Missives from quarantine: Week 1

A little family goes a little nutty

We went into self-quarantine on March 14, 2020, ducking the Ides of March, which seemed particularly worth avoiding at that time. 

Back then, our elementary-age kids were still going off to school each day. But like all the other parents, we knew it was only a matter of time until the pandemic crept into the Midwest and shut everything down. 

We decided (rather unceremoniously in hindsight) to pull them out of school after that Friday, March 13. (Do people not remember that? Friday the 13th. Sheesh.) We were slightly ahead of the trend—all the local schools would be shut down by the middle of the following week. Our timing was prescient, though, because it turned out that one teacher in their school building had fallen ill. Had we sent them that Monday, before the schools officially closed, they would have been exposed.

That Saturday was to be our last time we’d be out and about for months and months. We ran miscellaneous errands we’d been meaning to get to, like getting our bicycles serviced and grabbing a few home improvement supplies for upcoming projects. And we stocked up on groceries, filling up my office (I already worked from home) with nonperishables and extra sundries. 

And that was that. Quarantine. No one knew how long it would last, or how intense it would be. We just knew we had to lock it down and wait.

Remember that time? Things were getting cancelled left and right, but reluctantly, because everyone kind of hoped that maybe the coronavirus would kind of go away and we could kind of still maybe do all of the things we wanted to do. I was supposed to moderate a panel at SXSW. Cancelled. We were going to go to Florida for spring break—we had a beach house rented with some close friends, and—cancelled. Everything, cancelled. 

We knew so little about the coronavirus. One friend of ours was so paranoid that she wouldn’t even leave the house. We began doing things that seemed sensible at the time, like spraying down our mail and groceries with a bleach solution, just in case. And so on. 

Throughout our quarantine, we kept track of our day to day—what else was there to do? Here’s our family log of our first 60 days in lockdown, with pictures and the occasional audio interview. 

Perhaps you’ll see a reflection of your own family’s highs and lows and memories from that bizarre time. 

Days 1-4

[The very first thing I did on the first day of quarantine was badly slice open my finger. An inauspicious start, to be sure. To avoid troubling the healthcare system, I asked around on Facebook and in short order had a doctor friend-of-a-friend look at my bloody hand and assure me that I *probably* didn’t need stitches.

From there, the first few days are a blur. We were adjusting. The kids played outside a lot, and I played outside a lot with them. We tried to keep them busy while we both worked—our colleagues near and far were all scrambling to figure out childcare and work and virtual school, just like we were. There were screens and screens and screens. But by Day 5, we were settling in for a long haul.]

Day 5

Teaching Camille how to record music during Creative Hour.

Pictured at bottom left: Extra foodstuffs that we're storing in my office.

Not pictured: The work I am currently not getting to because the kids are home all day.

Also: We started doing interviews periodically, to try and capture little snapshots of what life is like during this bizarre time. Here’s the first one:

Day 6

They spend a lot of time in this tree in our front yard now.

Thankful that today ended up sunny and 70.

Day 7

Friday. So tired. All of us. But...fine. Ended the day with pizza while video chatting with friends. And then Jumanji 2 (errr 3...the second new one.) Girls are downstairs "taking turns" jumping on the little trampoline to get wiggles out. Bed for them momentarily. Bed for us, like...right after that.

Stay tuned for week two’s missives from quarantine.

Also here’s another interview, from Day 7.