We're getting better all the time...

Tomorrow Miriam is supposed to be a page at the state senate, but she's been a little nervous about riding downtown with Andrew (who has been down with COVID). He's been taking Paxlovid for about four days now, though, and woke up feeling great this morning, so he took a test this afternoon and...it was negative!

"Wow! You won the COVID race!" I said.

"That's true!" he said. "I was positive for the least amount of time. Of course, I'm taking performance-enhancing drugs."

Which...is true.

So, Zoë is negative, Phoebe is negative, Andrew is negative. 

Benjamin took a test yesterday and it was ever-so-faintly positive, but we let him downstairs to play in the basement anyway...for the first time in over a week...to play LEGO. 

I'm still sick and am scared to test because I'm afraid it's going to be "more" positive than I'd like it to be at this point. While designed to be solely an indication of disease, and are no approved to show how much of the disease is present, the rapid-tests can actually offer an indication of how many virus antibodies are active in your body: "The line that you see on a test 'is actually made up of millions and millions of little antibodies holding onto a dye...so the more virus, the more little dye molecules are going to line up on the line.'" Thus, the tests offer more than a binary (yes/no) answer to the question of whether or not you have COVID; rather, "the intensity of the line does tend to correlate with the amount of antigen in the sample."

So I'm hoping for a faint, faint line. We'll see...if in a few days...when I get brave enough to take a test...

Let's see...

Alexander is still pretty freshly sick, but he's feeling pretty okay. 

Here's a picture of him and Zoë with a puzzle they worked on together yesterday evening:

Zoë looks so dolled up because she attended the National Federation of Music Clubs Festival yesterday. Andrew drove her to the testing location, escorted her to her piano teacher, and then went outside to wait in the car (her teacher knows all about COVID at our house; Zoë missed the rehearsal for the audition last week, though Miriam attended, and Zoë missed her piano lessons last Wednesday...and I don't remember if she missed this Wednesday). Parents aren't allowed into auditions, anyway, so having Zoë go in alone wasn't a problem.

She scored a superior rating. 

Miriam also had her auditions for organ (which Grandpa took her to, since she's been hiding out at his place). According to an email from her teacher, Miriam earned Superior Plus ratings and 2 Gold Cups in  both Organ Repertoire and Hymn Playing auditions.

So both girls did well, and Zoë had given me permission to actually do her hair for once. 

While we are happy Rachel and Miriam have so far avoided being infected, we do rather miss having older kids available to help around the house! It's not that Andrew and I can't do the dishes or anything (we do the dishes frequently); we're just used to sometimes...depending on our most capable helpers to do some tasks around the house. That said, our medium-sized kids have been stepping up to the plate.

True, the first week we were sick, it was Zoë's dish week. But she was sick, so Andrew and I did the dishes all week. 

The second week we were sick, it was Benjamin's dish week. But he was sick, so Andrew and I did the dishes most of the week (I made Benjamin do the dishes on Friday or Saturday or something like that).

This week it's Miriam dish week and she's not even here! But Benjamin was all geared up to do the dishes after dinner, without even being asked. Instead we had him take out the whole house garbage and help with the floor (and Andrew did the dishes). 

Zoë made dinner on the 9th (heart-shaped egg-in-a-hole):

And on the 10th (heart-shaped noodles that we'll likely have for dinner again on the 14th because we still have a couple of boxes left).

We've had a lot of breakfast-for-dinner and noodles-from-a-box dinners, and those are great dinners for kids to make while learning how to cook.

Here's Phoebe being curious about the applesauce I made last night with all the apples I forgot to make the kids eat the last little while. Usually if I cut up an apple or two (or three or four) at lunch, the kids will eat them. But...I haven't been cutting up apples lately. Sure, Phoebe has munched on a few (several), but they simply haven't been the snack of choice. Apparently no one cuts up apples like Mom.

Anyway, Phoebe has been having fun helping Andrew cook some dinners (on the days I've taken inconvenient late-afternoon naps, for example). She helped him stir cream of wheat one evening and tonight she helped whip up some biscuits. All this helping has ignited her curiosity about the goings on in the kitchen. 

So while I was making applesauce, she set up a stool so she could peek into the pot and said, "What Mommy making, hmmm? Apple soup?"

It certainly looks like I'm making apple soup, doesn't it? And what reason would Phoebe have to know that apple soup isn't really a thing (at least, not with apples as the main ingredient; I found plenty of soups that use apples as supplementary ingredients. (Some of those recipes sound intriguing to me, but we all know how Andrew feels when I "sneak" ingredients into other foods...))

As Amanda pointed out, there's really very little difference between applesauce and, for example, pumpkin soup. You take some fruits/veggies, boil them until soft, purée them...

Really I think it was a clever conclusion to jump to (as clever as her "ice lollipops" earlier in the week). Her circumlocution skills are on point!