Klara spent the week at home alone because of her double ear infection. Of course, she wasn’t physically alone in the house. N works from home but his job requires deep, unbroken concentration, and he can’t entertain her.
She had a wonderful time. Reading, drawing, listening to books on tapes, conducting science experiments, building pillow forts and inventing vehicles for her toys. Both I and N was like this in childhood, so we aren’t surprised.
This is such a great time in a person’s life when you don’t have to be anywhere or do anything. Time is completely your own and you follow your imagination on long, unhurried adventures. Arestovich says that the disciplinarian society increases the pace of our inner life to a feverish pitch because this way we are easy to control. It’s by slowing down our inner (meaning, the one inside you) pace that we find freedom.
On the negative side, after a week of a six-year-old’s uninterrupted play, the house is a dung heap.
Clarissa's Blog 
Florida will do that to you around autumn, and it’ll be several weeks before it gets really bad, but it usually ends up like this.
This is one of the drawbacks of visiting Florida in August or September that nobody really talks about because the correlation is really weird.
Multiple altitude changes will also make the ear infections much worse.
The actual infective agent can vary widely: strep, staph, viruses, even resistant strains, maybe even fungal infections if you’re super unlucky.
It’s the temperature and humidity gradient that’s to blame, and the whipsaw pressure changes push the nastiness around in the sinuses, so flying makes this worse.
And so we’ve not been flying around lately because I have a double ear infection as well.
This means we’re actually stuck away from home and that getting back without flying is non-trivial.
So instead we filled out more government forms, paid more money, and we’re now on “remote work” visas that are long enough that we can take our time getting back.
Also, throw the right amount money at your neighbours and they’ll be happy to do your chores for you, so there’s that.
While we could board a cargo ship headed toward the US, with arrival sometime in the next two to three weeks or so, they now tend to be very picky about the condition of the travellers on board, including a persistent insistence on certain shots which of course neither of us have.
They also won’t take on anyone who’s sick for obvious reasons of mid-Atlantic isolation on board.
So for now, we are similarly not needing to be anywhere, although we’re still doing some of our work.
Not that we’re anywhere near respectable at this: cat-themed pyjamas aren’t exactly our normal “home office” attire, even when nobody’s expected.
Do you have cats? Klara should build a cat fort … with pillows. đŸ™‚
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“the house is a dung heap”
While reading about her wonderful imagination… that’s the shoe I was waiting to hear drop…
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I think I will tuck this away, and drag it out the ten times a week my own kids reduce the home environment to rubble. I can say: “they are having a carefree, creative childhood, unfettered by disciplinarian society.”
đŸ˜‰
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I always remind myself that no mother is obsessively clean. We lived in a sterile environment where you could eat off any surface. And that made nobody happy.
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