Joe Newman from Sarasota, Florida says that being 107 years old means you keep breathing every day.  In February, he was featured in the local newspaper for his vitality – noting that he was still driving his Mercedes hardtop convertible.   I’m not choosing to write about Joe, but thought his story might be a fun lead-in to something these past two months have really brought to the forefront of my life.  How prepared am I for what lies ahead?  And who am I?   I admit to chafing a bit when told I was part of the “at-risk” group and needed to restrict my activities.  Honestly, I am fairly much a spring chicken compared to most of the population in my zip code! But as a hospice volunteer and dear friend of many in their 80s and 90s, I began to look at my privilege to be active in a

Juli, Alana and I have been largely stuck at home with each other for the past 2 months. Normally, we had family and friends help us babysit Alana while we both work. Since the stay at home order, I’ve been watching Alana in the morning and Juli has handled the afternoon. Most days, Alana and I get out for a nice long walk. This arrangement has worked fairly well, and perhaps unexpectedly, I don’t seem to be getting much less done at work. I am able to call into some morning meetings, but the number of meetings I attend has gone way down since I blocked off my mornings. Plus, because my company uses Teams, I am able to respond to urgent messages via the app on my phone. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about this while out walking, and I’m still not sure what the cause of

For me, there was no sudden onset of quarantine. I had been on maternity leave for nearly three months when DeWine announced that the schools were closing. Over those three months I had learned that I felt much better if I got out of the house at least once every day- even if it was just a trip to Target or a coffee date with another new mom. So when we began to quarantine in earnest, it wasn’t a drastic shift from being out of the house for 8+ hours a day to being home all day; instead, it was a very subtle shift of my once daily outing disappearing. Rather than suddenly losing face-to-face interactions with dozens of coworkers and students, I lost face-to-face interactions with the small network of other new mothers that I had built up in the last few months. It felt like someone hit reverse