I've been wanting to write all of this down since March. So many thoughts and feeling dealing with a pandemic with kids. Some days I was totally fine, other days I just wanted to cry. Sometimes you would feel like grieving the loss of what your life was like before and the things you were missing out on. But everyone in the entire world was missing out as well.
In my head it all started going down hill when one of the Utah Jazz players tested positive for covid and they shut the entire NBA down. I remember thinking what the heck were they thinking? Why are they freaking out so bad! Then USU went online like the next day and Easton's preschool was canceled. Then a few days later they announced the schools were going online for two weeks. (that ended up being the rest of the school year.) In the middle of all of that people started to panic and head to the stores. Entire rows were empty of food. It was eerie. Honestly I thought I had a lot of food storage until I was faced with the stores being empty. Then I soon realized that I didn't do as good of a job with my food storage as I thought. Especially where my kid were now home all day eating all of my food! I needed less rice and more snacks!
Soon church was canceled and everything started to slowly close. I went from being really busy to having nothing to do. It was absolutely crazy. No basketball, no church groups (and we have 4 kids in 4 different church activity groups) no photos, no anything. Just us and Mario kart. We played a lot of Mario kart. We were told to stay away from people outside your house and many people started to work from home. The term "social distancing" became the buzz word. Now I feel like it's a swear word. We were told to not be in groups of more than 10 people. I laughed that there are some Utah families that had more than that living in their home.
I was pretty calm at first until I heard my brother in law Cory talking about the food shortages. You couldn't find things like milk, eggs and bread at the stores. Meat was really hard to come by. The Saturday after everything started going crazy I found myself at Maceys with Brett filling my cart with food. There were people everywhere. And huge lines. They had to limit the amount of food you could buy for ex. one gallon of milk or one thing of eggs etc. Honestly with my kids it wasn't like I was getting food storage it was more food to tide us over until the next week. I would be lying if I didn't admit that I felt that panic big time though. I kept thinking what if they don't get food back in the store quickly? What if the shelves looked like this for a long time. (and they did). Food prices went up- especially meat- so my food bill went crazy. Honestly when I walk by Toilet paper now I usually grab one just in case. For whatever reason TP was so hard to find. I mean out of everything people were hoarding it was toilet paper? Not food? Lucky for me I had plenty.
I remember looking at the food I had just bought and felt scared to eat any of it. What if this is all we have for awhile? The unknown was so awful.
I thought this was going to last maybe two weeks. I just needed enough stuff to get me though two weeks. So silly me thought I better buy stuff for my kids to do! So I got some paints.
The boys built forts.
On March 18th in the morning I was laying in bed and felt my bed shake a little bit. Bryan has this habit of shaking his leg so I thought it was him but he was sound asleep. I thought I was being weird and went back to sleep. My phone was dead at the time so I didn't see any messages on it. When Bryan woke up I told him I thought I had felt a earthquake but I must be weird or something. And as soon as he turns his phone on it had tons of messages on it. We had 5.7 earthquake just outside of SLC. And they felt aftershocks from that for weeks and months. It shook hard enough to knock the angel Moroni's trumpet out of his hands. I can't even make this stuff up.
Then if being locked down in a pandemic and starting homeschool that day wasn't enough the rumor was going around that the huge quake that they have been saying Utah was going to have forever was going to happen in minute. So people were pulling their cars out of the garage and putting their 72 hour kits in them. Like major freak out. But that isn't how earthquakes work! So I wasn't worried about that.
I can't tell you how unsettling it is to already feel the uncertainty of everything and then have a earthquake. We are lucky it really didn't do much around here. I was the only one in my family who felt it.
You will see a pattern in 2020. Just when you think things will get better something else crazy happens.
I'm so grateful I live in Utah. Most other states shut down a lot more than mine. People in New York are still quarantined honestly.
Fishing an 4 wheeler rides
The boys found ways to entertain themselves. I had to let them on their electronics a little more because they were going crazy. It's hard to have your life flipped upside down and be cut off from all of your friends. And not even being able to say goodbye.
We started holding church in our own homes. We even would have the sacrament at home. Once a month we would also invite a few people from the ward over who needed someone to help give them the sacrament. We would have our neighbor Kristen, Bob and Lois summers and the McEvoys come over. Then we would cook a big breakfast. We did that a couple of times. Easton felt that we needed a picture of Jesus if we were going to do church.
It's so interesting to look back at what the church did in the last few years that prepared us for this. We had church shortened and started doing lessons at home with our families in 2019. Now that is what I teach my own children every week. we were already in the habit. The temples changing the rule that you could get married outside the temple and not have to wait a year. So many many couples just got married and are waiting to be sealed now. (including my nephew Braden!) Siblings being able to witness baptisms which later came in handy when some were only allowed a few people to come to their baptism. etc.
Social distance fishing. Glad we could do things outdoors a little bit. I would laugh at the people with girls. They would color and play with chalk. My boys needed to be active!
Many photographers did something they called front porch porch sessions where they stood far back and took peoples family pictures. Just really quick. My friend Kylee was driving by and offered to take some for me last minute. So my kids came out in whatever they had on and Bryan stayed on the couch and refused to come.
Bryan really went crazy in the yard though quarantine. Since there was nothing else to do. He started mowing twice a week and leveling it out to be totally flat.
I knew things were serious when the prophet had all the foreign missionaries come home. Including my nephew Spencer- Easton's favorite person. They were only allowed to have just the parents at the airport to pick him up and they weren't even allowed inside. They had to be in the parking garage. We decided last minute to just park at a church in Layton when they were on their way home to say hello. From a distance because he had just flown across the world and at that point we had no idea how deadly this virus was. (we were told 5-10% of people could die from it. Right know in Utah it's less then 1% have died.) We wanted to make a big deal of him in case he was never able to go back out! So Grandma and grandpa, our family and Jenny and her younger three girls came. Sannette was so sad we were not at the airport! That is where missionaries come home! Then when Jen didn't let her hug Spencer she feel apart. She was so sad. This was really hard on her because she loves school and is social. IT was the first time in a few weeks since I saw our family too. We didn't go to dinner at Debbies or go see them for a long time.
We brought our pirate flag to welcome him home.
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