Filling a Day of Social Distance – 4/13/2020 – 30 years ago

Continuing the blog post series prompted by COVID-19….

Here are the unique activities for yesterday:

Taking portraits of a Common Grackle. The grackles are little too big for our feeder but one flew to the sycamore and sat around for long enough to be photographed….picking up the nuances of color in the feathers. They are not an ordinary black bird! And the yellow eyes give an additional zip to their appearance.

Cooking barbeque chicken slowly. I decided to cook chicken breasts loaded up with barbeque sauce and a little extra olive oil…for 6 hours. I used two forks to pull apart the meat about 30 minutes before we ate to let the sauce get to every bite. Very yummy…and we have plenty leftover for another meal too. 

Links to my previous “filling a day of social distance” posts  here.

I started posting about what was happening to me 30 years ago beginning last November. And I’m continuing the monthly post now, looking back to April 1990….

My baby was old enough to be crawling, enjoying looking out the window at birds and her dad washing the car, intrigued watching herself be dressed in front of a mirror, sometimes cranky as her teeth appeared, and playing pat-a-cake. Her increased mobility gave her more opportunity to explore on her own – biting the play pen to see if it tasted good (or helped her gums feel better), checking out the cat’s favorite box (the cat looking on placidly), and striking a pose to rest or just look about.

We had company from out of town and visited some sights around Maryland and DC with her for the first time. Of course, she was too young to remember any of them: Mount Vernon, Catoctin, Arlington Cemetery, Jefferson Memorial, National Zoo, Brookside Gardens and the Aquarium in Baltimore.

The Aquarium was her first time in a backpack (since they don’t allow strollers); it was an experience for me too.

I was getting ready go back to work part time in May – having a few interviews for the assignment I would have until I started back full time in the fall. While I was preparing myself, I was doing things to make the change for my daughter easy too. We transitioned from cloth to disposable diapers, dropping the diaper service. She had her first days in family day care during the last week of the month…and seemed to enjoy the interaction with the other young children. We were very fortunate to find a wonderful the provider right away; my daughter was with the same family day care until she started Montessori pre-school.

I was off from work from mid-August 1989 to early May 1990….the longest time period I was not working in my career. It was a time of huge transition and I realized at the time that I was extremely fortunate to not have to rush back to work juggling the changes at home with a career immediately after my daughter was born. The company I worked for was ahead of the times in terms of medical leave and then unpaid leave with a job to come back to.