Six weeks in...

It is hard to believe we started our 7th week of Safer At Home today.  In so many ways things are going well... in others we are really struggling.  We are learning all the time to take things one day at a time.  With each week comes more news that is hard to receive.

Last week we learned that the kids will most likely not be doing summer school.  If you have read the blog for a while, you know that our district summer school is incredible and practically free and so much fun.  This summer M was looking forward to starting band and taking a very important class about the transition to middle school.  We are still praying that this class will be offered in some manner so that he can be as well prepared for middle school as possible.

The Park and Rec department has put all registrations on hold for things like Summer Park which our kids love so deeply and also pool passes.  I can see the writing on the wall that most likely there will be no pool this summer and no Park program either.  This will devastate my kids in the deepest way.  Brandon and I have been thinking about things we might do or purchase to redeem this summer for the kids.  Let me know if you have any brilliant ideas!

Week six brought about new levels of creativity in the kitchen.  I will write more about this when I share the pictures from it, so I will leave you in suspense.

Speaking of pictures, I can't believe I am only a couple weeks behind real time in the blog.  Wow!  I have been working every day trying hard to catch up.  There isn't much time to get blogging done.  T still consumes most of the day and many days last week I went to bed at the same time as the kids.

I realized there was a funny but very real blessing that I forgot to mention last week in my post about the blessings of this time of isolation.  That blessing is no fear of lice!  If you are parenting elementary age kiddos right now, you know how stressful it is to always be checking for and worried about lice.  It seems it never leaves the schools and no one is immune.  We have never gotten it at our house, but we take so many precautions.  A couple of weeks ago I started letting T use my brush to brush her hair.  This is significant!  We KNOW we don't have lice!  How cool!  In fact, I am so confident that we don't have lice that my scalp doesn't itch when I write about it.  Wow!

This week we start official scheduled therapy times for T with her talk/play therapist and her OT.  It will be good for us to get into some routines in these areas.  I am thankful for therapists who can help attempt to partner with us during this season.

I have a goal to write less in these posts as I am getting so close to catching up to real time in the blog.  I do want to include the stats.  There are now 3,064,823 (yes, over 3 million) cases in the world,  1,010,507 (yes over 1 million) cases in the US, 6,161 cases in our state, 87 cases in our county and still just 6 cases in our community.  We have had very slow growth in our county and zero growth in our community since last week.  This is good news. There have been 23,000 new cases and 1,400 deaths in the last 24 hours.  Based on my stats from last Monday night, in the last week there were 583,788 more cases in the world and 225,908 more cases in the US, and 1644 more cases in my state.  We have had over 200,000 deaths in the world with over 56,000 deaths in the US.  I want to point out that John's Hopkins has not moved the number of cases over one million as I type this, but I have been using same meter website each week so I am keeping it consistent.  I am sure all places will be reporting the milestone soon.  All of these numbers continue to climb, but I feel like the daily totals of cases and deaths is leveling off which is a great sign.