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I would hypothetically travel wearing N95 2 weeks post my 2nd shot. However, there's no way I can do that. One unfortunate consequence of our 24/7 homebound status is that my 2 year old has INTENSE separation anxiety. Like I can't walk more than 10 feet away from him. So I don't know how I could actually travel. (Edited to add: we won't fly with the kids until there's herd immunity or they can be vaccinated)

We haven't even eaten outside on a restaurant patio so will probably start with that sometime in early summer.

My youngest turns 3 in July so I'm hoping to have a small beach party for him.

@ChitownRo: We are dealing with intense separation anxiety too!! It makes me feel better to know we aren’t alone. We usually go camping with friends every summer, but I already told DH I don’t think it’s possible for me to go because our little guy really struggles being apart from me.

Our girls have their birthdays in a few months and I plan to have a family birthday party. All the adults will be fully vaccinated by then and we also plan to keep it outside.

I’m not sure about eating out! I haven’t thought that far ahead.

As far as travel, we hope to take a family trip and an anniversary trip in 2022. Both would require flying.

Our provincial rollout has been a s**tshow, and as a person in her 40s with no risk factors I’m unlikely to get my first shot before June and Canada is delaying second shots by up to four months, so full vaccination won’t be until fall. So not for a good long while. We have plans to go to Disney World next March, and I imagine that’s the first time we’ll be on a plane, although I’m hoping we can do a weekend in Ottawa this summer just go to get away a bit. I feel like even vaccinated, I don’t know if I’m going to feel comfortable eating in a restaurant for a while! And my kids’ birthdays are January and March so I imagine they’ll get parties for their next birthday, but we might give them small make-up backyard pool parties this summer to make up for the parties they didn’t get to have.

Well, my husband and I are both 3 weeks post our second shots.

We are currently “traveling”, but not in a fun resort or anything. Until our kids are vaxxed, we are continuing on as we have the last year, with the notable exception that now we will see family members who are also fully vaxxed indoors. So we are visiting my mom finally now. My kids hadn’t seen my mother for almost 1.5 years, and haven’t seen my husbands parents in 2 years. DHs parents are in Canada, so it’s super frustrating that their vaccine rollout has been slow—I know my husband really misses his family. It’s so difficult to cross right now—it involves a ton of paperwork.

Anyway, we still aren’t doing indoor dining or big travel as a family as long as the kids aren’t vaxxed. We’d do smaller road trips, continuing to stay away from indoor spaces and unmasked people, etc.

Where we are currently visiting my mother, it’s basically an anti-masker Mecca, small town, rural. No masks in stores (or like, maybe 40% masks), so we have not taken our kids anywhere at all indoors. Not even a supermarket.

But we are finding so many outdoor things to do, it’s okay! Just keeping on, keeping on.

Adding to this, what are your plans for family members who refuse to get the vaccine?

Most of our family is already vaccinated or will be soon, but there are a few who I’m not sure will actually take the shot. I’m thinking of refusing to hang out with them unless it’s distanced and outdoors.

I got my second vaccine mid Feb and dh will get his second mid April. But I don’t know how much it changes things! The one thing I did do a few weeks after my second shot was get a pedicure. I soooo needed it and the place had a lot of precautions, but we have avoided all indoor things we could prior to shots. This past week we ate on a chipotle patio and I think it was the first time we have even come close to a restaurant!

Inside in a restaurant, I don’t know. I guess when kids are vaccinated which looks like 2022? Indoors without masks is tough. We don’t have family to babysit and I feel less good about a random babysitter for now so not sure about date nights.

Travel - we have done 3 long road trips to bunker with family since covid (thanks to virtual work and school). We felt ok running inside for bathroom breaks and it was kind of fun to find places to eat outside on the way. We have another big road trip planned for the summer. But flying, I don’t know. We’re tentatively planning to fly to see family at Christmas because weather is too dicey to drive that far and hopefully cases will be really low. But it is going to totally weird me out if we do it!

I’m hoping for our January kid bdays things will feel normal-ish. With all these things, I’m hoping case numbers basically disappear once vaccines have been out a long time but where we live, I don’t know how many holdouts there will be ... here’s hoping little kid vaccines stay on target too. Even then I think I’ve kind of forgotten how to be normal!!

RE non-vaccinated people: I feel like the reality is covid will be around for the rest of our lives, and lots of people are not going to get vaccinated. It will be really hard to avoid them, so I'm just going to lean on the data that the vaccines are really, really effective.

Of course that relies on all of us being vaccinated, which won't happen for awhile. If I'm not sure if someone has been vaccinated, we will only socialize in an outdoor setting (if at all) until our whole family has been vaccinated.

I'll get my 2nd vaccine in two weeks. DH will probably get his first in a month or two.

I'm surprised I have almost no desire to eat inside a restaurant. I'm sure I will once things open up but right now the idea of it feels so foreign.

As a family all of our summer plans are camping within 120 miles. DH and I are hoping to attend a wedding at a camping/woodsy resort in Europe in August. It's a longshot and we don't anticipate any sightseeing or restauranting ( ). My in-laws just invited the family for a beach vacation in Mexico in Spring 2022 that's nice to think about. I hope the kids are vaccinated by then so we can go.

I haven't missed kids' birthday parties. I look forward to having more options to celebrate the birthday kid but I don't need a ton of other kids around.

I'm most looking forward to seeing family and friends. My vaccinated parents drove up for Spring Break last night. We're seeing my nephews for the first time in over a year for Easter, masked, distanced and outside.

My son's birthday was in early March when the weather was too uncertain for an outdoor event. So, we scheduled a belated party for mid April. It will be outdoors and masked / socially distanced. I hired a skateboard instructor who will bring gear and ramps to set up in our driveway. Then we will have pizza and cupcakes. Need to figure out how to spread the kids out for eating. When we host events like this, we use our basement Bilco doors for bathroom access. We only use our basement for limited purposes, and none of the guests enter the main part of our home.

This is the third event we have hosted for my son's class. The other two were a Halloween egg hunt and a Valentine Exchange. They have been fully remote all year and have only had school via Zoom. Other than our events and a few park playdates, they never see each other in person.

My second vaccine is next week, and my birthday is at the end of the month. I'm planning to book a massage for my birthday!!

I am pretty paranoid about indoor dining, and it's now spring here. I will probably stick to outdoor dining for awhile longer.

Travel... not sure what to think with my unvaccinated kids. I would LOVE to plan a vacation for this summer.

Traveling by plane or eating inside I would be willing to do once fully vaccinated (I have one shot so far). Especially given the comments by the CDC head this week re: low risk of transmission once vaccinated. In reality, I think the earliest we're likely to fly anywhere would be Thanksgiving. We didn't fly that often before Covid either! We're already driving to stay at a beach house with my ILs in June and then with my family in the fall. All adults will be fully vaccinated.

Regarding a bday party, right now I'd do one outside, but not sure when I would inside while kids aren't able to be vaccinated. I already eat at restaurants outside -- I'd do most things outdoors, the risk of transmission is extremely low.

I’ll add that we’ve travelled by car multiple times over this last year - renting cabins in northern Mi twice and then driving to Florida to stay w vaccinated in laws. But we kept our rules of not going inside anywhere (ordering curbside groceries, takeout only, drive throughs etc). We even had a portable toilet in the car .

It was nice to have a change of scenery. And we thought we should take advantage of DH’s remote work flexibility with these trips while the kids are young and we are not worried about academics.

Probably next year or when my work place opens up again. (Work place has very strict requirements and will not open up until there is only isolated cases of less than 1 per 100k for at least a month, so basically covid is a thing of the past). Well have to see how things go. We'll have a newborn within a week or two so I don't plan on any possible exposure to her for at least a year.

@LadyDi: yes, so draining. I had hoped that after 2 weeks with my MIL he would stay with her for short periods of time, was a no go.

We're all in on all of the things. We were exposed at a super small family gathering where no one had symptoms or known exposures back at Thanksgiving and 3 out of the 5 of us have confirmed through antibody testing that we had it at one point (only symptoms ever where taste/smell changes and we quarantined). We mask but are willing to do a lot more. I started to see increased clinginess and anxiety in my kids as well so we started doing more to prioritize mental health for them. We've mostly done road trips to family, outdoor dining and hanging out with friends that they already go to school with. We're lucky in that here vaccines are available so we're getting first doses this week without feeling like we're taking it away from others with no immunity.

Good questions. We're almost there - I'm getting my second dose tomorrow and DH is one week out. I also had covid (nanny exposure) in December, and our kids had it too (asymptomatic), so they have antibodies - that colors my comfort level a bit.

I'll be comfortable with indoor dining (we have been doing outdoor dining, though picky about spacing of tables) once we're fully vaccinated, especially since restaurant workers have had priority for vaccines for a while now.

I'll also be willing to travel, but I kind of want the restrictions to loosen (masks, etc) before we go anywhere exciting. Domestic travel (on planes) to visit family, we'll do. Maybe even visiting places like San Francisco, which we've been meaning to go to for a while but haven't been able to fit in.

For birthdays, we have a fall and a winter birthday so outdoor parties aren't really feasible, and I don't want to put people in an uncomfortable spot for indoor birthday parties until people are vaccinated, so we may skip another year of parties. We've been able to do cool things for the kids anyway (apple picking for my son, a fancy dinner out for my daughter) so they aren't missing parties.

I'm looking forward to having vaccinated friends over, indoor playdates and things like that too. I think it will be a mix of who is comfortable and who isn't for a while, but I get the feeling that several of our friends are ready.

DH and I have two weeks until we get our second shots. We're planning on flying to a family get together at a beach house in August with all fully vaccinated adults and 5 kids under 6. Honestly, the risks are so low for little kids that we'll keep masking, but we'll start to do indoor activities again. The kids are already in daycare/school. The one exception I haven't figured out is a pool. Can't mask at a pool and the outdoor ones can get pretty crowded during summer typically.

We're apparently insane trying to buy a house in this market, so I estimate no other big vacations for us this year, but we'd stick to road trips just for budget anyway.

My BIL is a bit conspiracy theorist and doesn't want to get a vaccine, so we'll probably stick to outdoor gatherings with them until our case count is super low.

@codeitall: I just bought our outdoor pool membership this morning and personally am way less worried about an outdoor pool (even a crowded one) than an airplane - or also than daycare/school - because being outdoors massively lowers the risk of transmission (you're still safer outdoors unmasked at a similar distance than indoors masked). Right now our state rules only allow pools to be at 50% capacity, but if case counts fall this summer, I assume they'll allow more people in.

I’ve been eating in restaurants pretty much this whole time. I live in a basically Covid zéro Zero province so that kind of stuff never really stopped. My girls were able to have their fall birthday parties last year (though they were smaller than usual).

Travel is what we have been most impacted by. The trade off for our relatively normal Covid Zero life is very strict quarantine rules. My inlaws live just a few hours away in the next province over and we haven’t been able to see them since October. Doing so would require a 2 week quarantine when we got there, and a 2 week quarantine when we got back - no exceptions. Sigh. I miss travel so much. Dh and I are hoping to do a 10 year anniversary trip to the Caribbean in January and then take the kids to Disney World next March. But who knows.