It's raining on our parade!

I had a brilliant idea last week! Everyone has been in a funk and we knew we just needed to get out of this house. I did some searching and found an AirBnB that had a little of everything we were looking for, and at a decent price. We booked it and told the kids to get ready for a weekend at the beach in Corpus Christi! Since our last trip  to Corpus was cancelled, #thanksCOVID, this was just what we needed. 

However, Mother Nature had other plans. It wasn't long after we booked our AirBnB that there was talk of a disturbance in the gulf. I tried to stay positive because it looked like it might hit more north, and then it shifted, became Tropical Storm Hurricane Hanna, and was headed straight for Corpus. This morning they closed the beaches until Monday and our previously non-refundable AirBnB was now eligible for a full refund. So once again I had to give my kids the bad news. I know it's not really my fault, but I feel totally responsible. Maybe if we didn't try to do fun things there would be no disappointment! I can't even blame this one on COVID, lol. We're all feeling a little bit like this guy:

Well, we'll see if we can reschedule our outing in Corpus. Maybe the third time's the charm, or maybe we just should stop trying- one of the two! I know it will be better than sitting in our AirBnB during a tropical storm, being feet away from the beach and not being able to go out on it. 

So I was waiting to blog until after our awesome weekend adventure pictures, but here are a few other things I can share :)

Fuzzy antlers on a deer at McAllister Park

Not sure why, but he likes to sit on my lap. Then he successfully used my face to get my phone to open and snapped a flurry of pictures. I kept this one :)

One day Alex and I went up to the city of Gruene (pronounced Green) and walked around the antique shops and got ice cream.

It was also really hot!

Dan participated in a ride to honor a solider who was murdered at Fort Hood. Just look at the turnout of jeeps, trucks and motorcycles! #iamvanessaguillen

I finally found a White Mountain puzzle at Hobby Lobby that wasn't overpriced! I've got another one I'm waiting to do. I'll probably start it this weekend since we won't be doing our little vacation.

More Alex cooking adventures! One morning he felt like having some bacon and egg breakfast tacos, so he made them all by himself. He really has this cooking thing down!

Each week he gets to cook one dinner and every other week he gets to do a dessert. He got lucky this week when the Deacons quorum asked him to teach a recipe to the class for their Zoom activity. He taught them to make a family favorite, seven layer cookie bars. Then on Saturday he combined his meal and bi-weekly dessert into a fanciful feast for us- Fondue! He did all the prep work, which is a lot if you've ever had fondue. The dinner portion was awesome and the chocolate marshmallow fondue to dip our treats in was divine!

Lastly, one of the things that re-opened and thankfully has remained re-opened is Power Park Ninja. Alex has made a lot of improvement over the last month or so, and even got to do a summer camp session with the coaches. They shared this picture on their FB page of them playing laser tag in the dark! So glad there's something to enjoy amidst all the other stuff going on.

Hindsight is 2020....d'oh!

Man, if you'd told me back in March that my husband and kids would be home with me every day for the next 6 months I would've thought you were crazy. I mean, when everything started becoming more serious with the virus Dan was out of town working and missing a family camping trip during Spring Break. That's the kind of busy he was. Before Spring Break I had had a crazy amount of accompanist gigs and we were in full swing to compete with the Brass Band. Cade had joined yet another musical group and the Honor Band was preparing some hard pieces to compete at UIL with. Alex had just done a robotics competition and a ninja competition and the boys had both competed in a piano competition. We were all gone all the time, I barely had time to cook, and a day with nothing on the calendar just didn't exist.

So maybe if you had told me then the reality of what today is, I just wouldn't have been able to accept it. Maybe we needed to accept this adjustment of our schedules little by little. But the emotional rollercoaster of all the changes and all of the unknown and waiting to find out more has been exhausting. 

Pretend you are my 14 year old son and you just want to know when you can go back to school. In march it started out with one week past spring break. Then it was two more weeks. Then it was the rest of April. And then, even though we knew it was coming we had to wait for what seemed like forever to find out they would in fact not be returning to school at all. Then comes summer and you're glad to have a moment to not think about it, but it always lingers in the back of your mind. But at least there will be marching band. They start having Zoom sectionals and handing out music. Texas has opened back up and a glimmer of hope is on the horizon. Then slowly things start shutting back down and closing in as the cases rise in your community. Plans get cancelled and you don't want to even think about it, but if things are this bad, could we really go back to school? Your band director tries to keep the momentum going, but now school will be 100% online for at least the first 3 weeks of school. Then the mayor announces that as long as school is online, no extra curriculars are allowed to meet in person until in-person instruction resumes. Now it's not 2 weeks until marching band starts, it's 7 weeks until you might go back inside a school building.

When I was entering my freshman year, the only thing I was worried about was what to wear, and if I was going to get lost, which I did. 

And that's just Cade's story. Alex has his own. Dan has his own. You have your own, and I definitely have mine.

A lot of people continue to ask how I'm doing. Short story is that I'm the same as always. Long story is that my quest for answers to my symptoms has come up empty and a bit of a frustrating story in its own. I don't know if it's because of military healthcare or Covid, or the combination of the two, but all in all its been a bit of an oxy moron. Initially my doctor presumed me positive despite my negative test results because of my symptoms. When my symptoms were still plaguing me at 4 weeks he said it would take a few more to see some improvement. As they continued to plague me we did some basic lab tests looking for maybe an infection of sorts. When all those came back clear and weeks went by with no improvement, I had another phone appointment and they approved an in-person appointment for me, yay! I show up and didn't pass the covid screening questions (duh) and got re-routed to the ER. Spent hours there, and really the only good thing from that whole ordeal was leaving with an inhaler and a steroid. Finally something to help with the breathing. Since then I have had multiple specialists appointments to help answer my symptoms cancelled due to the spike in Covid cases. Oxy moron. I've had extensive lab work done looking for auto-immune disorders that often act like what my symptoms are, and everything came back clear. I just want to feel like myself again, and any time they don't find anything wrong with me, it doesn't give me any treatment, answers or hope.

So for now here's the basic theory. Whether it was covid or not, I was sick with some sort of respiratory virus that has now thrown my body into a post-viral fatigue syndrome. My instinct is leaning towards covid just because of the timing and the symptoms. I have since read and followed the stories of thousands of others who have had lasting symptoms like myself, including some who literally have the exact same ones as me. The tricky thing with post-viral fatigue is that if you're not careful you can then get stuck in a chronic fatigue. I've done some research into that and it's pretty scary stuff. I'm hopeful that time will heal as long as find the balance between allowing my body to rest/heal and nourish it with health and activity. I still have shortness of breath, tightness in my chest, fevers and fatigue. Naproxen (aleve) has been a godsend as it's the only thing that gives me some relief from it all, sometimes. I've tried to go off of it to see if I've 'gotten better' and I'm quickly reminded just how much worse I can feel. So if you see me out at the store or with my kids, know that I'm not contagious and I'm exhausted under it all. Just ask my boys and they know that mom can't do as much as she used to anymore.

A lot of times I don't know how to see the silver lining in all of this. It becomes overwhelming. Because it's 'one for the history books', that means we don't know the way out of this. But as time as passed, a few things I've learned personally are new ways to relate to others. It's been a pattern in my life that I've experienced a lot almost trials. We had some serious struggles with Cade as a child and because of the experiences we went through I have the ability to relate to others that are in similar situations. I've been through a military separation, but not a deployment, but I can relate to those experiences of my military spouse friends. I've been a full time working mom so I know what that's like. Each learning experience allows me to have more of an ear to lend to those that are experiencing similar trials themselves. This time around I've learned how much of a stigma there is for those suffering from Covid. It's hard if they're working, it's hard if they're parents, it's hard to get health professionals to take you seriously, it's hard for family and friends to feel comfortable being around you, and they may not recover very fast, if ever. I've learned patience. You can't be sick for 107 days with the same symptoms without patience. I've also learned to respect and relate to those with auto-immune disorders like my sister who has RA. So many of them deal with chronic fatigue and things like me, but with no end in sight. It's just something else to add to my arsenal of understanding.

I'd love to say I can look back and be glad for these experiences, but I'm not there yet. One step at a time, one looooonng day at a time. They say hindsight is 2020 and that has new meaning to me now. All along maybe it meant that in 2020 we'd reset our baseline for normal and always look back to it from now on. It's time to re-think education, healthcare, they way we work, the way we travel, how we spend our time, and learning love and patience for all of our fellow mankind. I have a feeling hindsight will be 2021 as well. Hang in there folks, and look for the small stuff you can learn along the way.

Independence

It's been a little while since I've blogged. I haven't had the energy, and I didn't have much adventuring to share. Sadly San Antonio has seen a huge surge in cases of the virus. Just a few stats to give perspective:

• June 1st- news headlines were touting a slow down in cases with a total of 9 new cases that day, and a total of about 2,800 for all of Bexar County.
• As mentioned in Alex's birthday blog post things were worsening so we decided not to take him out to eat for his birthday
• July 3rd- Total cases that day, just a month later, were 1,334. That was the second time that week we had over a thousand cases. Total in Bexar County right now is 14,212! Sadly I don't think it's getting any better any time soon.

It has kind of felt like we're back at the beginning of the pandemic when you were hearing news updates every day with new closures and changes. Since things had started to open back up we had made some fun and what we thought were responsible and socially distant getaway plans for the Fourth of July. Dan's niece, Denice, was going to come hang out with us, and we were going to camp on the beach at Padre National Seashore and watch the fireworks from the deck of the USS Lexington. As things worsened Denice felt it wouldn't be best to travel here, which we were bummed about, but totally understood. Then the fireworks were cancelled in Corpus. And then a few days later they closed the beaches! *sigh*  They even sent out an emergency alert to everyone's cell phones!

I'm not sure how others feel in other parts of the country, but for our family the past few weeks have really kept the pandemic fresh in our minds. It weighs on our moods and keeps affecting our daily lives. I try not to let my mind wander to the future because there is so much uncertainty, but school is just around the corner and we still don't know what that will look like for the boys. Also I feel like the media is always trying to find someone or something to blame for the rise in cases. I know there was definitely a desire to try to return to some sort of normalcy, but why all the blame. What if everyone was really doing their best and the rise was inevitable? This thing is way more serious than we can really comprehend and I think we're all just doing the best we can.

Here's an image that captures how we've been feeling!

Anyways, I'm really not trying to be a drag, but want to accurately document this unique time in history and how it affected our family. 

While most of our days run together and involve us staying home, we have picked a few adventures. Last weekend we drove to Gonzales, TX to check out a few historic sites Dan had previously come across on a motorcycle ride.  

We stopped at Buc-ees, a popular gas station/convenience store in Texas. Had to get a picture of their mascot wearing his mask! 

First up was the jail museum! Sounds a little weird, but we've been to prison museums in Korea, Colorado and now TX. They're pretty interesting!

This jail was built in 1885.

The first system used to help create a sketch of supposed criminals

I loved all the markings on the walls of the prison. There was something striking about it, and for the most part they weren't vulgar like today's graffiti is in bathrooms. 

Ceiling

Original steel doors

Kitchen cupboard

Gallows used for executions. It used to be in the town square but it caused too much of a public problem, so they but it on the second floor of the prison. The last time it was used was in 1921.

This was the key the tour guide was using to open different parts of the prison, and it's the original key!

These next few pics are on the second floor and you could see inside the cells.

This is a picture of the clocktower on the building next to the prison. Legend has it that the last man who was hung on the gallows predicted that the clocks on each side of the tower would never work right again. Apparently right after he died they stopped working, and after multiple tries to fix them they would never sync- some ran fast, some ran slow, etc. Cursed??

After touring the jail we hit a Whataburger drive through and ate our fast food out in the field of the next museum we were going to take a look at, the Gonzalez Memorial Museum.

This musem had a lot of pretty interesting pieces in it, including the actual cannon that Texans know as the "Come and Take it" cannon.

I thought this old newspaper press was neat

Glass marbles

I liked this map hanging above the glass curios

There's the cannon! Funnily enough they built a replica of the cannon right before the uncovered the original cannon in the Guadalupe River. The replica sits outside the museum.

War weapons are neat, but this WWI bomb from a wrecked plane is pretty cool!

Alex liked the walls of the memorial museum because of the shell imprints

This statue in front of the memorial museum honors those who helped defend the Alamo

It's interesting that even driving an hour and half each way to Gonzalez and doing a little touring was a nice break to the monotony of being home all day every day. Sometimes you just need to get out for a bit.

As for our Independence Day we did a small BBQ and swimming with a good friend, outside, and then did an escape room. Covid-19 regulations allow us to do escape rooms privately, so no fear of the strangers messing it up for us. We did a room at Great Room Escape called Anubis, and escaped with one minute to spare! It was a fun room with clues that were hard but made sense and required some teamwork to get through. Yay! 

And it's not fourth of july without some sort of fireworks, so we bought a few at a local stand and had a 'blast' setting them off. 

I hope you've all found a way to 'escape' your worries and keep searching for meaningful ways to use your time! 

Oh, and I keep meaning to mention. Cade has started his own blog, which you can check out here!