Coviding

We started social distancing on a Friday sixteen days ago. I downloaded twitter just to keep up on the spread of COVID-19, and I started reading about the need for people to stay away from others. At first, it was just that: we were not meeting friends, we were shopping as little as possible. Our friends were still getting together. 

By Monday, the city was shutting down. 

J. and I are lucky to have jobs that can be done from home, mostly. We are hampered only by a baby who is in full-on explore mode. 

We joked with my parents not long ago that W. was born a toddler in a baby's body. Really it's probably more like a five year old in a baby's body: he wants to do things, and he wants to do them himself. He is more and more pleasant a baby as he can control more and more things himself. No wonder he was so angry as a tiny infant. He couldn't do anything himself, and we didn't know what he wanted. (Hint: it was not food or a diaper change. It was entertainment and movement.)

So the baby is adorable and requires constant attention. 

Every day we trade off baby-wrangling. Our goal is two hour chunks, but we manage that exactly never. An hour or so of this baby one-on-one is about all a human can manage without a break. He is busy. In that hour, he has probably crawled up the stairs and tried to fling himself down (1-10 times), attempted to knock over the dog's water bowl and cried when it was put out of his reach, gotten a gleam in his eye and gone for the space heater, opened the bottom oven drawer and crashed cookie trays together until we are all temporarily deaf, turned over the bead-wire toy thing and gotten his hand stuck underneath and cried, grabbed at the leaves on the plants in the living room and tried to pull them off, and cried to get on the couch and then tried to fling himself off (10-50 times). 

He won't eat real food unless it is puffs, teething crackers, freeze-dried fruit, or bread-like products. Today he deigned to put a bit of soup in his mouth, but only because I gave him a real, grownup metal spoon instead of the pretty silicone ones that are supposed to protect his teeth. 

Ever since W. was about 4 months old, we've been letting him come sleep in our bed after his first long sleep in his own space (currently a pack n play in our room). Many was the night that we had to bring him into bed with us by midnight, and he woke up every hour thereafter, requiring nursing or patting or repositioning to get back to sleep. Lately, though, I've noticed that he can sometimes put himself back to sleep, and I watched early this morning as he rolled himself over and fell back to sleep, back to back with his daddy. It was very, very cute. 

He is just really, really not into being a baby. Nonetheless, here we are. He is a baby, and he's fighting it all the time. 

...

I went into a drugstore the other day to pick up a few things we needed. An employee was coughing as he scanned products on the shelves, and a woman walked by me, then back past me, almost brushing against me. People! Have you not heard of distancing? I was so paranoid afterward that I came home, took off my clothes, and took a shower. I also wiped down or discarded outer wrappings for everything I'd bought. 

I've never been a germaphobe, but this pandemic is turning me into one. 

Isn't it strange that just a month ago I dropped J. and the dog off at the dog park and took W. to T@rget? I set W. in the seat of the cart without wiping it down, and we lingered in the aisles. I didn't worry about how far away other people were. 

I wonder, will we get that back? 

Now the dog park is closed, and going to T@rget seems dangerous. 

I thought I fully appreciated the full, varied grocery stores here in the US, after living in places where the options were not so great. 

Turns out I didn't appreciate them enough. 

unfinished (but I'm posting anyway)

I baked Christmas cookies on December 31. That doesn't sound like much of an accomplishment, because I was at least 6 days late on the cookies, but it was a big deal for me, because it meant that I had the energy for something superfluous, which doesn't happen much lately.

The cookies were courtesy of the two nights in a row that this baby let us sleep for 6-7 hours straight (meaning he slept for 7-8 hours). Of course, he went back to 3-4 hour stretches immediately after (peppered with 1-2 hour stretches just for fun!), but now we know it is possible. I have slept for 6 hours straight 5 times since he was born.

I was so energized by the two nights of sleep in a row that I even invited some neighbors and their kiddo over to decorate. It's like I was a real person again for a minute.

Then the baby started trying to sit up in his sleep and being very cranky all the time because who can sleep when you have skills to learn?

He's also crawling and pulling up on things, to then stand there happily, experimenting with letting go, and occasionally falling with a loud thump and screaming. This is not a baby who tolerates pain well.

I've tried to soak in every minute of this little baby phase, since even four years ago, right after I met J., I wasn't sure if this would be something I got to attempt to have. And I have spent plenty of hours staring at this little face while he slept in my arms, day or night. His sleeping face is the one thing that still looks like it did when he was tiny. By day, his face has elongated and filled out. He's no longer the little frog of a baby he was. But when he sleeps, his lips pout out just as they always have.