Quarantine: Sat. 3/14

It was a beautiful, sunny, spring-y day. We all slept late--Lucia and Greta didn't get up till almost 9. Before the day really got going we went to the library, which will be closed after today. We dropped off a few bags of book donations, returned some books, and took out a bunch of books. Just in case we don't have enough reading material in the house. (That's a hilarious joke, for anyone reading this who hasn't seen our many rooms of bookshelves or the bags of extra books in the attic etc etc etc.)

After breakfast, we loaded the girls' bikes into the car and all drove up to the reservation to ride/run/wak on the loop trail. The girls biked, Andrew ran, I walked Farrah. So many people were out, keeping a distance from one another but still out. That seems okay, for now. Who knows how all this will change.

I ran a super important errand to the Dollar Tree after lunch, to get...what? what did I even buy that totalled $47? Spending that much is really really hard to do at the Dollar Tree. Basically I was stocking up to run a homeschool and survive a two-week-long snow day. My haul included paper trays, sixteen rolls of scotch tape, six hundred push pins (art project!), fairy garden components (art project!), loose leaf paper, construction paper, organizing baskets, four bottles of dish soap (for potions!), two containers of chalk (outside time!), and a lone Easter decoration. And I guess a bunch of other things to total 47.

When I got home, Andrew focused his anxiety on clutter and threw a conniption about my stacks of unmatched tupperware and other space-filling junk, so we spent some time in the basement organizing and discarding things. I made enough room in the cabinets for some of our panic groceries, then panicked that I hadn't bought enough panic groceries. I really didn't buy that much. We'll be grinding our last kernals of wheat in about two weeks. (We're currently reading the darkest chapters of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter, when the family is waiting out a four-day-long blizzard for Almanzo to return with lifesaving wheat.)

The girls played outside in the yard and driveway all afternoon with the kids across the street. For now our policy is no indoor playdates, but playing outside is okay. Again--this may change, but for now, it's what we're working with.

We ordered pizza for dinner, because we still can. L&G watched High School Musical 3.

So far, things in our town remain open. People are mobilizing to distribute food to families who can't afford panic-food hauls, and to kids who rely on school for breakfast and lunch. Neighbors are talking in the street but keeping a safe distance from one another, joking about it but doing it nonetheless.





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