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.
