It’s hard to remember that only a week ago, we were on the road home from Florida. It seems like months! But here we are, one week into social distancing and school closures and work from home.
Honestly, it hasn’t been bad. I felt fairly panicked on Monday, particularly that evening when the text arrived saying that schools would be closed through at least April 10. (The first closure had just been for this week.) But as the days went on, I calmed down. I attribute this to three things:
First, I stopped consuming as much news. I’m still checking it often, but just scanning the headlines and moving on instead of reading all these doom and gloom articles.
And second, I lowered my expectations wayyyy down on how much school/education we should be doing, and how much work I should be doing. On the education front, I am confident that Emma and Charlotte will be just fine even if school cancellations last months. We can work on things here and there at home, but I’m not going to kill myself trying to set up schedules or activities. I keep seeing so much stuff online, and have given myself permission to just let 99% of that stuff go.
Emma had one project due yesterday, so we did finish that: her personal timeline. It turned out great!
(Starting Monday, we are going to be receiving ~4.5 hours of schoolwork per week from Emma’s teacher, to be done over the course of the week on whatever timeline or schedule works best for us. This seems like a very reasonable approach and amount of work, and I’m glad to see our school system reacting well so far.)
On the work front, I’m focusing on essentials and letting the rest slide. JSC was at “Stage 2” (telework encouraged) on Monday and Tuesday and went to “Stage 3” (telework mandatory) on Wednesday. (Stage 3 also officially closed the daycare, although we had already kept Charlotte home.) I had a few large meetings that went surprisingly well, considering they have never, ever been held with every single participant being remote. We are all being forced to accommodate each other in new ways, and I actually have some optimism that what we learn from this experience could improve our whole work culture in the future! Fingers crossed.
Jose went in to work for half days on Monday and Tuesday but has been able to telework since then. His small company has not closed, but they’ve been very flexible with schedules and remote work, understanding that a lot of people now have children at home for the foreseeable future.
And the girls? Well, they seem to actually be LOVING this. We have talked a little about why things are different, and they understand that there are new bad germs out there that we don’t want to catch. But they don’t seem overly worried (which is good) and are having fun. Emma commented the other night as she was getting in bed that she likes how we’ve been spending so much time together. It definitely made me stop and realize that despite all the stress Jose and I have been feeling, there are a lot of good things about this situation as well.
We have gotten out of the house for at least an hour or so each day, and that’s been good for all of us. Another silver lining — we rarely do family walks or bike rides during “normal” life, and especially not on weekdays! It also helps that the weather is good this time of year. (If we’re still doing this in July, getting outside will be considerably less enjoyable.)
Jose and I have each been getting in some sort of workout on most days as well, which is great for my mood and overall energy. The other day Jose spotted some wild bluebonnets as he was on a bike ride, so we all walked back over the next day to check them out. Bluebonnet photos are totally a “Texas thing” that we had never done, so now we can say we have! Ha.
On the running front, the 5K that I had been training for (via Couch to 5K) has been officially postponed, which I expected. It was supposed to be on the 28th, so maybe I’ll do my own “virtual” 5K race that day…or maybe I’ll just do the usual more leisurely run. I actually stopped following Couch to 5K last week when we were at the beach, and switched gears a bit. I had reached the point where all the runs were just solid blocks of time — run 20 minutes, run 22 minutes, run 25 minutes — and found myself coming up with excuses for why I didn’t want to do them. That made me realize that I don’t actually care about being able to run for 20 minutes or 25 minutes without walking.
My running goals are not the same at this point in my life as the ones I had 10 or 15 years ago. These days, I don’t care if I’m slow as long as I’m doing something, and I just want to be in a good routine. SO! I abandoned C25K and have been doing run/walks on my own. I did 3/1 run/walk intervals when we were at the beach. And this week I’ve actually been doing 3/2 and loving it. It gets me out there and moving and sweating, but also doing it in a way I enjoy.
The one thing I haven’t done much of is sewing, actually. And it predates coronavirus, because I really haven’t sewn much of anything since getting back from QuiltCon. But I’ve got a few projects that are starting to gain steam, and now that we’ve got a week of the new normal under our belt, I anticipate getting back to my quilting. I was supposed to teach a class at Sparkly Elephant last night, so instead of outright cancelling we decided to do it as a Facebook Live! I had never used FB Live before and thought it was surprisingly fun.
I haven’t left the house other than to run or take the kids outside in a week now. I expected that to make me feel pretty stir crazy, but it really hasn’t. I’m usually an active and involved person, but I’m also very much a homebody. If I didn’t have kids, I would be totally fine with this stay-home setup for a good long while — I’m excellent at keeping myself entertained! — so a lot of my early anxiety stemmed from worrying about the girls, and whether they would get crazy, and whether we would all be fighting, and whether too much iPad would rot their brains. But, for the record, they are only normal levels of crazy, we are doing normal amounts of fighting, and iPads are not the devil.
I’m hoping to start blogging a bit more while we are all social distancing. Probably not long ones like this every day, but I suspect I may want to look back on this time someday and remember that it all turned out ok in the end.
Hang in there, friends!
Glad to hear about how others are doing, glad you’re finding a new routine for your family. This all happened so fast, or so it seems at least… we could have probably prepared for all of this weeks ago already.
Yeah, it’s a little mind-blowing how quickly things changed, but I guess we are all learning that we have to react quickly to a threat like this! In retrospect, I think we all could have prepared…but hindsight is 20/20. My husband and I were talking about it a few weeks ago, but even then I had zero thought that we would be where we are only a couple weeks later.