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I didn't want to jinx it, so I waited until today to post that, two weeks ago, I got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. So since they say it takes fourteen days after the second injection to be considered fully, effectively vaccinated ... that's me, as of today.

And thus my household is as protected as we can be. My wife and I are fully vaccinated, and my kids are, well, kids. I read about a methodology of risk analysis that basically says being vaccinated reduces your chances of catching COVID-19 AND suffering serious complications/death as a result to less than 10%. And kids seem to be naturally resistant to both the coronavirus and advanced health complications associated with it, such that any given child's chances of catching sick and needing hospitalization are ... less than 10%. So from a statistical risk point of view my children are as safe as I am, none of us 100% but hey, ain't that life for ya.

Please indulge me for a moment as I express my gratitude for the continuing health of my loved ones. In many profound ways, I remain immeasurably fortunate. No one in my family, immediate or extended, so much as contracted COVID-19, let alone died from it (knock on wood, we as a species are not out of the woods yet). Is that partly because the vast majority of my family is in the lower-risk categories? And partly because we were all willing to take the precautions recommended by the medical and scientific experts as they evolved over the course of the pandemic? And partly pure dumb luck? Yes, yes and yes. But although I happen to live in the upper-middle class bubble and I'm surrounded by and related to people with white collar jobs in blue states where they kept the offices and schools closed and nobody succumbed to paranoid conspiracy theories about their liberties being egregously infringed by mask mandates, I know it's not that cut and dried! COVID has proven time and again that is does not discriminate, and can cut across the larger trends at any time. I do know a few people who caught it, people who are a little younger than me, and smarter than me, who literally work in the medical research field and definitely understood and practiced every protocol! It's not just the very old, the very poor, and total fucking morons like Donald Trump who proved susceptible. Maybe in the end it just comes down to luck, period.

A further irony is the fact that, while my household dodged the bullet of the pandemic itself, the past year-and-change has seen its share of, shall we say, health challenges. It is as true for us as for anyone that the fall of 2020 and winter of 2021 saw none of come down with mild flu or even a cold, thanks to masks and social distancing and general hermit-like behavior. But on the other hand, at the very beginning of the pandemic somehow the whole family had lice, somehow! And just last week the bino had to have surgery to repair his ruptured eardrums that never healed after some savage ear infections. Also, did I mention that I almost killed him with diabetes?

Perhaps I should unpack that last one a little bit. There are of course many things which this sporadic pandemic blog series has failed to capture, but one of those (which maybe could only have been addressed in hindsight) is the strange contradiction between the subjective feeling that life went on pause for a while, time ceased to have any meaning, and we kind of lost a whole year, versus the fact that all of the above is objectively untrue, and I live with three reminders of that fact. The little guy has grown like four inches, the little girl has begun edging into puberty (even though she just turned ten last month, which is a whole 'nother post) and the 'bino has just changed a lot, because he's at the tail end of that stage where the development comes fast and furious, mental and emotional and physical. And he's always been big for his age, which usually just meant "tall" but this past twelve months somehow went to, um, "in a distressingly high percentile for weight"?

One thing that I have learned in the past year-and-change about myself is that, unequivocally, food is my love language. When I think about my loved ones, whether it's on the needs level of physically taking care of them or on the wants level of making them happy or demonstrating that they matter to me, my go-to domain is feeding people. I do over-the-top cakes for the kids' birthdays, and always let them pick what's on the menu for family dinner that night. I happily work the grill at house parties, I love taking my wife out to dinner to celebrate milestones and I will run to the 7-11 for a pint of Ben and Jerry's if she's had a rough day. Thanksgiving and Christmas are literal feast days in our house. Etc. etc. etc.

And it's possible, in fact entirely likely, that at some point during the pandemic I have bitched about nowadays it seems like all I ever do is shop for groceries, cook, and clean, and that is true enough and utterly explicable because we are all stuck in the house all the time and no one eats at school or work so it all settles out as increased domestic workload, but while I bitch about it I also absolutely cling to it, I admit. As long as I have been making sure my nearest and dearest have been getting three squares a day, I feel a tiny bit of control and safety in this perilous year, and that has kept me sane. I bitch about it but I'm also so grateful for it (do I contradict myself, very well I contradict myself).

Of course I never do anything halfway, either, and abve and beyond providing for my family I want to make them happy, or in the case of 2020, at least distract them a little from the pervasive awfulness. Kids ate all the granola bars? No problem I'll just buy more. They want Doritos for a snack? OK, we can designate Fridays as Doritos days. A bag of Oreos makes everyone happy? That is a bargain by any measure. So yeah, for a while there when it came to food I just wasn't saying no to the kids all that much. Yes we bought fresh fruit and yes we made them eat their vegetables at dinner, but they are a couple of elementary schoolers and a pre-teen, the food that makes them happy is McDonald's and pizza and soda and sweet tea and ice cream and candy and junkity junk junk galore. (And don't think for one minute I was merely an ascetic enabler through all of this. I may have singlehandedly kept a couple of the Mix industries, namely Chex and Trail, afloat during the pandemic.) The point being I was well aware that none of this stuff was super ultra healthy for them but I weighed the pros and cons and the trade-off for mental stability and just went ahead and spoiled them with processed high fructose corn syrup on demand.

And sure enough, the 'bino packed it away and started to pack it on. At first we (I) thought it was one of those early childhood things where they get a little belly fat but it's just storing up for an imminent growth spurt and goes away as quickly as it came. Then it didn't go away and I thought, well, I was a chunky kid too and he does arguably look the most like me out of all three of them, maybe that's the way it goes. Then one day at a routine wellness check the doctor says they want to run some blood tests on the kid for diabetes, like that's a literal possibility, and suddenly it's nothing but GUILT and you feel like a failure as a parent. Or worse than a failure who committed sins of omission, but a monster who committed active harm against your own child. Which sucks.

Of course I started this tangent by saying "almost" so let's reel it in a little here. The 'bino is not, as of this writing, diabetic, the blood tests were negative. But he is tipping the scales inthe 99th percentile. And we've talked to him about it, and cut back on the Doritos, and emphasized the importance of exercise and activity in general. And he gets it, he really does, he's a super-smart and conscientious kid. We caught a troubling trend on his growth chart early enough that he will hopefully turn out just fine. But man, you know it's been a doozy of a year(-and-change) when your best coping mechanisms so spectacularly backfire.