A year ago this week, I bought a pack of pre-cut 12” x 12” cotton squares and a bag of bee’s wax pellets. Having already stocked the pantry with every staple I could think of, and the bathrooms with as much toilet paper as I could order, my attention turned to crafty projects that I was sure I would have nothing but time to complete. (Side note: I am not crafty or even DIY-adjacent.) Among my goals: making my own wax paper with which I would wrap my regular bounty of homemade sourdough bread. A year later, I have baked about half a dozen loaves – most of them edible, a couple not, none Instagram-worthy – and the cotton squares and wax pellets remain in their original packaging, staring at me daily from the same corner where they landed when I yanked them from their Amazon box.
 
The list of things we didn't do during a year of locking down is long, perhaps because the year wasn’t a sabbatical but rather a slog through a pandemic punctuated by protests, vitriolic elections, a siege of the capitol, and several viral surges. But there’s a lot we did do – individually and collectively – during this somewhat endless moment and as it winds down, I find myself anxious about losing these milestones. We stopped over- scheduling our kids because there was nothing to schedule. Family meals became the norm because there was no one else to eat with. We found upsides to screen time and got better about recognizing when too much made zombies of all of us. We met our neighbors, walked our cities, and drove traffic-free. We cared for one another, finding new ways to reach out when someone got sick or suffered loss. We finally internalized the thing we’ve been hearing forever: life is short and happiness can be fleeting, so find your happiness. But don’t be one of those YOLO jerks who rubs your happiness in everyone else’s face (via Instagram) because happiness is also luck and timing and genetic and economic and if you’ve got it, then you’ve got some to pass along. We were reminded to pay it forward.  
 
I don’t want to lose any of this, and yet for whatever reason, this week I suddenly feel myself back in the throes of a version of normalcy. Sitting in traffic (suddenly traffic!), heading to pick up one of my kids (from a resurgent sport!), it dawned on me that summer is three months away and I have no idea what my kids will be doing. As bad as being a slave to a packed schedule is the feeling of needing to fill that schedule. The pandemic is far from over, but normalcy weighed on me, nonetheless.
 
I am determined to hold tight to as many lessons of the past year as I can, even though I already feel the steep uphill climb of that determination. If we all do it together, though, the hill flattens. If we make a collective promise not to return to the prior race to nowhere, but rather to embrace our epiphanies and carry them into the foreseeable future, then collectively we change the status quo. If we all get off the hamster wheel, it stops spinning. And so, as the world begins to open up, rather than revert let’s evolve. Let’s take a lesson from the very coronavirus that sent us into this tailspin of a year, the virus that can only survive by mutating. Let’s commit to change the things we didn’t love about Normal 1.0 and instead create a new version 2. The wax paper, though, will have to wait.
 
Some non-COVID links before diving into science:
  • Nike launched a maternity wear line, and then this study came out about the benefits to a child when a parent exercises before and during pregnancy. Coincidence?
  • This week I read about infants born during the pandemic having such low germ exposure that the foundations of their microbiome are being thrown off, putting them at risk for issues like asthma, Celiac disease, obesity, and ADHD. Read more here about the impact of limiting our exposure to microbes.
  • And finally, a huge thank you to goop for spotlighting the trials and tribulations of puberty, how to parent through it, and for such kind props to the OOMBRA and the PUBERTY PORTAL.
 
Vaccine news:
  • Distribution of the AstraZeneca vaccine was halted in several European countries because of 37 reports of blood clots out of 17 million doses (odds: 1 in 460,000). For context, here are some other odds:
  • Getting struck by lightning (1 in 1 million)
  • Visiting the ER for a pogo-stick injury (1 in 115,300)
  • Becoming a professional athlete (1 in 22,000)
  • Being murdered (1 in 18,000)
  • Moderna has been getting some pretty great press ever since revealing it is studying COVID vaccine efficacy in kids 6 months to 12-years old. And yesterday, in BREAKING NEWS, Pfizer and BioNTech announced the same. No one is saying when the results might be available let alone when younger kids may actually get vaccines in their arms, but these are major steps in the right direction.
  • And early data suggests that the mRNA vaccines may protect against asymptomatic infection (whoop! whoop!). But in even earlier data, it looks like Moderna has reduced efficacy against some of the variants (whomp, whomp…).
  • Have you heard about the COVID long-haulers whose symptoms go away after getting vaccinated?
  • For those of you who like to pull the lens waaay back, here’s an interactive, real time map of vaccine distribution around the globe.
  • Vaccine hesitancy is proving to be very real, though, and may just stop us from achieving herd immunity.
  • Meanwhile, for some IRL data about how well vaccines protect against COVID, Israel is sharing its data… and Pfizer looks even better than it did in the study phase.
 
COVID + mental health:
 
Happy Friday, everyone. Keep your masks on – we’re not done yet.