This morning as we were getting ready for school I told Parker he needed to sit down and eat his breakfast. He responded that he had to wait to pee because he had a boner. I agreed that it’s really hard to pee when you have a boner. However, I filed the boner thing away and thought I should ask him on the way to school how he knew about boners, not exactly how he knew about boners but mainly how he knew the proper medical term. On the way to school I asked him how he knew about boners and both he and Aiden said they had asked Shirley about it. Apparently they were watching a movie that referenced boners, not hard on boners, but the other kind of boner, a mistake. The grandma in the movie had a t shirt on that said I don’t make boners (this is also a T shirt many wives could feel comfortable wearing). For some reason this led to the kids asking Shirley what a boner was. I asked them why they didn’t just wait and ask me and they claimed I wasn’t around, fair enough. However, having only boys I figured I would be the one to tell them what a boner was, but that it would probably be a few years down the road. Parker also added that he gets boners a lot, especially when he has to pee at school and that he has to stand above the toilet when this happens. I tried to flush it out to determine what he meant by “above the toilet” but couldn’t really determine what he meant by that, as long as he’s not peeing on the ceiling I’ll just let him keep on keeping on. Thanks to Shirley buying the birds and the bees book on Amazon coupled with the fact that we let them watch a lot of TV-14 and up content, my kids have an extensive knowledge about sex. I suppose it’s still better than the alternative, learning about sex from Darlene Doornbos at recess.

On Wednesday morning I was unable to sleep so I got up and blew out the driveway. The amount of fallen snow was at an in-between point where it probably wasn’t necessary to blow out the driveway, but I didn’t want Shirley on my back when she woke up telling me to blow out the driveway. This year I am foregoing a plow service and I definitely don’t need to hear “I told you you should have gotten a plow service!” That being said, at this point I don’t mind blowing out the driveway, its a way to get outside and put on a podcast and not have to worry about anyone bothering me, similar to mowing the lawn in the summer but without a place to put my beer or any real practical way to drink it if there was a place. When I got in the house I went and tested the down stairs toilet because it wasn’t flushing properly the night before, someone had likely dropped a concrete turd in it along with way too much toilet paper. Since installing the new toilet down there last summer there had been zero clogs and I was concerned I would have to contact a plumber. Sure enough it still wasn’t flushing. I was going to run to Home Depot and get a snake to try and unclog it when Shirley told me we already had one, I managed to locate it in the garage and went to work, the only problem is I couldn’t get the thing to unwind properly so I had to do it manually which required me to put my hands in the toilet water that still had poop remnants floating around in it, and it wasn’t my poop, which wouldn’t have made it great, but it would have made it better. I jammed the thing down there as far as I could and moved it around and then pulled it back out. Voila! The toilet flushed completely and I avoided the unnecessary trip by a plumber to fix the clog, Yeah me!

Earlier this week I had called my buddy to rehash what had happened at lunch basketball (don’t tell anyone in the Whitmer administration about this, this is really dangerous and I’m sure someone from the health department will be tasked with finding where we play and shutting it down out of fear that the business allowing it will make a profit and somehow be able to remain viable) and he told me he loves winter and was saddened by the fact that there’s only six weeks left. I was shocked because I hate winter and can’t wait for it to end. Due to every night being a movie night since the lockdown started the Jansma’s are running out of movies to watch (movie watching is a key to keeping the cold dark nights of winter from passing by at a snails pace) especially since Shirley has grown a conscience and won’t let the kids watch a lot of the questionable movies I had planned to fill the content void. She even came down to the basement and put the brakes on me and the kids watching Mad Max Fury Road a few weeks back. To be honest, I think the kids were a little freaked out by it, but they weren’t going to let me know because they could tell I was really excited to watch it with them. For those of you who haven’t seen it it’s post apocalyptic and is wall to wall action and violence. Also, Shirley may have came down at the worst possible time due to the fact that the scene that was playing involved five scantily clad women in the middle of the dessert taking a water break and hosing themselves down. Had I not been with my kids I would have labeled the scene bonerific. So, in light of the fact we are going to have to wait at least a good six months for the kids to mature to the point where I can unleash the questionable content I have picked out to watch, we have turned to streaming tv shows, in particular the Goldbergs. I never paid much attention to this show when it was on the air and dismissed it as not being funny, even though I had really never sat down and watched an entire episode. However, it takes place in the 80’s the same time I was growing up, and it is quite witty and relatable to even my kids. One of the reasons is because the mom is over the top in her love for her kids and smothers them in every episode and the dad just sits in his recliner with his whitey tighties watching TV, paying little attention to his kids. Obviously the gender roles are reversed and the only difference is that Shirley doesn’t wear white tighties, although she use to have some Grannie panties that were even more objectionable than whitey tighties, but I managed to get throw those out a few years back without her knowing.

The show has really grown on me and my kids also love it. However, there is always a problem with shows that cast young actors, it happened with Leave it To Beaver, Wonder Years, Family Ties, and many other shows (it didn’t happen in Webster or Different Strokes because their child actor was a midget) The young actors morph into akward teenagers and the show typically looses its charm. I jumped in on season 2 of the Goldbergs which involved Adam, the youngest of the Goldberg children beginning 7th grade. We made it through season 2 this week and started season 3 last night. Adam is now going through puberty and the show is using that in its plot lines to document what an awkward and awful time puberty can be. However, the years to follow are going to be difficult and while the show somehow has managed 8 season I can see where this is going. Unwatchable TV is just down the road but my kids will likely insist on riding this thing out until the very end. The only way to avoid such a painful existence as the winter drags on is to come up with an alternative show to garner their attention and sever their allegiance to the Goldbergs. Now I just have to figure out if I should start with The Sopranos or Breaking Bad as the new streaming path to send my kids down to eradicate the Goldberg when it becomes unwatchable?

Ted Williams was the last major leaguer to bat .400 over an entire season. Batting 400 is impressive unless it’s the success rate in acquiring sister and brother in laws. I’m two out of five, and the catastrophe that is my siblings choices (and one of Shirley’s sisters) impacts me more than I ever could have imagined. Granted, had my brother and sister listened to me when I told them they were making a huge mistake (I’m not the type of guy who sits back and lets shit go wrong without trying to intervene) I could be batting 800 (there’s no way I was talking Shirley’s sister out of marrying her husband). Regardless, my brother came home this weekend from Seattle with his Debbie Downer of a wife and I realized why they don’t typically come back to Michigan together, because she’s a bitch and she can’t stand my brother, two things that don’t bode well for spending time together when visiting family members back home.

Where I am at right now, and some of you may know this some of you may not, is my mom has moved out of the house we moved to when I was in second grade and is living in my tv room on a hospital bed and the house has been sold. However, all of her shit is still there and I am tasked with getting it out of there prior to February 1. Since my brother was back from Seattle my other brother came up from Gary Indiana (yes, he lives in the butthole of Indiana) and the two of them along with my sister and I converged on the home of our youth (as well as when I was 30 and lost my job and had to move back in with my folks and share a room with my brother Andy, needless that was the low point, I had nowhere to go but up). My mom maybe the only organized hoarder on the planet, she collects food from Big Lots, clothes from everywhere that isn’t fashionable, as well as antiques and nick knacks. The good news is due to the fact that the house has two working toilets there were no five gallon buckets with human shit in them to dispose of. Every room, every closet, every cupboard was filled with something, and 99% of the time that something had absolutely no value. We moved most of it into the garage which from there it will be thrown into a roll off to be taken to the dump. As we emptied the various crevices of the house it became obvious we weren’t eradicating the home of everything that day and that the smart move would be to just make it a one step process for everything still in the house and get a roll off to place in the driveway.

My mom actually had a pioneer satellite radio adapter in her “craft room” that had never been open. It would have been fun to call the number first of all to see if anyone answered and then screw with them and tell them you wanted to hook up your pioneer satellite radio. Eventually we decided to call it a day and headed over to my sister’s new house for dinner. Like I use to do when every single Jansma family get together was at my house, I smoked some meat, this time I did baby back ribs and they were fall off the bone delicious. Shirley, my kids, and my mom had been watching my sister’s brood (4 kids 5 and under) so she could help with the dismantling of my parent’s former house, even though she showed up two hours late and claimed she had been getting diapers. When we rolled in to her house all of the kids were making a movie and my brother’s kids were also there, my brother Jesse from Seattle has a five year old daughter and a one year old son and my brother Andy has a 9 month old daughter. My kids are 7 and 10 and were the creative minds behind the movie. Jesse’s wife, we will just call her eeyore, came storming into the room where we were watching football complaining that my kids kept using the word murder. This upset her for some reason, not sure why and I responded to her that their dad is a criminal defense attorney so what did she expect? She responded that she didn’t want her daughter going to daycare when they got back to Seattle and saying she was going to murder her daycare mates. She poked the bear and I told her that my kids were awful and this was how they were. The reality was that when I was a kid my friends and I constantly played games where we pretend killed one another, as well as real BB gun wars where we shot one another. My kids mentioning murder really wasn’t that big of a deal and if eeyore thought it was she was bringing it up to the wrong person. I’ll yell at other people’s kids, so obviously I don’t have a problem when other people yell at mine or reprimand them. So, she was free to do so without any brush back from me.

The next morning my brother Andy came over for breakfast with his family and when Eeyore finally appeared around 10am Shirley made the mistake of asking how she slept, “Not good, it’s just so loud in your basement, you can hear everything!” It couldn’t have been that bad, she slept in two hours longer than anyone else did. On top of that, since I have never slept in my basement, I was able to seek out a third party to determine if Eeyore’s claims were valid, Andy and his wife have slept in our basement dozens of times, and they said it is quite peaceful and they have never noticed any noise. My brother Jesse, who has to plan things behind his wife’s back so that he can just take off and do it and deal with the consequences later, made the mistake of telling her about a Sunday lunch he had planned with someone that Eeyore flipped out about. I had made plans to go watch football at a buddy’s bar with a few guys and that also pissed her off, knowing that my brother would be off having fun with out her even though she doesn’t particularly enjoy being around him but seems to still want him around to torment him and have him help her with their two kids.

On top of how exhausting it is to be around Eeyore, there’s also a somewhat complicated dynamic between my brother Jesse and I. We are quite competitive and even more competitive when competing against one another. I have broken countless tennis rackets playing him in tennis and we have gotten into a number of knock down drag out fights over such meaningful things as corn hole, washers, and racquetball. The competitive gene was not passed on to Aiden, but Parker is a fierce competitor (asshole) just like his dad and wants to win at everything. Lexi, Jesse’s daughter, is exactly the same the only difference is my brother goes out of his way to stoke her competitive spirit where as I try to find ways to curb Parker’s knowing if he stays on his current trajectory he may be even a bigger A-hole than I am. Eeyore set up an obstacle course in the kids playroom and Sunday morning I spent a chunk of it timing Parker and Lexi as they went through it with a spoon with a ping pong ball on it in their mouth. Parker nailed it and his times continued to improve as he went through the course. Lexi, who is five, didn’t have much luck getting all the way through the course but was determined to beat her older cousin. Strangely, I could feel her pain because I always want to beat my brother and since it’s winter right now all I had was board games. Qwirkle is a game of shapes and colors and you need to get all six shapes in row or all the shapes of one color in arrow to get a Qwirkle. My brother had never played and I ended up getting out to a commanding lead, but then he caught on and started getting intolerable after nailing a couple Qwirkle’s, my heart started pounding and my palms began to sweat. Was I going to blow what I thought was an insurmountable lead? Was I going to be the Detroit Lion’s of board games? I managed to put together enough points at the end to stave him off and was quiet in victory. The next night I beat him in another board game and was quiet in that victory. Unlike him, who is a complete loud mouth gloating dick when he wins, I keep my mouth shut for the most part in victory. However, when I lose that’s an entirely different story. We ended the night with a rematch in Qwirkle, and while it wasn’t ideal to lose to Shirley in Qwirkle I am glad she beat my brother so I didn’t have to hear him gloat.

I guess the good news is that they are now on their journey back to Seattle and I won’t have to see Eeyore for quite some time. She is the person who always goes worst case scenario with everything, the chances of Lexi murdering one of her classmates seemed pretty minuscule to me. The good news is, being 3,000 miles away keeps her from hearing some of the truly golden nuggets that come out of my kids mouths like the other week when Parker, who is 7 almost 8, asked Shirley and I what it looked like when animals had sex. “Well, Parker there’s this thing called doggy style……..”

Monday morning, the first morning the kids were suppose to return to school after Christmas break saw them getting tested for Covid to determine when they would be allowed back for in person learning. The following morning a heated argument arose between Shirley and I regarding who is to blame for this nightmare. She blamed me for bringing Covid into our house and I blamed her for making the epic mistake of getting tested and putting the Jansma family on the radar of the Fourth Reich (The Michigan Health Department). Typically I am willing to take full responsibility for my negligent behavior but in this case what I had pulled off was akin to Ron Jeremy wearing no protection his entire porn career and coming down with penal warts the day before he retires. Not exactly a win, but an accomplishment none the less. I made it ten months and had avoided a virus that is more prevalent than cheapness is in Dutch circles. I wore a mask, I social distanced, but I wasn’t going to change my pre-covid lifestyle to avoid contracting a virus I knew had little to no chance of having any type of significant impact on my health. I also knew it was inevitable that I would contract it at some point but in life timing is everything and this was the worst possible time to come down with the vid. Parker was in the room while we were going back and forth but high tailed it once he realized this was a code red after Shirley dropped an F bomb. Had I been thinking clearly I would have strongly opposed Shirley being tested, what good was it going to do? With Shirley’s positive test now it was a matter of hoping the kids tested positive so they could return to school sooner rather than later. The smart play would have been to forego the test and just keep the kids out of school for a week claiming some type of unrelated covid illness. Shirley’s concern was the danger we would put the people visiting my mom in now that she is living with us. However, we didn’t need a positive test to tell them to stay away for a week due to Shirley losing her sense of taste and smell as well as exhibiting other covid symptoms. We agreed to disagree as to who was at fault but I had logic on my side, what good did the covid test do? It’s like getting tested for Herpes, you already know you have it, why put yourself through the anguish of the testing procedure? Just get some black market Valtrex and move on with your life.

As I was getting the kids breakfast Shirley came down and said she spoken to some doctor who is in charge of something where she works and she had told him that she ended up getting tested, he told her that now she was on the Health Department’s list and a marked women along with everyone else in her household. Finally she acknowledged that maybe a test wasn’t the best way to go. Making matters worse, the kids came back negative pushing their return to school date out even further. Adding insult to injury, Shirley gave my cell number to Fourth Reich to circle back with me and tell me what I was suppose to do and not do. I was not making the same mistake Shirley did, no test for me. Sure enough Tuesday morning I received a call from a volunteer who was working for the Fourth Reich. Even the least perceptive person could sense the hostility as the conversation started. The women started out by telling me how seriously MDH takes Covid which was the window I needed to jump in and respond “yes, too seriously based on the mortality rate being .0006% of the population” she responded by saying it was way higher to which I countered that there was a huge chunk of the population who had it but never knew it and as a result were not tested, or knew they had had it and chose not to get tested like me. She started in about quarantining but I wasn’t having any of it explaining that I had it before my wife and that I was out of my window to quarantine. In closing I told her that the worker that spoke with Shirley would’t accept the date for her onset of symptoms and our kids are therefore being deprived of in school learning as a result. (we need those bastards back in school as quickly as possible, things are falling apart at the seems over here) She claimed she was going to speak to her direct supervisor about it but I doubt there will be any type of rectification of the onset of symptoms date for Shirley. I like to think it was refreshing for the volunteer to finally speak with someone who had it together and wasn’t playing the game, but I’m sure it probably ruined her entire day, she was a definite Karen.

I had sworn that if my kids were held out of school for any extended period of time we would load up and go to Florida. Unfortunately, Shirley isn’t too keen on this idea so we may have to make way for the Sunshine state under the cover of darkness. One of the problems is that I keep forgetting my kids, because they are kids and tested negative and have no symptoms and can’t pass it on, are suppose to quarantine. I wanted to take them to tennis lessons yesterday and get them started on routine of Tuesday and Thursday tennis lesson but Shirley squashed that idea immediately. The real problem is I know how things should be handled and the protocol seems to be the opposite of the proper way to deal with kids who don’t have Covid, can’t pass Covid, and need to get out of the house before one of their parents kills them. What makes matters even worse is that my idea about how things are done are typically shot down by Shirley, and she always adds that all of the doctors she works with disagree with everything I am saying. Well, guess who else is a Dr (besides me, a doctor of the law, but a doctor none the less) yes, Fauci is a doctor and he’s an idiot, so why would I listen to a doctor when I have ten months of dealing with covid under my belt? On top of all of that, Shirley finally snapped today and summoned me to come home and deal with the kids. I had a consult this morning as well as some virtual court hearings, the consult had to be at my office and the virtual court hearings were best to be dealt with from there as well. Shirley has been entrenched in her home office since the beginning of all this but claims I can use the auxiliary office which is really a spare bedroom down in the basement where Jasper sleeps most of the day away and just so happens to have a desk in it. She summarily jumped off the phone without me agreeing to come home. However, I canceled my 2pm tennis match and texted her that I would be home after I finished a couple things up at the office. I wasn’t planning on throwing my hat into the ring for HOTY (husband of the year) in 2021 having already claimed the championship belt DOTY in 2020 by taking my kids to a waterpark to close out the year, but why not? Why can’t I go back to back?

The last couple of weeks have felt like I’ve been living life as if it were Pulp Fiction, nothing seems sequential and things that I though occurred in a linear fashion probably didn’t. The kids had the last two week off from school and had not missed a single in person school day other than for our mini vacation to Phoenix in November. Most of Christmas Break involved them on their electronics while Shirley and I continued to work. Fortunately, we finally received a decent amount of snow and I was able to convince the kids that we should go sledding at Johnson Park. While the snow wasn’t exactly ideal in light of the fact that I still have yet to hire a plow service, and not to brag, but we have a really long driveway, fortunately I was able to make due with my old snowblower which I re-acquired from my father in law on Saturday. Yes, my Dutch ass is refusing to hire a plow service due to the lack of snow that we have had so far and the likelihood that I wouldn’t get my money’s worth when it comes to plowing unless we get dumped on the next two months. As the kids and I were heading to the sliding hill I received two separate calls from Shirley, the first was to tell me that Amazon was refusing to deliver down to our house because our driveway wasn’t fully plowed. I had blown out the driveway on Saturday afternoon and we received a dusting of snow Saturday night. Amazon not delivering to our house would have no impact on my life, and actually may be a blessing if it precludes Shirley from ordering up her daily deliveries from the internet bully that has continued to put small business out of business as it becomes the most powerful entity in the universe.

The second phone call was to alert me to the fact that Shirley had tested positive for Covid. This is where the last two weeks get’s pulp fiction like, did Vincent Vega eat at the diner before he injected Uma Thurman with adrenaline so she didn’t die from a heroin overdose? Did they bring in the Gimp before or after Christopher Walden hid his dad’s watch up his ass? The Monday before Christmas I went for a run and as I embarked on my journey it began to rain, it was just warm enough that it was rain and not snow but I needed to blow off some steam so I decided to just put one foot in front of the other. Now this is where it gets pulp fiction like, there was a night where I was coughing so much that Shirley asked me to go sleep in the guest bedroom, I don’t recall if that was before or after I went on my run, but it was likely the first symptom of the VID fro me. Ironically, once I relocated to the guest bedroom I stopped coughing. The only reason that it is important to pinpoint my first symptoms is if the Health Department calls I need to tell them when the onset was so that I can assure them I am already out of quarantine. Regardless, even if it was sometime that week, or even yesterday, I’m not a believer in quarantine, but I don’t need the government on my back telling me what to do even more than they are already doing. Flashback to the week before Christmas, at some point I had the chills and I want to say it was on Christmas morning but it may have been Christmas Eve, however, I was expecting a lot more, the hype surrounding Covid seems to be more overblown than that surrounding Tua Tagovailoa. One hour of discomfort coupled with an annoying cough can’t be the symptoms that result from such a devastating virus. Not that I am the type of guy to run in and get tested at the first possible symptom, but I saw no reason to think that I had contracted Rona.

We continued on to Johnson Park and it was bumpin. Lots of people had the same idea we did and it was good to see there was something that Whitler couldn’t take away from us, the outdoors. Granted, a sledding hill always attracts a high percentage of hill rods, and based on the contingent at Johnson Park you would have thought it was a gun and knife show at the Delta Plex based upon the number of trucks with lifts on them in located in the parking lot. Protocol when sledding on a public hill is to go up the side, similar to a playground slide. However, you always get those kids who decide they are going to climb right up the middle of the hill where all the traffic is. On top of that, you also get the kids who decide to slide down the side of the hill where all of the foot traffic is. As the kids and I were making our way up the hill there was a guy with his back turned to the hill, huge mistake, you never turn your back on the hill, it’s like getting out of your go kart when it spins out on the go kart track, instead of waiting for an employee to get you back on track. Sure enough, as I started yelling “watch out!” to the guy some chubby kid on an inter tube took the guy’s out at legs out. The guy looked at me from the ground as if it was my fault that he violated the number one rule of public sledding hills. Fortunately, neither I or the kids suffered any type of injury as we went up and down the hill for roughly an hour.

On the way home it was determined that the kids needed to be out of school for at least a week. Apparently there is some kind of protocol for exposure to Covid that relies on people being forthright about contact and the onset of symptoms. Had it been up to me, the kids would have been in school as I write this blog, but Shirley brought them in to get tested this morning and depending on the results it looks like best case scenario there are learning remotely this entire week. I’ve opted to forego a test, I know I had it, it’s the only way Shirley would have contracted it since she doesn’t leave the house. I on the other hand am a bit more active and could have picked it up at a number of places. Pinpointing the onset of my own symptoms is no small feat, but the onset of symptoms in my kids? They always seem lethargic when they aren’t on their devices, and I’m suppose to pay close enough attention to them to determine if they have some of the other symptoms associated with Covid?

Ironically, between Christmas and New Years the kids and I traveled to a water park in Sandusky (the butthole of Ohio) to escape the reign of terror that is the Whitmer administration. Ohio is rampant with Covid but I figured the water park had just the right amount of chlorine and urine to keep the kids and I out of harms way. We arrived late Tuesday night and made our way to our room. My original plan was to go out to a real live restaurant to experience how life would be had we not elected the dumbest human being on the planet as our governor. However, I took the easy way out and we decided to eat at the burger place at the water park. It didn’t seem overly busy but it still took over an hour to get our food, this didn’t bother the kids because they had my phone for entertainment, and it didn’t bother me as much as it would have under normal circumstances because it felt good to be doing something I use to do on a regular basis, go out to eat, even if our food didn’t arrive promptly. After dinner we retreated to the room and I nodded off as the kids played on their devices. The next morning I headed out to get a cold brew and some stuff from Meijers as well as make a business related phone call and grab breakfast for the kids. When I returned the kids seemed to be in no hurry to get into the water park. Eventually we made our way down and decided on the biggest slide for our first ride in the park. No one in the park had a mask on and no one seemed to be all that concerned about social distancing. Up until that point I had never understood why anyone would willingly give up meat, but if the moral superiority of watching someone eat meat when you don’t is anything like I felt when looking at all the obvious bad choices the water park patrons had made (tattoos, over eating, piercings, being at a waterpark) I totally got why my goofy brother in law wanted to eat an impossible burger from Bk instead of going to Arby’s.

Next up on the waterpark tour was Flow Rider,(It had to be good with a name that similar to my favorite rapper Flo Rida) this was a simulator that allowed the kids to boogie board on a man made wave. There was probably a point in time where I would have tried this with the kids but I opted to take video of it instead of ending up in the back of an ambulance. Aiden was first up and did better than I had expected but still not good, Parker did fine and the kids seemed to have enjoyed it. We then proceeded to another water slide that was one we rode individually as opposed to the first slide where we were all together on a tube. This slide was a lot harder on the body and the kids decided they wanted to go play in a part of the park that seemed to be designated for kids half their age but I went along with it because it allowed me to sit on the sidelines. I went to gather our stuff and bring it to the play area so that I could try and keep an eye on them. Somehow they had managed to sneak out of the park and back to the room while I had gone to gather our belongings and face timed me from their I pad asking me where I was as I stood guard thinking I was watching them. I assumed that they would want to come back to the water park since we had only been there a little over an hour, they didn’t. At this point in the trip I became seriously conflicted, do I make them come back down so we can all be miserable in the water park but get our moneys worth? Or do I concede the fact that this was a bad idea (going to a water park during normal circumstances is a bad idea, during a pandemic it’s probably a sign of true desperation) and go back to the room for some leisure time? My desire to get away from the pasty fat tattooed patrons of the water park won out and we didn’t set foot back in the water park for the remainder of the trip.

Who would have thought that my kids deciding to retreat to the hotel room may have saved thousands of lives? The unfortunate thing is that with Shirley getting tested we are now on the Health Department’s radar and they are claiming the kids can’t go back to school until January 21. The complete overreaction continues, with no rhyme or reason as to why the protocols are done or why they need to be followed. Aiden had a headache at some point and Parker has yet to experience any symptoms but they can’t go back to school for over two weeks? They wear masks and social distance at school and they don’t have any symptoms. On top of that I’m riding a roller coaster when it comes to Shirley, one minute she’s telling me I don’t care about people (I don’t) and that I brought Covid into our house and the next minute she’s making fun of her mom for saying “you just never know” when it comes to Covid. What’s it going to be? Pick a lane, either this is complete nonsense and you have no respect for those people who have lived the last ten months in fear, or everyone who questions the legitimacy of this is a monster on the level of Ted Bundy or Roger Goodell. The good news is that getting it prior to our trip in mid February to St. Thomas is a blessing, contracting Covid right before we are suppose to leave won’t be a problem, I need that trip more than I have needed anything in my life, had you given me a date certain as to when this nonsense would be done I could work towards that goal, but with no end in sight and not much to look forward to, that trip is the only thing keeping me putting one foot in front of the other.