Urgh, COVID has hit our household with a vengeance! First our wonderful domestic lady went down with it, then my husband Monty, then our au pair Cindy, and now our three-year-old autistic son. We have had two hard days and nights with him and are back in the trenches trying everything we can to get medicine into him. Aidan will not take any medication, no matter how badly he feels, and no matter how much he needs it – he just won’t take it. And when he’s sick, he won’t eat or drink either. So he really is very miserable when he’s poorly. Very needy, very nauseous, very hangry, and very hair-trigger.
Trying to get anything done with almost 30kg’s clamped to your leg, is near impossible. Monty would take over from me if he could, just to give me a break, but Aidan only wants mom. The one thing Monty can do with him is take him out on drives around our neighbourhood and thankfully, he’s more than willing to kill a couple of hours here and there doing so, so this mama can get some rest! They’ve just popped out to the hardware store together, and that’s given me time enough to run the dishwasher, a load of laundry, do a quick tidy, setup Aidan’s bedtime routine, and put pen to paper. Even when we’re resting, we’re not really resting – am I right, moms?!
When toddlers feel poorly, it’s the end of the world all day long. Congestion or nausea hijacks any hope of a good night’s sleep as well – not that I get too many of those as it is! But giving Aidan a lovely warm bath or taking him out to get some fresh air, generally helps things along. Tell me why this week is freezing cold with heavy rain forecast everyday?! Because when it rains, it pours people – that’s why. Our tough weekend is extending into this week as we are understaffed, under-caffeinated, and struggling for energy. Both Monty and Cindy have been to the doctor already and I’m beginning to get a scratchy throat myself. The pharmacy has delivered more meds to us in the last week than we’ve seen in the past year! COVID is the worst! But when I think back to how scary it used to be to contract progressively worse new strains of it, I feel we’re in a far better spot with it than we were in 2020!
COVID lockdown still feels so surreal to me… To think we lived through a cataclysmic apocalypse-type of event in our lifetimes is just super weird. Who’d have thought that something so profoundly impacting on our global community would have happened to the likes of us? But it did. And now that we know far more about COVID, a lot of the early responses feel way overblown and some of the crazy precautions unnecessary. But looking back, when it first happened, we were all pretty scared. I know I was! I had found out I was pregnant with Aidan a week before we went into hard lockdown here in South Africa. And while bored people the country over, were getting their knuckles into sourdough starters, starting vegetable patches, subscribing to workouts online, sitting through endless Zoom meetings, and developing an unhealthy obsession with ‘Tiger King’, I sat, gripped by fear, lounging in my pyjamas almost all day long, waiting on grocery deliveries to our home, sanitiser in-hand, ready to spray down anything I needed to touch that had had contact with the outside world. My desire to protect my child from the ravages of COVID hasn’t changed much, since I learned that some people can be susceptible to heart damage when they contract it, and autism comes with a sleuth of co-morbidities. But there’s no protecting a child who is at the heart of a busy household full of people. One person contracts it and we all go down like flies, one after the other, every time. And it’s not easy to manage when our entire household is fully dependent on the paid staff that come in and out of it. Truly, first world problems – I know! But if Aidan was in school, he’d have substitute teachers. Here at home, there’s only one of each of us. And how do two sick parents operate while both working full-time from home, with a high needs child who is additionally needy when poorly wrapped around their legs? It’s just super chaotic some weeks. And this is one of those weeks! It feels like moving through molasses. I’m hoping that by Friday, we are all feeling a lot better! Then it’s just the wait to regain our senses of taste and smell, get over these hacking coughs, and hopefully we’ll all be back in the swing of things soon enough!
