Well, let’s just say we are all trying to figure out the new normal following this COVID thing. I have been working from home since the first week or two of March (the days have run together and I can’t remember what exact day that even was) and my son has been home since the second week of March. With changes in our home lives, we have had to make major adjustments.
Dom has been working on his PhD online, we were trying to do homework and Zoom classes for my son, and I have been trying to attending meetings and do all my work in my office/craft room. The first month or two was tense! Dom was trying to record videos for his own blog and classes, I was in constant meetings, and Devlin was trying to find something to do. We had to figure out who was doing what so the background noise didn’t bother the other person. As the days and weeks went on, we all realized that background noise of your family watching a video, recording videos, attending meetings, and dogs barking was the new normal. My work meetings always had the same things I did in the background. People in meetings weren’t putting their cameras on because we all had bed head (or just hadn’t been able to get in haircut in forever). We are lucky that I can work from home full time, even though I was working from home at least two or three times a week before. But how did we do it?
Every day we would try to get together and see what each person had planned. My meetings were on and off all day long, but my company was very understanding that if you couldn’t attend something due to helping kids with homework, it wasn’t a concern. Dom and I would discuss what he needed to do with school and then look at my meeting calendar to see what times worked best. There were some days our schedules didn’t line up, but we would go to different parts of the house to limit the ability to hear the other person. Sometimes I would have to bring Devlin into my “office” to do homework while I was in meetings, so I knew he was actually doing it. We would get behind by a few days and struggle to get his assignments done before his teacher would drop off the next set of worksheets.
Besides work life, my personal life was a disaster. I had been killing it at OrangeTheory Fitness, but that shut down. Grocery stores were bare…and the lines to get in or even check out were insane. I have always loved doing Walmart Grocery Pickup, but when they couldn’t find ¾ of your stuff, what is the point?! This made us dig through our deep freezer and eat food we forgot we had! It is now the second week in June and life is becoming a little bit more like we had before all this shutdown stuff. Grocery stores are just about normal (but I still can’t find any Charmin), restaurants in Illinois are allowing outdoor seating while Missouri allows indoor seating, my gym is opening up next week, and my son and husband are able to go back to karate for outdoor classes. Hopefully soon we will be back to eating inside, normal gym classes, hanging out with friends, and traveling!!
We have all had to figure out what constitutes our new normal. Each family has had different experiences and needs. What are things you didn’t realize you would miss that you weren’t able to do?? How did your family have to adjust to everyone being in the same house, all-day every day??
