Um yeah about that food bill… Apparently S19 is in his “bulking phase”. 
Right before spring break he was sick, sleep deprived from pledging and probably hadn’t eaten well from lack of time. Now he weighs about 25lb.s more than he did a month ago! And since he’s now vegan, I’m buying soy milk, veggie burgers, tons of vegetables, tons of cereal etc. It’s a lot more expensive since the rest of us still eat meat and dairy (trying to eat less though). Maybe the food bills will go down soon when he enters his “cut” phase and works on getting his six pack back. Good grief!
My DD doesn’t eat that much, which is why I’m looking forward to her not having a full on meal plan next year. Buying groceries will be much cheaper. However, during this time, DH and DD are going through lots of drinks (juice, chocolate milk) so that’s what I run out of.
We’ve made good progress on putting away all the stuff we moved home a week ago. I’ve determined she has massive amounts of clothing. Majority comes from thrift stores, which is good, but also when something costs $3 you don’t really take time to weigh the need for it and you overbuy. Even after cleaning out, the closet and dressers are full.
@SammoJ , that’s frustrating. Has he tried any alternate means of getting in touch with the professor? Like a phone call? I do think that professors need to have SOME way of communicating with their students, especially now that in person during or after class isn’t happening!
My daughter baked bread last week, and made us pancakes this morning, so foodwise, we’re doing better with her here.
We’ve had to add a complication to our self-isolation: My mother is now living with us indefinitely. She suffers from depression but had been doing fine on her own until recently despite a broken kneecap several weeks ago. She lives in New York (we’re in the Boston area), and with the lockdown, she could no longer go to physical therapy or do anything else, which threw her into a depressive episode. I had trouble reaching her at the end of last week, and a friend checked on her Friday and found she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink for at least a couple of days. I got down there as soon as I could and brought her home with me. So, juggling very hands-on care with work and everything else now. We’re supposed to have a nurse coming to help later. Always something!
Gosh @Vineyarder , at least you know she’s ok now she’s with you, hope you manage to sort it all out/juggle successfully . It must have been horrible to find out she hadn’t been eating.
Parents are a worry to us too - my father is in the epicenter of it all in NY and is high risk (age, copd, kidney disease) and needs to go to dialysis regularly so he can’t totally isolate. My mom and mom in law are both back in our country of origin and we would not be able to get to them in a hurry as we’d be quarantined for two weeks if we could even get a flight there. Luckily they both have good care on hand.
D19 has done a massive clean out of stuff and we have boxes to donate to goodwill, when they reopen for donations. She has put her posters from her dorm room up on her wall and while it looks really cool, it also makes me a little sad. I remember the excitement of move-in day and almost the first thing she did was put them up. Most of them were gifts from high school friends specifically for her dorm.
We are now completing the second week of our “shelter in place” and it’s expected it will be extended to end April. Hunkering down… it’s going to be strange having a Passover Seder with just the 4 of us. Some of our friends are going to zoom theirs but I don’t think we will. And seems D19 will have her birthday at home too… I think she’s a bit sad about that, she’d originally planned to take some of her good college friends out to a hip DC restaurant.
I’ve also been baking a lot. Apparently “stress baking” is a thing.
Having 4 people in the house 24/7 is quite a lot of work between cooking, cleaning and laundry, along with other general household chores and maintenance. It was a lot less work with the kids away!
I’m pretty confident the kids are going back to school in the Fall. I just don’t see the Pres and officials letting the country slide into a huge Great Depression over this. I think it’s eventually just going to come down to survival of the fittest. The flattening of the curve is to allow the most at risk people a chance to get proper medical care and give them a chance to survive. It’s definitely a weird predicament the world is in.
My parents are in their mid 70’s and are healthy but I do worry about them. I’m not as worried about my own family ( maybe wrongly), as we are a pretty healthy bunch. We have been strict social distancers though. The only thing we do outside of the house is exercise. Son19 goes to the track every day and I’ve been cycling and hiking and working outdoors. My wife and son17 use the home gym and go for walks frequently. I go to the grocery 1x per week, gloves, mask etc. and thoroughly sanitize afterwards. We are not seeing friends or family. We live in a town with a lot of medical staffers, and there are numerous cases in town now, so it’s best to just avoid seeing anybody.
I personally think that things might get worse In the next 3-4 weeks, but then it levels itself out. I think some sort of vaccine or treatment plan will be found, and we will have to trust that moving forward as we send our kids back to school and everyone goes to work. There is no way you can have a normal functioning global society moving forward with nobody working and kids sitting at home.
Stay safe and healthy!
Thanks, @SJ2727. I hope all goes well with your parents and mother-in-law, too.
We hear you on the stress baking! D19 made a delicious ricotta cake yesterday, after making a tea loaf the week before. Her online classes start today, and she was doing some homework over the weekend. I hope she’s still able to get some knowledge and fulfillment out of her classes – and I hope we get back to a world where her career goal of being an art adviser or art-fair worker makes any sense at all.
Ha, I’ve been producing something 5-6 days a week! This has to slow down!
@RightCoaster I tend to agree with you and hope you’re right about school in the fall!
DD just told me the Colorado class/trip she was signed up for late May has been cancelled. She had been on the fence about it due to missing work and her cousin’s wedding so that answers that question. So it’s not a huge disappointment to her. However, the wedding now has a backup date if needed and I don’t have any idea how her job is going to go this summer. But at least the decision has been made.
I think I wrote elsewhere that this will be the smallest Seder I have ever been at, and by far the smallest I have ever run. We will have a few guests on Zoom, including my mother. Last year we visited and had our Seder at their house, but this year it wasn’t likely anyway, with my wife’s new job and everything.
It’s interesting. My mother grew up Conservative back in the day, but became Orthodox along with my father when we were small. However, as my father’s dementia progressed, she started returning to her Conservative roots, and so will now be willing to fire up her computer on Passover.
On the other hand, neither her or my father were ever observant because they believed that Jewish religious practices were commanded by God, but because the believed that the practices had their own value in and of themselves. SO it makes sense that she would be willing to give up some practices (like not using electronics on a holiday) in order to maintain the ones which she sees as being more important (participating in a Seder).
@momtogkc Just to let you know, my daughter who is also a freshman at Tulane also has a cough but absolutely nothing else. She can exercise, etc. with no shortness of breath or issues, so we were wondering if it was just the change in climate (also live in FL). However, her two week self-quarantine ended today and we decided to extend it another 2 weeks just in case since she seemed to enjoy herself at Mardi Gras.
Our stay-home order has just been extended to 3 May… and looks like CA schools will not be reopening this school year so D26 will be online the rest of the year too.
D19’s remaining dorm belongings arrived today (NYU packed, boxed and shipped at their expense any belongings that had been left behind by students who were unable to go back to fetch them, after the decision to close for the rest of the semester was made during spring break).
D19 has started her online classes, which seem to be going fairly well. I congratulated her on her straight A’s for the semester – the New School has decided the only grades will be A, A-, I (incomplete), W (withdrawal) and Z (unofficial withdrawal). She half-joked that she would have gotten them anyway, which I’m sure she would have.
@RightCoaster, I’m not so sure things will be thoroughly back to normal in time for fall semester. At the least, there will still have to be strict social distancing in dorms and classes, since there won’t be a vaccine yet and the virus will still be highly contagious.
Pleased to say my mother is much improved in the few days she’s been with us. We rented a hospital bed for her (much easier for her than our guest pullout sofa). The nurse came yesterday, and we’ve engaged a physical therapist and a home health aide. Given all that’s going on, we’ll probably keep her here for at least a month and see if the New York outbreak peaks and stabilizes.
My daughter is studying in Colorado, and classes are online thru mid August.
There are kids at my D’s school that are freaking out about grades, because come grad/professional school they’re going to be competing against students from these schools that are only giving out A/A- and their P/F is gonna sink them. I can see the worry and wish schools could’ve gotten on one page here.
@milgymfam Bowdoin concluded that, as long as the college had a policy where all students are getting C/NC and no grades, kids would not be penalized in grad school admissions. It will be noted on transcripts that the kids had no choice but to take the C/NC route. Bowdoin also thought that any grades given during this period from any school will be looked upon with an asterisk since any college giving grades this semester will likely be very lenient in their grading policies. The kids who I think might be upset are those who were really hoping to raise their overall GPA this semester but that’s not 2023 kids, that’s mostly seniors. Our kids only have one semester under their belt and plenty more semesters to move their GPA.
@homerdog Haverford is telling the kids the same thing, but they’re not really believing it. Kids who are looking at med school, especially, aren’t thinking that a P in chem lab will cut it, and things of that nature. My D is content with it because she doesn’t think it’ll harm her, but she understands her friends worries. Haverford is allowing students to uncover underlying grades for any class that they want to. My daughter has had 2 (of her 3- she has one teacher twice) tell her to uncover her grades, that she would want to. Now I’m not sure if her 3 As mixed with one P will look worse than just all Ps. The fourth class is likely to be an A-.
@milgymfam A lot of top schools are not C/NC with no chance for grades including Harvard. I’m not worried about it.
What do you mean uncover her grades? Just so she can see it? Or she can actually get those grades on her transcript? That’s a different policy if kids can choose. Not what Bowdoin and Harvard and others are doing.
S19 feels like he knows what his grades would end up being. Would it look good to see another semester of As and A-s. Yes. But he thinks his grades will be about the same this time so his overall GPA would have remained very close to his current GPA.
The med school thing is just hard. I don’t know how premeds are going to do class without labs.
Undergraduates trying to break the graduate/professional school admissions code in unprecedented times is IMO at about the same level of usefulness—and maybe even less—as CC’s chance me threads.