Sunday 29 March 2020 - Lockdown Day Four

My goal for lockdown day four was to spend the entire day in my jammies. Yep - I'm aiming high. But I was thwarted - by this persistent heavy rain and our dog. She was refusing to go out in the back yard and go to the toilet. She's a retired greyhound and does not like getting her little twinkle toes wet. Or cold. But I didn't want an accident inside. In the end, in desperation, I went out in the pouring rain and carried her onto the grass - figuring that once her feet were properly wet she'd give up and do the business. Even that I had to do twice. I was soaked and cold and had to warm up in a shower. It just felt wrong to have a shower at 11am and then put on a pair of jammies, so I gave up on my dreams and put actual clothes on (trackies and t-shirt).

I know I jest about my rubbish parenting, but I have to confess to some genuine feelings of inadequacy. We have this family Facebook messenger group - just my parents, my brother, my sister and me. Every day since schools closed, my sister has posted photos (in COLLAGE form, if you please) of the activities she's been doing with her kids. And they are impressive. We've seen baking, jigsaw puzzles (finished, not quit on mid-way through), foot spas, dress ups, drawing, origami, salt dough ornaments, home-made invisible ink, and letters to the Easter Bunny. You know what was the most fun thing we did in this house yesterday? We gave the dog an empty chippie packet and then laughed our asses off as she wedged her head right in it and then wobbled around the room trying to get it off. Yeah, classy stuff.

I mean, I could have come back with "Well, today we set the downstairs bedroom up for the kids to use to play wii and PS2, and Miss9 did a bunch of Singstar" but I realised that what we'd actually done was set up yet another way for our kids to use screens. Because God knows they don't have enough of that... Today has been still more blobbing around. Nothing worthy of a photo collage, I'll tell you that. I have resolved to get my act together. Sure, it's school holidays, but I am going to do some kind of home-made, Pinterest-worthy, photo-collage-able activity with Miss9 tomorrow. Watch this space.

Miss9 and I took part in a lip-synch challenge on a Covid-19 family challenge Facebook group run by a friend today. We smashed out a pretty sweet version of Mamma Mia. We even wore costumes - I wore aviators and put a sparkly silver cardi on over my black trackies and t-shirt. But I was absolutely horrified when I saw myself in the clip. I haven't washed my hair for three days, and I wore no make up. It wasn't pretty. And don't believe what they tell you - the camera doesn't add 10 pounds, it adds 100. Yikes. I think it says a lot about my state of mind that I just hit 'upload' on the video anyway. I'm either completely chilled about this lockdown thing or I've totally given up already.

Someone died from covid-19 in NZ today. It wasn't one of the two people in ICU care. I was quite shocked to read that. I think I genuinely thought we might get through this with no deaths at all. But we seem to have fewer new cases of the virus today than we did yesterday. A fluke? A coincidence? Or the beginning of a trend? Wouldn't it be great if it were the latter?

Late addition to this post - Miss9 is sitting in bed beside me, reading Pollyanna. She just turned to me and pointed at the chapter number: IX. "That means 9 in roman numerals" she said. "Yes," I said, "how did you know that?". She laughed and said "You taught me, Mama". Maybe I'm not such a shite parent after all.

Meme of the day (specially dedicated to Miss9):