I’d like to tell you the grueling and nearly laughable story of the last three and a half weeks of life at our house, but I can’t. In what is hopefully the bitter end to the tragic saga I am about to relate, I have completely lost my voice, so I can’t tell <\/em>you anything right now.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n You see, we still haven’t celebrated Christmas with my parents and brothers yet, and we’re more than halfway through January. Even by the most stringent and orthodox of Catholic practices, that’s pretty late. But far worse than postponing half of Christmas for four kids aged five and younger, the past three weeks have been among the most difficult parenting weeks of my parenting life–and we lived through the Winter Quarantine of 2020. I need to get this down for posterity so that I can look back on it when things feel like they are getting hard and remember what hard really is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It all started shortly after Christmas, when we drove back up from a wonderful Christmas with my in-laws. Several people down there were feeling a little sick, but nothing major, and the last COVID outbreak had been about two weeks earlier, so we convinced ourselves that we would be fine. In hindsight, this was rather foolish, as even before Christmas I personally knew more people with the ‘Rona than at any other point in this God-awful pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Nevertheless, we endured a white-knuckle drive through developing sleet and snow on December 28 until we landed at one of the hundreds of newly established COVID testing centers near our house. We had good luck with this one previously–both in terms of a negative test result and in rapidly receiving PCR results by midnight of the day we took the test.<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> On this occasion, when we decided Maddie would also get tested, they even let her use the newly developed spit test. She was thrilled that she got to suck on some lemon hard candy in order to submit a more copious salive sample.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don’t know what was in that candy, but the results came back as the clock struck midnight and Maddie turned into a pandemic pumpkin. While she didn’t have any visible symptoms aside from the minor cold that all of our children (and their parents) have been enduring since the start of school last fall, Maddie tested positive while Theresa and I tested negative.<\/p>\n\n\n\n