On the Friday before the Labor Day weekend, Daughter 3 stayed after school for a few minutes to talk to the substitute teacher of her Bible class. Pastor Mike (not his real name) is the pastor of my in-laws’ church, his wife works in the school office, and they have a daughter in middle school there, so my daughter felt rather free to pepper him with some tricky questions. Over that long weekend, the teacher, who had been feeling a touch under the weather on Friday, progressed to definitively positive COVID-19 symptoms.

We were in the loop anyway through my in-laws, but my daughter received a notice on that Tuesday morning: because she stayed to talk to that teacher, she was considered “exposed” and had to quarantine for 14 days, just in case she got sick too. On Thursday, Daughter 2’s best friend, with whom she had spent most of Labor Day weekend, left school early – she had lost sense of taste and smell. On Friday of that week, due to these and other cases, the school announced that it would close for 2 weeks. Just due to mandatory rules regarding exposure, 1/3 of the staff (to say nothing of a significant number of students) had been ordered to stay home and quarantine. On Sunday, Daughter two said she thought she was having an asthma attack that she couldn’t kick (she has moderate asthma). On Monday it was worse and my wife took her to be tested. We did not get the test results for nearly 24 hours, but when they came they were positive. From that moment on, our entire household was considered exposed and ordered to quarantine.