Coronavirus shuts it all down

Well the kids are now on day 5 of missing school due to the coronavirus outbreak and who knows when they'll go back to school again - it won't be any earlier than April 13, which would mean they'd have had 22 days off due to the virus, then 5 days of spring break. They're already getting a little bored, really. They're supposed to try to implement some kind of distance learning, but I am not sure that's really going to work.

For Reed, it means missing out on school time (not missing school time, just not having it!) and missing out on the two college tours we'd booked (JMU and UVA) during spring break - the colleges will be closed. He doesn't care about missing school at all. He had one outing with friends (to Zaxby's, Dairy Queen, and then to play basketball) and maybe that wasn't the smartest thing to allow, but it's good to get out and he washed his hands at least once, hopefully more.

For Amy, it means actually missing school. Well, a couple of classes, anyway (earth science, with her friend Morgan and a good teacher, and of course theater class. And boy has this thing thrown a monkey wrench in the school play. They've been working on Footloose since December, I think, and it was scheduled for March 26-29. Their teacher Ms. Novi has told them the play WILL go on at some point, but I really doubt it. Too many competing interests, if school ever even gets back into session this spring. For this reason, it's kind of a good thing that she has a less-involved role this time around - she's on the marketing team, rather than being an assistant stage manager (that's ASM for those who know what's what) like she was in the fall. For the fall play, she was at school basically 5-6 days a week for months. On the marketing team, it's about 2 days a week, though it probably would have ramped up a little bit as it got closer. Being less invested, I think it doesn't hurt quite as much that it's gone sideways. The other big bummer is that the theater trip to NYC which was to be the week before spring break is canceled. Boo.

For me, as of yesterday I'm allowed to completely work from home, unless something comes up. For Tod, the majority of his work at AWS is done in a SCIF, so he can't do that from home. He's hoping maybe it'll work out that he can work from home one day a week, we'll see. It's a super weird, surreal time.

We've never lived through anything like this before and honestly it's scary already to think of how things might go. So we will do all we can to stay healthy, maintain our sanity and not drive each other bananas, and hope it's sooner rather than later that we can go back to "normal," whatever that is. Right now we just keep deleting things from our calendars. And as much as all four of us are introverted home-bodies, when you have no choice but to stay home, it's not the same as when you're choosing to stay home. Having a snow day is awesome because you know it will be done in a few days...this, we have no clue how long it'll last.

Everybody wash your hands.

Reed the movie buff

Reed has become a bit of a cinephile in the last year. This Oscars season, he wanted to see all of the movies nominated for Best Picture before awards night, and he did. When a movie he might want to see comes out, he watches their reviews on Rotten Tomatoes very closely, and won't see anything that's not rated highly (is "fresh" the right term?). When Amy and I were in NYC last month, Tod and Reed even went to the fancy theater to see a showing of all the short movies nominated for Oscars, like 6 of them. And they both loved it! For some reason, he even ordered BluRay copies of 3 of the best picture nominees, so he'd have them. It's kind of turned into his "thing" and it's pretty cool!

Still can't get him to organize a movie outing with friends, but at least he usually does seem to go along if someone else suggests it!

Home alone

Last weekend, we had our first "alone" getaway in almost 8 years – the last time we did it was for Tod's 40th birthday in 2012. But this time....we left the kids home on their own.

CRAZY. We flew out early on Saturday morning to Austin, where we had a fabulous time seeing shows, eating, and seeing the sights. Meanwhile back at home, Amy managed to get rides to/from the drama tech build, and they even set up their own grubhub account so they could get Red Robin delivered. They were 100% unfazed by the whole thing. Of course they do hardly notice we're here on the weekends, until it gets to be dinner time. They even got themselves off to school on Monday morning. We flew in on Monday afternoon and everything was just as we left it. 

I know they're 17 and almost 15, but it is still a momentous thing to leave them alone for more than two days!!