A Year Ago, the World Shut Down

         Today is March 13, 2021. A year ago today, the world shut down. Well, it started to. It was the last day we had normal, in person school. It was the last day I was in the same room with the kid I worked with 1:1 for 2 years. I saw him as he passed in the drive-thru graduation parade, but that was it. It was the last day things were sort of normal. Even though at that point things were not totally normal. I took this picture that day. I take pictures of a lot of my makeup looks. And yes, it is pretty much necessary to make a b%$#y face to show of the eyes. Anyway, this was from March 13, 2020. When we got the announcement at the end of the day saying to bring home our Chromebooks, just in case, we were hoping it was just a bad Friday the 13th thing. Everyone thought that it would be over quickly. Just a couple of weeks of quarantine. Just a month. Just six weeks. If they thought it was going to be that quick I don't know why people were buying up a year's supply of toilet paper. 

       In this blog post from March 13 of last year I talked about Travis's IEP meeting, and how Spartanum (his school's variety show) was canceled. It was really just the first cancelation. There have been so many in the last year. https://fieldofdolls.blogspot.com/2020/03/nice.html 

       The next day I talked about how I was now a homeschool mom. I am sure a lot of people heard that school was shutdown for a couple of weeks and decided to just give the kids a two week vacation. I didn't do that. Probably a good thing too. It took a few days to get into a school routine, but we did it, and we did some cool things. I taught Travis things with money that no one has been able to teach him. https://fieldofdolls.blogspot.com/2020/03/now-im-homeschool-mom.html

      This past year has been incredibly weird. That is really the best description for it. We went from packed hallways and seeing people we work with to nearly empty (or completely empty) hallways and hardly seeing anyone in person. We went from going to visit people to not being able to visit. No travel, no concerts, no movies, no live shows. 

      But really, as weird and as hard as this last year has been we got things that we didn't have before. We got photo shows back, but in a new format that is a better fit for the modern world. We can show with people from all over the world, very easily. People have gotten clever with their visiting. We video chat now, which means I can "see" people I have never gotten to see. Or rarely get to see. I really hope when the world gets back to normal that we still have cool photo shows, those have been really excellent! Speaking of that, my next one opens for entries on the 19th. We are getting close! I also hope that Zoom parties continue. That has been so great! I love being able to hang out with people that live too far away to visit. 

     So yeah, the world has been weird, but a lot of good things have happened. I have written about a lot of them over the past year and I don't want to repeat everything now. Things are getting slowly back to normal. And I am still hoping that people will be just a bit less gross when this is all done.