Our world has changed quickly in a brief amount of time. Our new norm may be staying within our own 4 walls, and our backyard, and everyone is using the word quarantine like this is normal. With schools closing, businesses closing or suggesting working from home if that’s an available option, restaurants closing and social distancing the new term for our lives, we are experiencing a whole lot of never before NEW.
Hopefully what we are experiencing will pass and our old norm with some changes will become normal again. However for right now we are experiencing things never before seen, heard, or lived through. This is the ideal time to document this period. Take photos, videos, screenshots of specific information and, of course, write. No one else can tell what you are experiencing better than you, so write, write, write. Have your children do the same, or help them express what they are seeing and feeling. Someday this will be a part of their history to tell their children. This needs to be their experience, their drawings, their photos and videos. This doesn’t need to be a full scrapbook layout, but simple daily “snapshots” of what you did. Family stories and personal stories with photographs, photos from your phone are just fine. Are your kids continuing their education via online courses? Detail what those are, are they becoming homeschooled and Mom and Dad becoming teachers overnight.
Document this. All of this is important.
Define what is happening locally, within the US and worldwide. Express feelings, emotions and thoughts. Write it down. Did you stock up on foods? What did you stock up on? Did your normal cooking change? Did you experiment with new foods or new recipes? Take a picture and tell about it. Take a picture of the receipt so it shows the prices, this becomes a bit of a time capsule.
Now would be a great time to spend time getting your kids interested in a new hobby, like cooking, writing, photography, drawing, there are a lot of options that they can explore. There is so much information coming out daily that this is a good way to also have a record of it. Also, your experience will be different than someone else’s and these stories need to become part of our personal family history. We live in a digital age and having a record of our experiences will be important to us and our children later on. Record it with pen, paper and photos, videos. Interview each family member through video, ask the same questions to each member of the family, you might learn something new.
When this period of change is over, you can create a book for each member easily through numerous options online and remember this time in history.
