Curfew time

I woke up sandwiched between both daughters, and when this happens my back gets really sore. But never mind. We got up, they read, I played my morning game of Blood Bowl (won 4-0, thanks for asking) and then we had video calls with my parents, my sister, and with the girls’ abuela, (my wife’s ex mother in law, please try to keep up) and her husband in Nova Scotia.
By the time that was over, the girls had been up for four hours without going outside, and grew increasingly manic, until they played the "let’s throw toys over the bannister at the top of the stairs" game and my wife got mad and told them she was giving away all the things they’d chucked. As this included Cecile, the enormous plush octopus La Serpiente has known since she was but five months old, there was much howling and despair, and I was upset too, because I have great affection for Cecile.

To generate some calm, I took the girls out for a walk, to buy coffee and macarons. While there were protests and/or riots downtown yesterday, and a curfew that continues tonight, Ballard was quiet as usual. We did a big loop of the neighbourhood, where I trained the girls to respond to different sheep dog whistles, and when got home I found the coffee had made me feel dreadfully tired, so I went back to bed for a bit. Recovered, I took both girls down to the market on the back of my bike to buy fruit and their weekly hot dog, while my wife worked up some bean burgers from a recipe that took 8 hours.

La Serpiente ate hers. Destroyer ate part of hers, and both balled up their buns into spheres of bread, because my children are strange. One great feature of the cargo bike is that they can sit on the back and eat their lunch as I ride along, and unlike a car there’s few crevices to trap crumbs. I’m contemplating a car, but I’m put off by quite how much filth we will accumulate inside it.

So we got home, and I went back to bed, which I seem to be doing a lot of, and I was woken by my phone with a message from the mayor that there was a curfew at 5pm today as well, which is quite odd for a country where everyone is ostensibly obsessed with maximising their personal freedoms. It’s easy for us; the girls can play in the back garden and not have to go out on the streets but I feel for everyone less fortunate than us. Although the curfew is meant to cover all of the city of Seattle (Uber drivers exempted, because how do you get back from the airport in a curfew?) nobody on our street seemed to take any notice, but again, would the police be arresting you if you walked your dog? But then, why risk it this week?

Again, we got the kids asleep in five minutes tonight. How long can this go on?