We'll See

Today, daycare sent an excited message that next week we parents will be allowed in past the lobby again and can drop off our kids outside their classrooms - a prepandemic privilege whose revocation probably never crossed anyone's mind, back when I had to slip blue covers over my work shoes before entering the infant room, a similar blue to the now-ubiquitous surgical mask. M. was in the infant room, and L. in the big preschool room through the adjoining door within the room, and when either girl got too fussy or sad, the other would get to go give a quick comfort visit.

I feel like I've heard this story before: we were almost back to this point last summer, right before Delta hit. There'd been an art show sort of thing inside the center one evening, and L. and I had gone, admiring her and M. 's and other kids' pictures, L. playing for a little while on the playground, other playmates and parents around. A classmate's mom had clearly lost weight; I figured it was probably noticeable that I had gained it. The sun hadn't set yet, at probably seven-something.

Every return to normalcy gets scuppered or seemingly punished. Digital magazines call 2021 "hot vax summer" ; then, Delta. We return to family Thanksgiving; the world discovers Omicron. I get a haircut; my kids sick out of daycare for something like the next week with a standard kid virus. We buy a couch; M. picks up Covid at daycare and brings it home. The couch gets delivered; M. breaks out in hives for a week, and then we all start catching colds again. I plan a birthday party; snow probably cancels my mother's plane into town [later update: yes, it did, or at least some element of the inclement weather did]. No under-5s' vaccines: October 2021 turns into November turns into February or March turns into who knows when. Almost no in-person church since October. Nothing in public to do with our wild, cooped-up kids. Gynecology appointment rescheduled every single month since November; I'm twice-vaxed and have a recent negative PCR, but they still won't take me with Covid symptoms, even knowing they're not Covid.

So I'm glad to be entering the building again, and dumb enough to think this time it might keep going, that there won't be another variant, that the case counts will more or less crater soon, that my kids can go to school with colds even after our we-got-Covid-too-recently-for-a-repeat expires.

We'll see. It should be nice for a while to get to go in and see the classrooms.