One of the interesting things about my boring blog-fixing project is seeing how very predictable I am with my mood slumps. I work on a month’s worth of posts in a day, generally, and it seems like in every batch there is just ALWAYS at least one post about how low I feel and what I’m doing about it with food and exercise and moping and shopping.

I am in another low time now, and I am coping by re-reading Maeve Binchy books, buying too many kinds of tea, eating extra vegetables and extra treats, buying extra non-perishables, and openly weeping while listening to Michelle Obama’s podcast on walks.

Our school district has taken a step in the direction of rejecting the hybrid option (which, as commenter Liz aptly put it, was actually “a 40-page document explaining why they just can not open at all”). They haven’t come to the final decision yet, but my feeling is that one way or another we are going to be going remote: either from the beginning, or after we try the hybrid option and a lot of people get sick and we have to shut it down.

But apparently first we are going to do the intermediate step of making sure teachers and other school employees know how little we care about them and their families, and to what extent we consider them daycare workers rather than educators, and how entitled we feel to that daycare, and how entitled we feel to normality even when normality is not currently an option. Some parents are threatening to sue the school district, the principals, the school board, the teachers themselves. One parent said that in her opinion teachers and other school employees should feel grateful to still have their jobs when so many people are out of work, and another parent responded that they didn’t see why teachers and school employees should get to stay home when other people have to work, and that was when I gave up on having a happy life.

Considering ALL the options are terrible and there is NO good option where things are normal and there’s no pandemic and everyone keeps their jobs, then surely choosing the option where we turn this whole thing against teachers/schools is our worst and most short-sighted idea yet; and it won’t even WORK. We will lose some of the teachers and other school employees at the very start, as they quit in the face of parents/administrators insisting they go back when it’s not safe; this alone may be enough to leave the school too understaffed to open. But if, after the first wave of quitting, we still have enough staff to open, we will lose more teachers/employees shortly afterward, as they get sick and/or die, or else quit from the stress; at that point, the school will certainly be too understaffed to remain open, and possibly now too understaffed to do effective remote learning. We will have pushed pushed pushed to get schools to open, and it will result in schools being closed anyway soon afterward—but only after losing people we didn’t have to lose, and traumatizing/demoralizing the rest, and leaving the whole school system worse off than it was before.

I had a low day yesterday, and then had trouble getting to sleep even though I took benadryl, and then at 2:00 in the morning my phone rang and that is just never going to be good news. And I could see on the screen that the caller was my eldest son, which was weird; this happened once before, though, when he’d gone outside to get something out of the car and locked himself out. But when I answered, he didn’t say anything, which gave me visions of him badly hurt (calling me RIGHT BEFORE LOSING CONSCIOUSNESS!!) and/or kidnapped somehow. But no: butt-dial. Time it took for me to get back to sleep after this drama: roughly 1 hour 45 minutes.

I have what I find to be a pleasing though boring update on my fretty dentist situation. That post is just a giant tangled ball of stress, so I suggest NOT clicking the link, and instead I will summarize the relevant part by saying I’d canceled Edward and Henry’s routine dentist appointments, then regretted it because Henry has braces and it really seemed as if he ought to have a cleaning, especially since the DAY I canceled the appointment we got a pre-appointment letter from the dentist that made it sound really really safe. And anyway it made me feel as if every decision I make is wrong, and I’d continued to fret about it, but felt too sheepish to call the dentist and ask for a new appointment for Henry. Then I saw Elizabeth’s routine cleaning coming up on the calendar, and I called the dentist office and asked if it would be possible to give Henry that appointment instead of Elizabeth (I’d been planning to just cancel it), and they said yes, so now the kid with braces will get his cleaning, and I feel better.

A friend brought to my attention that kids 18 and older have to sign HIPAA authorizations and possibly medical power of attorney forms, or else their parents can’t have access to their information or make medical decisions for them if they’re incapacitated. That seems…rather crucial, in a pandemic or even not in a pandemic, and had not occurred to me at all. My hope is that at some point someone ELSE, like the kids’ colleges, realized that this was something that needed to be done, and that Rob and William have already signed such forms. Looking at the HIPAA form, I vaguely remember them being given one like it (with some ceremony about it, like, “Now he’s 18 he gets his own HIPAA, Mom!”)—but I don’t FULLY remember if that happened (1) at the pediatrician (as opposed to at an eye appointment or something), and (2) if they filled out our names on it, and (3) if it happened for both Rob and William. So there’s my new/current fret.