Locked down but not out

It's the fifth day of "just the three of us." Five days since the schools closed. The second day since the government locked down on people gathering and travelling.

I'm relieved by the restrictions since hopefully that will forestall most of the holiday-makers coming to Cornwall and reduce pressure on the very limited health service here. We still feel distant from the virus, but we're now in a stage where I know someone who knows someone who died. It's getting closer.

The Weekend before Lockdown

To replace the more traditional mother's day celebration, I bought my mother a puzzle box from Boxed Locks. We went round on Saturday to drop it off and did a doorstep exchange: we left the puzzle on the doorstep; they sent their dog out so we could take him for a short walk. (They're walking the dog themselves, this was just a little bonus.) We wiped the lead and the dog down with antibacterial wipes when we got back.

On Sunday, Mother's Day, the kids made me breakfast in bed: scrambled eggs and tomato with a cup of tea. With all the Pandemic goings on, their class had abandoned mother's day crafts, but their Dad had ordered some cards online for them to give me, so I didn't miss out!

After months of rain, the weather had finally turned sunny, so we went to the beach as a safe Mother's Day outing—if, by some miracle, we were the only ones with this idea. We weren't. But we went at low tide was so that we could scramble over the rocks to the next cove. Core muscle-exercise, science/geography exploration, teamwork and problem-solving! And most importantly, fun, with at least one little nook noted down for when the weather's warmer.

The beach cafés had adapted to takeaway, which took care of our lunch plans. A menu was blu-tacked onto the glass doors along with a sign directing customers to the takeout window. At the takeout window was another sign asking people to queue responsibly. When we joined, everybody was keeping 2m distance from the next person in line... but then somebody jumped in front of me, not realising there was a queue, while the next people joined right behind us, leaving no gap at all.

The Great British Public are renowned for their queuing abilities, but we have much to learn when it comes to pandemic etiquette.

The cafe had taped up its picnic tables to stop people using them, but there were some public ones on the boardwalk which were heavily trafficked. I warned the children not to use them, but one came free as we got our food, and they stubbornly sat down, my son insisting he wanted a table.

It was a 'pick your battles' moment of parenting and I caved. I regretted it almost instantly, because it was such a reckless thing to do under the circumstances. We didn't have a way of cleaning the table nor any handgel.

On the way home, we discussed it. I explained that if somebody with the coronavirus had used that table in the past couple of hours, we had almost certainly just infected ourselves. Like the rest of the world, I'm fuzzy on how long the virus lasts on surfaces and how easy it is to transmit from one, but when you're sitting and eating in that space for 15 minutes, you're really giving the virus every opportunity to spread.

To an extent, we take that risk every time we go out in public. We weren't the only people rock climbing, for example. However, there were far fewer people on the rocks and a much broader space to navigate with hundreds of different routes across; transmission would require an infected person to touch the same hold we did since last the tide came through. We'll go rock climbing again, but we won't eat at another picnic table.

While we've still got a few days before we know if we got away with it or not, it was easy to see why the government put us on stricter measures Monday evening. We watched that announcement live. Nothing in it was a surprise.

My son asked: "Have you ever known anything like this before."

I replied: "No. Your grandchildren are going to ask you to tell them your memories of this for their school project one day."

He's a history buff. As much as he's taking on board how serious this is, he also loves the experiencing-history-firsthand side of it.

My daughter is less concerned all round. She's more inclined to worry than my son, but she's also less interested in the details of what's going on. Of the three of us, she's going to suffer the most from the lack of social interaction, but so far the sunshine is making up for that.

HomeschoolingSo far, the daily schedule I worked out is holding up. An hour of English activities at 9am, an hour of Maths activities at 11am and an hour of 'topic work' (i.e. something vaguely educational of our choice) in the afternoon. By the end of Monday though, I was starting to feel the lack of alone time.

It's an odd thing to complain about in self-isolation, especially since I'm so grateful I do live with other people and I'm not totally alone. I'm an introvert, but I need low-key company. On the other hand, I also need my solitude, and it's so damned hard to get that with the kids at home.

Finally, the parent-child dynamic means that I have to be "on" in all social interactions. I can't sit there and just be on the fringes (well, sometimes I do, but that's not an effective situation since it's usually me snapping at them that I need space.) I'm also terrible at multi-tasking, so my own work (mostly paperwork and the inbox) was not getting done.

So today I told the children that they would have to work independently and leave me alone to get on with my own work in another room. This needs practice (they kept coming in to talk to me), but we're going to do this periodically so I don't burn out. We're otherwise enjoying homeschooling and distance-learning... It's actually a really good opportunity to do one-on-one with them that I don't otherwise make use of.

The weather's remained glorious, so we've been outside a lot. After Monday's announcement, we cancelled our trip to Dartmoor (no more seeing my boyfriend, even at a safe social distance), but we biked down to the local woods, built an aqueduct with a stream, rocks and some hot wheels track, and then nearly killed ourselves biking back up. Today, the kids had a water fight with the boy next door while I weeded the garden. We weren't wearing coats and we got hot! It's really impossible to describe just how much of a morale boost it is to be outside and enjoying it.

On the flipside, I bought the new Animal Crossing game on the Switch, so we've been spending a lot of time sat on our sofa exploring a virtual island. We all have characters, we work together to achieve various goals and today we managed to get the museum open so we did a family 'tour' of that.

There's responsible parenting and then there's geek parenting. In isolation, we can make time for both.