It’s been a difficult few months. Covid has hit the US hard, and things are getting worse and we keep hearing “it’s going to get worse before it gets better”, and that “better” part still hasn’t happened yet.
Since the last time I posted, so much have changed in our lives, and it’s now in a weird state where we feel stable and content, but am also just living one day/week at a time.
In the meantime, our little one keeps growing into this happy, smart, excited, curious human. It’s just fascinating to watch him grow and develop.
Childcare
We have come to realize that childcare is the most important component in our (lockdown) life. It contributes so much to our happiness and mental health. Having childcare provider determines whether or not we’re mentally functional or not.
Very very fortunately, we have childcare at this moment. Looking back, our timeline was like this (dates are all approximate because I’ve lost sense of exact dates):
- 3/20: Daycare closed for two weeks.
- 4/1: Daycare says they’ll be closed for the entire April.
- 4/28: Daycare says maybe 5/15 for reopening.
- 5/10: Daycare says “maybe, but we’re really scared”
- 5/11: I started working on reopening plans for Daycare, became their volunteer IT department, started making processes for parents and daycare to reopen
- 5/26: Daycare took our son in and started following the reopening procedures we put in place for them.
The procedure I put together for the daycare went from one online form (submitted with Google Form) to one survey, one on-going test result report, one waiver, and one guidelines.
It’s been two months since we sent him back to the family daycare and we couldn’t be happier! Our son loves going back to the daycare. He really really thrived there, and he runs into their house every day; and sometimes doesn’t want to leave when being picked up. I think he was getting a bit bored at home, and he was really driving us crazy trying to work from home while entertaining him.
Outdoors
Since our normal go-to places with the kid are pretty much all closed now (discovery museum, railroad museum, most of the playgrounds, etc), we have come to really love going outdoors. Since we’ve been already outdoorsy people to begin with, this wasn’t a hard transition. It’s just that now we’re always outdoors. We go on hikes with him and the dog, we go see horses (there’s a horse sancturary near us), sheep/goats (there are sometimes goats in the surrounding areas for clearing bushes), cows (there are some ranches near us that have hiking trails near them), ducks (a pond near our farmer’s market has 100s of ducks and geese), and chickens (an elementary school nearby has a chicken coop).
It’s amazing to go to all these places with a child. He gets so excited, repeatedly mimic the animal sounds or their names (sometimes in both languages), and gets shocked when he’s close to them. We also really love having animals in his life.
We also go hiking, go biking (we have a child seat attached to our e-MTBs), and go to the beaches. Overall, we’re really loving our outdoors life and feel extremely spoiled living in an area where it’s usually only a short drive away to these amazing outdoor spots. We don’t have to travel far and don’t have to stay overnight. All we need to do is to wear masks when there are others around, and we only buy food and picnic in parks or on our hikes when there’s plenty of distance.
Mental State
We generally only read/watch news that are necessary for us. Basically just all the local measures and what the local government recommends us to do. We don’t have the energy to pay attention on things too far away from us and we have no control of. So, that makes us pretty happy mentally.
About our son: he’s still this happy, adventurous, excited child. But he definitely started to be more cautious with other people. We basically don’t see people outside of our immediate family anymore, except for one weekend when we hosted all my in-laws over for my MIL’s 85th birthday. They stayed in the yard, wore masks, and stayed socially distant between households. During that party, our son was very cautious with everyone at first, staying right behind my legs; but he happily opened up after an hour or so. The whole lockdown definitely had an effect on him, but we’re happy we are safe and healthy. All the other stuff can wait.