How COVID-19 Has Affected Life – So Far

So, I thought it would be interesting to document some of the ways the Coronavirus has been changing our life.

I’m curious if when we look back years from now this will just be a little blip in our lives or if it will have affected every day life.

When I was a teenager I used to keep a journal, but in the last few years this space has become my journal so this is where I will document it.

 

 

Just a little timeline to start:

Monday, March 9th – friends who were in China but had spent the last number of weeks in Thailand due to the virus were on their way home. I met some ladies from church at the friends’ house where we dropped off some groceries so they would have some food when they arrived home the next day. These friends had chosen to do a 14 day voluntary self quarantine so they wouldn’t be leaving the house. I was with a bunch of introverts and we were jokingly asking how one gets a 14 day quarantine. At this point COVID-19 was very much something overseas, not something we were actually thinking would come to us.

Thursday, March 12th – our province got it’s first case of COVID-19 (someone who got it while travelling and then came home).

Friday, March 13th – things were really starting to blow up locally, Jared brought his laptop home from work because he didn’t know if he would be going to work on Monday. That evening the university announced it was cancelling all in-person classes.

The next week other school institutions followed suite and by the end of the next week all schools, colleges and universities were closed.

 

HOW LIFE HAS BEEN LOOKING:

 

+ we are pretty much not leaving our house except to get groceries and go for little walks around the block. As of yesterday, March 25th, our city had closed even closed down all playgrounds.

 

 

+ the last two weeks we have joined our church services thanks to the power of the internet. I think most churches still had in-person services that first week but because our church rents a building from a school and they cancelled all building rentals we couldn’t.

 

+ last week temperatures were still quite cold, with some mornings still being -30 with the wind so we haven’t been getting outside as much as I would like. That being said, I have never seen so many people walking around my neighborhood, normally the number of people outside ramps up in the beginning of the spring, but generally it’s not this early when the temperatures are still as cold as they have been.

 

 

+ Jared is still working (what a blessing!) but now instead of having an hour commute in his day he just heads down the hall to his office. We like having him at home and this is way too easy to get used to. Plus, he made us oatmeal cookies before our church service on Sunday, we’ve got to keep him around.

 

+ this pandemic has also affected the foster care world quite a bit. One such way is that our social workers are only doing the most necessary of visits and all family visits are cancelled. There is a visiting suite where we’ve taken our little guys to visit birth family before and those have closed down and our worker informed us that even those who were doing non-supervised visits cannot do those any more. My heart breaks for these birth families who are cut off from their children.

 

 

+ being cut off socially as we are we’ve been very grateful for video chat. The kids have each been able to chat with some friends and for the last two weeks we’ve met with our church community group this way. It’s nice being able to check it and see how others are doing.

 

+ while our friends were still in self-isolation after international travel there were a couple of times where I went and picked up some groceries for them. Self-isolation grocery drop off looks like putting the groceries on the front step, knocking on the door and then waving at them through the window.

 

 

+ our homeschool hasn’t looked a whole lot different (other than the lack of outings and hanging out with friends), the kids still learn about what sounds interesting to them (which is currently a lot of science videos on YouTube) and they have been playing Lego together for hours and hours.

 

+ there have been so many times were I’ve thought “Is this real life?”, this is just such a weird state we are living in.

 

 

+ this has allowed for some extra reading time, so there’s a fun bonus! I’ve also made a couple of extra book-ish videos.

 

Honestly, as a pretty hard core introvert I can’t say I’m sad about this social distancing.

I’m sure I’ve missed some ways that life has changed but this is the general idea for now. It hasn’t been that long yet, it’s weird not knowing how long it will last.

How has COVID-19 affected your daily life? How are you feeling about it?