grocery store at some point this week (wearing one of the cute masks my aunt sent us!). So that will be an exciting trip in the car. You know how some old people like to just “go for a drive”? I get it now. I really, really get it.

My old band director lives in our neighborhood and has been going out on her porch nearly every night since the stay-at-home order started to play a “Corona Concert” for whoever is walking by. Sometimes other people bring their instruments and join her. It is my very favorite thing to come out of all of this, and I kind of hope she’ll keep it up occasionally after we’re all back out in the world again.

Reading Update:

Liberty Falling by Nevada Barr: The Anna Pigeon series is my very favorite mystery series (national parks + murder, what could be better?) and I usually devour them, but this one took me a long eleven days to read—mostly because I was reading it over my first days back at work and partly because this is my least favorite AP book to date. It takes place in New York City with the Statue of Liberty as a centerpiece and I just really missed having a more typical national park as the setting. The mystery was compelling, though, and the ending was pretty gripping. Just not my personal fave (for the record, my favorites so far in the series are #2, A Superior Death, and #11, Flashback. Finished on 4/17/20.

The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty: I really like Liane Moriarty’s books and I just started this one today and am already sucked in. She knows how to tell a story!

Corona Concert Series

Easter 2020

There have been a lot of moments over the past month or so that have felt strange—”returning” to work in my living room, wearing a mask to the grocery store, realizing I could unpack the extra clothes in Will’s diaper bag because we never take him anywhere… but I hadn’t really felt sad about what we were missing until this weekend. Since I was just coming out of maternity leave and living that newborn-mom life, we didn’t have much on our calendar this spring. But I was sad on Easter when the grandparents came over and stood in the parkway to watch while Alice did her Easter egg hunt in the front yard. I had gotten the kids all dressed up because it felt weird not to, and then we just went back inside, put our quarantine clothes back on, and went about our lives in our house. We are so lucky in the grand scheme of things and I know that, but I kept thinking about how Will is never going to be this little again and his grandmas are missing out on getting to hold him. Stuff like that.

But Alice was very cute! She and I dyed eggs on Saturday (something we usually do with my mom) and she got way too much candy in her Easter basket, so she has been very happy and sugared up. Hopefully we’ll be able to celebrate with our extended family next year!

So proud of her eggs!

Photo is a little grainy because Grandma used the zoom on her phone to keep herself social distanced

Double life

Mom and editor—today I did it all! Will woke up to eat at 4:!5, and after he went back down I headed downstairs to make tea and dive back in to work. I had a manuscript waiting for me and I spent a couple of hours editing before anyone else was awake. Then Matt left for work and I started juggling. Overall it wasn’t too bad. Alice read books for a bit until I needed to get on a long conference call, and then she got to dive into 90 minutes of Blippi. Will alternated between sleeping and wanting to sit with me and wiggle excessively on camera. He is the cutest coworker!

We took a quick walk before lunch and nap. It was beautiful outside and Alice is in love with the scooter we got her as an early Easter present. While she was sleeping I got some more work done and caught up with co-workers. Inspired by 168 Hours, I’ve decided to track my time. When I shut my work stuff down at 6:00, I had worked 9 hours, so I spent 4 hours during the day on childcare and lunch. It might seem inefficient to drag out the workday so long, but I saved an hour on commuting and would have taken the hour for lunch anyway if I had been in the office (or, more likely, worked through it). So today the kids basically extended my work day for 2 hours. Not bad! And not having to pump and being able to go for a walk with them over lunchtime are definite perks.

Tomorrow I’ll have fewer conference calls and hopefully will be able to get more some more “real” work done as a result. We have our biannual seasonal launch meeting coming up later this week and I need to get my head around all the presentations I’m responsible for. Nothing like jumping back in with both feet!

Favorite coworker!

Diving back in

The weirdness of the past several weeks has been compounded for me because I’ve been on maternity leave… but tomorrow I’m diving back in to work from the comfort of my home workstation set up on a dining table in my living room. Matt is still going to work, so I’ll be here watching two young children and doing my job simultaneously. I am nervous. I sat on 2 1/2 hours of conference calls on Friday and while it wasn’t a disaster, it was pretty exhausting. This is how I’m expecting my schedule to basically function:

4:45 a.m.: Wake up, brush hair and teeth, put on professional-ish shirt (no one can see my pants on conference calls!), make highly caffeinated tea

5:00 a.m.: Sit down at computer, edit or do other focused work (no checking email until after some real work gets done!)

7:00 a.m.: Check email, probably feed Will

7:30-8:00 a.m.: Get Alice breakfast and set her up with some kind of activity

8:00-10:00 a.m.: Conference calls, manage email, work on small projects, cater to children’s whims as necessary

10:00-11:00 a.m.: Take kids outside, run Alice around as much as possible, manage urgent emails from phone

11:00-12:00: Manage email, work on small projects

12:00-1:00 p.m.: Unavailable for work, making lunch and putting kids down for nap

1:00-3:00 p.m.: SACRED NAPTIME! Edit or do focused work, participate in extremely important conference calls that require no child drop-ins

3:00-5:00 p.m.: Work on projects (Alice will get screen time after nap)

5:00-6:00 p.m.: Clear out inbox and close things down for the day (Matt will hopefully be home at 5:00 or before most days)

And of course I can always hop back on later at night and on the weekends as needed. I’ve had several conversations with Alice about how I’m “going back to work” and will need her to play by herself a lot more, but she’s three—she has no idea what work is or why it’s important. So we will see how it goes. I’m really hoping to limit her screen time to two hours every afternoon. Wish me luck!

Reading Update:

The Highway by C.J. Box: This is Book 2 in Box’s Highway Quartet thriller series. I read the first book, Back of Beyond, a few weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot. BoB is set in Yellowstone National Park, which is why I picked it off the shelf at the library—any book set in a national park is a book for me. The Highway takes us out of that setting into small towns in Montana and features a really sinister villain who doesn’t get his comeuppance in the end, leaving a clear path to Book 3. Box’s writing is fast-paced and engaging, and while I didn’t enjoy The Highway quite as much as BoB (mostly because of the lack of national parks content and because the story felt a bit more grim), I'm definitely planning to finish out the series as soon as our library system opens back up. Finished on 4/1/20.

168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam: I read one of Vanderkam’s other books, I Know How She Does It, on my maternity leave with Alice, so it felt fitting to dive into her best-known work now. 168 Hours reminds readers that we all have the same amount of time in a week, but some people make much better use of that time than others, and gives us ideas for how to optimize our hours. There wasn’t really anything new for me here since I’m pretty familiar with Vanderkam’s thoughts on the subject via her podcast “Best of Both Worlds”, which I wrote about recently in my favorite podcasts roundup, but I enjoyed going into a bit more detail and reminding myself as I head into what is likely going to be a fairly busy and stressful period of time working from home and caring for children simultaneously that I have a lot more control over my time than societal narratives may tell me I do. Finished on 4/3/20.

When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald: I first heard about this quirky debut novel from an editor at Book Expo last spring and I immediately added it to my TBR. Fiction, about a young woman named Zelda who was born on the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome spectrum and is obsessed with vikings. I loved the narrative voice and all the references to Norse culture, and I devoured it in less than a day. Also, the packaging of the hardcover edition is beautiful, and it’s definitely earning a forever place on my bookshelf. Highly recommended! Finished on 4/5/20.

Our neighbor has a flag for every occasion!

Time keeps passing

In some ways it has felt like time has almost stopped over the past two weeks, what with staying at home 98% of the time and cycling through the mundane but comforting routines of our lives right now. But just as I was opening up this blog post, Will rolled over onto his belly for the first time, reminding me that time does keep passing and we’re not stuck in some kind of eternal holding pattern, no matter how much it might seem like it sometimes.

Matt and I are in a friendly (read: highly contentious) competition about who can get more “ripped.” Given that I just had a baby and he has put on about 15 pounds over the last few years, our version of ripped is pretty unimpressive. But I have been doing 8 minute abs every day along with working on the 100 pushups challenge, and I loaded the kids up into the Burley this morning for a 2+ mile round trip walk. We delivered some handmade cards to Alice’s best little buddy’s house, and I took advantage of Alice and Will falling asleep to get some extra walking in.

Some neighborhood friends stopped by to visit with us through our glass storm door around lunchtime, which was fun and also sad because Alice couldn’t go out to play with them. We have one of those doors where the glass part can come down to reveal a screen that slides in and out of the door, so I can pull the glass down and leave about 12 inches of screen at the top—perfect for being able to easily hear people standing on the other side while blocking all potential germs! Then we got on a Google Hangouts chat with two other families before dinner, and Alice’s other little friend put a card for her through our mail slot. All in all it was a pretty social day, with zero actual physical contact!

Alice and I also mixed up a batch of bread dough this morning (recipe here) and it’s in the oven right now. We’ll see how it turns out—the dough seemed awfully wet even after its 7+ hour rise. I am the opposite of an expert baker, so it’s possible I managed to mess up even this extremely basic bread. Annnd I just looked out the window and saw that Matt and Alice are riding his (one-person) motorcycle down our driveway, across the street, up our neighbor’s driveway, and then back to our house again, over and over. Yay quarantine!

Reading Update:

Dead Wake by Erik Larson: A great read! Probably my favorite I’ve read of his after Devil in the White City. Also really made me want to re-watch Titanic. Finished on 3/26/20 (audio).

“A” Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton: It’s fun to start a new-to-me series with so many books lined up to read. I’m usually not a big fan of first-person POV in crime fiction, but it worked for me here. Grafton is one of the greats and it’s exciting to dive in knowing how beloved these alphabet mysteries are and looking forward to the character development of Kinsey Millhone. I thought these lines summed her up well, as she muses about how she doesn’t care to admire scenery as she drives: “Driving anywhere looks much the same to me. I stare at the concrete roadway. I watch the yellow line. I keep track of large trucks and passenger vehicles with little children asleep in the backseat and I keep my foot pressed flat to the floor until I reach my destination.” Finished on 3/27/20.

At least she’s wearing her helmet!

Denial

There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the 1918 flu pandemic and what we can learn from it as we manage today’s coronavirus. But as I’ve been listening to Erik Larsen’s Dead Wake, I can’t help but notice some other parallels from that completely unrelated disaster. On the surface, it’s tough to see connections between the two: the sinking of the Lusitania was a tragedy of humanity’s own making, motivated by a wartime agenda, while the coronavirus is a natural disaster that in many ways is completely out of our control. But there’s one underlying theme that runs beneath both events: denial in the face of concrete evidence.

Trump’s recent declaration that he wants the US open and “raring to go” by Easter (just a little more than two weeks away) flies completely in the face of what the medical community and public health experts are telling us about where we are in the trajectory of the pandemic. Each day, confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths rise, and some experts are predicting we’re at least three weeks away from the peak of the outbreak. But it’s a well-established fact by now that Trump doesn’t really care about data or facts the way most people understand them. What’s really fascinating is how he’s far from alone in this tendency. As described in Dead Wake, the denial of many, many people on the Lusitania, including a lot of the crew, as the ship foundered, is a striking parallel. If you’ve seen the movie Titanic, you’re familiar with the hubris of people stating confidently, “This ship can’t sink!” literally as the water is rising up to meet them. What is is about the human nature that we cling to hope and optimism, often past the point of rationality?

Today the stock market is on the rise as a result of the stimulus package rapidly making its way through Congress, promising $2 trillion in aid to individuals and companies. But realistically, if we’re facing down another four, six, or eight weeks of much of the country being shut down (which seems almost inevitable if you listen to the people who actually know what they’re talking about), it’s obvious that amount of money isn’t going to prop the economy up through this whole ordeal. And in a couple of weeks, when it becomes impossible to deny that fact any longer, we’ll be right back where we were a week ago, with investors freaking out and the market plummeting. It’s just so interesting how short-sighted we seem to be in the face of disaster and how desperately we want to believe that things can’t be nearly as bad as the evidence clearly shows they will become.

I don’t really have a point to make here—just musing about how very different events in very different times seem to bring out the exact same emotions and thought processes in people.

At our house, we’ve been taking walks, making pancakes, and painting with watercolors. Alice got a scooter as an early Easter present, and I don’t think there have ever been more people out wandering around the neighborhood. Clearly we’re all bored and just looking for something to do!

Casual unicorn out for a stroll

Quarantine - Days 4, 5, 6, and beyond...

It’s definitely starting to feel like Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day around here! We wake up, play, do Camp Kindergarten, play some more, eat lunch, nap, go for a walk, eat dinner, play, go to bed. Over and over and over and over…

I had been looking forward to the weekend, but it ended up being frustrating. Having Matt home just disrupted the routine and encouraged Alice to act out and push boundaries, and I didn’t actually get more time to myself somehow. Blargh. I have started up again with my tried and true 8 minute abs workout, which is kicking my butt, and I’m doing the One Hundred Pushups Project. So hopefully I’ll come out of this at least a little more in shape than I was previously (trying to give myself a break and remember that I’m less than 12 weeks postpartum when I feel frustrated about my fitness level).

I’m starting to get really stressed about “going back” to work in less than two weeks. I just can’t imagine how I’ll balance trying to be available/working during the day and watching two very young kids. I’m confident I can do my job well and put in 40 hours a week, but a lot of those hours are going to have to be early mornings, nights, and weekends when I’m not also being a primary caregiver. I know everyone is dealing with some logistics juggling but I think I have a bit more of a challenge than most of my colleagues in terms of my kids being so young and me not having a work-from-home spouse to switch off with during the day. Whatever happens, I’ll figure it out! I have a few manuscripts incoming right after I return that I’m REALLY looking forward to editing, so that will be my focus for my nights and weekends time while I focus on communications and smaller projects that don’t require as much deep concentration during the day.

I’ve been trying to stay away from book industry news because I suspect it’s mostly terrible. I can’t even imagine what all this is doing to independent bookstores and even to B&N, which relies heavily on people walking into stores and browsing. One thing I am confident in is my company’s ability to weather this and even thrive under tough economic conditions. I wasn’t working there during the 2008 recession, but the company’s proactive response during that dark time is a big part of our culture now and we’re able to draw on that experience as we meet whatever lies ahead in the coming weeks and months. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with my colleagues and my work, and figuring out what’s next for all of us.

Reading Update:

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner: I ended up liking this novel quite a bit! I’m interested in going back reading some of Weiner’s earlier novels, which I understand are a bit different than this one. I enjoyed getting the perspective of the main characters as they grew and matured, and to consider the different roles women play at different times in their lives and how society dictates those roles. I’m still a little unsure whether the main characters’ names (Jo and Bethie) are supposed to be an allusion to Little Women. At the beginning of the novel it seemed like they must be, as Jo was a tomboy-ish aspiring writer and Beth was a goody two-shoes type, but it never really became clear, so it may have just been a coincidence. Finished on 3/19/20.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata: I had read about this short, strange little novel on both Modern Mrs. Darcy and The SHU Box (I think) a while ago. It was weird, but a fun quick read! What I found most interesting was the idea of the convenience store (or any workplace, really) as its own little world with accepted rules, culture, and vocabulary. I definitely feel this sometimes at work, and because I really jive with the culture of my workplace it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about my job. Maybe that makes me uncool or whatever because I’m not trying to rebel against my workplace and genuinely buy into and agree with a lot of the corporate messaging, but… I identified with the main character in some ways because of it! Finished 3/21/20.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson: Another audiobook from OverDrive that I think I’m actually going to get through! I love a good Erik Larson book. Totally gripping narrative nonfiction about the last crossing of the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania during WWI. Very much enjoying it!

“A” Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton: Somehow I’ve made it this far in life without reading any of Grafton’s famed “alphabet” Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I’m remedying that now, and looking forward to working my way through the whole series.

One good thing about being forced to stay at home is the number of art collaborations Alice and I are doing together!

Quarantine - Day 3

It’s only Day 3 of our self-isolation and the days are already starting to blend together. This is exactly why I’m blogging—to be able to remember my life, especially this extremely strange period of it! We went through our morning routine of breakfast and Camp Kindergarten. Alice and I made a trek to the basement to get our guitars and brought them up to the living room so we could play band together. Then Will woke up from his morning nap and I loaded Elton John and Adele into the CD player. One of my goals for maternity leave was to organize our very large CD collection (we’re so old school!) and it hasn’t happened yet but I think it will over the next week or so. Thinking about what music to put on for the day is a little bright spot, and it’s fun to go through all the CDs and remember forgotten favorites.

Nap was kind of a disaster, after the first fifteen minutes when I laid down between Alice and Will and had many grateful thoughts about how lucky we are to be together and healthy and have everything we need. Both kids were simultaneously asleep for only about 20 minutes and neither of them slept nearly as long as they should have, so I didn’t get to learn the bass part to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” the way I had planned. I’m trying out a FaceTime band practice with some friends tomorrow!

It rained most of the day so we didn’t go outside, but Alice did a great job playing by herself and with me, and the screen time was reasonable, probably two hours or a little less. She cracked me up wanting to play “Miss Megan” from Camp Kindergarten and give me lessons and homework to do. Fish sticks, baked potatoes, and frozen vegetables for dinner, nothing fancy. Matt let her take the longest bath ever but I didn’t fall asleep putting her to bed, so now I get to go read!

It’s supposed to be warm tomorrow and we need to get out of the house (and I need to get some exercise—this is something I need to find a solution for and build into our routine). I don’t know how I’m going to keep Alice away from her friends if we see them in the neighborhood and I don’t think she’ll understand if I try to explain why we can’t go to the playground. UGH. Not being able to see her buddies is going to be the worst part of this whole thing. In some ways I’m glad my kids are so little while we go through this—the social isolation would just be worse if they were older and I would feel a lot more stress about school being closed and feeling the need to do educational stuff at home, but it’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on in a way that’s not scary. And then of course there’s the constant physical and emotional drain of caring for two kids nonstop in a closed environment!

I didn’t do a very good job of staying off the internet today, which is probably why I’m feeling blah. Time to stop computering and go do something else!

Quarantine - Day 2

Posting this just after midnight! It was super sunny this morning, which helped me feel a little less doom-and-gloom, although both Alice and Will were up and ready to start their days before 7:00. We played for a bit, had breakfast, and joined the Facebook Live for Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten again. Alice was much more engaged this time! My favorite part about it is all the new kid-friendly songs I’m learning. After “school” was over, she played by herself while I cleaned up the house a bit and made lunch. Something puzzling—she almost always does a good job eating her lunch, but we often struggle at dinnertime to get her to eat more than a few bites of whatever we’re having. One contributing factor could be that lunch tends to be less of a “real” meal and more of a snack plate. Today was, for example, was carrots and cherry tomatoes with salad dressing, sliced pear, cheese, and veggie straws on a plate. But I’m not sure whether the difference is because of the food we eat or if she’s snacking more than I realize before dinner. ANYWAY.

Will was already snoozing in our bed by Alice’s naptime, so I tucked her in with him and told her I was going to take a shower. By the time I came back, she was asleep! It was amazing—usually I have to lie down with her to get her to go down and half the time I fall asleep myself. But today I was clean and then had more than an hour to read and putter around with both of them unconscious. Win!

We had planned a playdate with her swim buddy before the social distancing recommendations got so strong and I didn’t have the heart to cancel it, so he and his mom came over for what will likely be our very last social interaction for some time. It’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on, and I’m expecting many, many questions about why she can’t see her friends. Ugh.

Matt came home, realized he forgot to vote and went out again to take care of that, and then he and I tuned in to a webinar by my investing guru Phil Town while Alice watched a show. Chicken stir fry for dinner, a long, drawn-out bedtime that resulted in me falling asleep in Alice’s bed again, and then some anxious social media scrolling rounded out my evening.

The only thing I did to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day was to take a picture of Will in the same onesie Alice wore three years ago. Who wore it better??

Quarantine - Day 1

This weekend included a wild trip to the grocery store with insanely long lines, cleaning the laundry room (and enjoying our new dryer!), band practice, helping my mom test her work-from-home capabilities, and voting. And now we’re heading into at least two weeks of self-quarantine and social distancing.

With all schools closed in Illinois, activities canceled, and social distancing highly encouraged, we’re entering a weird period of “figure out any and all potential fun stuff to do at home.” Yesterday (Monday) wasn’t too bad. Alice slept in until nearly 8:30 and then we had breakfast and tuned into a Facebook Live event at 9:00—Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten, which was a fun school-like hour, even if the content is a little advanced for a three-year-old. Will snoozed on the couch through most of it, so I was able to focus on Alice and do the activities and songs with her. Then we played Barbies for a bit before I loaded the kids up in the car for a quick trip to the bank drive-through to deposit a check. Then lunch and nap (I fell asleep with them despite wanting to read instead).

When I woke up from the nap I had a bunch of texts on my phone from a neighborhood group thread with rumors that Illinois will go into lockdown soon in similar fashion to San Francisco (there has not been any confirmation of this yet). I freaked out and texted Matt, who had heard the same thing from a different source. Imagining the absolute madness of the grocery store after this potential news breaks, I got the kids back into the car and went to our small neighborhood grocery store, hoping to avoid the massive lines that have been standard at the larger stores around here. I was able to get a good amount of stuff, including eggs, milk, and bread alternatives (pretzel rolls, focaccia loaf, etc. because they were out of regular sandwich bread). So now we’re pretty well-stocked. Then I had a really frustrating text conversation with my mom, who is still in the denial/this is all ridiculous/there’s no way we could go on lockdown state of mind and insists on taking the commuter train to work even though she could work from home. Gah.

Matt came home and wanted to get quarantine cigarettes as a treat for himself (gross). I was dying to get out of the house by myself, so I went to the tobacco store/hookah bar, which was completely empty of course. The store owner was obviously stressed about the current situation and had a lot of questions for me about where I worked and whether my business was still open. When I told him I work in book publishing he looked at me quizzically and asked, “How do you make money”? I was like, well… we publish books and people buy them? It was odd. But he had roll-your-own American Spirit tobacco, so I bought the cancer leaves and went on my way. Picked up A&W for dinner because I needed to eat some feelings, and it was delicious.

It wasn’t a bad day, but definitely different from what our Mondays looked like a month ago, which included story time at the library in the morning and swim class in the late afternoon. Alice has only been going to school Tuesday through Thursday since I’ve been on leave, so today (Tuesday) will mark the first true disruption in that she will be home when she was supposed to be at school. Matt’s work is still open and will continue to be, I think, even in the case of a lockdown, since plumbers are on the list of essential workers. I’m happy he will still be working because $$$, obviously, but having him out of the house all day every day means all the childcare falls to me. Being confined to our house and yard makes this more challenging than it would be normally (and will become extremely challenging when I go back to work on April 6th). Because he’s going on jobs, I think his risk of contracting COVID-19 (and bringing it home) is fairly high. We’re not able to completely self-isolate the way families with both parents working from home are, and that means we really shouldn’t have contact with anyone else because our household isn’t a closed system. So that sucks—both the risk of contracting the virus and the social isolation our potential exposure necessitates.

I hope we don’t get sick (or if we do that we have only mild symptoms), I hope we’re all doing enough social distancing to slow the virus’s spread. I hope in four or six or eight weeks things will get better and we’ll look back on this time as super strange and temporary. Fingers crossed!

A little Peppa Pig to help get us through the day