If there’s one thing I can encourage all the homeschooling parents out there to do, it’s to maintain a tidy, organized work station for the children. It’s really done wonders for my mental health. See?

(The longer this self-isolation goes on, the more and more I seem to connect with the spirit of Alexis Rose. I think she’s my quarantine muse.)

Last week we ate really well and that’s about the extent of my wins. It was a very Whitewater Cooks kind of week and this Chicken Tortilla Soup was a hit as was this CHEESE-STUFFED NAAN BREAD (all caps definitely required).

My friend, Kendra, nominated me for one of those Facebook things where you post about motherhood for 10 days with photos…and as much as I want to participate, I just don’t have the bandwidth to commit to 10 days of that. I did feel inspired to start combing through some old photos though, and here are some of my faves:

(How was she SO MAD ALL THE TIME?!)

It was such a haze, those years. But now we are here, and I am so thankful:

I was feeling less anxious overall about the whole Covid-19 threat but then the latest news about the correlation between blood clots/strokes in young people who have Covid-19 kind of sent me reeling a bit again, reminded of how little we truly know about the virus. I have found great solace in this quote by C.S. Lewis (replace the words ‘atomic bomb’ with ‘corona virus’):

_____________________________________________

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

_______________________________________________

Keep on keeping on, friends.