March 2020

 This is the month where shit started to get weird. 

March started off more or less normal: Annika busy with school, crazy hair day at Los Alamitos (for which I dyed Lukas’s hair flame-red), a playdate with Ben, Lukas entertaining himself by making Karate Kid movies and sneaking us with that damn joy-buzzer thing I bought from American Science and Surplus … 

But then, the coronavirus news that had been in the background of our lives for a month or so got local and personal. Word got out that someone in “the extended Los Alamitos family” had contracted COVID-19, and there were rumors that large gatherings might be canceled or scaled back, school might close for a week or two, etc. (As it turned out, the sick person was the father of someone in Lukas’s grade, and he passed away within a week.) After that, the dominoes started to fall rapidly: the mother-son dance was cancelled midday on March 6, the Friday it was supposed to have been held, so all of us who had been planning to go together (the Patels, the Gividen boys, the Marshalls, the Grants, the Rogerses) just had our own party at the Marshalls’, none of us really taking it seriously and all talking about how it was probably an overreaction to cancel the dance. That was the same day R. and a lot of other people were told not to come in to work, and work from home for a couple of weeks instead. R. convinced me that going to the gym (AVAC or OrangeTheory, which I’d joined in January and had been doing 4-5 times a week) was a bad idea, so I stopped (MOST RELUCTANTLY, I must say). By the end of the next week, March 13, we all knew about the local man who had died; due to rumors of a major lockdown/shelter-in-place and the closure of most businesses, I spent Thursday and Friday laying in supplies (baking ingredients, shelf-stable and frozen foods, TP, cleaning products, shampoo and toothpaste and scotch), and we got the official word that school was closed for three weeks. The kids — much as they complain about *going* to school — were pretty upset about suddenly *not* going, and literally nobody was prepared for homeschool/remote learning; it was a true shitshow while all the teachers scrambled to try to put SOMETHING together. I told the grandparents they should stay home and I — gloved, masked, and carrying sanitizer — would get their groceries and run their errands for them for awhile. We decided not to expose Petra, who cleans our house every other week, since the case we knew of had come so close to us; we told her to not come over, but that we would of course still pay her. My last haircut was in February; R.’s was on March 10. Every kind of “elective” appointment was cancelled or postponed: dentist, ortho, driver’s license renewal, any and all get-togethers, all restaurant dining, everything. And since Disneyland shut down on March 14, our planned (surprise) April trip was off, too (good thing we hadn’t told the kids we’d booked it … by the end of the month, sadly accepting that it wasn’t gonna happen, I postponed till October). It was going to be a long three weeks, but we’d manage. 

Quotable
—“I want a unicorn and a ponytail!” —Lukas, misquoting my standard “life ain’t fair” response (“Well, I want a million dollars and a pony, but I’m not getting those either.”)