What I’m NOT doing during Quarantine 2020

I feel like my kids on a road trip right now – are we there yet? Is this whole pandemic slowing down and over yet?! Nope. We’re still here and finding our new current normal. There have been some beautiful moments in all of this, to be totally honest. In that same spirit, there have been some whoa ugly ones too. But this is our delightfully chaotic life and we are choosing to make the best of this crazy situation and see the good parts.

My family is pretty mellow about a lot of what’s happening in the world, and we tend to roll with whatever life throws at us pretty well – and, after some minor course corrections, our ship seems to be cruising along as well as we can right now. With that being said, we Wuistingers have made some choices about things that we are deliberately NOT doing – or not doing much of.

What my family is not doing during Quarantine 2020:

• Hiding what’s happening from our kids
  • Court and I have always been as open and honest as is age-appropriate to us with our children. We treat them like the humans that they are: intelligent, thoughtful, emotional people who deserve to know all that they can about what we share. There are some things that our children know a lot about that their peers may not. There are no off-limit topics around here, which can make dinner conversations interesting, to say the least! Skylar is especially empathic and super quick to observe and absorb everything around her, so with this current situation, Court and I felt that we needed to get ahead of it and let her gently know what was possibly coming: school closing for an extended Spring Break, people not being allowed out of our homes, etc with as much notice and explanation as we could. She took it as well as a 6 year old could and has said a few times that she “really doesn’t like this virus.” Neither do we, sweet girl, neither do we. We emphasize the things that we do to stay healthy in our house and try to focus on the positive things, but we do not hide what is going on from them.
• Stressing school or structured learning
  • Our kids are little. At this point, we’re doing some of the district suggested activities and things, but we aren’t adding a ton of stress by trying to become full time school-in-crisis teachers. Court and I are stressed and our kids can tell, so we feel that adding a whole bunch of structured to-do items onto that is not going to help anyone one bit. Thankfully, we have an amazing teacher who agrees that play is incredibly important and that our kids need our focus and attention more than anything. Our family tends to science lessons into everything (ask me about that time Court and the kids spent an evening chucking stuff off of the 2nd floor landing while he explained gravity and all of those equations to them!) because that’s just who we are, so we’re continuing that and a few other things, but not commiting to 2 hours of “school” each day or anything.
• Living on our phones and social media
  • Hi, increased anxiety and inability to shut my brain off. This is what happens when my screen time and social media time creep up – and I’m not a great human when I am anxious. It’s for sure not my natural state and my brain just can’t even handle it. So, knowing this, I have been super deliberate about what I’m scrolling, watching, and listening to – and this means even being careful about some podcasts that I listen to. I can’t handle the news cycles; they are just too fear-based and repetitive. I want to hear good things too, like how many people have recovered and who is getting to go home or love on their grandchildren again or things like that!
• Making giant lists of ALL.THE.THINGS.
  • We’re just not – we’ve got some projects that are getting done around here, but they seem to be small “eh, we’ll get to it someday” type projects – also? I don’t want to run to HomeDepot 50 times per week… although, now that I’m typing this, that could be a way to break the monotony! But, when the mood strikes and the timing is right (hi, we’re home for awhile!), I’ve done a few deep cleaning projects and such – like the other day when, somehow, my lid/straw to my water bottle flipped and landed BEHIND THE FRIDGE. What?! Oh, Lord, why?! Well, I was in a good mood and figured “hey, why not?!” and proceeded to clean the ENTIRE outside of the fridge (PSA – dust the top of your refrigerator, it’s gross and you need to…you’re welcome!) and scrubbed the floor and wall behind it once I cleaned out all of the random crap that had disappeared back there over the last 5 (maybe?) years! Holy dust and lint, Batman.

Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?! Thankfully, 2018 and 2019 were years of slowing down for our family. Looking back, I’m grateful that the Universe asked us to embrace that journey then so we were not thrown into this totally. We could not have ever known that this was coming, but I’m glad to have had at least a tiny bit of practice for it. If this is all new to you, my suggestion is to pick 2 things to say “NO” to right now. And give yourself some grace and space to process, y’all This is not easy. It is hard for reasons that aren’t crazy obvious – and we will get through this. Promise.

Stay well, y’all.

xoxox,

Dr. Jamie