Local parent, researcher and writer, Maddie Wallace, continues her daily diary describing the experience first, of self-isolating, and now of being in lockdown with her children in Southsea. It’s day 30, Maddie has gotten into the swing of things and is being productive, what could possibly go wrong?
A and I got up at 9am and sat at the dining room table doing our work together. She did some Education City activities on her iPad while I tried to finish the article I started at the weekend. It was a bit like I imagined lockdown would be, before I spent four weeks actually in lockdown and realised that some days you can barely move.
Pastoral bliss. Peace and productivity.
A got bored of doing her work before I’d finished mine, so she did some yoga on the floor behind me. She asked me to look at the new poses she’d made up, which were essentially just real poses she’s forgotten the name of. It was distracting enough for me to give up work for the day and we made a robot instead.
He’s called Steve and he’s a Coronavirus hunter. He has a long weapon called a germ vacuum which catches the virus and puts it into a germ cage. A actually had some stickers of germs from an old science magazine, so she stuck them all over Steve’s germ vacuum. She did most of the work, I really just helped with Sellotape and cutting the string for his hair. It made me think about the way children interpret the world differently to adults.
This was where the day stopped being fun. We went for a walk with the dog and it was an unmitigated disaster. Try carrying a scooter and a 5 year old having a meltdown while trying to manage a 22kg dog who’s seen a cat. It took two and a half hours to do a twenty minute walk. I’m in agony because the ankle I broke in 2018 still needs surgery and I have osteoporosis, so I’m not meant to carry heavy loads or run down the road chasing a five year old.
After all that, when she’d finally gone to sleep, I marvelled again at how children’s interpretations of the world can turn a good day right around in an instant.
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Maddie is sharing her lockdown experiences every day on S&C – you can find each day’s diary and all of Maddie’s previous articles for S&C here.
