Quarantined Life: How to NOT go insane while staying home

April has been a blast with these interesting sunshine we get every morning. It’s like you get to experience a different Sun every single day.

There are days when the Sun would wake me up because it’s directly hitting my face. But there are also days that it would just stun me in the morning with its golden sunbeam in a pale blue morning. It gives me the sense that although we are in this dull quarantine routine, we still get to wake up to a different new day. 

So, my days are kind of similar to that. Though I wanted to stick to a routine, sometimes it just doesn’t fit naturally. For instance, I know doing morning exercises would be my best bet to a healthier quarantined life, but I have all these house chores and guilt from not being able to work as my most significant distractions. In the end, I feel like the opportunities are not being realized. But, I’m trying to do what I can do with what I have. Although they are considered small wins, I still think keeping the sink tidy most of the time is one of my achievements in this pandemic.

I knew I had to push myself harder, especially when I also have a kid to care for.

Her view of this pandemic-stay-home situation will somehow reflect how I feel towards this global crisis. It’s already hard because we have to stay home. And for the record, she hasn’t left the house since March 9, so I could only imagine how daunting it is for her to stay purely indoors for 48 days and counting. From her regular schooling, weekly trips to the bookstore and malls and those bi-monthly field trips, we were down to entertain ourselves with the things we have in our home. 

It isn’t that bad when you are creative.

There are days when we would watch movies and pretend that we are in a movie house. I would rearrange the couch so Kerrigan would have a small bike path. We would sweat our boredom in a Just Dance dance-off. Sometimes we would bake, paint and run around like a bunch of kids. I also tried growing a garden, but I’m seeing no luck with that. There was this one time when we flew a kite from our balcony. It was fun when you try to be creative. 

Flexibility allows us to thrive in this time of the pandemic.

There are days where we try to be spontaneous, although it isn’t my strongest suit so as to have a strict routine. I’m kind of in the middle of that. I think my daughter’s getting that too. We do have a routine, but we try to be flexible, break it if it doesn’t excite us anymore. For example, she knows those mornings are usually for study time, but since I am too occupied with house chores during my morning rush hour, we would push our study sessions in the afternoon. But then I realized she needed more time to learn her numbers and words, so I made sure that it is the first thing she does in the morning and her teacher prepared whatever will be done after lunch before her afternoon naps. I’ve said that we could fly a kite or bike in the garden with a snap, but I still make sure she has her naps and baths, otherwise how else can we have peace, right?

How about the things that I do for myself at home?

Clearly, this pandemic kicked my already overworked butt at least several times, and I could still feel the kick as we get another quarantine extension. But, instead of feeling shitty from the massive slowdown brought by the virus, I redesigned my website. It looks a level higher from the usual blog layout with its minimalist look and functions. So, despite the slowdown, there are things that I manage to keep moving.

No one knows when this pandemic will be over. Some countries are optimizing their lockdowns to avoid halting the economy further, but there are also repercussions to that. My forecast is that it would take our whole 2020 to get us back to our “old normal”, but that is from an optimistic standpoint. We are here to make the most of what we have, but this time we create them from home.

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