So it’s almost exactly 11 months since the first Covid restrictions were implemented…. It’s getting long enough that “last year” will soon stop referring to “normal” times. The vaccine is now starting to become a thing, and I know of at least one cousin that has received it (she works in health care), but no one has offered me (personally) a timeline beyond the vague “by September”. September is still 7 months away, on the other side of summer, and still too non-committal for me to add to my calender or to make plans based on.
At the moment, life feels an extra sort of bleak. Layered on top of Covid is that fact that it’s been -30°C this last week; I don’t think I would have wanted to leave the house even if there way somewhere to go. The dimmer and shorter days of winter don’t help either.
This coming summer, we’d hoped to take an exciting summer vacation. We’re at a point, that we hadn’t been in the past, where we could take several weeks off as a chunk from work and have the money to actually take the family somewhere. With a two week quarantine on returning from out of the country, the idea of spending a week in Europe followed by two weeks locked up at home didn’t seem to balance out. We considered a road trip to the East coast, as that wouldn’t involve international borders and so no quarantine on returning home, but now Manitoba and the Atlantic provinces have their own bubbles, so would I have to add 4 weeks to my travel time to Halifax if I drive, and 2 weeks on the way back? We’d tentatively settled on visiting relatives in the US: we could go for 6 weeks and then spend 2 weeks on quarantine on returning home. Maybe the quarantine requirement would be lifted by then and we could spend 7 or 8 weeks with them. But the Canadian government has moved to make quarantining way more expensive by requiring you to stay the first 3 days in a hotel of their choice at for $2,000. That’s within spitting distance of what we paid for an overwater bungalow in Tahiti! And it also completely blows up our road trip budget. Well maybe the BC coast remains an option…
For now, at least, the kids remain in school. School has always been full of odd rules, and Covid has resulting in more oddball rules, and probably lowered my patience to deal with them. One new rule, designed to limit the spread of the virus, is that inter-class interactions are severely limited. For example, the playground is now on a rotation with only one class/grade using it at a time. So any given grade only gets to use it only once a week.
Another particular rule the school brought in was that no papers could be brought from home (a possible virus vector?). One of the most obvious results was that the kids no longer bring home an agenda from school, but now the parent-teacher communication happens via email. I can’t decide is this is better or not. Another oddity that grew out of this rule is that the kids just had Valentines Day…without (paper) Valentines. One of my kid’s classes sort of got around this by having each student creating a “Valentine” for another particular student in their class as an art project, and then posting them all on the wall. Props to the teacher there!
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