2020 in review

Two weeks in to 2021, I'm finally ready to publish my summary of the infamous year 2020.  

In addition to the global spread of COVID-19, 2020 was a year with a lot of horrible things:  racial injustice, waking up to systemic racism (which isn't new but our awareness increased uncomfortably), breathtaking political divisiveness that cost lives, a horrible president and then air that wasn't safe to breath, robbing us of the great outdoors on top of everything else.  In December there was evening a shooting within a block of our house, at 5:45 pm.

It was hard enough, even though we know so many people experienced much more hardship.  Our families have been healthy, even if not perfectly so.   We had financial stability and each other.   Dd had his well-run, normal, social daycare.  D got to go to summer camps, learned to read fluently and did better in online school than many kids, from what I gather.

Back when we called COVID-19 "coronavirus" and thought it was a horrible yet dramatic phase, rather than an earthshattering upheaval of life all over the whole world, I wrote two posts about our experience in March and April.   

School and Work

I worked full time all year, which is saying something.   In the six-and-a-half years we've been parents, I've constantly measured the work-life balance of our friends, not in a keeping-up-with-the-Joneses way, but rather in a genuine search for peer role models.  We do not know many couples where both people work full time and if we do, we're all too busy to keep up a friendship very well (pre-pandemic, when we saw friends....).   It's hard and this year we missed a lot of the help we've been so fortunate to get from our parents.

D was still able to go to 5 weeks of the camps we signed up for since they were already outdoors.  I get a good laugh when I recall my stress during the competitive registration process for various camps that started in January.  I was actually worried that there was a week in August where we had not found a camp we wanted to send him to.  This year we had 10 weeks of normalcy and 5 weeks of summer camp, which means he was home with us for 37 weeks.  

As mentioned, D's reading has been one of the best parts of the year.   In January he was reading Bob books and in December he was reading Calvin and Hobbes, Clementine and pretty much any other chapter book that strikes his interest and matches his maturity (e.g. not too scary).   In the spring, we got almost nothing from his kindergarten teacher except for the district's subscription to an online practice website, but first grade has been pretty well organized and he does get something out of it.   We've also bought workbooks and made up a lot of lessons of our own.   

Dd has been in daycare except for the periods shown in green below on the graph of King County positive cases per day.  The times he was not in daycare were spring shut down and the holiday period where we isolated and then bubbled up with my parents.

Jack and I continued with our same employers and both of our industries survived the economic fallout of this year.   Jack designed his first apartment building.  I worked on smart TVs most of the time.

Travel

It's a good thing Washington is a great place to live and explore because we haven't left the state since we went to the Azores in February 2019.   We had plans to go to San Francisco and Vancouver, Canada, but obviously those fell through.

• San Francisco in April
• camping over the Fourth of July at Seaquest State Park where we went on one of the best hikes of the year, on a beautiful ridge with good weather, good morale, wild strawberries and hardly any other people.

• July AirBnB in Cinebar (near Mt. St. Helens) with friends (in lieu of Vancouver Island, Canada, where we weren't allowed to travel)

• AirBnb fail in Sammamish in late August.   We left an hour after we arrived and just went back home.  Ugh.
• Yurt at Grayland Beach State Park with my sister and brother-in-law over Labor Day weekend
• Camping on the beach at Blake Island, with my parents on their boat
• Thanksgiving with just the four of us at Wallace Falls State Park

Friends and Family

• babies born: Emily to R&A,  Anna to P&K, Nolan to K&C and several younger siblings for Dd's PEPS friends (Victoria, Beckham and Kai)
• weddings: two were postponed (one for real, one just the party)
• surgeries: my mom had a second collarbone surgery in January and Gary had a follow up surgery in June
• We actually did have two big family Christmas celebrations in 2020, but they were in January, to make up for the regular celebrations we postponed for Desmond's hand foot and mouth disease and Gary's surgery in December 2019.
• Starting in about June we gathered with our parents and siblings outdoors, meeting at parks and beaches and sharing a few meals in the backyard (Jack's parents') or open garage (my parents').
• Here is my sister's 40th birthday celebration

• For both kids' birthdays, we went up to Liberty. (Dd turned 2)
• December was wonderfully different.  We took Dd out of daycare before Thanksgiving and made a covid bubble with my parents from Dec 6 through Jan 2.   They babysat three times a week and we worked late and took PTO to cover two work days with Dd.  The kids got more attention and we all got to catch up.
• Jack's brother took up hiking this year getting out much more than we did.   In August we hiked Heather Lake with him in weather that is more reminiscent of October or November.

• Aside from family we saw our friends Teri and Daniel (and kids) and Read and Anne (and kids) the most as well as a few friends from daycare who we felt a bit more free with because the kids were already in the same circle of contacts at school.  We even made a bit of a bubble with Teri and Daniel (agreeing to be "exclusive" about being indoors without masks with them), which felt wonderfully normal.   Halloween ended up being a highlight of the year since we carved pumpkins with Read and Anne and had a dinner and haunted house with Teri and Daniel.

• On a sadder note, two of my colleagues died suddenly this year.  In the way of the workplace, I'll never know what exactly happened, and the final reality is the same in any case.   The first was a woman in her sixties, named Yoshiko, who I worked with often for 6-7 years, though I only met her one time in person.  The second was a man, named James, from the Seattle office, who was probably in his early forties, who I used to chat with in the kitchen back when we all went in to the office.

Home

• 2020 outdoor projects
• 2020 indoor house projects
• Being home so much did make it easier to have D help with chores.   He sets the table and unloads the dishwasher regularly, though he sometime puts more effort in to trying to get Dd to do the task than it would take to just do whatever it is.   He also sorts his clothes from Dd's and put his away.  Unless we're really behind at bedtime, he scoops the litter boxes too!  Dd likes to sweep and start the roomba.

• The roof and the boîte got lots of use this year.  We played and ate on the roof more than in years past, partly because it is much less scary to be up there with Dd than it was last year.  Here we are eating dinner with my new roof cart and playing in the snow that caught us completely by surprise one evening in December.

Recreation and Sports

• It was a pretty good year for biking and we are well-equipped now for the next few years.  Most of our rides were from home because we didn't have a functional bike rack for four months: zip-strips-are-holding-us-back
• We got an elliptical in June, which has been a life saver.  You don't have to wear a mask, a shirt, or headphones while using it and it feels safe when it's dark or there is a month of horrible air quality (we also have air filters in some rooms for "wildfire season" ).   An added bonus was the enormous box it came in.
• Jack ran outdoors some, though it often felt too crowded, and adapted to using the rings we've had for a couple of years in the entryway and kettle bells, rather than weights.  Bodyweight is plenty.
• D got to practice soccer with some of his team for one hour a week, starting in the fall, which has been fabulous.
• D and Jack went snowboarding a few times and Jack even went snowboarding with different friends twice before everything changed.
• t-ball
• baseball, but Jack did still have a bunch of league meetings and orchestrated the purchase of new uniforms for his whole team, which are now in our basement.
• One of the things I worried about pre-pandemic was teaching D to swim and I have spent an embarrassing amount of time researching lessons and pools.   At the beginning of the year we intentionally gave up on organized group lessons and made a point of making time for me and D to get to the limited hours of our local pool.  He was making some real progress and I can't wait to get back to teaching him AND swimming laps myself.   It feels like Dd has barely ever been in a pool in his short life.
• After reading about the toxic algae in Lake WA this summer (because 2020), I noticed one spot on the SE side of Mercer Island that had a measurement for safe water quality while most of the lake looked bad.   Clarke Beach Park is one of the best places I've ever been swimming in Lake Washington!  In addition to not having toxic algae this summer, it has a great protected area for kids and a bigger area for better swimmers and it also has afternoon shade, since the island slopes down to the beach.   
• We did a lot of walking and playing in our neighborhood, which has some real advantages like getting home in time for lunch and a good nap.
• D and I also did some Cosmic Kids yoga on YouTube which is cheesy, but also fun

Reading, Watching, Thinking

• The Lemonade War, is the first and best book of a series we read to D.   A sister and brother run competing lemonade stands and it includes insightful discussion of their feelings and quite a bit of arithmetic.  We also found the Clementine series to be quite fun.
• D watched Wild Kratts more than anything else.
• The last time we were in a big crowd was when D and I joined my sister to watch the hilarious Cat Video Fest compilation with a full house in lower Queen Anne.  It's hard to believe that was less than a year ago.
• Jack and I laughed pretty hard at the movies Knives Out and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.
• Dd and I made it through most of a Music Together session in early 2020.  We'd already signed up for the next session, which was virtual and didn't really work for him.
• I read some more of the Outlander series, and for the first time had a paper copy of one of the books while waiting for the eBook hold.  It was on super thin paper with small font that I just couldn't figure out how to adjust!  Also there there were no page breaks for chapters and it practically hurt my wrists.   Somehow Dd had no problem with his large book.

• Together Jack and I had fun reading and then watching the Robert Galbraith detective series (by JK Rowling).
• Eye opening fiction I read included: American Dirt, The Hate U Give, and Out of My Mind
• Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson about racism in the judicial system was heart wrenching.   Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell was really interesting.   I like audio books for practical reasons but both of these were made more powerful by being read by the authors.
• I even read (listened to) Little Women for the first time.
• We read the first Harry Potter book to D just after kindergarten ended (such as it was) and we all had a lot of fun with it until the confrontation with Voldermort at the end.  Book two will happen when it happens.
• In January, my mom, D and I went to the MLK Day march.  It was my first march ever.

Food

• It was the year of the salad kit.  With a little extra effort the four of us can eat a Costco sized salad kit in one meal and I don't even care what is in the dressing.
• We also made a lot of pizza 2-3 times a month and got a lot better at it.
• I found the perfect guilt free chocolate, by alter eco, which I first tried through our Imperfect Foods box, which I also recommend.  The chocolate is super-dark, organic and vegan and it is not exploiting workers or the environment.   I'm not saying I've managed to cut out other kinds of chocolate but it's a start.  A lot of chocolate is grown with horrible labor practices (including child labor) and unstainable agricultural methods.  

• During the spring lockdown D and I picked a bunch of dandelions for an ill-conceived project.  It inspired us to cook up some greens.  As prepared with balsamic and raisins, they were not great, but it's cool to know they are edible and, in fact, used to be cultivated.

Health

• The biggest thing, at least for half the family, was the end of nursing Dd.  It was a little hard for me to stop what with the pandemic, but once I finally made up my mind, we all adjusted fine.
• We definitely had fewer small viruses, though Dd brought home a cold in September that resulted in me having a pretty bad cough for over three weeks in September and October.  By the time I got a COVID test, things were quite well organized and not yet inundated by the third wave.

• The kids both had molluscum (harmless but annoying skin virus) that we ended up treating with lots and lots of duct for most of the year.  I think it's all gone now.
• I tried a supplement called Jubilance which I had been looking forward to for a few years, but put off until after I was done breast feeding.   It claims to reduce emotional PMS.  It actually did for me, but it also gave me regular headaches, so after the third cycle with headache days I am finished with it.
• One more 2020-style event of 2020 was that Dd got a tick bite on D's 6th birthday.  We didn't find it until the next day and I only saw it because he had such a small amount of fine, blond hair.   Therefore, I read about ticks a lot and will need to keep reminding myself that just because we didn't have them around here when I was a kid, doesn't mean they are not here now.   Some of them do carry diseases, even in the Seattle city limits.  

Ok, that's all she wrote.   May 2021 be healthy, peaceful and rewarding.