COVID-19 and Family

I’m a father of three exceptional children (ages 17, 10, and 7.5 years old) for those who don’t know me. In the “before times,” we often found ourselves carting children from one event to another, from Cub Scouts to Soccer to Football to Softball to Track and Feild. Three kids who had an extraordinary post-school life that often resulted in a lack of family time. Frequently, my wife would be taking one child in one direction while I would be driving another to a different objective; talk about a family of ships passing in the night.

Then late February 2020, along came COVID-19 in all its horrible glory. At first, there was fear, then panic over toilet paper supplies. A strange desire to bake bread was followed by an all-out panic to find yeast. The world seemed to be upside down. Laterhing our spawn with copious amounts of chemical antiviral sauce and the uncertainty of going out our front door loomed as a constant reminder that we were witnessing the end of days. It didn’t take long to settle into a groove and take a deep breath of air (before the great California burning of 2020). It was last night that I looked around the table to see a family happy, enjoying dinner as a family, the way a family should. No TV, no radio, just fun conversations, laughing, and simplicity abounded over our apricot jam chicken legs and pasta. It was at that moment that I was somewhat grateful for COVID-19; weird, right? But you see, several years passed, and rarely did we eat dinner as a family; we were all too busy to take an hour out of the day to eat as a household. Thank you, COVID-19, thank you for positively affecting my family; not all that you have brought to our country is doom and gloom.

Don’t forget to wear your mask and stay healty my friends.