Mom’s Log: Day 219 of the Rona Meltdown, Both Maddening and Funny

Mom’s Log:

October 22, 2020. Our Army family is far from our native land, as usual. It is day 219 of the coronavirus meltdown of society.

(I only know that it’s day #219 because my friend Marsha from high school has kept up with it on the daily news. {Facebook.})

There have been no entries here in the mom log in a month because, well, things have been ugly.

Mainly me. I have been ugly. Bad attitude, no make-up, always a pony tail, and all hope was failing. We are hanging on by a thread. Any update would not have been something you would want to read.

Locals remain friendly, and we see them more often than we did in the spring and summer. The South claims “southern hospitality,” but actually we have found all of America to be quite welcoming, and we have lived everywhere.

Home sickness hit all of us hard this year, which was greatly relieved by our summer visit to the home lands of Alabama.

Virtual school this year is far less lenient than in the spring.

It is all sink or swim now. They are often being graded on their ability to submit their work properly, not on their actual understanding of the material. For a perfectionist like me, that causes a ton of stress. It flies in the face of all my ideals, and yet for the life of us, we cannot manage to get it all submitted properly. It is impossible.

How is this going for you?

I think about all the many ways people have been affected by coronavirus and our attempts at slowing the spread of it. Such a mess. What a year.

-Lonely people because we are encouraged to social distance and not to visit the elderly or sickly.

-In fact, no one visits us either anymore.

-People missing out on spiritual encouragement as churches and Bible study groups were cancelled. Then once they were back in session some did not follow safety measures, so the at risk population still could not feel safe going to church.

Thankfully, our pastor’s wife is a nurse in the hospital COVID floor, so yes, our church has been hyper vigilant and very safe.

-Kids spending way too much time indoors

-Anxiety for everyone trying to deal with all these changes

-People losing their businesses and their jobs

-Caretakers afraid to go anywhere for fear of getting their family member sick

I only know one person who walks around like, ” This is neat! I get to be home more, do improvement projects, save money on gas, get more done, this is been great for me!”

That would be my husband. It’s true that we have far more access to him than usual, and that has been nice. While I am happy for him, I have found that level of positivity to be hard to maintain.

However, I do have some photos of amusing things we have encountered in our isolated house recently.

Competition for food among the younglings has become fierce. They have taken to writing their names on snacks in the cabinets.

They also have an odd habit of hoarding rocks.

When I get stressed, my body turns against me. I have been to a couple of doctor appointments lately. They still think celiac is a possibility. I am going gluten free again to see if it works. Perhaps in a future post I will go into more detail on what celiac is and how many surprising ways it affects your body.

Alan has finished refurbishing the deck, so he moved on to painting this one window trim. It was the only window in the house that was oak while rest of the house has white trimmed windows, so now it matches everything else nicely.

In an effort to keep up with the heavy demand of my housemates for food, I now receive produce shipments from Misfits Market https://www.misfitsmarket.comevery two weeks. I get to pick out what is in the box, it is all discounted and organic, and it arrives right to my door. Pretty awesome. The only hitch is that sometimes the box gets beat up, and I get some damaged goods like the shipment pictured above.

If you want to try Misfits Market for yourself, be sure to use this code: COOKWME-GY7LYH to get 30% off your first order!

Maybe it is not my healthiest coping strategy, but I have been sneaking one mini-coke per day in the garage. Unfortunately, I am now completely out of mini-Cokes. Sad.

YES!!! Not me though. I would lose it and start screaming back at them. Way too much stress.

If you follow me on Facebook, you probably already saw this last one, but I thought it was so cute. This is the Army base John David made out of index cards. He likes to make whole card villages. I love it.

“The angry person in front is the leader.”

I asked him why he is angry, and JD said, “Because he is the leader!”

haha! You could go a couple different ways with that, but either way I thought it was funny and kind of true. I guess in this house I have been the angry leader lately.

I have not handled the virtual schooling well, until today. Somehow today I woke up okay. Today all the constant little problems have bothered me less than usual. Plus, the younger boys are coming off of being grounded for their bad virtual school behaviors, so they are acting better now. That makes a big difference. Consequences. One cannot overstate the importance of consequences. Unruly houses make for miserable parents, and that is the boat I was riding in.

But today I’m oddly happy. ha!! So I thought it was a good day for a log update. Hope you enjoyed it! We are going to make it y’all. God is still in Heaven. The sun still comes up everyday, and the fact is we can take this and become better for it or we can become bitter. I don’t like bitter. Do you ?