When Covid Finally Got Into Our House!
Hey Everyone!
Well, that was a rather long and certainly unplanned break. For nearly a month now I haven't been able to update my socials or communicate properly within my crochet groups. Its been hard. Some days I thought "Oh, I'll just post something I've made..." and then realized it would be silly without an explanation. It has been totally manic here. We've had sickness, nearly 3 weeks of isolation and lots of kid boredom!
It all started when we were contacted by a fellow parent to say there was a case of Coronavirus in my son's class. He was obviously in close enough contact with the case to contract the virus, but not close enough for the new Government/school policy and NHS/Track and Trace to consider him a 'close contact' worth notifying us of...
Through all of this we have went above and beyond to be one hundred percent safe with everything we do, from online deliveries, washing shopping before putting it away, face coverings (from as far back as when the government were telling us we didn't need them...remember that?), moving to home working, total sacrifice of outside social life and lots of washing hands! We didn't return the kids straight away after schools opened back up and even when they did return, any sight of a case in the school caused us to pull them out and go back to home school (mum-style, to make up for the lack of work provided from the school themselves).
We got the message on the Tuesday evening and went into household self isolation right away. We had plans for over the weekend so we wanted to be extra safe. We decided to test on the Friday morning, before we started our busy weekend including the kid's Karate grading and a visit to my pregnant sister. None of us had any symptoms, but we used the kit of lateral flow tests we had in the house anyway and it turned out to be a very clever idea. Two of the kids came back positive.
From there things got a bit crazy. The two with the virus were isolated to their rooms and we booked PCR tests for confirmation. It was a long 27 hour wait to see if the virus had finally got us...and the results showed that it had.
Seeing as NHS/Test and Protect trace your contacts from 48 hours before your positive test result (if you are asymptomatic) and we had been self-isolating since the Tuesday evening, they had no one to contact! We are very proud that although the virus got into our home, it never got out again. The spread of this particular string of cases stopped with us, and we passed the virus on to no one (so our highly criticised 'overly cautious' efforts really paid off). However, we still had a 10 day isolation ahead of us from the date of the positive test results.
Unfortunately, the children did eventually start showing symptoms, so their isolation had to start over (due to the rule of 10 days isolation required from your first display of symptoms if you develop them). Luckily, they weren't hit to hard by it. We realised our 10 year old daughter had lost her sense of smell after asking why we had handed her water to wash their slightly infected earlobe when it was actually TCP! Our 7 year old son took it a little worse (possibly due to his asthma), with a nasty cough and one particularly bad night of fever. All in all they were isolating for over 2 weeks, with our little boy doing the longest.
I must credit the both of them for staying in their rooms and entertaining themselves so amazingly. They both have tablets, so we would facetime and play games across messenger. I would also sometimes sit in the hall and play bingo with them and read stories, as long as they stayed in their rooms and I wore a mask. Having my fiancé's old Nintendo GameCube set up with Super Mario Sunshine probably helped a bit too. It wasn't easy for any of us, having to hand in all their meals on a tray and thoroughly wash the bathroom after every time they used it. We were all really missing our usual kisses and cuddles. On one particularly sad night, we had to console our little boy after he video called us over messenger from under his blankets because he was so terrified of a Daddy Longlegs that had gotten into his room.
Because the rest of us were testing negative, we didn't actually need to isolate. However, logic dictates that these new loose rules are what got the kids ill in school in the first place, so we also imposed house arrest on ourselves and tested every day in case we had picked up the virus from the infected two at any point. After the kid's isolation period came to an end we tested them again. NHS had advised us not to test again, but the piece of mind we got from seeing the now negative results was worth it.
They did so amazing and I couldn't be prouder. Even when my son got sick with it, his sister would check on him for me. She let him sleep in her room for a few nights and took me waking her to check his breathing like a pro.
Of course I am now playing catch up with schoolwork, housework, totally blitzing their rooms and hot washing all the bedding and laundry they gathered in their rooms with them. I had to reschedule all 3 of their optician appointments for after isolation, which meant them being on different days then going to collect their new glasses the week after, not to mention catching up on clubs and activity stuff.
They are now back to school and routine is beginning to return. My evenings and weekends have got busy again between the mix of homework, after school clubs and activities, but my days are back free to do what I need to do.
Over my time away I have managed to get a few projects done, all of which I will share on my Instagram over the coming few days & weeks. I have been on a fairly productive run lately and fingers crossed this continues.
Hopefully not too many of you can relate to this post, as Covid clearly isn't nice, but you will be pleased to know I am going to be back up and running very soon and no orders have been missed. Some are having to be posted later than I'd hoped in order to make it safe for my buyers but everyone was lovely and understood.
We'd like to say a huge thank you to everyone who supported us, checked in to see how we all were, dropped stuff off for us and for generally being awesome.
Until the next time guys, have a great weekend.
Alena x
