Tom Petty sang that “the waiting is the hardest part” and it was never more true than right now. All we’ve got is the waiting.

Waiting to see if schools will reopen, waiting for a vaccine or safe treatments, waiting to see if we’ll have jobs, if there will be enough food, rent money and an economy that will keep us going when and if the virus passes.

Other generations have faced worse challenges and made tougher sacrifices than staying home together, cut off from friends and activities. But we’re waiting to see just how big a toll all of this will take on us.

Right now, we figure if we have a roof over our heads and enough food, we have plenty to be thankful for.

We’re thankful for the Internet, which we worried was distracting our kids from more important things and now has become the main path to more important things, like hanging with friends, studying in school, playing games and doing projects.
We’re thankful for the farmworkers we see out laboring daily, that they are risking their lives to bring us fresh food at poverty wages, after some in this country labeled them as the enemy and spent too much time and money trying to wall them off.

We’re thankful for the supermarket clerks and cashiers, the gas station attendants, the police and firefighters, and the janitors and maintenance workers keeping us safe. And yes, of course, we are hugely grateful to the doctors and nurses who have the most dangerous jobs of all in facing off this highly contagious and scarily evolved killer virus.

We’re thankful to get all that family time we’ve been lacking in our 9 to 5 or 9 to 9 crush of working to earn the huge amounts we need to take care of families in one of the most expensive places on Earth.
And we are thankful for our readers for picking up the magazine and reading online and buying advertising, even when you are also waiting to see if you can stay in business.

Our goal is to give you information you need to get through this challenging time. In this issue we have articles about how to home school, how to get exercise indoors, how to donate breast milk for needy mothers, how to navigate the perils of foster parenting, how to build a classroom at home, how to find cool educational and fun websites, how to get jobs and build your immune system—to name a few.
We have a truly moving story about local moms who are sacrificing their safety to help the rest of us and an important one about how local people who have been laid off are coming up with new entrepreneurial businesses.

We’ve been doing community features like those for 22 years and hope to make it at least another 22.

The virus is throwing a monkey wrench into our ability to publish when so few businesses can afford ads or even have services they can advertise during lockdown. We’re asking for help from our readers to keep us printing. Some have already donated, including one family that will match readers’ donations up to $5,000.
We have 10 staff people and our basic printing expense is $15,000 a month. You can donate at our GoFundMe account here: bit.ly/3bILy9d or directly to our PayPal account at the Buy Now button here growingupsc.com/contact

Thanks in advance for anything you can do and thanks for reading and supporting the magazine!

Stay Safe
Brad Kava, Jennifer Ford, and Steve Dinnen