Well, we had a really nice holiday. And I am aware of how many people did not get to have a really nice holiday for a whole host of reasons. I am incredibly grateful that our expectations were met, and relatively unscathed!
I won’t lie. The first 2/3rds of yesterday were rough. Not knowing if we were going to get my husband’s results, or what those results were going to be, was hard. We were supposed to spend the whole day with my in-laws, but we kept pushing back our possible arrival time. It wasn’t until we had decided that they would come to us and we’d celebrate in our garage with the door up (and the air filters running and my husband in a mask), that his test results finally arrived. I had actually set up the entire garage – I even added some holiday touches – before he finally got the email around 3:30.
But we got to spend the afternoon with my in-laws. Last year we didn’t even see them at all so spending 4.5 hours over there felt like a major win. We even got to watch Encanto, which we all loved. It was a really nice day.
Opening presents at their house on Christmas Eve also helped release a lot of the pressure for today’s festivities. Instead of leaving at the crack of dawn for my in-law’s (and then driving down to my parents’ at lunch), this year we enjoyed a leisurely morning of new video games and reheated cinnamon rolls (the ones we had missed on Christmas Eve morning) before heading down to my parents’ house around 10am. I got to stay in bed until 8:30! We are never going back to our old way of celebrating ever again.
Today was a low key day. We opened presents and played Exploding Kittens and built LEGO sets and learned magic tricks and played an escape room that my sister got us. We also ate, and ate, and ate. We were going to watch the Muppets Christmas Carole but ended up leaving a little early for more video games at home (definitely the right call). Now it’s 7pm and I’m working out on the elliptical while my daughter reads and my son plays his new game with his dad. I hope my husband and I can manage to make it through a movie tonight before we head to bed.
Tomorrow we have nothing planned. It rained all day today, which was great because we wouldn’t have made it outside (although the down pour made for a slow drive down to my parents’ house), and it’s supposed to rain a lot tomorrow which is fine. There is a part of me that wants to start taking down the Christmas decorations but another part of me thinks that is crazy. I did put them up early this year, so it makes sense that I’m ready to take them down. We also are back on January 3rd, which means there won’t be much time later. I think I’ll do everything but the tree tomorrow and take the tree down later in the week.
I have lots of other stuff to get done tomorrow, like laundry and picking up and finding places for the kids’ new stuff and actually cleaning our bedroom in the downstairs unit. My sister is going to spend some night there later in the week and she’s allergic to cats so I have to make sure the little bit of cat dander down there (the cat does not spend much time in that area) is eradicated. On a related note, I have a new shower curtain and I can’t wait to just throw out the old one instead of trying to clean it. I HATE cleaning the shower curtain. (I’ve used the current shower curtain for a full two years so I feel okay getting rid of it. It’s just so, so gross).
We don’t have a ton planned for this coming week. My sister will be in the city and we have some outside stuff planned (hoping the weather cooperates). And some friends will be in town for a night later in the week. We were going to actually go out, but now we all think just ordering in and mixing our own cocktails makes the most sense. I guess people generally just take off their masks at restaurants and bars and after my husband’s testing fiasco I’m not ready to put myself in that kind of situation. Luckily our friends seem totally fine with our change of heart; they have been very cautious as well, and are taking the new variant seriously.
It’s been good to see the absence of a horrible spike in hospital cases, at least in places like SF where vaccine levels are high. I know it’s still too early to be more than cautiously optimistic that omicron actually leads to milder illness, but I have read that we’re far enough out from omicrons arrival (and subsequent take over) that we’d have seen the start of a spike in hospitalizations if this were delta. So that is encouraging.
Having said that, I still think we’re in for a logistical nightmare in January. If a bunch of vaccinated people are going to end up getting Covid now, and they and/or their family members have to isolate for 7-10 days, that is going to be a lot of people calling in sick. I will be really surprised if there isn’t some kind of large scale disruption at my district that we just can’t absorb without drastic measures (like a couple of weeks back in distance learning). Truly, if we can avoid that it will be a miracle. I’m definitely going to be making Plans A, B, C and D for my own classes for at least four weeks after we get back. Maybe longer.
I know how lucky we are that my husband’s test came back negative. I was actually starting to think it was positive, and that Kaiser calling us was what was gumming up the works on his results. He said that people were absolutely just taking masks off at the door at the holiday party he went to on Wednesday, and while he stayed strong earlier in the evening, by the end he was keeping his mask off while he completed entire drinks, not just pulling it down between sips. The fact that he just got a cold, and not covid, is a miracle.
We’ll see if our Dave and Busters visits come back to bite us in the ass. The kids did wear their heavy duty natural latex respirator masks in there, and we never took our masks off for anything (I even made them step outside to drink water from the bottles I brought). But we were in there for 3-4 hours both times and statistically speaking we can be sure quite a few people in there had omicron and didn’t realize it. I plan on making them test appointments before we return to school regardless. I hope other families do the same (doubtful – and if they all did there would be a testing availability crisis anyway). Again, there is no way we can avoid major disruptions in January. No way.
I think the most frustrating thing right now, is the lack of infrastructure available for the people that do want to be cautious and considerate. How can we ask families to test before they return to school if we know they would have to test 2-3 times before and during the first week to actually catch an asymptomatic infection? There is a real feeling of, anything I can do is not enough anyway, and it will be a major pain in my ass to actually do it, so I might as well just wait for symptoms and hope for the best.
In the meantime, we have decide to suspend indoor, unmasked play dates indefinitely. We are lucky enough to live somewhere with temperate weather and plenty of opportunities for safer, outdoor socializing. We’ll probably still wear masks outside (we never really stopped doing that, I think because then we didn’t have to worry if the kids got really close to each other, but honestly I don’t know, we just never made that transition, at least not in San Francisco). This is not because we are worried about getting sick necessarily, but more to avoid the ramifications of positives to our daily lives. We’re still doing things that are important to us, like practicing martial arts at the dojo and letting our daughter start swimming lessons in January (it seems highly likely she will get covid from this as it’s inside without masks and they have to crown around at the end of the lane for directions pretty frequently), and I don’t think we’d still be doing these things if they weren’t vaccinated, so it’s not like they were for nothing. I have to keep telling myself that when I feel down in the dumps about being right back where we started.
And here’s the part where I apologize for this crazy long post. I guess I had some stuff to say. I didn’t expect to spend my entire 45 minutes on the elliptical writing, but the timer just went off. I appreciate getting to process, and find perspective.
And to say that I’m grateful. Because I really, really am.
Thank you for sharing so much good news and the joy of your holiday. Still wet here which I am grateful about. The wet is so needed.
Hope you are able to clear things today (boxing day) and that you get time for you and refreshing this coming week. Suspect you are right that January will be memorable and impressive for the wrong reasons, but hoping to be proven wrong.
Wishing you all peace and joy and health!
you chose to use gratitude/grateful in your last sentence. Such impact and exactly the word I needed then and there. I do so appreciate you!
Honest question, K – at what point do things have to get to for you to feel comfortable stepping away from the extreme cautionary measures your family is following? Not judging – to each their own and you have to do what makes you feel comfortable – but when we are at a point that your entire family is fully vaccinated and, yes, Omnicron is showing to be way more contagious BUT also way less severe, especially in fully vaccinated individuals… when will you feel comfortable treating it more like influenza and the common cold? You and I are on such different pages in terms of caution with it at this point that it’s honestly curious to me how stressed you still are about it, and I so wish you didn’t feel that way! I know that they started with 14 day quarantines and then 10 and now they changed the recommendation to 7 days (at least for health care workers)… I wonder when they’ll just go to “you can resume life as normal once you’re no longer symptomatic” – just like how we treat every other virus out there. Especially with oral antiviral treatment also available now – it just feels to me like we’ve truly turned a corner.
At any rate, we are on day 11 of being in our condo in Mexico, and it has been SOOOOO rejuvenating for all of us. Everyone wears masks indoors and restaurants give you sanitizer for your hands when you walk in, but overall life feels SO good & normal here, and it was something we all needed. My husband’s brother and his fam were also here the first 8 days, and man those cousins played hard together. Everyone is vaccinated, and the 5 of them all tested negative on Friday in order to fly home Saturday (we leave tomorrow). Those pieces of normalcy were incredibly needed by all of us, and I’m glad to read in your posts that you’ve had a bit of that with your family this holiday season as well!
Honestly, it’s just about the logistics repercussions of a positive or multiple positives at this point. Missing that much work, having my colleagues have to cover for me for 10+ days. Writing all those su plans. It would be a nightmare.
Your vacation has been amazing. That is great! My daughter’s friend has spent the entire trip to her grandmother’s house sharing a tiny room with her mom, wearing a mask to the bathroom, not seeing anyone or going anywhere (even in the apartment). They have to stay an extra week so more time stuck in a tiny room going no where. Her mom is freaking out that she’ll test positive and have to push her flight back another week. She’s already missing a week more of work than she had planned. It’s a mess. And the friend is fine. It is just like a cold. But logistically it’s nightmare and the vacation that was supposed to provide connection with people they haven’t seen since the start of the pandemic is not that at all. The grandmother not only doesn’t see her daughter or granddaughter but had to cancel all her own holiday plans with friends and other family. What would happen to your trip if just one person in that house tested positive before you need to fly home? Surely it would be a shit show for someone. What would have happened if one person started showing symptoms on the second day? Even if you all don’t care about getting sick, having someone test positive can really mess up plans. And being a teacher when subs are non existent and positives require 10+ days of quarantine is just really difficult. And yes eventually they will have to make different rules for how long people have to isolate, but that isn’t going to happen any time soon.
We all decided that since the kids are all newly vaccinated, and the adults all got their boosters and/or COVID in the past month (my FIL and MIL both got it in Nov and my BIL as well tho none of his fam came down with it) – we decided our chances of getting it and it messing up our travel plans was crazy low – low enough we were willing to risk it. Even if someone had tested positive, we’d have just gotten another condo rental in our building if needed to ride out quarantine if it went longer than our current reservation (cost of living is really cheap here and it’s free to change flights). For us, the small chance of a potential positive forcing any of us to miss work was worth the trade off of this time together as a family, and quarantine is not required after a positive if you are vaccinated so even if 1 person tested positive it wouldn’t have meant the other 10 would have to quarantine.
I must’ve missed the story about your daughter’s friend – is she vaccinated? If so, why is she staying in a bedroom? Who had the positive case?
My daughter’s friend is positive. Just got fully vaccinated when she turned 12 (Halloween birthday). They flew to NYC and she got a sore throat and tested positive on the third day. She’s staying at her grandmother’s house and gma (and her husband) are 80. They are vaccinated and boostered but her mom (my friend) doesn’t want to expose them. Evidently the grandmother isn’t worried about it but the husband is (grandmother is remarried). So they (my friend and my daughters friend) are stuck in a room away from the grandparents. And they had to push their flight out a week (supposed to fly yesterday, now flying this coming Saturday). If the mom (who is sleeping in the room with her daughter) gets sick they will have to push it back even more.
I don’t actually know if with omicron the chances of a breakthrough infection are crazy low. Maybe they are? Obviously you guys have been fine on your travels, but positives are affecting other vaccinated and boostered people.
I think as a teacher I’m more worried about missing work than most people. My husband could work from home if he tests positive. Or if our kids do. But not me. I have to burn sick days and spend all these hours writing sub plans. It’s just not worth it for me for indoor play dates. We’re still doing other things that are potentially risky, but not that. I will still see my three friends inside without masks if we really need to (if it’s raining one day we planned to meet outside) but honestly we’ll probably keep meeting outside when we can because why not? It’s not freezing here. But maybe I’m missing the point. I honestly don’t know anymore. All I do know is a positive in my household would make my life incredibly difficult for at least two weeks. Possibly longer if someone else tests positive after the initial person did. But I think my job is less flexible than a lot of people’s.
Just sharing solidarity with the precarious and fragile work arrangement situation. I’m a college professor at a school in the Northeast with strict (and science-based) policies. If anybody in my house gets covid then they are a “household close contact” and I cannot work on campus. I’m in the lab sciences so I can teach my class on zoom without too much lost, but covering labs is a logistical nightmare and puts a huge imposition on my colleagues. It would also be pretty hard to quarantine in our house due to layout and bathroom placement. The idea that we might all get covid one after the other, 5-7 days apart could easily have me out of work and our kids out of school for most of a month. I can see these calculations being very different if we were different ages or in different professions, but that is just not where my family is. We have overall taken very similar precautions to your family.
I also think people should take a serious look at what happened at colleges with vaccine mandates when omicron hit. (https://www.cnn.com/2021/12/14/us/cornell-university-covid-cases/index.html). These are situations with 97+% vaccination rates that are having massive Covid outbreaks. My entire family is fully vaccinated (boosted if eligible) and I’m confident we would not be severely ill. I am not at all confident that the vaccines protect against transmission against this variant.