day 7

I know this is going to last for weeks, if not months. And yet I hope that if we can make it through one more week in the apartment, things will get a little easier: more routine, less uncertain. The numbers of new cases in Italy should start to stabilize and go down after two weeks of lockdown there; if we're lucky, the numbers here will follow. If we're lucky. The latest advice from the government is to not leave the house except for grocery shopping, but they haven't actually banned people from leaving the house, so as far as I can tell everyone is still going out to play. And while I'm ranting, they haven't closed construction sites, which I guess makes sense because the economy, and construction workers do stand far away from each other and wear protective clothing anyway? But this means that it's NOISY around here all week. I can tell it's Saturday morning because I can hear the birds chirping.

Update: ...but apparently Saturday is an ok day to continue renovating the apartment two floors down. Bird song drowned out until tomorrow. 😕

Last night Caroline cried herself to sleep because her friend sent her a picture of the donkeys from the stall. The stall is closed for the work group, but the kids were still allowed to take the donkeys out for walks this week. And Caroline wanted to, but since she couldn't assure me that an adult was going to go walking with them or that her stall friends had any sense in their pretty little heads (it's touch and go there), I told her she couldn't go. Which crushed her spirit. I hadn't really considered that the girls are secondary; it is the donkeys themselves who are her best friends, and she cannot call or Skype them... I'll let her go walking this week if it's still a possibility; surely people will have realized the gravity of the situation by then and there will be a smaller chance of the girls getting distracted and congregating with their friends? I am so glad that we got the bunnies before all this started, otherwise I'd probably have a very depressed child on my hands. As opposed to an only mildly depressed child.

"You can't Skype with donkeys" is my thought of the day. Isolation means a time of reckoning with our family systems, for better or worse. And one challenge for all of us is to identify our needs that don't get met within these systems. If we're lucky, we will find creative and corona-compatible ways to get them met; but that's not always going to be possible, and then we have to sit with them anyway and mourn their loss. For me, it's the fact that I have to do this work for four that feels overwhelming - the kids are kids and as wonderful as Daniel is, his emotional life is even to himself a complete mystery. And who will sit with me? I'm hoping the weekend will mean some extra time alone to regroup.

Meanwhile, Caroline proves that Nailed It! is in fact educational programming...

it's...

...multi-colored cake!