Parentheticals

Utah went to "Orange" social distancing this week. After studying and pondering the directives for DAYS (because they were so contradictory), we finally figured them out: "Stay home, unless you want to spend money, in which case, try to stay 6 feet apart, but go ahead." Since we have literally engineered our life so that none of the things that bring us joy involve spending money, we can either just stay home forever (Alison isn't anticipating getting out of orange before next Christmas), change the way we live, or stretch the guidelines a bit. We've started socializing with one other family outdoors, reminding the kids to stay 6 feet apart. They try hard :). And once every week or two we'll get together with another family. However, Alison's best friend's mom just died, so we have been babysitting her kids several times this week; we feel that's far more important than the guidelines.  The kids have lost a lot of social skills in two months ...

We are starting to get into the swing of social isolation. We know that we're very lucky; Mike's job was already remote and isn't likely to be impacted too much by the closures (his company makes software that other companies use to do payroll and HR stuff), and we already homeschooled. But we had social activities every day of the week, and losing all of them at once was really difficult for us. It took a while to get a hang of things. The kids discovered that they can play their imagination games with friends over the video messaging app Marco Polo (thanks, Amy, for the tip!). We set up an old phone for them (after a few days of them using Alison's phone for hours until the battery died), and we find them crawling under the table whispering into the phone, "I have to hide! Someone's coming!" or such. They love getting Marco Polos back and run off to watch them immediately (although the new phone is quieter, so they've been less responsive the past ...