Is 2020 Over Yet?

Is it over yet? I was blogging daily while our state was under a stay at home order. Right after that ended, teachers were called back to work. We had to complete all of the IEP meetings that had come due during the stay at home order. We then had to go back into the schools to clean up our rooms, and gather students’ personal items for parents to pick up. After that, we got to officially start summer.

My summer started with my mom going to the hospital emergency room with a blood pressure/heart rate/breathing emergency. The hospital did a lot of tests, and only found that she was a little dehydrated. They sent her home with an oxygen tank. With no answer, I went to our health department for a Covid-19 test. I am the only one who goes out right now, so if my mom had it, I would have been the vector. My test came back negative. The follow up doctors think that it was an accidental overdose of blood pressure medication. Upon inspection, I discovered that she had two different bottles of the same medication, from different companies (so they looked different). I have now started managing my mom’s medication as well as my dad’s.

A week later, my aunt fell at her nursing home, and broke her hip. She doesn’t self advocate well (cerebral palsy and limited cognitive functioning). I spent much of five days at the hospital with her. She ended up needing surgery. She will most likely not walk again, but she may be able to move enough to assist in her care.

Aside from health emergencies, I decided to use this home time to clean out and reorganize our storage sheds. This has been a daunting task, but I am almost done! I have been gathering boxes of my mom’s, putting them in a wagon, and bringing them to her to go through. She ends up keeping quite a lot. I think she may have finally realized and accepted that her lifetime of collections won’t fit in her room!

Black Lives Matter! This is the event held in my community. It was peaceful and unifying. In the last year or so, our county churches have been doing a great job trying to create ONE COMMUNITY. As the grandmother to a beautiful biracial granddaughter, I have hope that her generation will be the change they want to see in the world.

Topping everything off with our pandemic….that isn’t going away. While it hasn’t stricken my household, there are at least two cases in my aunt’s nursing home, at least one case in the nursing home where my daughter works, and there has been a case at our local high school (summer football practice). Very few people here are wearing masks or following CDC guidelines. Our local leaders are divided- the county mayor is telling everyone to go back to our old normal because it isn’t that bad here (we have gone from 1-2 cases a day to 8-10 cases a day and the hospital is fine). Our city mayor is encouraging more caution. Regardless, my household is using caution.

One thing that hasn’t gotten back on track are supervised visits for my kids and the dad. The visit center had to close in the stay at home order. We tried to do phone supervised visits three times, but the kids freaked out. Now the center has lost their location, and only do supervised visits in a public place like a park or restaurant. My teen is not able to do visits right now, but Little AoA is. The dad has now refused to have any visits with only Little AoA. The week after he refused visits, he contacted his attorney to complain that the kids weren’t coming to visits! I predicted that he would do this, so I kept pretty meticulous documentation and put it in the faithful hands of my attorney all along the way. It has been almost a full 8 years since we parted ways. My heart just aches for the kids who have not been able to live without fear of the dad.

I will end here by sharing a picture of our favorite little Chinese restaurant. It is just a couple miles from our house. They were closed during our stay at home order, and then revamped how they serve once everything opened back up. They converted their door to a walk up take out window. I haven’t seen anything else like this.