We've been under "Stay at Home" orders for 60 days now, and I want to record some of what I'm experiencing.
What I'm enjoying right now is the lowered expectations. In some ways this is an idyllic time that reminds me of my childhood summers. We typically had nowhere to go and just passed our days at home, playing in the yard and the woods and inventing fantastical worlds for our dolls indoors.
That feeling visits me once in a while and I feel a sense of luxuriousness about the sheer volume of time I have with no obligations. No appointments to take the kids to, no school-related obligations in the evenings. We just simply breathe in and out and stay at home.
At the same time, this situation can be incredibly stressful, especially if we tune into the news media too often. Anxiety is running rampant and it can be very easy to get keyed into that. So I've let go of some things to just bring the stress level down a notch.
One thing I've let go of is concern about my kids' grades in school. I do care about their education, and we have settled into a nice routine for their schoolwork at home. I'm drawing the line at work completion. They have to make an effort to complete the work and hand it in. I'm not worried about their grades, however. It's just not a stress that we need right now.
And so it goes... I hope we can hold onto some of the slower pace of life when we emerge from this time of quarantine.
