Quarantine Day 5 – The Family Is Back

After some excellent advice from Dr. Dora, the family veterinarian, we decided to invite Kevin back into our home since there have been no known cases of transmitting Covid-19 from human to dog. I will have to say that Kevin has boosted moral for my wife and I, even if all he does is follow us around for treats and not catch any rodents whatsoever.

More importantly, we had not seen our daughter since March 7th, before we flew out for our cruise. We made the decision today that we could wait no longer. We have experienced no symptoms in the last several days, and we did a thorough wipe-down of the house before we had grandma drop her off. I cannot begin to tell you the relief it was seeing her and having her back home. It feels like we are a family again, despite our isolation. Even still, until we hear back our test results, which we were told 3-5 days from Monday, we won’t be having any other family members visit us. The quarantine continues; it’s just much better now that we have Kevin and my daughter back.

With no results, meaning no family visits, we will have to continue working from home with our daughter, who is three. Her school is closed, like everyone else’s, and it will be parenting duty around the clock, along with working overtime for our primary jobs to compensate for remote working. For those of you who have already been doing this for the last week or two, I salute you. I hope your superiors take it easy on you. I was on a call this afternoon with four members of my team, and my daughter came in and yelled, “daddy I found another princess dress!” Of course she did, she has the entire catalogue of Disney princess dresses.

We(Americans) are resilient. We are isolating to save the lives of our vulnerable. Quarantine is a bit of an antiquated term, which we should instead interpret as: let’s do what we need to, power through this, and develop innovative ways to work around our present difficulties. The time to lend a helping hand to coworkers and family members is now, and I look forward to the challenge and opportunity.