In March 2020, the world stopped. Literally.

I kept trying to explain to The Kid that this was a historical event- something he would tell his grandkids about- but I don’t know that he believed me. There was so much fear in those early days. Months later, I saw a video on instagram that depicted a woman coming home from grocery shopping at the beginning of the pandemic and six months after it started. In the first depiction, she was carefully wiping down each food item with a Clorox wipe and not touching items in between cleanings. Six months later, she was lightly bouncing the Clorox wipe across the top of the groceries like she was blessing them with the antibacterial cloth instead of cleansing them. It made me laugh because there was so much truth to it.

In April of 2020, The Baby started having seizures. We caught them on video and did telehealth calls with his doctors. When one of his doctors ordered an EEG at the hospital, we were petrified. The Baby won’t wear a mask on his face and here we were waltzing into a hospital- for all we knew, a hotbed of COVID germs. We weighed all the options and decided to risk it, but we were scared. Thankfully, the hospital was a very clean ghost town and everything went okay.

No one in my family has gotten COVID but we’ve been very, very careful. With The Baby’s underlying respiratory issues, we had nightmares about showing up to a children’s hospital and being turned away for lack of beds. So, he missed out on a year and a half of school. We did “virtual” special needs Pre-K, which was little more than a morning Zoom. For 18 months, his world was limited to the people in our immediate family and his nurse.

While we did ultimately choose for him to start in-person Kindergarten this year, it was a carefully thought-out decision. It helps that his self-contained classroom has a very small census.

Yesterday, I picked him and his nurse up from school a few minutes early and we drove to a CVS twenty minutes from our house and sat behind a weird curtain and he got his first COVID vaccine.

We’ve spent almost the last two years being worried about him and this disease that has ravaged the world. I know he’s not fully covered yet, but we’ve taken the first step and I can’t quite express our relief.

(BTW, no side effects for him! He went to school and his been himself.)

Whew.