As my kids never fail to remind me, they woke up as per normal and went to school as per normal on a Friday the 13th in March of 2020, and came home at the end of the school day like any other school day, but that turned out to be the last time any of them had a normal in-school day. I don't think that's where I started counting, though. For me the last partially normal day was Monday March 9, when I went into the office but was sent home about halfway through the day after our home office decided to shut down out of an abundance of caution - not because anyone who worked for my company had gotten sick, but because there was one reported case of COVID-19 in an employee at a different company on a different floor in the NYC skyscraper where our home office is located. Therefore, Tuesday March 10 was Day One of me working from home, and the beginning of what I variously referred to as 'quarantine', 'lockdown', 'shutdown', 'WFH 4eva', 'I feel like there aren't any rules anymore', 'what are discrete units of time anyway', etc. At least I'm pretty sure that was the beginning. It's easy to lose track of things.
The bino's birthday happens to fall just past the middle of March, and his birthday party in 2020 was one of the first casualties of the upheaval. We were supposed to take him, his sibs and a handful of his friends to the local indoor trampoline place to celebrate him turning seven, but we opted to cancel it. Actually if memory serves we optimistically believed we were going to 'reschedule' it. Surely the panic over this novel coronavirus was a tad overblown by the media. Surely we weren't on the cusp of a once-in-a-century historically bad pandemic. Surely we could follow the guidance of leaders and health experts and flatten the curve. Surely the worst thing we'd be dealing with come summer was trying to explain to people that maybe we did overreact in the spring and maybe we reacted appropriately and it worked, but we'll never know for certain, and better safe than sorry, right? Surely?
Yeah, no, as it turned out. Little girl also didn't have much in the way of a birthday celebration in April. We did get some friends together for my wife's birthday in July, at an outdoor venue with almost nobody else around. Nothing much for the little guy in September (though he's not into big birthday parties anyway) and I insisted on nothing more than some nice takeout for my birthday in October.
So all of this is top of mind right now because, as I said, the one year anniversary is imminent, but also because this Friday, two days hence, we are going out to celebrate the bino's eighth birthday. Not at the trampoline place! We know the pandemic isn't over, it's not like it had a one-year expiration date. (Weirdly the trampoline place is still open for business, which on the one hand makes me happy, because venues going out of business due to the pandemic sucks. But on the other hand, just doesn't seem like the kind of place I want to take my kids to just yet. Other people obviously feel differently.)
Instead what we are doing Friday night is going to a drive-in movie. Should be fun! My wife took two of the kids to the drive-in a few months ago, and they had a good time. The food delivery to the car (because this is at the Alamo, of course, a theater I am entirely thrilled to support financially) was excellent, and the bino is probably looking forward to that more than the flick itself (Raya and the Last Dragon). His actual birthday isn't for another couple weeks, and that's when he'll get cake and his presents, so the celebration is taking over a goodly chunk of the month of March. But after missing out last year, and enduring the entire 360-some days since, he's entitled to a bit of that, I reckon.
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