Little background info.
The COVID 19 virus has spread through the world. There are currently only 52 cases reported in Utah, but in an effort to slow the spread and "flatten the curve" the government as opted say that all gatherings of more than 10 people should not happen. This means all public areas are closed for at least 2 weeks. No dining in at restaurants, no museums, no libraries, etc.
This has impacted us directly in many ways.
1- Will is now working from home exclusively. (My favorite part of all this!)
2- Schools are on a soft closure. The girls are now doing all their schooling online with their teachers. 3/18/2020 was supposed to be their first day of virtual learning after the teacher had a couple days to scramble to get things figured out.
3 - There has been a run on the grocery stores. All paper supplies and basics are hard to get ahold of. There is no problem with the supply lines, it's just that people are buying it up as soon as they put it out.
4 - Monica and Lisa are both completely out of work as all the theaters are closed down for the foreseeable future.
Yesterday was 03/18/2020.
The girls were already anxious about starting online school and all that that would entail. Their whole schedule has been turned upside down as we are pretty much holed up inside our house. So they both had a rough night sleeping.
7:00 am, my alarm starts going off and I snooze a few times as I am trying to wake up. Suddenly the earth starts rumbling and shaking. It lasted for about 15-20 seconds. It felt like forever in the moment, but it probably wasn't long. Once I figured out what was going on, I thought, oh crap! An earthquake! What do I do! My first thought was to get under the bed, but then realized I probably wouldn't fit under there. All the while, Will is pushing me out of the bed because we have a ceiling fan over our bed and he was worried about it falling on us.
I got to the closet doorway, gathered my thoughts, and realized I needed to get to the kids! I ran for our bedroom doorway and started yelling for the kids to get to their doorways. Alana was there pretty fast. I got worried about Naomi because she didn't respond fast. She was just trying to figure out what was going on. I got to her doorway and pulled her into it.
I realized at that point the shaking had stopped and that I was in panic mode. I hugged the kids and tried to calm myself down. The girls and Will, I think were still in shock. I made them stay there for a minute just to be sure. That might have been just for me to calm down.
Then we went to survey the damage. We had a clock fall off the shelves and break the motor and Will's Zippos all tumbled on his shelf. But that was it. It was really scary, but turned out it wasn't very bad. We took a moment outside the front door to take some calming breaths of the cool air, then decided it was time to get on with the day.
The texts and calls started coming in from friends and family, making sure were ok. I felt so loved.
The texts and calls started coming in from friends and family, making sure were ok. I felt so loved.
We had coffee cake for breakfast for a special treat then got to work on school work. The girls did a good job having a positive attitude. Alana had a rough time reconciling the physical classroom expectations to the new virtual classroom expectations. Some assignments had to be changed to facilitate the change. She ended up getting really frustrated at one point so we put in for a Facetime call with her teacher. That was really helpful because the reassured her that its ok that things are different and it is supposed to be that way.
We had about two dozen aftershocks through the day. I felt about a dozen of them. The initial earthquake was a 5.7. Two of the biggest aftershocks were 4.4 and 4.6. Alana asked a lot questions. She was obviously very worried. I don't blame her. I was trying to put on a calm face but I don't think my nerves could have taken any more. I was really grateful that Will could work from home to be with us and offer reassuring hugs.
The rumor mills were working over time. At one point the biggest one was that the U forcasted "The Big One" earthquake to come in the next hour. It is impossible to forecast earthquakes. They did say that in 97% of previous earthquakes, the strongest one is the first one. I even saw something about there being a run on gasoline but that was quickly squashed.
There was a little bit of damage around Salt Lake. No injuries, but the Angel Moroni on the Salt Lake Temple lost his trumpet. Will joked that was Heavenly Fathers way of doing a mic drop. Will also joked that it was nice that the earthquake gave us something new to talk about. We had been focused on the COVID 19 stuff for so long.
The girls still feeing unsure, needed some of my attention, so we decided to make pioneer dolls together. The girls really enjoy creating things.
After dinner, we had family movie night. I felt like we needed to do some fun things to help the kids relax and take their thoughts away from the scary stuff. They had fun having a picnic downstairs and watching Frozen 2.
When the kids went to bed, Will and I ventured out to try to go to the grocery store. We had been blessed in that a couple weeks before the COVID 19 stuff blew up, I felt like I really needed to take an inventory of our pantry and get our food storage back up to where it needed to be. So I did a big shopping trip. This was such a blessing because when the run on the grocery stores started, I could avoid the whole thing and not worry about our food situation. Well we were starting to get a little low on some of the perishable things, so we went to the grocery store. 1/2 of the shelves are bare. It is really unnerving to see. There were somethings we could not get, but it is things that we could live without for a while.
Another blessing I want to point out is that last Friday was our anniversary. Will was able to take the day off and we decided that we should go to the temple. Right after we got out, we got emails saying that the temples were going to close for the foreseeable future. I am glad that we were able to squeak in that session.
We have definitely felt blessed through this unnerving time.
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