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Although I have a big ole soft buboe in my heart for the Plague Doctor (so much so that I bought a figurine ornament for my dork Christmas tree this year) I think the most enduring symbol for the Long Pandemic Year of Twenty-Twenty may be this:

But then again that may just be particular to my family.

I mentioned a while back that the early lockdown days reminded me of snow days but another specific overlap element was the stocking up on non-perishable food, which is one of those things I (usually) only think about in the winter. It's a great privilege to live in a time when we can pop out to the store at the drop of a hat for whatever notion grabs us in the moment. Except of course when it snows, as the inclement weather does not care about your sudden craving for Sweet Chili PopCorners. Nor does it even care about your legitimate need for household staples such as bread and milk and soap and (sigh) toilet paper. Toiletries will keep indefintely, bread can be frozen, but milk, that's the tricky one. All the moreso in a house with several children who eat lots of breakfast cereal and drink milk by the glass, not to mention adults with robust lifelong coffee addictions.

Enter: shelf-stable milk!

Of course the difference between the pandemic and a blizzard is that blizzards come and go. You never know if the blizzard is going to live up to the hype until it actually arrives, so sometimes you overprepare for it, and sometimes under. If you get caught underprepared, the worst case scenario is that you suffer a few days without some basic necessity, then the roads get cleared and the stores reopen and you restock and you think "I'll never let that happen again!" and then you promptly forget all about it until it does. Unless maybe, maybe, right after the blizzard you buy a few shelf-stable milks just in case. Whereas the pandemic has been an ongoing concern for, let me see, somewhere between nine months and an eternity, by this point. Which is plenty of time to really think things through and make adjustments to the actualities of life-as-she-is-lived. Some people are over it, but my nuclear unit is still taking reasonable precautions, staying home, wearing masks when we do go out, but really minimizing the amount of going out at all, including popping out to the store. And given the aforementioned ongoingness, we've had plenty of time to realize that we can just about stock up on a week's worth of groceries at a time, except for the milk, which means it's a good idea to always have some shelf-stable boxes on hand, in the all-too-frequent case of running through last week's fridge milk before it's time for the next run to the grocery store. Not only have we had time to realize this, we've had time to implement it as a standard operating procedure. So this has been a very Parmalat-heavy year.

The twist, of course, the punchline (because of course there's a twist and a punchline, isn't there always?) is this: 2020 has also been a year that has really brought home how hard it is to keep two adults and three kids happy with the same limited at-home options. There are a few very basic foods and meals which everyone in our family genuinely likes. Beyond that, we generally have to content ourselves with two-out-of-three. That is, two out of the three kids will eat a dinner, as prepared, and be reasonably content. The third kid will require serious cajoling just to eat the mandatory single bite ofe every element, and then will eat something else entirely. Occasionally there' something which only one kid likes, with two dissenters, probably about as often as something that gets approval from everyone. By and large, it's two-out-of-three.

AND APPARENTLY THIS EXTENDS TO THE MILK! I personally can't tell the difference between the shelf-stable milk and fridge milk, especially once the s-s gets opened and, you know, put in the fridge. Cold, it all tastes the same. But try telling that to my kids. To be brutally honest I have stopped dedicating brainspace to cataloging each and every predilection. I think it goes something like this: the eldest refuses to drink the shelf-stable milk, or use it in cereal, or anything. The little girl will use the s-s milk, grudgingly, if we are out of fridge milk. And the bino LOVES the s-s milk, will ask for it by name and prefers it over the fridge milk, so sometimes we have both open fridge milk and open shelf-stable milk taking up space in the refrigerator at the same time. Not a state of affairs I ever expected to have to contend with, but again, that's pretty much the most apt descriptor of 2020, anyway.