It feels like hope is on the horizon

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 27/09/2021 (1633 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My kid brought home a picture from school last week. She made it on the first day of fall.

It said, “Goodbye Summer. I will miss,” with a blank spot for her to write what she would miss the most about summer. She wrote “Findig Seashells,” with the spelling error and both Ss backwards. Under that, she drew herself and her sisters collecting shells at the beach, with a person she said was me lying in the sand under an umbrella. It was the sweetest little drawing.

I’m glad she has nice memories of collecting shells at the beach. We did it often this summer, and last year, too. I’m not sure I’ve been to the beach as much in my whole life as I have been the past two pandemic summers. One thing this pandemic has done is dramatically slowed the pace of our lives and changed the way we spend time together. Working from home, for the most part, and remaining in our immediate bubbles means we have more time to spend together.

Of course, it wasn’t always rosy these past two summers. I think we all experienced feelings of loneliness, isolation and seeing too much of each other. But we’ve been able to spend time — time we wouldn’t have otherwise had in our pre-pandemic routines and lives — at the beach or wherever else our adventures took us.

As we ease back into school, and the routines and interactions with other social circles that come along with it, I feel a great sense of anxiety mixed with relief. All three of our kids missed their friends terribly, and they’ve missed having their own lives outside of our home. Each of them gained a sense of normalcy and independence they’d been starving for. Another thing that happened almost immediately upon returning to school is that our youngest child caught a cold.

It was a mere two days into Grade 1 when I had to pull her out of school for three days (and then the weekend) until she got over her symptoms. Her negative COVID-19 test result was a huge relief, but the onslaught of her initial symptoms — sneezing, runny nose, a slight cough, and a little of lethargy, with her body just on the cusp of a fever, but not quite — came with a great deal of anxiety.

“Oh gosh, is it a cold or COVID?”

Luckily for us, it was just a cold, and she recovered quickly. By her third day at home, she was nearly all better, bouncing off the walls and loudly demanding our attention. She still had a slight runny nose, which is why we kept her home, but it was a sweet relief to know she was feeling better and that it wasn’t COVID-19.

Another dose of sweet relief came last week, when Pfizer and BioNTech announced they’ve wrapped up clinical vaccine trials in children and that they planned to ask for authorization to use the vaccine in children ages five to 12 in Canada, the U.S., and elsewhere as soon as possible. It feels like hope is on the horizon, at least for our family.

I’m glad the kids are back in school. I know they are, too. I’m hopeful our youngest, most vulnerable family members will be eligible to be vaccinated soon, and I hope we will be able to start heading down a path to normalcy.

shelley.cook@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @ShelleyAcook