So we are into week two of homeschooling again here in England, and I thought I would post a little update on how I am coping with lockdown 3.0. The short version is that I am just about coping. My mental health took a bit of a hit over the past couple of months, thanks in part to the house move, which was stressful, and I went into 2021 hoping that there would be a light at the end of the tunnel, and not really finding one. Obviously it is positive that there are now a few vaccines that have been given the green light, and people are beginning to have these, but there is still so much uncertainty, I feel like for every positive news headline there are ten negative ones, and it can be really difficult with so much negativity everywhere you turn at the moment.
Unlike the first lockdown, Ed is going in to work, which means that I am home schooling on my own. We made the difficult decision to keep Benjamin in nursery, not only to help reduce the amount of stress for me during the day whilst juggling working and helping to teach the children, but for his benefit as it is good for him to have the social aspect of going in. It means that we have found ourselves in a daily routine, which focuses on school work in the morning, followed by lunch and work for me in the afternoon, which is going fairly well.
Although I am furloughed from my part time job, I have taken on more freelance work, which means that I am juggling quite a bit during the day. I try and make sure that I finish everything by 5pm, but sometimes I do end up working in the evenings as well, which to be honest keeps me distracted from the fact that there isn’t much else to do. With the instruction to stay at home, as well as watching films and tv shows, I have been reading a lot, which is nice. I just finished Bridgerton on Netflix and absolutely loved it – if you haven’t seen it yet, give it a go (it’s pretty raunchy in places though, so perhaps not one to watch with your mum).
We had been getting our food shop on a click and collect with Tesco from the first lockdown, and had only stopped briefly, so we are back to doing this to minimise the amount of people we come into contact with further, although where we have moved does have a fairly big co-op, so we can go in there if we run out of the essentials in between our slots.
I want to try and get back to working out, as I have let this slide since the house move, and I feel very lethargic and sluggish when I wake up in the morning, also not helped by a relaxed attitude towards snacks (I think my brain is still in Christmas mode when it comes to food). I don’t have any set fitness goals, but I would like to have some more energy.
Other than that, things aren’t that much different for our family of five. We have adapted, as 2020 taught us to do, to this new normal once more, and are just holding on tight and hoping that we eventually get to spend time with our family and friends again.
