How the weeks have flown

Soon we will look back on this time as a period of healing, bonding, growing, gnawing. Being together this much with your family, weekdays, weekends, morning, afternoon, night, is not really what most of us are used to, unless you're hermits living in the forest. For most of us, the kids are in school, you're in the office, out with friends, shopping, and so on.

At first, the thought of it was quite daunting and scary - but after a while, you get the hang of it. The shouting gets softer, people get used to annoyances, video calls are set up and made more efficiently and you know how to avoid getting into someone's video background.

You can still have prata supper but at home.

Next thing you know, several weeks have gone by and there are only 2 more weeks of the official Circuit-Breaker to go. Schools will be restarting in June and the kids will be out of the house, staggered for a start with a mixture of home-based and school-based learning. The days of everyone sleeping until 11am every single day will be over soon!

We've done our fair share of cycling recently. The only exercise we can do as a family.

I've made it a point to ensure that everyone gets their weekly dose of exercising in the form of walking and cycling. We almost made it to T5 the other day - maybe this weekend we'll succeed. But the complaints seem to start once we hit the Changi Coastal Road and only get louder thereafter.

For me, I go running almost every day, with occasional breaks - and I also do pushups and use some resistance bands which I bought from Decathalon several years ago - always handy to have during times of Pandemic. Note to self, buy a few more.

Family Zoom time is always good - for dance parties and Mass.

Several weeks ago, I had this idea of attending Mass online together with the extended family - bad Internet video quality notwithstanding, we've made it a weekly appointment on Sundays to meet on Zoom and stream the Mass from Youtube together. Recently, we've also been saying Rosary, playing Kahoot, having disco and Karaoke parties too. The kids aren't into dancing to Boney M, so it's just Mum, Fred & me dancing like monkeys in front of our respective computers. Just 6 months ago, people would be looking at us and getting worried.

This past weekend, we celebrated Mum's birthday online. She invited an uncle, aunty & several cousins from Australia, Indonesia, and other parts of Singapore.

Zoom birthday party in full swing - complete with sleeping baby and bag of chips.

If it wasn't for the lockdown situation, we wouldn't have all gotten together like this - so it was a great opportunity for us to actually see and "interact" with each other - although it did get a bit noisy and once people started pulling out their stuffed toys and random objects around the room to show to the camera, you weren't really sure who was paying attention and who accidentally put themselves on mute. It was still a blast.

So even though the virus sucks, we've learned to work through it, play around it and survive it. I know eventually, I will think back and miss these days of quiet, nosiness, reflection, chaos, worry, and joy, knowing we lived through this and came out better people!