CHAPTER 2

2020 COVID-19 – March 17

Trying to stay healthy, sane and have personal space while minimizing the spread of contagious diseases is basically impossible with a baby. If there is anything babies hate more than social isolation it’s missing the opportunity to put all things in their mouths. Babies also hate social injustice, racial inequality and bigotry,…because they are pure.

Our son will be one year old in July, forget not touching his face, he licks his own hands. Like a cat. And pretty much anything else he can find. He coughs into my mouth and is a PSA for what NOT to do to keep disease from spreading. Lucky for him he’s got a real case of the handsomes. ❤️

The four of us are all mostly healthy right now, minus the obligatory winter nose snots and stress-induced parenting tiredness/headaches. We have a baby trying to put garbage into our mouths and a four-year-old who has a dastardly habit of eating whatever discoverable she finds in her nose. Pandemic or not we have been trying to teach/remind her not to do that because…well, it’s gross and yeah it is super gross. Last night she picked, looked at it and then folded over in tears because she “really wanted to eat it” the struggle not to consume it was too real. It was both heartbreaking and barf-making.
She ate it anyway.

Claudine had a cough last week, no fever or other symptoms, but it is the exact sound that nobody wants to hear right now. She is getting better now, thank goodness, but it’s impossible not to overthink each throat tickle, sneeze, cough and itch right now. My wrist was itchy (likely from the excessive hand washing) and that caused an easy mental saunter through unstable town, first stop: hypochondria.

Luckily, in general, on a normal day, my nature is to immediately assume the absolute worst – a self-protection coping mechanism – and I can jump directly sinus-first INTO the conclusion that death is rapping its scythe at the door. If you are sick you are probably dying in my mind. So a pandemic is TOTALLY up my alley.
Kidding, please make it stop.

I feel like each article I read (and I’m spiralling) each time I go to sleep and wake up (including waking in the night to read more news articles) things keep getting more surreal.

I mean KFC has suspended their “finger lickin” marketing strategy amid COVID-19 fears. Licking fingers was always a silly way to have to tell people to eat chicken…and I’m a vegetarian anyway but…wow. This is serious. What are people supposed to do with all that ‘tasty’ chicken grease now, KFC???

With a Britney-Spears-circa-2007-shave-your-head kind of intensity, I’m genuinely terrified about how this is all going to pan(demic) out. What if we are collectively too late? Who knows these days? Not even W.H.O. knows. (see what I did there?)

It’s the entire reason I’ve started writing a blog again to take away from my news article reading stress cyclone. I know it’s going to be ok, it always is. Just, when exactly? I need a timeline!

Yet somehow, with family in Trinidad, UK, Canada, and the US, all going through this almost simultaneously, it feels a little less oceans apart and more oddly connected (but connected 6ft away for social distancing, please)

It’s a journey we have all now been flung into taking together. And I’m learning to pause even on the days that I want to fast forward.

Stay safe, everyone.
I love you all.

Rating: Proper handwashing is weird because it makes us touch our fingers a lot. And fingers/hands are extra weird and bony. At least mine are. #weirdhands

Pros: Super happy and blessed to have so many fingers.

Cons: Too many fingers to wash.