When Mom was alive and in dialysis I had some sort of awareness of days of the week, but I haven’t had a Friday at the end of a work-week since 2018 and so this morning I can join the M-W workforce and say, “Thank God it is Friday!”
This is not because I don’t like my job, I do...I like it very much. I get be around books all day, checking them in and out and pulling holds. I get to put together kits for crafts for kids and help people print things. (Oddly, a service I’ve been using my own branch of the library for since I printer died at my hands a few months ago.) I get to research books to use for the Storytimes I’ll be leading and I get to open up packages of new books to put on the shelf. I love it all so much!
But still…Leaving my house for 5 hours every day for a job (1 hour of that is commuting, it’s on the Southwest corner of my county, 20 miles from my house) is not something I’m used to by any means and so I feel zapped. The birds woke me up this morning. I never sleep later than the birds. Never.
I also thought it would be a good idea to schedule the kid’s vaccinations this week after work so last night I didn’t even get home until 8pm and y’all…some nights that’s my bedtime! Of course I needed to wind down and so Donnie, Wes and I turned on Legally Blonde which I haven’t seen in years. (I’ve seen the musical twice, however, it’s one of my faves.) “I’m just watching this until I feel like I can fall asleep.”
We finished the whole movie. I STARTED A MOVIE AT 8PM ON A WEEKNIGHT AND THEN I FINISHED IT. This is about as far from Normal Kim Behavior as you can get.
By the way…did you catch that up there? My kids are getting vaccinated! I signed my 15yo daughter up as soon as the Walgreen website opened up so I took her last night, but my 12yo wanted one or two more days to brace himself as he’s not a fan of shots, so he goes tonight. I can not explain how happy my daughter was. There was absolutely no hesitation. As a matter of fact, she got the alert that places were setting appointments for ages 12-15 after I had already gone to bed Wednesday night, but she texted me anyway and I got up and scheduled her right then.
I just hate so many people have anxiety about getting the vaccine because every shot someone I love gets, reduces my anxiety 10-fold. We are so close now to living in a full-protected household. Protection from something that has killed almost 600,000 people in this country so far. I’m just…beside myself with relief. By June 18th my family should be fully vaccinated and then…we might eat inside a restaurant for the first time since March 2020.
Maybe. It will take awhile to ease my anxiety a bit about doing anything normal I guess.
So, Friday of my first week working, the week my kids get their first doses of the vaccination, and the week the CDC told us all we can be unmasked if we’re vaccinated. What a weird week that sets a whole new future in front of us.
My husband starts his job a week from Monday. He installed the last outlet and closed the last open circuit from the house re-wiring project yesterday. All of the circuits in the bedrooms were mixed together so while upgrading the wiring, he separated them which made the project take another day or two but now every outlet in every bedroom is grounded. You don’t realize how many things have 3-prong plugs until you don’t have 3-prong outlets. We also have hard data lines in all of the rooms so if you have a stationary setup you can avoid using the Wi-Fi. The Wi-Fi is also moved now to a more central part of the house so the overall internet experience is going to be 1,000 percent better which is good since Donnie’s livelihood will depend on it.
He should be getting the tech from his new job in the next few days and then his home office transformation will be complete. By the time the kids are fully vaccinated and we go out to eat for the first time inside a restaurant in months, our lives really will feel different. We will be toasting in a new future that feels entirely uncharted.
If you had asked me in March of 2020 if the pandemic would change our lives I would say, “I’m sure it will,” because it felt so huge. But I could have never predicted all of the different roads we would end up on during the course of the next 15 months and sometimes - when I sit back and imagine our future - I get a little bit of whiplash by how different it looks from how I thought it looked when I moved Mom here in March 2020…at the beginning of the pandemic.
Here’s to settling into the new future and trying to find time and space to mourn the people and paths lost, while being grateful for the opportunities and improvements we stumbled onto along the way.
Kim, I have been reading you since my 15 year old was in my womb, but I don't read direct from your site. I popped in here today to comment directly. Just want to say that i feel so much hope from this post. YAY! My Riley gets her first shot this Thursday here in Oregon.
I Love this for you! 💕💕💕
And that family pic is SO great!!!