covid diary: day 168

 

I'm getting it back together. I hope.

After two weeks of nonstop deadlines, I'm finally digging out. Oh, and did I mention that this is the third week of school? It's a LOT to work full time (and then some) and oversee three kids doing everything they need to do for school. I get emails on emails on emails from teachers, principals, guidance counselors, and even colleges (most of Liam's classes are dual credit college courses). I talk on the phone with teachers, check all the many, many different apps and websites for the appropriate schedule and grade and attendance information. I follow up on homework and make sure everyone has what they need when they need it. It's exhausting.

And today is particularly tiring. I was up at 4:45 to go to the pool, then home and showered and working at 7. I worked until 9:45, then I took the boys to the optometrist for their annual exams. Henry's got great vision, Max has a slight astigmatism but not enough for glasses, and Liam's eyes are slightly worse but the exam showed no physical cause for his ocular migraines, so I guess he can just thank my side of the gene pool for both of those things. So it's new glasses for Liam, plus contacts whenever they get trial packs in again (who knows in these pandemic times when that will be). Then we grabbed lunch at DQ (the boys were VERY excited about that) and came home so the boys could get back to school and I could work a little bit more.

And then.

For some reason, I've designated this Get Shit Done Week. Sunday my dad came over and rewired some things so we could move the modem and router to my office to give me a hard line to the internet to take some of the strain off the Wi-Fi that came from four of us using it at once. (Haha, joke's on us, because while the new placement is great for me, it means Liam has no signal in his basement work area, so for now I have a 100-foot ethernet cable strung from my office down into the basement. Very classy.) And today the plumbers are here because we've had a small leak for months now in our laundry room. The leak is caused by a valve in the shower upstairs in the master bath, and naturally, they couldn't replace that valve without having access to it ... so they cut a hole in the bedroom wall. Side note: Seriously, does nobody design a house with the foresight to consider that they might want to have access to the plumbing? Come on now.

The plumbers finished just in time for me to rush Liam to the tennis courts for a home match tonight that I won't be able to watch because I have to go back to work 6-10 since I took off earlier to take the boys to the optometrist. I guess I'm ready to go? Ugh.

In short, life is progressing apace. Tennis is being played, casts are being worn, and school is happening with some reluctance and more than a little effort.

Carry on.

P.S. I'm done tracking numbers because this is only going in one direction. It's bad, bad, bad. So just assume for now on that it's worse than it was yesterday, and maybe a little bit better than it will be tomorrow.