Let’s talk quarantine at our house…

Quarantine for my house started March 6th when we decided to pull our kids out of school and transfer them into the Cyber Academy our school district offers. With all the uncertainty my husband and I decided this was the best thing for our family. With the kids and me having Asthma and my youngest daughter also having a weak immune system we needed to make sure we minimized the possible exposure to COVID 19. A week later all schools in our state went virtual, stay at home orders were issued which forced us to close the doors to our store. We had to scramble to try to stock up on essentials and hunker down for what we thought would only be a few weeks. Weeks quickly turned into months and here we are October 5th, and not much has changed. Stay at home orders have been lifted, and stores are starting to have more of a supply of the essentials that were hard to keep in stock. We are also getting ready to open the doors to our store as we have only been filling online and local pickup orders.

How have we handled it? Hmmm, being home with the kids was great (yes I said it time with the kids was great). We got reacquainted with each other and made up for “lost time” I guess is the best way to put it. Just about 2 years ago we saw an opportunity to started a liquidation business and with the business growing so quickly there was really not much time for our usual after school conversations about their day, no random dinner jokes, no evening dance parties or sing alongs and quarantine gave that back. The first month flew, kids where getting along, we were spending time with each other having movie and game nights together. Great!? Well that lasted about a month or so before the bickering and complaining started to seep in. They are great kids and considering the circumstances they were handling it very well. It was probably more me feeling like I was loosing my mind more than usual.

With all the uncertainty and the stay at home orders it was been hard to keep things in order. Some of the things that went out the window once stay at home orders went into affect was meal planning, grocery list due to limited stock on all the things I usually get, food budgets because weekly sales flyers were no longer a thing our supermarkets, sleep schedules because who needed a bedtime anyway, laundry schedule since we are just home, screen time limits for mom and dads sanity, chore charts “mom is home she could handle it”, and trips to target (every moms happy place) thats just to mention a few. We had three milestone Birthdays our oldest daughter turned 16, our oldest son turned 18 then our other son turned 13. We celebrated just the 6 of us no other family, no decorations, and homemade cake. Any one who knows me know that I love to have gatherings especially when it comes down to milestones in our lives and birthdays are big for us, especially this year.

The road to “normal” at our house is not easy since so much has changed, we didn’t finish the last school year on a great note, yes they all did well but remote learning was difficult for all sides. We didn’t have it together, neither did the teachers, or the school district, nor the county, the state, the country. Everything was a mess. Now that we are cyber which you would think was the same, is a new system to learn. Our school district also had an increase of over 800 new cyber students, so equipment and materials were limited and each of our kids started on different dates weeks apart. I’m currently working on getting kids back on track sleep schedules (with a bunch of teenagers I’m not sure how thats going to work), try to get meal planning back on track so I can have an accurate grocery list and start saving money in the supermarket again. Getting new schedules up for laundry, dog responsibilities, screen time limits (the one should be interesting), and chores charts. Yes chore charts even for the big kids because mom can’t do it all.

Wish me luck, all ideas and advise are welcome.

All in all I think we have handled it as well as to be expected. Some tough times, ore than I’d like to count but we remind ourselves that some people have it worse. We are blessed and grateful for everything we have most importantly our health, our family.