The covid at home experience

When Covid first hit, I took it pretty seriously. I went grocery shopping with one of my best friends, and we got loads of groceries. I didn’t go overboard with the toilet paper, but we did go to Sams to pick up some, which lasted both of us a long while. Covid did put a damper on our plans just like anyone else. However, I was not willing to risk my daughter’s health to go anywhere.

Okay, I’ll be honest with you (which is the purpose of my blog to give you everything real and not sugarcoat anything). The job that I was at when Covid first hit, I don’t think they were taking it seriously at first. Let me rephrase that I don’t think my department was taking it seriously at first. Our department had two sets of teams, one in Arizona and one in Kentucky (where I am). At the time, I felt Covid was worse here than it was in Arizona. In Kentucky, they started sending children home to do NTI, and there were more cases here than in Arizona.

They wanted to be fair and do both states at the same time. If they were sending people to work at home and it wasn’t a pandemic, that would be understandable. However, I think they could have handled dealing with the pandemic a better way in this specific case. Meanwhile, dealing with Covid in the beginning stages, my friends and I started to miss each other. So some of us decided to all hang out at a safe social distance, of course.

When we first got the memo of working from home, you can say I wasn’t anything less than excited. Working from the comfort of my own home, not worrying about what causal business outfit I was going to wear, seemed like a fantastic idea. So, in the beginning, I would get my child up with me and take her to one of the Granny’s houses to watch her while I got my work done. I was doing this for a while until I thought, why am I doing this? It would be better if I keep her home. That way, I don’t have to get up super early to drive her anywhere.

There was just one problem my job at the time was on the phones. At first, I thought it shouldn’t be a problem because we are in a pandemic after all. Now, my child has always been a night owl, so I could do my work until she woke up at noon. Take a break, get her breakfast, get her settled, and then go back to work. Then on my lunch, we would eat lunch together then I would go back to work again. It worked for a while until, for some reason, my baby woke up and decided she wanted to get clingy. She wanted me to hold her once she woke up.

Then my baby started to get sick where she would have seizures, and I felt like I needed to work at home and not have a phone job. So that way, I would be able to take care of her, and she can make as much noise and play and not bother me while working. So that’s when I went into a full-on determined mommy mode. I started to apply to everything that I could as long as the pay was right and the job filled in my checkmarks of what I wanted.

I was able to find a job that I feel is better for me. The position is at a company where I have always wanted to work. I can keep my child home, and she can run and play as much as she wants. Then I got the idea to have her do morning assignments, either by packets or by the iPad. I even set up her room to look like a classroom.

We decided to move to a better place for us. I love our new apartment. It feels like home to me. But, unfortunately, while I was able to work at home, my boyfriend could not at the moment. Well, not long after we moved, my boyfriend got Covid. So my daughter and I stayed in the living room, and my job allowed me to use Covid pay part-time to take care of them. Unfortunately, my child couldn’t trick or treat during that time, but I still decided to dress her up in her costume, and we had a party in the house.

Right after his quarantine, I got Covid, and while my child was up under me before I knew I had it, she never got sick thank goodness. Having Covid was so hard because I couldn’t be around my child and love on her like I always do. My boyfriend would facetime me every day to talk to them, but it wasn’t the same as being there with my baby. Luckily, she understood that mommy was sick and couldn’t be around her.

While being sick, my sister was dying. Everyone was able to be there for her during her last moments except me. I was so hurt not being there for her. I started getting nightmares about her after the funeral. Thankfully, I was able to attend because it was a couple of days after my quartine. I finally came to terms with my sister’s death and a little bit of time flew by, and my boyfriend was able to work at home as well.

I was so happy because we both saw each other a lot more and got to spend more time with Aaliyah as a family. This pandemic has taught me that life is way too short to live unhappily. Go out and do what makes you happy and spend time with your family. Tell them how much you love them because you never know what could happen in the blink of an eye.