We wash our cloth masks in a mesh laundry bag. It hangs near the clothes hamper and everyone puts the masks in when they get home each day. Every few days we zip it up and wash it with a color load (using cold water). The masks are hung up to dry… and they do so really quickly.
With four of us…two of whom were wearing them daily for most of the last year, we have about 20-30 masks so we don’t have to wash them more than about twice a week.
Almost all our masks are from Starks. They fit well, are comfortable, and have a nose flap that reduces the fogging of our glasses.
We also wash our masks in a mesh laundry bag and hang them to dry. We did the beach for a long weekend last year and our masks never smelled like sunscreen after washing. We had worn them leaving our room/hotel after applying sunscreen.
We love our Starks masks too! And were just talking about ordering more. They were the favorite of our kids’ to wear for school. And now that that will be starting up again in checks notes 3 weeks (why so soon???), definitely want more!
The family binge watched Olympics and Ted Lasso over the weekend. I binge watched Olympics and Global Pandemic Season 4.
I think that one “jumped the shark” after Season 3. It was so nicely tied up with a bow when Disney dropped the mask requirement and it would have been great if the US version had really wrapped up there, but I guess they did leave the door open for a reboot?
I’ll post highlights of the 7/20 Senate hearing and 7/22 White House briefing in a bit.
Highlights from YLEs update today:
Good news…looks like Delta wave for UK (and some others) has peaked.
6 weeks until peak? But we go back to normal school in 4. (+- 2 weeks). Not happy about the kid aspect, given the no vaccine and unknown long term side effects of covid (a friend posted that her 15 year old has residual effects from a mild case in December). But I am also hopeful that deaths won’t follow on the same trajectory since most of the elderly are vaccinated.
Not everyone will regret not being vaccinated. But some will. And I’m heartbroken for those families. DH’s friend was 36 years old and active in his boot camp group. He left behind a wife and two young kids.
We are 3 weeks out and I am in disbelief that the situation is worse than it was for us a year ago. A year ago I was wringing my hands over which distance learning program would be better for my then 4th and 2nd graders. I was SO stressed about it when their school first stated they didn’t know if they would be able to offer their specialized dual immersion language program via distance learning that I looked into other schools with the same program and for a minute had them enrolled in two different schools to figure out which one would give them the better experience for distance learning. Their usual school ended up figuring out how to manage it it so we kept them enrolled and didn’t finalize enrollment in the other school. Their school also did amazing following all the guidelines and had zero cases of spread at school and so once community spread was on the decline, we sent them back in-person for the last term (grading period).
This year while I technically have choices, they feel much more extreme. No distance learning will be offered for my kids’ program (or really any specialized programs). No masks can be mandated in schools by school boards and the legislature gave itself total power over any emergency declarations around health mandates coming from either the health department, the governor or any local governments, so if they (the legislature) don’t agree with what the health department recommends, even if the local governing body supports it & wants to make a mandate, the state legislature will just overturn it. And the leaders of our state legislature have all come out to say they would overturn any mask mandate that any school tries.
So I wish I could back to me a year ago & say to save all that worry for next school year. Because this year I am spent. We’ve mostly resigned to the fact that they will be in-person for many (good) reasons, but I can’t get the shot into their arms fast enough! And we will be enacting some protocols at home to ensure that our even younger and higher risk preschooler doesn’t catch anything. He’s the one we’ve worried about the most over all of this, and once he can get the shot, either by his 5th birthday or whenever they approve the 2-5, then I can finally feel like I can re-join the world, that right now I feel is quickly leaving me and family with an unvaccinated high risk child behind.
ETA: My two older kids (now 5th & 3rd graders) will be going back in person. The preschooler is most definitely not going anywhere near a classroom until he’s 2-4 weeks out from his full vaccination. I did a homeschool program with him last year for one term of school. This year we are enrolling him in an online supplemental option that prepares kids for K and I will take a closer look too at some pre-K online/distance options offered by private schools in the area. And if he can get the jab sometime by mid-winter, I would love for him to do some semblance of in-person preschool.
This is the situation for my niece and her youngest boy who is 3. I was quite discouraged by the news that Pfizer will seek approval for 5-11 in the fall. He won’t be 5 until January 2023. I know it will be approved long before then for younger ages, but it can’t come soon enough for them (and me). Especially since we’re planning/hoping for a DLR trip for their family (and me!) in February. I just don’t know if it will happen if he can’t be vaccinated by then.
This is one of the really painful parts. It feels like the decisions keep getting harder, or at least just as hard. Definitely not easier unless one just throws caution to the wind.
And we’re liners. Most of us are going to overthink Every. Single. Decision.
It has been such a roller coaster with the kids’ vaccines and I am right there with her & you on this not-fun ride! First it was 2022, then it was all all kids 2-11 together and by September (that was SUCH a happy day for me and I mentally circled my youngest’s 2nd birthday- this December- as the day I could be happy again re-joining society). And then yeah, the news that 5-11 would be going ahead for EUA but that younger might not, definitely put a damper on my 2021. But we’ll see. The last I saw was that if the data is there to support it, they would still go for EUA. So we’ll see. But this is most definitely longer than I ever thought or imagined it would be.
My DSIL and I were talking last night when she came over for a porch visit. She is back to taking her kids to stores and they’ve eaten out indoors a few times during off peak hours. And internally I am SO jealous but also so very panicked that she’s exposing them unnecessarily. Externally we talked about how if DS4 had never been hospitalized, I might just be bold enough to try some of those things or let our kids play together more often.
But unfortunately I have sat by his bedside hooked up to a million tubes and wires in the PICU and any decision I think through has the memory of those very worst 3 nights of my life while were in PICU w/ him looming in the background. And because it was respiratory related (RSV) and he was hospitalized again for it just 3 months later (really rare even for an infant to get it 2x or so the drs at both his pediatrician’s office and the hospital) we just decided early on to not even remotely mess with Covid.
And previously, we’d been to Dallas when there was Ebola (we had tickets to take DFIL & DMIL who are lifelong Cowboys fans on a bucket list trip to see a game and we had the kids in tow too) & also to Disneyland just after measles outbreaks (more than once), but each time we had some sort of safeguard- for Ebola it’s really hard to catch and for measles vaccines work and our kids get them, so at first it seemed like Covid would just be like that eventually once we learned more. But here we are going on a 2nd year of this. I definitely feel like @PrincipalTinker said it best, we’re re-taking the exam we failed before.
Maybe. But we have a higher percentage completely unvaccinated than they do. I’m not sure how much those two data points offset.
I also still haven’t come across data on what % of vaccinations in the UK were AZ vs Pfizer/Moderna (I believe those are the 3 that have been approved there).
Unfortunately, I think they took a calculated risk to delay trials on kids because 1) lower risk from acute Covid (long Covid risks for kids really hadn’t hit the radar yet) 2) see how mass rollout on adults went first, with an eye to a hopeful assumption that if enough adults got vaccinated, we could reach herd immunity and there might be no urgent need to immunize kids. The continued vaccine hesitancy and Delta threw monkey wrenches into that plan.
I am sure many of you have read the reports of Provincetown
“Sixty-nine percent of confirmed cases among Massachusetts residents have occurred in individuals who were fully vaccinated, officials confirmed, and those infected have been found to be predominantly symptomatic.”
“In addition, officials reported that 88% of the cases are among males, and the median age of those testing positive is 39.”
I keep on thinking that 69% of those getting Delta already being vaccinated might not be so bad since we have such a high rate of vaccinated residents- but I know this is bad.
I mean, it would obviously be a lot worse if vaccination rates were lower (like what happened in India). Hospitalizations are climbing across all age groups. They’d be skyrocketing if not for vaccinations.
I wish they were getting a better handle on breakdown on transmission from vaccinated vs unvaccinated. But it’s getting high enough it might not matter that much at this point?
So 31% of the people getting it are unvaccinated? I understand that the symptoms are, for the most part, less severe (there are vaccinated people in the hospital and we are no where near peak for this outbreak).
