Quarantine over; Lockdown continues

Quarantine. Is. Over.

It's so innocuous and straightforward on paper, on the government issued booklet that finally came through our letterbox on Monday. The person who develops symptoms self-isolates for seven days or until the symptom disappear / they're no longer contagious; the rest of their household is in quarantine for 14 days to be sure they won't develop symptoms. The reality for myself—I'm sure, for many other families out there—is that it's the children who develop the symptoms, and the parents, the drivers and workers of the household, who can't go out for two weeks.

This was an entirely self-enforced exercise and that was what made it so hard. There were so many times when it seemed so pedantic to ask somebody else to get me some milk, or to tell the kids that we had to play in the back garden and not in the shared access courtyard or the old school grounds.  It felt like creating unnecessary work for others. After all, I knew it wasn't Covid-19 the kids had had.

Except I don't know. I'm pretty sure it wasn't, but it's entirely possible that the kids had a light touch of the coronavirus and I either didn't catch it or was asymptomatic. If I'd made a judgment call to just run out to the shop myself one day, it probably wouldn't have done any harm, but there are thousands of people across the UK making those judgment calls every day. Some of those people are wrong... It's better not to take the risk.

Mentally, it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought. True, I'm having a bit of trouble sleeping, and my brain isn't really thinking in straight lines. Twice in the past few weeks, I've rubbed the empty space on my ring finger and had an instant of panic before remembering that I've not worn my wedding rings in almost two years, and they're quite safe in my jewellery box.

Yet there's no fear there. Despite the inherent stresses of the pandemic, and even knowing we've had a confirmed case of the virus in our village now, it's still feels like something that happens to other people... As somebody said to me, the magnitude of the death toll just dehumanises what's really happening. I know that's a false sense of security, but at least it lets me relax.

At nine and eleven, the kids are probably the right age for this: old enough to go on a walk without me but not so old that they're frustrated at being stuck at home with their family and away from their friends. For our family, lockdown is just restrictive enough to be an adventure, and the kids have risen to the challenge.

Twice in the past week, I relied on the children to cycle/walk the mile to the corner shop for some milk, paying with their GoHenry cards (a kind of pre-paid credit card for children). The second time, my son went by himself, only to discover that their credit card machine wasn't working. The staff suggested he use the cashpoint (ATM) so he could pay with cash. My son has never used a cashpoint before, but he went and figured it out (I was impressed he remembered his PIN!) and brought the milk home.

Perhaps the biggest help was that this fell across the Easter Holidays. We didn't have to do anything, and we didn't attempt to do anything. No schedules, no projects, no self-inflicted deadlines... we just pottered around and pleased ourselves. We settled into an unforced routine of mornings playing Animal Crossing on the Switch, then afternoons in the garden, enjoying the sun.

We've barely had two consecutive days without rain since we moved in, and my son was absolutely dumbfounded to discover that Cornwall could stay dry for more than a week. We got creative with our patch of grass out back, creating different games and/or spaces with whatever was in the shed. The cats loved it, lounging in the sun with us.

So what we got out of two weeks of quarantine was family time. Time spent enjoying being a family. The past two years have been so turbulent for us that there has always been something to worry about, something to do... particularly in my case. We spent the past two weeks without anything to do but be happy together, and we were. For years (long before the marriage break-up), I've struggled with being mentally present for the children. This past two weeks, it's been effortless, even with insomnia brain.

Two weeks of quarantine down, and potentially months of lockdown still to go. But we've already come a long, long way.

Biff concluded

Much to my relief, when my daughter opened the butterfly jar this morning, Biff was still alive. I had dreamed that he had died overnight; she dreamed that he lived a long and happy life in our churchyard. Neither of our dreams would come true...

As with yesterday, Biff was quite happy to sit on my daughter's finger and enjoy her warmth. When he did flutter off, he flew into the window sill, so we set that up as our new butterfly nursery: more LEGO flowers with sugar water, but this time I added halves of an orange that was miraculously still in the fridge a week into quarantine. The orange went down a thousand times better than our false flowers. As usual, low effort paid off.

(We also discovered some dead flies and wasps as we cleared out the lantern that had been in the windowsill. This perhaps was not the right tone for a butterfly nursery, but we hoped Biff wasn't sentient enough to notice.)

 

That was how he spent the morning. We didn't worry about a barrier to keep him from flying around the house: I figured that the light contrast would keep him in the windowsill, and he didn't seem particularly fluttery anyway. My daughter was twitchier and wanted to put him back in the jar, but I read that cabbage whites like to fly and are prone to damaging their wings if they're kept in a confined space, so we left him loose.

Every now and then the children came and held him on their fingers; the rest of the time he sat on an orange or the window. For about half an hour, he was rechristened Mary, as we tried to figure out his gender: cabbage white males have one spot on their wing and females have two. From the underside, his wings appeared to have two spots, but when we finally caught them open, there was just one.

The children have finished their self-isolation period, though I'm still in quarantine, so the plan was for them to take him down to the churchyard after lunch. There are a lot of wildflowers there, and he'd have an afternoon of intermittent sunshine to bask, drink and make himself at home. My daughter grew increasingly anxious the closer we got to lunch and finally decided she was just going to take him (my son would rather have had lunch first). Biff was put back into his jar for the five minute walk and they set off.

In the churchyard, they found a sunny patch of primroses for Biff. They returned with an empty jar, a few photographs, and—in my daughter's case—floods of tears.

As we made lunch, I tried to console her. "You should go and check on him this afternoon. See if he's still there. If he isn't still there, that's a good thing. If he is and he doesn't look like he's doing too well, you could always bring him home for another night."

Her head whipped up: "We could bring him home?"

I had said too much, but it was too late to backtrack. "If he's not moving from where you left him, then... yes..."

"I'm going to check on him right now!"

I had been thinking we'd wait two hours instead of 30 minutes, but she was already racing out the door. She did not take the jar with her, so I decided not to worry over much.

I had reckoned without her resolve. Ten minutes later, she came back through the door with Biff on her arm. "I had to bring him home! He hopped on me and wouldn't come off again!"

Her story was that he had been right where she left him, he climbed readily back onto her finger and showed no interest in coming off again. As she walked out of the church-gate, he flew onto her head and then back down to her arm. Now, I would not put it past my daughter to cover him with her hand on the way home, but it was a five minute walk with two gates to open as she went, not to mention our front door.

It looked worryingly like we had a domesticated butterfly on our hands (literally).

Back in the window Biff went, and I told my daughter we could keep him if he was happy staying. However, we would also take him outside and give him every opportunity to fly off if he wanted to.

So it was that the children took Biff outside about an hour later, and finally he discovered a zest for flight. He fluttered over the fence, into the neighbour's garden and out of our lives... presumably for good.

The children spent about fifteen minutes peering forlornly through the gaps in the fence, trying to get a glimpse of him. I said we should leave the oranges on the back wall, so if he was hanging around, he could find a source of food... and I may or may not have watched those oranges hopefully for the rest of the afternoon.

My daughter has coped admirably with Biff's rehabilitation: we still have dozens more chrysalises on the back wall and she's already picked out the one she wants for her next pet butterfly...

Luna's story, coming soon! (Release date TBC.)

A Butterfly Story

Between good weather and quarantine, we've been getting very familiar with the garden. On Wednesday, we found a butterfly chrysalis on the wall. This immediately became the most dramatic feature of the garden, and so we gave much thought to it overnight... we were concerned it might be too exposed where it was: it wasn't camouflaged at all, so it could easily be napped by a bird looking for a tasty snack.

Therefore, on Thursday we followed online tutorials and prepared some damp paper towels in a mason jar. Using a bamboo skewer, we gently prised the chrysalis away from the wall then glued it to the skewer. We popped that in a mason jar and bingo: One homeschool science lesson.

I then suggested that the children go and hunt around the garden to see if they could find any more chrysalises. This seemed a suitable extension activity—most importantly—it would keep the children occupied for ten minutes or so.

One minute later, my son called: "I found one! No, two... four! Five! Six!"

Clearly, he was overdoing it. I called back: "I'm not falling for that on April Fool's Day."

"No, Mum! It's true! There's loads!"

Somehow, it wasn't an April Fool's. Underneath the ledge of the back wall, were twenty to thirty chrysalises.

New extension activity: naming them all. We got through about fifteen before they lost interest, but my son lovingly named our inside chrysalis: "Biff."

We did some online research: the internet wisdom was that chrysalises took a couple of weeks before the butterfly emerged, but our chrysalis looked like it was a cabbage white, and the guide I found to those said they took thirty days. We weren't sure how old our chrysalis was: we couldn't recall seeing it on the wall before Wednesday, but how often did we really look at that stretch of wall? We decided that we would give it a month to see if it would hatch (eclose to use the correct term). I suggested that if it hadn't hatched by May, we could dissect it, but that didn't go down well.

The next morning, I glanced into the jar and found an empty chrysalis. Further inspection revealed Biff clinging to the paper towel underneath.

What I think happened was that we found an overwintering chrysalis. Once we brought it inside where it was warm and bright for so long, the butterfly came out, thinking it was spring.

It's technically warm enough for a butterfly to survive, but we don't have any flowers in our garden yet and the whole area around here is generally flower deficient. To our horror, we realised that rather than saving Biff, we had instead given him a harder start in life.

Once more unto the internet! Furiously we googled and worked... well, my daughter and I did. My son was a little less struck by the urgency of the situation. My daughter made our own nectar (ten parts water to one part sugar) while I scouted around the house for spare bottle caps.

Then we reached over the garden wall to pilfer some flat stones from the farm access road (we'll return them once we're done!) and placed them in an old planter. Butterflies like flat exposed stones to bask on, and Biff would need to let the sun warm up the veins in his wings. We pushed the bottle caps into the soil and filled them up with sugar water.

Then, we constructed brightly coloured plastic flowers from LEGO and placed them over our sugar water reservoirs. Our butterfly nursery was complete! We placed it outside in the intermittent sunshine with Biff's jar pushed next to it. By this point, Biff had climbed back onto his bamboo skewer and we happily envisioned him climbing to the top of it and spying the flowers. Attracted by their bright colours, he would flutter into our nursery, drink the water and warm up on the stones. Then he would be ready to take flight into the world!

Ten minutes later, both the jar and the nursery were empty. Biff was gone.

Clearly, this whole butterfly-raising thing was not going as planned. We decided that we could try the nursery again once the others hatched, and we checked the other chrysalises several times throughout the day, but no further butterflies emerged.

Then, as the kids were playing in the garden this evening, my son spotted a butterfly in the grass. It was Biff!

He was clinging to a blade of grass, looking distinctly unfluttery and generally depressed. Gently pushing one finger underneath him (careful not to touch his wings), I was able to get him to scramble onto my hand, but then we couldn't persuade him off it and into our (now cold) nursery. We made a few attempts to get drops of sugar water on our fingers to feed him, but he seemed more interested in crawling over our warm hands. Inspecting him, we could see he was missing a leg, and we were concerned that he was making no attempt to open his wings. Were they damaged too?

Eventually, we brought him back inside. In the warmth of our living room, he perked right up, wandering about our hands and arms before doing a short flutter onto my daughter's colourful T-shirt. As I began preparing his jar again, improvising another LEGO feeder, Biff decided to take real flight and fluttered across our living room to mantlepiece. He rested there a moment before taking off again.

My daughter reached her hand up and he landed on her fingers. It was love! As of that moment, we had a pet butterfly.

I told her to cover her hands while we finished getting the jar ready. Then we coaxed him back onto his bamboo skewer—I don't know if this is scientifically accurate, but he seemed very ready to settle on his old chrysalis—and placed him back in the jar.

Biff is now in the shadows underneath the cabinet. But what comes next for our hero?

• Will Biff still be alive in the morning?
• Will we succeed in releasing him into the wild?
• Will my daughter succeed in her campaign to keep him for a few more days... or forever?

Tune in for the next exciting installment of Biff's Life!