One of the tough things about aunting in the time of COVID-19 is managing Cade’s anxiety. He’s a recently clean (one week so far) anxious autistic kid with ADHD and other special needs and an extrovert. That extrovert part might be the death of me. He’s all the time with the talking. All the talking. And I haven’t yet figured out how to filter the babble from what might need my attention. Today seems to be smoother than yesterday, so it probably just take some patience, which I hate. Patience sucks and I have very little of it.

One of the issues his anxiety has landed on is food. He was so worried about it even though I easily had enough food to feed the three of us for at least two weeks. I told them both, “It might not be what we want when we want it, but it’s food.”

Last night Cade & I drove to pick-up our Hy-Vee order. He was stunned by how eerie the empty parking lots were.

As we were loading grocery bag after grocery bag into Ruby I asked him if he felt better. He said he felt a little better because we got so much food.

NOTE: I’m not trying to buy more than we need, it’s just that I literally have no idea how much food two young men will go through in a week. Is three boxes of cereal laughably overkill? Not even close to being enough? I DON’T KNOW! How long will 90 pizza rolls last them? Will I kill them if they eat all the ice cream? Probably. I mean I’m generous, but come on.

As we were putting away the groceries he looked at the stuffed-full refrigerator and sighed. “We have a lot, but what if we can’t go grocery shopping for a long time?”
“We’ll order groceries again on Sunday,” I said.
He shook his head at me.
“We’ll order what we want. We’ll pick them up when we can. We’ll get what we get and it will be fine.”
“I hope so,” he said.
“Me too.”