Blending Families in a Time of Covid

Laying on the floor with my legs up on the couch to relieve pressure on my back. Currently I'm the one making sure the kids don't need anything while my boyfriend is cleaning up the kitchen post-breakfast and our daughters are playing Minecraft.

Except we're in neighboring suburbs as we do this. The girls are playing Minecraft in our respective homes on a Saturday morning when we have them over the weekend. They are using our messenger log-ins to talk to each other over video chat.

Welcome to late-pandemic. I'm fully vaccinated. He is still several days away from his 2nd shot and 2 more weeks away from them being fully effective. Our kids aren't vaccinated. We have some plans for hopefully moving on together later this year but so much is in the air.

One of these things is how well our kids will get along. Our daughters playing Minecraft and doing video chat is a test of this. It has worked out well so far. But this hasn't gotten to be tested with my son added into the mix as well.

We messed up our scheduling for the end of April and month of May. I have either one or both kids every other weekend. He has his kid the weekend with the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month. Most of the time, we are in sync, having kid weekends apart and getting non-kid weekends together. But every 3 or 4 months, it switches up. Typically I then adjust my schedule, take kids for 2 weekends in a row and then every other weekend from there. Because of a mixup in our shared calendar, I switched my weekends and now for the end of April and all of May, we are off sync, no weekends without kids together. The silver lining is that my fuck-up means that through all of May, he and I get to spend time with the other's kids, to see how we parent around the other one and how our kids like being around the other adult before we need to make any binding decisions.

For now, we are settling for Minecraft and video chats as a start. It's going well. As well as it could go for kids 7 years apart. Every once in a while, my boyfriend wanders back in the room his kid is in and I hear his voice. My heart swells and I think that this is what it's going to be like, the girls playing, him helping with video game stuff, just like maybe I'll get to do spooky stuff with them. (It is difficult to see how my son will fit into all of this but I foresee quite a lot of my bf teaching him things by taking them apart, learning computers by messing them up and then fixing it, just like my bf had to do back in the days before you could look up on your phone how to fix the thing you just fucked up on your computer.) Until then, we work with what we have.