With the Coronavirus hitting the bay area, the local governments announced the lockdown today. Yesterday, I got a call from our daycare that they’ll be closing for two weeks. I honestly was totally expecting this, so I thanked her and said hopefully we’d see her in two weeks. I know it might take longer.
Generally, I wouldn’t worry about this too much since there are two of us at home, handling one child. However, our son has been sick since a week or two ago - it started with a runny nose but he started to have fever on Friday. It got pretty high (105F=40.5C) over the weekend, but since the times are challenging, the doctors didn’t recommend that we go in to the clinic for him to be seen, so we’re just struggling with a cranky sick baby at home and hoping that the baby tylenol would bring the temperature down.
On top of that, we have both been sick as well, so we’re not feeling that great either. We’re sick and both have sore throats and some coughs. Maybe we do have coronavirus?? Who knows?
Today marks the first day we’re both working from home while trying to care for a sick baby. We did not look forward to it, and were prepared to either both take time off work (it would be difficult to have any calls from home if he starts scream-crying).
We mentally made up some rules for ourselves:
1. Arrange our daily work and meeting schedules and try to cover for each other.
We moved meetings around each others' such that at a given time, one of us would be more “free” than the other one, and would be on childcare-duty.
Overall I have more meetings than my husband does. So overall when he has a meeting, I let him be the priority one :) My husband had a meeting at noon while our son was screaming-crying since he was tired and overall not feeling well. I took over childcare at 11:53, and was lucky enough that he fell asleep at 12:03 and I had some quiet time texting coworkers from the baby’s room.
2. Do not criticize each other. Try to help each other out like a real team.
We established that we’ll help each other out and NOT criticize whatever the other person has done.
My husband cooks really well (I have an entire Instagram feed for his food) and he’s usually very opinionated about food. I told him to not judge my food if I’m making anything, and vise versa. I made some super quick noodle soup for lunch and he praised me for it.
3. Let the sick child eat and do whatever he wants.
We usually try to give him good food, but in times like this, we gave him rice crackers (soysauce flavored), pretzels, any amount of fruit pouches he wanted, then pizza for dinner. He still didn’t eat too much, but we decided not to stress about it.
Also, he was laying in the dog’s bed, getting dog hair all over him, and pulling the dog’s tail. He was playing with his oranges on the floor making the hardwood floor all sticky. He was playing with my office chair (because it rotates) and not letting me have my chair. All fine. We just need to get through this one day at a time.
4. At the end of the day, just be thankful about the situation. It really is a lot worse for a lot of people, we have it easy in comparison.
At the end of the day my husband wanted to do this online meditation thing for two hours and I took care of feeding dinner and bath. We were exhausted from the day so we celebrated with frozen pizza for dinner.
Compared to a lot of people, we both have non-critical jobs that we can stay at home for, and not taking a paycut. We only have one child to care for. We can afford food delivery if we want. We really already are the very lucky ones. It just that it feels hard compared to our normal lives.
I’m pretty tired after the first day. But we’ll get through this. I hope it gets easier each day.