When these “stay at home” orders were first issued, I was scared. I did not think our family could handle this.
UNSCHOOLERS QUARANTINED!!
What a scary concept!
I mean, my family has never been the type of family to “stay home”.
My children may never have stepped inside a traditional classroom, but we’ve never spent this many days at home. All together–all day, every day.
We’re a busy family. We always have been. I assume we always will be.
With our current family living situation, 4 adults, 1 high school senior(pretty much another adult), and one pre-teen, everyone has so much going on that it’s hard to keep track of who is doing what, where, and when.
Throw into the mix our in-home daycare, and our house is anything but calm and peaceful.
Oh, and did I mention all of our pets??
With 2 new puppies in the home, you can just picture the controlled chaos that happens on a daily basis.
I had to laugh at first when I heard the term “safer at home”.
For the first week, I was thinking to myself…
“Who exactly is safer in this given scenario?”
I thought for sure we were all going to hurt each other.
The more we read about and educated ourselves on Covid-19, we began to understand why we had to do what we now have to do.
All 5 of us that had jobs, suddenly don’t.
That puts us literally all at home, all day, every day.
To me, the world is our school. Learning occurs naturally, everywhere we go. I’m a pro at turning EVERYTHING we do into some type of learning opportunity.
I won’t lie, at first I did not think we could possibly thrive while being trapped in our house.
I cannot believe how wrong I was.
This quarantine has really been a time of reflection for me. As it gets closer to lifting, I realize that not only have my priorities changed, but my whole family has changed.
So what lessons exactly has my family learned?
We’ve learned to pitch in and work together as a team.
We’ve learned to accept each other’s weaknesses.
We’ve learned to appreciate our differences.
We’ve learned what it truly means to put others first, even when it means putting ourselves second.
We’ve learned to laugh together.
We’ve learned to play together.
We’ve learned to encourage one another.
We’ve learned to dream together.
In my mind, we’ve learned what it truly means to be a family.
Although I will admit that I want things to go back to the way they were, I’ll never regret this time we’ve spent together as unschoolers quarantined!
How has this quarantine affected your family?
