This approach was meant to minimize the chances of our
catching or sharing the virus, but it had some real downsides. Something you
wanted but not at the store? Then you're out of luck until your next ten-day run
(yeast, flour, I'm looking at you). We don't drink a lot of milk these days,
but we do use it as an ingredient. A half gallon might run out in 24 hours if
the kids decided to make a lot of pudding. But our
last gallon went bad before we finished it. And the actual trips to the store
have been enormous runs, taking multiple grocery carts and multiple hours.
The issue with being quarantined, instead of just
conservatively cooperating with the lockdown, however, is that you don't have
any warning that it's coming. You can't decide that on Saturday you're going to
stay inside for 14 days and go to the grocery store now. If you have active
reason to believe that you might be contagious, you can't just mask up and go
out to prepare. You have a moral obligation to stay home starting immediately.
The quarantine order just falls on you.
The news from our doctor that we should quarantine came
about halfway through our 10-day grocery cycle. That meant we were still good
for a while, but that we couldn't go out and replenish the stuff that was going
to run out during our quarantine. Did I have enough meat (probably)? Milk? No,
definitely not. Flour and yeast? This gave me the most anxiety, since my family
has been devouring homemade bagels and loaves of oatmeal/flour bread at the
rate of about one batch every 36 hours.
I got especially worried when I realized that in our case,
it was both the adults who were potentially contagious. Of course we wanted to
protect our kids. But could we really hand over responsibility to them for
feeding themselves and us for a two-week period? If we were actively feverish
in the bedroom, I don't think we would have had a choice. But my husband and I did
continue to be in charge of cooking for them and ourselves on a regular basis,
and I did keep kneading the dough (hoping that cooking would kill any virus). I
just hoped that if we got truly sick, there was enough canned soup and rice in
the house for the children to feed themselves. I worried particularly about my
picky eater, who started off lockdown cooperatively eating whatever was offered
but has backed off of that in the past month. I asked her sister what they
would have done about eating if we got sick, and she told me today that
"[she] probably would have yelled at [her] sister a lot."
This is hard to manage, and stressful. I see now that I
absolutely have to have a fourteen-day supply of food on hand at all times,
just in case. I'm grateful to be wealthy enough to keep a well-stocked pantry,
to have older children who can manage the stove and oven, for the previous
owners of this house who let us keep their backup basement fridge.
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