Quarantine, Day 75
This past week has been kind of stressful, but today turned out to be a pretty good day. I got up early so I could hit Walmart as soon as it opened, figuring that the best time to hit up a superstore would be as early as possible on a holiday where people might like to be sleeping in. I also made an extremely detailed plan beforehand, using Walmart's app tools to locate every item on my shopping list and rewrite the list in order of where I could find the items, working my way from the back of the store to the front. In an unfamiliar Walmart, especially one with one-way aisles currently, this somewhat tedious task saved a _lot_ of time. As it turned out, Walmart is about a hundred times better than Food Lion at safety practices, and with the place nearly empty anyway, I felt at least as safe as at Publix, and a lot more at home. No cart wipers, but a lot of social distancing and masks on just about everyone.
Why start at the back of the store? Because that is where the toilet paper is, of course. I did well, too, picked up twelve jumbo rolls of Ultra Soft and Strong, far better than the Toilet Paper brand toilet paper that was all I could get delivered. There wasn't a huge amount available, but there were several different brands. I was able to get everything on my list except yeast, which remains stubbornly unavailable, but luckily there is always beer bread. The good thing about shopping at Walmart is that when you spent two hundred dollars stocking up at Walmart, you feel like you're actually stocked up. My cart was _full._ We should not need more groceries for at least another week, and then maybe just a top up.
The thing that actually took the longest was my detour all the way across the store into the toy department. I spent a long time (less than five minutes, but subjectively very long when you're speed-shopping) looking at the Razor scooters, wondering if that would let the kid burn off energy and have some fun. The cheapest one that would really fit him was fifty dollars, which is not beyond our reach, but I realized I could only see him enjoying it with other kids around. Riding around in the driveway and the cul de sac alone seemed depressing even in my head. So instead I picked him up some other things. I got a pack of two generic super-soakers and two little squirt guns, a bouncy ball sized for throwing or kicking, a nerf football, and a four-pack of bubble wands. Stuff that also wouldn't be fun to use alone, but that his dad or I could use with him. Something to play with, but also the implicit promise that we would play with him. (I also got him some bubble gum because he likes bubblegum and hardly ever gets it.)
Anyway, I got the groceries home and unpacked, then I showed the kiddo his new things. He was _very_ excited. I promised him that when the temperature got warmer in the afternoon, we would put on old clothes and run around with squirt guns, and he immediately filled them up and went on the deck to start practicing. There was a lot of yelling and posturing in front of the window for the benefit of us inside. The bouncy ball was another hit, and we're going to save the bubble wands to take on a visit to Papa so he can see them too.
I decided on salsa chicken for supper because it is easy and takes five minutes in the morning to put together. Basically you cover the bottom of your crockpot with chicken breasts (a big one takes four or five), dump a packet of taco seasoning on them, and cover the whole thing with an entire jar of salsa. (I like the Walmart brand black bean and corn because it is good and extremely cheap for a big jar.) Turn on your crockpot to low and let it cook all day. Sometime at least an hour before you serve it, shred the meat with two forks and then wait until it has soaked up most of the liquid to serve it. Put it on tortillas with your preferred taco stuff. It's delicious! MIL ate two of them, another sign she's feeling much better after being sickly yesterday.
While the chicken was cooking all day, we did baked potatoes and salad for lunch, and then it was time for The Soakening. At first it was just the kiddo and me because my husband is deep into writing a book and is trying to make up for lost time in the past few weeks. We went out to the driveway and ran around squirting each other and shrieking, then went to the hose to refill our guns. We did that twice more before the kiddo realized that just using the hose would be a more efficient vector for getting really, really wet. I agreed on the condition that he got to be the one getting wet and I would hold the hose. He agreed, so we began a hilariously one-sided water battle of Kiddo vs The Hose. He got very, very wet. I got pretty wet too, but not as much. My husband came out and we were going to give him one of the big squirt guns, but he pulled out the two little guns and started squirting in a very treacherous fashion, so of course it was the hose for him! After that it was mostly anarchy, with a lot of me getting Supersoakered in the back while trying to drench my husband with the hose. And yelling, lots of yelling.
It took about an hour until we were all exhausted and soaked through and decided to call it a day. We had to use towels on the porch so we didn't soak Nana's hardwood floors as we sloshed off to our rooms to change clothes. There was resting time after that, then the kiddo and my husband baked a chocolate cake from scratch that turned out pretty good, then supper, a documentary about baseball, two episodes of Avatar, and bedtime. The kiddo didn't come out of his room after bedtime because he was stressed or sad even once. He just went right to sleep. It was a pretty good day.
