Kate Mellis<\/a> caught up with Lyn and Anthony over the phone and email.<\/p>\nAnthony (9), Lyn\u2019s son<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cKids my age are generally not interested in world affairs. I\u2019m in grade three and it\u2019s probably the first time ever, other than around World Wars and the bubonic plague, that kids and adults in every single country of the world have heard about the same life threatening world affair, Coronavirus.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nEven my four-year-old little sister knows how this ‘sickness’ has changed her way of life dramatically. There are no visits to the beach, no sports, no friends coming over for playdates. We are not even allowed to see other members of our family.<\/span><\/p>\nI have noticed lots of new changes around the house, such as, the way mum has been cooking new things all the time and the fact that we are mostly doing things together, a lot more than we used to, because we are all here at the same time. We have been going on more bush walks and playing games. I’ve been playing a lot of basketball with mum and have gotten so much better.<\/span><\/p>\nA few of the other things I\u2019ve been doing are; practising my saxophone, learning how to play \u201cHavana,\u201d\u00a0 doing a lot of cross country training on the treadmill every day; having Facetime and Zoom playdates, card games and Scrabble. We just got our new dog, Aria so we have a lot of time to bond with her.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nCurrently, my seven-year-old brother, my little sister and my crazy three-year-old Samoyed are wildly doing circuits around the lounge room. The noise is deafening. Fun! FUN! I can’t wait to join them. My life under lockdown is pretty darn GOOD!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\nLyn, mother-of-three<\/b><\/p>\n
\u201cWe were all in shock for the first two weeks. I\u2019d sit up at night and watch the American and British news and it was just shock. But once we got over the shock of it, we realized it was quite an opportunity to have some fun.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\nWe\u2019d just gotten a dog, Aria, before all of this happened, so she\u2019s been a wealth of entertainment and happiness. We let her off the leash for the first time to play with other dogs this week. Aria\u2019s never been off a leash in her life and she was like a ballerina. She was pirouetting on her back legs, doing 20 sideways somersaults in a row. It was a moment of joy that made the kids and I fall about laughing.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nLife\u2019s not as busy, everybody\u2019s happy and healthy and everything\u2019s just a team environment. Anthony said to me, \u201cmum your cooking is so much better now.\u201d And I explained, \u2018Anthony, it\u2019s not that my cooking wasn\u2019t great before but I just have more time to do things\u2019 and I do it with the kids. So now the kids cook dinner. Emily has become a whizz at banana bread.<\/span><\/p>\nEmily had her birthday in isolation. She had 200 balloons blown up in the lounge room and streamers everywhere and Coco Pops for breakfast which was a mega hit and we just played games of her choosing all day. The kids really miss their friends and that interaction.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nOften you think you can put things over the top of kids\u2019 heads and they don\u2019t pick up on it, but Anthony has really picked up on the effect of social distancing on others. He\u2019s noticed the effect on his little sister, Emily because she only just started preschool this year. She\u2019d had her first play dates with friends she\u2019d met and that was really important to her because she hadn\u2019t been to day care. He picked up on that. It\u2019s interesting that he\u2019s put a positive spin on it all. He can see the good and bad parts and the compensating factors.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nThe hardest question I\u2019ve had to answer from my kids is \u201cis it safe to go back to school?\u201d because everybody has had to distance so much. They\u2019ve been drilled about doing the right thing when they\u2019re out and washing their hands and everything, so the idea of going back to school is just a bit scary, because they know it hasn\u2019t gone away, they just know that it\u2019s not as bad now. I reassured them by saying \u2018I would never put you in a position of doing something that wasn\u2019t safe.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\nI actually had a Stockholm Syndrome moment the other day when they started to ease restrictions. I went, \u2018oh no, but I like my life now.\u2019 But that did pass fairly quickly when I thought, \u2018yay, no more homeschooling.\u2019 I even like that part because you get to know what the kids are doing, you get to help them, you get to see the little sparks light up when they learn something new. Their nanna has been helping them on FaceTime which has been really nice for her because she\u2019s alone.<\/span><\/p>\nThere\u2019s someone who has been going around my local area writing in beautiful handwriting, \u201csee the space in between as a gift of life and love.\u201d The pandemic has taught me to keep reminding myself not to get caught up in the issues of the P&C or the issues of going back to work or the busyness of this or that.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nWhen this is all over I\u2019m looking forward to going out to a very crowded bar in the city. The solitude is lovely and calming but it\u2019s also good to have that other side of life as well.\u201d<\/span>[\/vc_column_text][\/vc_column][\/vc_row]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“Kids my age are generally not interested in world affairs”…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1380,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,6,7,8,13],"tags":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/IMG_9993-2-1.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1373"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1373\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1380"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1373"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1373"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beautifullittlethings.com.au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1373"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}