"Like the week between Christmas and New Years, but make it apocalypse."

We have been in the house for 19 days. To say the novelty has worn off is an understatement. It's going mostly okay, but I think all of us could use some space and a little personal time. We have enjoyed the pajama days and strange baking experiments, but I miss my regular work schedule. A lot. Here's hoping that April can bring back a little bit of a productive routine.

Note: This post is not sponsored or compensated by Misfits Market. There is a referral link at the bottom if you want a 25% discount on your first order.

We're currently doing our part by staying at home. We haven't been in a building that isn't our house for 12 days. I'm a vegetarian and we try to eat lots of fruits and veggies, so going without trips to the grocery has been a little tough. Plus, being stuck inside makes you want to eat junk basically all day!

So we decided to give Misfits Market a try. Generally I don't love when you don't know what you're getting ahead of time, but the price seemed reasonable ($39.50 including shipping) given that our other options right now are instacart or going to the grocery store and potentially being exposed to a pandemic.

Just 2 days later, the box arrived! Normally I would have taken a cool unboxing video, but we're currently opening everything outside and washing items before they come in the house. Eeks.

My first major concern was whether the packaging would be wasteful. I was pleasantly surprised that the box is almost 100% recyclable packaging, less a couple pieces of tape, a few compostable "plastic" bags, and 2 small icepacks. 

My next concern was that the stuff would be weird items we wouldn't eat, bad condition items, or lots of the same thing. Nope! There was only one little bruise on one tomato, and otherwise everything was in great condition. Most of the items are organic versions of things we would eat, even if they aren't what we'd normally buy.

What did we get?

Organic lemons, organic fuji apples, green peppers, red and yellow peppers, parsnips, potatoes, organic tomatoes, oranges, brussel sprouts, red cabbage, organic celery, organic kale, green onions, and carrots.

In a time when we really don't want to go to the grocery store but still want to eat healthy, this was really worth it for us. 

If you want to give Misfits Market a try, you can get 25% off your first box with code COOKWME-UL7IAE  toto 

And then since we're playing with everything we can get our hand on, being stuck inside, we played "Garden" for a while. Honestly that alone was basically worth it.

See also: "No lifeguard on duty." 

I took this photo in the Galapagos at the top of a hike, but it's a good reminder for today: stop.

There's very little we can do right now. I happen to run a study abroad company, so there really is VERY little I can do right now in terms of work but comfort my future students and wait together. And most of the things we like to do as a family include going places, like to the playground or the library or to visit family. It's very easy to get frustrated.

But today, we're just going to stop being frustrated and try to enjoy being home. Are we going a little stir crazy? Yes. Have we watched the same youtube videos so many times that mom and dad can recite them? Yes. Are we out of wine? Tragically, yes. But we're doing our part, and in our house, this isn't an emergency. So we can do this.

That first 70-degree day after a snow day and the flu.

My son is really into memorizing facts, particularly about space and US Presidents. This provides me with thrilling opportunities to do things such as listen to someone yell a spitty list of all our solar system's dwarf planets into my ear for 2 to 3 hours at a time, which, judging from how often I do it, must be a hobby I really enjoy.

What's interesting about both history and space resources is they are full of "facts" that are no longer true. Because we have books and toys from different periods in time, some of them will say things like "Now, Bill Clinton is president" or... well, I don't know enough about Mars to write something that seemed true 10 years ago but now isn't. Pluto's existence is hotly contested by our toy bin, for example.

When I was in school, not in the dark ages but 20 years ago, we learned that there were 9 planets. There were 3 states of matter. There were 4 oceans. There were 2 genders. We learned these things as facts. 

It's still the same universe, but we just understand it better. We categorize it differently. Thankfully for all of us, we learned something in the last 2 decades. So now there are 8 planets, and 5 states of matter, and 5 oceans, and all the space-rocks and water and plasma are still where they were and what they were before. Nothing has changed except for our ability to better understand and describe things.

Don't be scared of learning new things and finding out that what you thought was a fact was, in fact, not.