I'm unfortunately up .6 of a pound, definitely from being in "shelter in place" mode. When we are going three or four directions at once, we eat less, and usually have a smaller meal when we do sit down. But life is back at a more pre-1920's pace (I can't even remember if it's Monday or Thursday), and that gives me time to make a full-sized homemade dinner almost every night, and if we don't, we order pizza. (Unfortunately the best pizza place in town also happens to be the nearest to us.) The freezer junk we patch it in with when we're too busy to cook is not tasty enough to want to eat a lot of, but the food we make at home sure is.
This week, we had a several-days-long problem-solving situation in our family that shows how slow (or fast) it is to change ideas of what we're supposed to do in times of virus.
Nobody in my family thinks the pandemic is a hoax and everyone takes it seriously, but for some reason, when our mother was asked what she wanted to do for Mother's Day, she said she'd like to all meet at a local park and have a picnic. At first, this sounded innocuous. We could spread out in our little family groups and talk from blanket to blanket. But, this was going to be Mother's Day, when (unless it's pouring down rain) probably everyone will have the bright idea to go to the park with Mom just to get out of the house. From what we've experienced at local public places, nobody does anything to social distance in public -- people brush by you on sidewalks and in doorways, teenage groups not wearing masks go chattering by, etc. My mom is quite old and had pneumonia unexpectedly last year, and her husband is no spring chicken. The family who would go consists of her and my stepdad, her four daughters, their husbands and their kids; it's definitely a group of more than ten people.
I started thinking about this, and asked my sis (who was organizing it) if she knew if there were group-size restrictions in the park. She didn't. I could just see our whole family including Mom getting arrested on Mother's Day for being dumb enough to go to the park in a big group in the middle of a pandemic. And then thinking of those non-socially distancing, non-mask wearing people who all go to the park, and of Mom and her pneumonia, I finally decided we wouldn't go. This was tough because at my mom's age, I want to take every opportunity to see her when things are happy, not just when there's a problem, and this party was what she wanted for Mother's Day. We said we would drive by and see her later in the day, and wave at her from her front yard. (Doesn't that sound fun.)
Next thing, my sister made a schedule (not including us), whereby each sister with her husband and kids would be with Mom in a given half hour, sister #1 at 2:30-3:00, sister #2 from 3:00 to 3:30, etc. This was apparently to keep the big group from being together at once, but I wondered how Mom (and her impatient husband) would like sitting in a hot park for two hours to see everyone. (But since we were already off the list, and I wasn't organizing things, I didn't comment.) Last night, sis sent a text that the party has been relocated to a particular sister's back yard. But she hadn't scheduled us in, though my problem was the park and not the family. I'm now awaiting word that people have thought things over and have decided to adjust some other aspect of the party. It seems like even in a back yard, having my elderly mom sit around under a tree in the 85-degree heat to wave at a social distance at all of her kids for an hour and a half is not that well thought-out, but we'll see. Last I heard, Mom still wants to do it.
This same kind of drawn-out analysis went into the decision my niece made in February to postpone her wedding. At first everything sounded normal, then it sounded maybe a bit inconvenient but would be fine, then people began to ask about folks having to fly there, then the virus got more serious, then she sadly wrote and said it was postponed, and of course now in retrospect, we can only think that of *course* it was postponed, and how could it be differently? We haven't gotten that far with Mom's party, but if we did all get sick from having been together for Mother's Day, or if she did, how stupid will it look in retrospect?
Anyway, whatever happens, I'm not eating the cake. Gotta get rid of the .6 of a pound somewhere. lol
Have a good week.