Blog/Finding joy in COVID-19 Lockdown #stayathome #savelives
30th April 2020
And so here we are in week seven of lockdown.
If someone tapped me on the shoulder at the beginning of the year and said ‘by the way matey, in March all the schools and pubs will close, you’ll only be allowed out of your house for emergency supplies and a prescribed amount of government approved exercise’ I’d have freaked out (if I were to have believed it was possible, which is unlikely).
However, that’s the situation in which we find ourselves, and we’re all trying to make the best of it.
There are some people who will find themselves, through no fault of their own, in real dire straits, whether it be practically, financially or mentally, and those of us who are lucky to be able to keep the wolves from the door are trying to lend a hand where we can, whilst managing our own – sometimes precarious – situations.
A new and terrifying concept to a lot of us parents is that of ‘home-schooling‘. While we’re all trying to keep our professional lives ticking along as best we can, we’ve also got to make time to ensure that our kids are affected as little as possible. And that includes trying to provide some sort of education for them in the weeks and months they’re away from proper teachers who know what they’re doing, have had actual training, don’t lose their temper and who don’t have other work getting in the way.
Our approach – my wife and I – has been fairly laisse-faire, I have to be honest. We try to keep our two (8 and 4) entertained with wholesome activities, attempt to keep screen time to a minimum, give them as much of our attention as we can muster, and have a crack at the tasks their school shares with us as and when we get them.
But every now and again, we go rogue. We do something purely because we think we’ll be entertained doing it, and our friends and family will be entertained watching it. Something like this…
It might only take half an hour or so, but it brightens our day, people seem to enjoy watching it and we’ll look back on it in years to come and hopefully say ‘That lockdown business – it wasn’t all bad, was it??’
Hopefully, however desperate your situation might seem, there are one or two glimpses of hope every now and again for you too, and that if support isn’t currently at hand then it will arrive very soon.
Stay safe everyone.