Family Life Through Lockdown – Then and Now

If someone had said to me a year ago that we would be in lockdown for over two months this year, I would not have believed it.  Ten weeks has passed and it all still feels really surreal to me.

We are in some sort of strange routine, muddling around each other, trying to keep each other sane, juggling working from home, general household chores, entertainment and of course education. It is fair to say that it has been a bit of a learning curve for all of us.

I have really enjoyed spending so much time with the kids. Obviously, the teens have to live up to their true teenagerishness by lurking in their rooms a lot making lots of noise and mess.  But we have spent time together and it has been rather civilised. On the whole. Well, we haven’t tried to kill each other.  Yet.

I was thinking the other day that in ten weeks, things have changed a bit. Some areas need work, some have gone downhill quicker than me on a skateboard and some, yes some have been raging success.

Getting up

Day one, week one of lockdown it was all systems go. We were maintaining the usual routine.  Everyone up at the usual time, showers and breakfasted ready to do PE with Joe Wicks at 9.

Now, the boys rarely see the mornings and one of them now thinks that exercise is walking from his bed to the toilet and back again. My daughter and I are still getting up and doing Joe Wicks, however, that time is getting slightly later and later each day.

It turns out that when you technically don’t have to get up to physically leave the house, it is so much harder to get out of bed.

Cooking actual food

Week one and I was flourishing my pans around more than Jamie Oliver. We had amazing breakfasts, tasty lunches and fabulous dinners.

Now, breakfasts are a bit on the basic side, lunches are well, rather receptive and dinners are still being cooked mostly, but with slightly less flourishing and the pure relief and joy when our favourite fish and chip shop reopened last week was quite overwhelming.  We had our first takeaway Costa yesterday, sat in the garden and it tasted wonderful and I know that both teens are watching keenly to see when our local McDonalds reopens. I do love cooking but every now and then it is nice to cheat and have someone else do it for you.

On the plus side, I have managed to get the kids baking and cooking a lot more and trying different foods which has been a real bonus of this whole experience.  Hopefully, they won’t be heading to McDonalds straight away.

Homeschooling

I have mentioned before that even though I am a teacher, I have found homeschooling my daughter quite exhausting. She isn’t always the easiest pupil and all this jumping around from subject to subject is seriously hard going. We started lockdown with structure and enthusiasm.  There were timetables and planning and a structured day from 9 until 3.

Now, we are tending to get up later, taking longer to get up and the days have become more of a make it up as we go along kind of style.  The timetable is still on the fridge but to be honest, we are not sticking to it and some days, I give up and we just go for a walk.  Because we can and I think exercise is just as important as anything else and to be honest, why not?

The teen’s attitude to home learning has taken a similar downward turn. It did take him a week or so to get into the habit of working at home, particularly with his brother having no school work due to GCSEs being cancelled. Then it really worked for him.  The study is on the top floor across the landing from his bedroom so he could sidle between his bed, the shower and his school work quite easily.

The last couple of weeks however, his school day is starting later and later and his bed is definitely more appealing than his school work.  With home learning carrying on for him until September, the next few weeks might just feel like a lifetime.

Family Time

I do love my family, I really do. As I said before, we have been muddling along nicely together.  The first few weeks were blissful.  We all spent time together quite enjoying the strange new routine.

There haven’t been too many arguments but I am definitely noticing that over the last week or so, there are signs of the general state of eternal happiness and love is starting to fray around the edges.

And I am ashamed to say that that is due mainly to me.

I think I am getting to the stage where I crave a bit of ‘me-time’. Just half an hour to myself without someone or some dog demanding food, help, emotional support. I love them all dearly and I know I am so, so lucky to have them.  But. I will love them more when they are all back at school and work.  And if they are all honest, I think they probably feel the same.  We all need some structure and routine back in our lives and to be able to leave the house and do normal things.

Exercising

This is an interesting one and definitely a game of two halves.  We all started lockdown with the best intentions. We were all doing Joe Wicks PE sessions most days. Not together, I hasten to add, that would be a disaster.  I started the day doing the session with my daughter.  The older teen would drag his brother out of bed to do a session later on and then my husband would do it when somewhere in between.  The boys cleared a space in the garage and made a bit of a gym and used that some days and the older teen started running.

As the weeks have progressed, the younger teen has done less and less exercise.  He has been out for the odd bike ride, and to be fair, he goes for miles, but he prefers the more sedentary approach to life these days. The older teen is still exercising but not with the enthusiasm he had at the beginning of lockdown. He is desperate for the gyms to reopen but I think that might be a while away yet.

The real success story on the fitness front has been my daughter and I.  Neither of us a particularly keen on exercise.  My daughter does quite a lot of exercise in school but apart from dog walks, I don’t do any really.  We have stuck with the Joe Wicks sessions and really enjoy doing them. Added to that, we have now started the couch to 5k app which is going well. we have also gone on dog walks, cycle rides and played badminton as our neighbour created a makeshift net outside our houses.  We invested in some badminton rackets and played most days.  It is the best fun but can get very competitive.

One of our neighbours has also started doing fitness sessions (socially distanced, of course) literally on the grass outside our house.  She is doing them free or charge and we have both been doing those too.  I don’t think I have been so fit for a very long time, I just hope I can keep it up once I am back at work.

So that has been lockdown for us.  This weird and wonderful few months has been mostly positive and I think we will take a lot of positives from it, however, some standards have slipped and I think we are all looking forward to a time when life starts to return to normal.  If normal ever happens.