Growing a Victory Garden. Is it Worth the Trouble?
Like many gardeners, when the Covid-19 pandemic hit and people started shopping for food in bulk, I wondered whether I should grow a victory garden. Victory gardens were large kitchen gardens homeowners kept during World Wars I and II as a way of ensuring food for themselves and others. Since a lot of rural people left the country to fight in the wars, the agriculture industry became strained. So the government started a campaign to transform every backyard and public park into land for food cultivation. It was a citizen’s…
Keeping a Special Needs Kid Busy During Covid-19
Monday, Day 5 By Monday, our family settled into this new life of sequestration. My husband hunkered down in his mountain of work, my son started taking walks, my daughter practiced her saxophone, and my youngest, well, she is a special needs kid so it’s more difficult to keep her occupied. Sad Beginnings Become Better Over Time Thirteen years ago, my youngest was starved and ignored as a newborn. Little food, no care, no comfort. I could make you cry with the story. She basically lay in a crib the…
An Overworked Engineer Husband During Covid-19
Sunday, Day 4 Just as my daughter started to recover from the flu, my husband got slammed with work. He’s a software architect at a large networking company. They make team-connecting software called WebEx. Well, after several governors announced school closures because of the coronavirus outbreak, parents across the U.S. needed a way to work from home. WebEx software became enormously useful and so did my overworked engineer husband. In an effort of good will, the company made WebEx free for everyone. That led to an avalanche of new users…
A Fever and Bedroom Quarantine During Covid-19
Saturday, Day 3 As I wrote in my last post, my daughter came down with a flu late last week. She’d been getting the chills and couldn’t sleep after her band trip to Ireland had been cancelled. While I’d hoped the mild fever she’d had of a 100.5 would go down overnight, it didn’t. She only slept a few hours and so the fever shot up to 103. She felt ragged. Tired. Depressed. She coughed a lot. So I sent her upstairs for a bedroom quarantine, worrying about whether she…
My Daughter Has a Flu During Covid-19
Friday: Day 2 So just as we were coping with my kids’ cancelled band trip to Ireland, my daughter started feeling unwell. A few days earlier, she’d gone for a walk with a friend who’d recently recovered from a flu. Also, she was home because her high school had just recently closed for the day. A staff member had tested positive for Covid-19. While the staff member wasn’t named, my daughter suspected it might have been her teacher, who’d been out sick since the previous Thursday, the same number of…
