It’s hard to believe there could be winners in the time of coronavirus, but there are.  Saoirse is definitely a winner.  Instead of her sisters, who entertain and love her, heading off to school until 3:30 every day, they are home all day to keep her company.  It really is a huge win for her and for the sisters in general.  The bonding that happens between the girls and their baby sister every day is wonderful to see.

I always wanted to home school but in a sort of, I’ll never do that for very good reasons kind of way.  Like the way you want to move to rural Alaska and become a homesteader sort of thing.  I thought it would be fun to develop my own curriculum for the kids that would feature music and nature and lots of math.  The practical realities that led me to never seriously consider it include concerns about socialization for the kids.  While I know home schooling kids can enjoy a rich social life, it depends upon the parent to provide interactions with other kids; this is built in for kids who attend school.  I am not a very social person, and I didn’t want that responsibility.  Further, I didn’t think my mental health would hold up to home schooling.  I honestly thought I’d go round the bend if I tried it.  Well, we’re about to see if that will in fact happen.  I think there are probably a lot of SAHMs struggling with their mental health right now.  I’ve been doing OK, but I’ll be very happy when things are “back to normal.”

I am continuing to severely limit my news exposure.  Instead, I consult the World-o-meter daily as well as the King County department of health website.  I pour over these numbers multiple times a day, every day.  I have the King County data plotted in Google sheets and mess around with curve fits and projections based on different X-Y scatter plots.  (This generally happens while I’m pumping or nursing.  If I wasn’t wrangling an infant, this would be happening in Matlab, obvs.)  Dealing with numbers helps me feel in control.  When I do read the news, it seems to be all doom and gloom, and I get whiplash from articles predicting different outcomes.  I conclude that no one really knows.  I do often find the articles to be a bit at odds with the numbers.  If I were the NY Times, I think my leading articles would likely be a bit different in focus.  I do think it’s an interesting experiment in drawing one’s own conclusions from raw data as opposed to media spin.  I wonder how other people’s thoughts on Covid differ from mine based on reading the news.