COVID-19 Small Business Journal: Shop Kid Life

Today is Sunday, and after seven straight days at the main shop, the kids and I stayed home, above the studio shop, while Jon went to the main shop to help pull and ship orders and get things organized, send emails.

While initially it wasn’t clear if it was going to be a two week “break” in which case we were just going to muscle through for two weeks, it now seems that we’re destined to be operating half-capacity for what looks like months. And so we’re looking at what’s sustainable for the long-term.

I think the kids were getting a bit wild going to the shop everyday, for so long. They enjoy going to the main shop, perhaps a bit too much: running around yelling and thrusting brooms about dangerously, dropping a trail of orange peel as they walk around, falling asleep in the car on the way home as the sun is setting.

So we stayed home today, did some staunching of the general and precipitous decline in the state of household, hanging some laundry, filling the vacuum to capacity and then calling it a day on that since emptying that canister is a dust cloud that I leave for Jon. I fried a few eggs. We took a break from math and phonics and spent a good chunk of the day reading stories and looking over some books on geography and airplanes and bees.

In the afternoon, I exiled the children and animals outside to the backyard, while I sat down to work on a few projects that we’re hoping to get together and launch over the next little while, as the shop is closed for the foreseeable future. I ordered some books for the shop and how fortuitous that Jon came home in time to investigate the order list: Now is not the time to expand your personal library, Liz. Didn’t you justify, over the last decade, buying all of these books for exactly, and I quote, “some sort of apocalypse”? Interior Chinatown will have to wait for another day. Perhaps to be enjoyed with a good bubble tea after all this is over.

In any case, the children are frivolously using up my washi tape stash, Naomi went the entire day without a diaper and did some business in her potty and the real toilet, Caleb told Naomi she could only come into his room if she paid with a credit card, and for lunch we had cinnamon rolls baked from a tube.

Half the time I’m thinking with all this social isolation thank goodness I have two kids, they can play together, get banished together, entertain each other, and the other half of the time I’m thinking my goodness one of these kids is going to kill the other and I’m not sure which it’s going to be. Joking aside, I am glad the two of them have each other—every once in a while I seem to lose track of them in the shop or at home, and they’re making a fort out of boxes in the front (acceptable now that there are no customers) or gleefully thundering down the ramp in the warehouse in their car, the thrill of an inevitable crash only adding just the right hint of adventure.

Tomorrow, we’re back at it.