Five on Friday: How it Started, How it's Going (Pandemic Style)

The one-year anniversary of COVID dramatically changing all of our lives is looming on the horizon . . . I know this bearing heavy on everyone's minds lately. The milestones are already happening: this was the day of the first confirmed case in our state, this was our last full week of in-person school last year. Now it's almost our son's early March birthday . . . the second one he won't be able to fully celebrate because of the pandemic.

I had some one-on-one time with our youngest child the other day. We were talking about how even though this last year has been so weird and different . . . it has not been awful for us. None of us got sick with COVID. Nobody in our immediately families died from it. Nobody here lost their job, we always had enough food (and toilet paper!) and a safe place to live.

Of course, that doesn't mean things haven't changed. Here are my pandemic-themed "how it started, how it's going" observations

1. Oh those early days of lockdown! I cooked and cooked and cooked. I like cooking, there were seven people here CONSTANTLY, and not much else for me to do. These days I can find myself a little burnt out on it and have told my children they are allowed to get the free garbage lunch the state has been offering all school children.

2. There are NOT seven people here anymore--two of the adults were able to go off to college in January! And the remaining three children are not packing lunch on the 0-5 days they go in to school (every week is different with these two schools' hybrid schedules!) Now there are days we don't even run the dishwasher!!

3. Last February, my boys were ahead of the pandemic puzzle craze. We had been swapping puzzles in the local library's exchange box for a few weeks before the pandemic started . . . then when the library announced it'd be closing to the public, we stocked up on a few. Suffice it to say, at this point the novelty has worn off.

4. Me, March 2020: "I'm not going to sew any masks for the kids because they're not going to go anywhere."

Me, today: "The bus is coming! Do you have your chromebook? Water bottle? Do you have your mask???"

5. I'm still not back to attending any in-person exercise classes, though, so for now, this part of my life remains pretty much the same: