As I’m sitting here writing this, my entire family is home. I’m not sure what our world will look like by the time you’re reading this, but I’m going to guess that, at this point, all our lives have changed somewhat.
Both my girls are at home taking classes online for school, which has been a huge change for all of us. My oldest had to leave her freshman year of college, where she was thriving, and my youngest in fourth grade misses her friends so much.
But even though being in our home for so long has brought some challenges, it really has brought us together so much more. And I’m hearing this from a lot of families. We haven’t gone crazy yet, and my husband and I still like each other — ha! I’m taking lots of pictures and actually planning on making a photo album of all the things we’ve been doing as family to remember this once we’re back to our new normal.
I mean, I have to take a picture of my husband wiping down groceries for 20 minutes in the garage before bringing them in; otherwise I’m not sure our grandkids will believe it.
My youngest daughter is creating a time capsule book so she’ll be able to remember her experience for years to come, too. I want to share three ways we’ve changed as a family during the quarantine — and I hope we don’t forget about them.
1. We’re playing a lot more board games and doing puzzles.
Actually, we put together our very first family puzzle. Fun tip: put a puzzle together, then use Mod Podge to glue it and have every person in the family sign the back, along with writing the year. You’ll always remember the puzzle you did during the quarantine. I hope we’ll be instituting for good a family game/puzzle night moving forward.
2. My kids are becoming more independent.
My 9-year-old daughter made some healthy peanut butter cookies on her own the other day. I taught her how to do her own laundry and wash the dishes. I definitely will appreciate the help moving forward.
3. We’re spending a lot more quality time together.
We’re doing so many things with each other that we normally wouldn’t be doing — or maybe that we would have ever done together. I even agreed to a “blind makeover” challenge in the midst of finding ways to have some fun. And ya know what? It was fun. I’m sure I would have never done that before, though. I was probably way too busy. We also had a paint party and painted “kindness rocks” together. That was so fun. I’m just finding the gratitude in all of this. I hope you are, too.
I know this is tough. It is for us, too. We just continue to try and find the bright side of things. If you look close enough, you’ll always find them. I’ve said from the beginning that I feel like this whole experience is going to be transformative for all of us in some way. I think we’ll all appreciate each other and everything we all bring to the world a lot more.
