Covid Diaries Week 9

May 9 - 15

Doing

It was Mother’s Day this weekend. Ella woke up and jumped in our bed, excited to give me a present and demanding I get up with her. Seriously?! She clearly does not get that the best present she could give me is time to sleep. I managed a few more minutes of shut eye by convincing her to draw a picture for Nannie before I finally gave up and got out of bed. Ollie however, did seem to get the message, sleeping in past 8:30am and giving me time to drink a coffee and catch up on blog writing. I think Ollie stays in bed while he is awake now, so that he can wee in his nappy before we pull it off him for another day of potty training.

We had snow on Saturday. Snow! I tried to get a picture, you can kind of see the snow gathering on top of the umbrella in this picture. It actually snowed even harder later on that day. I can’t believe it. Temperatures at night this week went below freezing. It's MAY!!! Thankfully the weather warmed up a bit later on in the week. Someone please assure me that was the last bit of frost I'll be seeing for at least a few months.

My work eased up a bit this week, so on Wednesday afternoon I took Ella for a drive down to Lake Ontario for a picnic. I was a bit uneasy as to whether or not we were allowed to do this, and as I parked on a side street I briefly wondered if anyone was going to report me. But the trail we were walking on had a sign saying it was open, with distancing guidelines, and it wasn’t very busy at all, so I soon forgot my worries.

We had a great time walking through trails next to the lake, and even found this secluded inlet to have our picnic. Ella loves, loves, loves drawing, so I brought along a sketchbook to see if she wanted to draw our surroundings.

It was a really lovely afternoon, the only hiccup came at the end when Ella had to go to the bathroom. She refused to do a “bush wee”, something that was so easy to do with her when she was young. We had a 20 minute drive home, but she insisted on holding it. I was worried as I knew I couldn’t stop to use a bathroom on the way home (will we ever want to use public restrooms again?), but fortunately she did hold it and we didn’t have any accidents.

On Thursday Ella had her first zoom dance lesson. It’s taken her dance studio about two months to set up these lessons. Ella participated for about five minutes and then just sat down and watched the rest of the lesson. Oh well, hopefully the next one goes a little bit better.

On Friday I had another free afternoon, so I took Ella out again. This time we stayed local, walking to the Italian bakery near our house for some lunch. This was the first time I’ve taken Ella alone to a shop so I was undecided about which was a better option, have her wait outside for me or come inside the shop and make sure she doesn't touch anything? In the end I took her in, and she was able to wait in the seating area (which is not in use at the moment, obviously). The family that own the place were so nice about it and even gave her a little chocolate treat to eat while she waited. 

We decided to eat our lunch at the park near her school, but just as we got there it started to lightly rain. I suggested we eat underneath the slide to keep dry, and Ella replied “but we are not allowed to go to the playground!” I assured her it was fine as we were not going to play on it or touch anything.

This all worked out fine until it started absolutely bucketing down. Now the slide was not offering us much protection, so we decided to just get wet and run home. It was pretty warm out (about 20 degrees) so it ended up being really funny the two of us running home in the pouring rain. When we got back Ella kept exclaiming “we are totally soaking wet!” like she was so happy about it. To warm up and dry off we made a huge bubble bath which Ella spent an hour playing in. All in all a pretty successful afternoon!

Reading

I’ve started My Grandmother Sends her Regards and Apologies by Fredrik Backman. I loved some of his other books (Beartown, Us Against You, A Man Called Ove) but for some reason I cant’ get into this one. I’m only a few chapters in and will push on for a bit longer as I like the author and it has good reviews.

Still reading Sapiens. Still interesting but slow going.

Watching

On Saturday and Wednesday nights my dad and Andy play poker online with my brother and a few of my dad’s friends. I am loving these two evenings to myself while Andy is occupied! I usually do a longer yoga class once the kids are in bed (or on the floor in Ella’s room while she falls asleep) and then make a cup of tea and choose a TV program that Andy hates. At the moment I’m watching This Is Us. I started watching this show while doing night feeds with Ollie, and I dip back into every so often when Andy is not around. (SPOILER ALERT!) I’m halfway through Season 2, and am just about to find out the whole story about how Jack dies. Even as viewers we know Jack dies back in Season 1, I am expecting this episode to be very sad. Get the box of tissues ready!

When Andy is around we’ve been binging Money Heist on Netflix. I haven’t been this hooked on a series in a while. 

Cooking

Nothing new this week except failed sourdough. See below...

Learning

Ok, we’ve finally jumped on the sourdough train. One of my students offered me some sourdough starter, and assured me it was a very easy process. Um, it most definitely is not. My mom and I have tried twice. The first was a complete failure but we figured out we shouldn’t have used the starter straight from the fridge. The second was better, but didn’t rise at all, resulting in an edible but extremely dense loaf of bread. I’m not sure either of us can be bothered persisting with it.

In the news…

On Thursday the Ontario government announced we are in Phase 1 of reopening the economy. Some highlights: Golf courses open this weekend, parks are open (but not playground equipment), and you can pick up books from the library again. Also retail stores with a street entrance will be allowed to open from next week. 

I found this article super helpful in determining the risk factor of different situations when out and about. The article was linked from the NY Times so I feel like it is legit. 

We are coming into a long weekend here in Canada, so there is a lot of controversy on whether or not people should be allowed to go up to their cottages. I can understand both sides of the argument, on one hand the number of Covid-19 infections in Toronto is much higher than in rural areas of Ontario, so of course those places don’t want it brought in by city dwellers. On the other hand, I’m sure the economy in those places depends on the summer visitors. And if I had a cottage I’d probably be dying to escape my house and go there for the weekend. It’s so hard to know the right thing to do these days.