End of Summer 2020

It feels like the end of more than just summer, but the end of a significant period in our lives. But the truth is, the beginning of the school year, while it may bring a little more structure to our schedules, does not signify the end of the coronavirus. Here is what happened in San Antonio in July.

And now that we're mid way through August we've added another 5,000 cases and about 150 more deaths. The daily cases are declining some, but the infection rate is higher, so a lot of area experts expect further increases leading up to December.

The big debate across the country is how to handle the return of school. The reality is that there is no perfect solution. Our mayor mandated that all schools that reside in our county start the first three weeks of school with distance learning. Then an Attorney General countered that with some ruling that allows schools to go back in-person if they choose. So even in our own city with such astronomical case numbers, some school districts have started school like 'normal'. Our particular school district is sticking with the initial 3 weeks online and then is planning to wait until the city is in the Green Zone before phasing in the in-person learning. Of course, if you don't feel comfortable sending your kids to school you always have the option to do the the school year 100% online. Personally I am glad that some schools are returning before us so we can see what happens locally. Our superintendent feels strongly that he doesn't want to reopen schools until they can remain open. He doesn't want this back and forth of opening and closing.

So to finish out our summer, we did finally get to have a weekend getaway! We scrapped the idea of Corpus Christi because after two failed attempts, the AirBnB that we were going to stay at jacked up their prices and it became unreasonable for us to stay there. Instead we used a combination of some of Dan's hotel points and cash, and stayed at a Hampton Inn near NASA space center and Clear Lake in Houston. Being at that location we could take advantage of water sports at Clear Lake, be 45 minutes away from Galveston beaches, and enjoy the hotel swimming pool and other activities in a big city.

I just have to say, it's no wonder Houston is struggling with case numbers more than San Antonio. There was a severe lack of adherance to CDC guidelines which made us uncomfortable in a few of our desired activities, but for the most part we were still able to do the things we were really looking forward to.  

We drove out Friday and mostly just hung out in the hotel room, ate some pizza, swam in the hotel pool and played some games. Also, something about having cable in hotel rooms just intrigues my boys. We don't have cable at home and they love flipping through 1000s of channels and finding maybe one or two unique things to watch, lol.

On the road!

Glorious Glorious TV!

Playing Pounce, one of our favorite games

Saturday we reserved a single Jet Ski for 3 hours and took turns. Cade was even old enough to be a driver as long as one of us was on there with him. It was a great way to spend the morning. I even drove our car away from the boat ramp and to a nearby park with a pier so we could easily switch and have kind of a hang out spot if it wasn't your turn.

Glad we didn't come across any Gators!

This was the first time on a Jet Ski for the boys! I think I was about Cade's age when I did my first jet ski in Door County Wisconsin.

That's me with Cade driving. He did such a good job!

Alex and me

We went back to the hotel for showers, lunch and naps!

That evening we decided to visit Kemah Boardwalk, which is a fun area along the Lake we had just spent the day playing in. We stayed for a while to check the place out, but with the heat, the lack of social distancing, lack of mask-wearers, and cost, we ended up cutting our evening short. 

So instead of having dinner at the Boardwalk, Dan and I got the kids what they wanted [Whataburger] and we got what we wanted [Ramen]! 

Sunday was our designated beach day. It was the day I was most looking forward to, seeing as how I had already tried to plan two trips to the beach. We slept in and lazily made our way to Galveston and spent our day at Stewart Beach. We spent about 5 hours in the sun and sand. The kids did everything from swimming, digging, getting buried to kite flying. I spent most of my time either in the water past the break or relaxing in my chair. Dan decided he's glad we're not stationed in Hawaii. It was awfully hot, even in the water so it was exhausting and relaxing at the same time. 

How does he look so grown up all of a sudden?

On Monday we checked out of the hotel and headed to downtown Houston for their Science Museum. We tried to get there nice and early so there wouldn't be any crowds, and that worked. None of the interactive features of exhibits were on or allowed, but it still was a great museum. I think my boys loved the gem and mineral section the most because I have a bajillion pictures of different rocks. My favorite part was the Faberge exhibit. I had heard of the Faberge eggs, but hadn't really seen any of his other style of jewelry. Good thing I'm too poor to even think about owning any of it because it really caught my attention! Also the Egypt exhibit at this museum is by far the biggest I've come across. I wish it wouldn't have been the last exhibit we came across because it was just a little too overwhelming to look at every little glass curio and each item inside. There were some great mummies and even a Rosetta Stone replica.

This is a video of an area called the Cabinet of Curiosities. It was roped off so you could explore and open each little drawer and cabinet, but it was still pretty cool. 

It's not every day you can hold Mars in your hands. This globe was huge!! Sometimes it displays the moon, sometimes Earth, but for right now it's Mars.

Sloths sure have changed

I'll share this singular rock picture with you because everyone in our family was pretty fascinated by this natural cube of pyrite emerging from a stone. Crazy!

A few Faberge pics. Such ornate detail, and the inlay used on so many of their pieces is just fascinating.

A Faberge metronome!

We paid a few extra dollars to visit their special exhibit- Death by Natural Causes. It was an eerie display of all the ways you can die naturally; arsenic, diseases, poisons, deadly animals, etc.

I'm not sure if it's because of Hollywood, but often times Ancient Egyptian things just seem so fictional and unreal to me. But there's obviously an overwhelming amount of evidence that a people really lived this way. It's just so much different than a lot of other ancient civilizations. Cade took a lot more pictures so be sure to check out his blog post as well.

Right outside the museum was a gorgeous little park with an awesome fountain set inside a hill. Selfie time! 

We had a great trip, and Covid only ruined it a little bit here and there. It was great to see the kids smiling and having a good time instead of wanting to claw their eyes out at home. This week we're just enjoying the lack of schedule because online school will be totally different this time around. Wish us luck, and send prayers and help out to all those who work in education this year!

**Disclaimer- anytime you see us without masks in pictures, it was just for the sake of the picture and they were put right back on. In fact plenty of times the masks end up in pictures because we forget we're wearing them**

***Health update for those following that story- after several appointments being cancelled due to the uptick in cases in San Antonio, I fought for another phone appointment with my doctor. Of course my PCM has changed (the original doctor has moved, ya military life), so even though this doctor could see all my notes leading up to this point, it was like starting over while talking with him. He's the one that ordered the more extensive lab work looking for inflammatory markers and auto-immune disorders. That all came back negative so his kind of last resort thing was to do a CT scan of my lungs since shortness of breath and tightness in my chest is STILL and issue. I was finally able to do that scan on August 6th and the doctor called me Monday on our way home from Houston. He wasn't able to clearly identify what he found on the scan, but said it was either an atypical infection or inflammation. (duh!) So I will get my second referral to pulmonology and not be ignored this time. Hopefully the experts will be able to get a better reading of my CT scan and know what's going on. Maybe I'll get some answers and help. I'd love to be back at 100%. I've been taking Aleve which helps me more than I realized. For about 4-5 days leading up to my CT scan I stopped taking the Aleve so it wouldn't mask anything that was going on, and holy cow- my fever came back, my fatigue went from like 40%-80%, my body hurt in so many ways, had trouble sleeping and more. We need to get this figured out!***

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.