Staying Connected During Quarantine
We’ve already talked about how we’re staying connected to our team and our clients through #covid19, but we wanted to share how we’re connecting with our families and communities on a daily basis. We’re fascinated with the human experience (of course we partial to how architecture and design play a role in it) generally, but we’ve been so inspired at the many opportunities we’ve found to appreciate each other during social distancing.
Doug – Because my sons are home, unable to go to school and my wife is there as well, we’re in the home together in the evenings a lot more than we have been because there’s no games or church meetings. We’ve been playing a lot of games together as a family, almost every night. We’re engaging a lot.
Nathan – We do things like a bake-n-run. My wife bakes something for the kids and then we do a drive-by delivery, we’ll waive from the car after dropping it on the porch. I’ve noticed when going outside and getting some sunshine walking the dog, there’s a lot more people outside and we’ve got a lot of opportunities to check on people and see what they need.
Marnie – We’re not a game family. I buy games and we never play them. But the last week or so, we’ve been playing a game every night too. It’s been really fun! We’ve been practicing losing, and teach our kids to practice losing. Turning the TV off has been really great. I’ll pick a kid and say, let’s go on a walk and it’s been a great opportunity to talk to them one-on-one and it’s really nice to see so many other people outside too. It’s a good thing, in a way, for us to be able to reconnect.
Rachel – We’ve also been going for walks to keep our sanity. Last week, I made my son’s hands and footprints into cards and we sent surprises to a lot of friends and neighbors. We also painted our windows to hopefully give the kids something fun to look at when they’re out for a walk. They get excited about the butterflies or bunnies in our windows.
Jessica- We started a group Marco Polo with my friends from high school. There’s 15 of us in there, and we joke and cry and it’s been great because we haven’t all sat down and talked in almost 20 years. There’s been a lot of bonding. My family sits down a lot together to eat a lot of days of the week and it’s been really nice.
Sean – A friend a few weeks ago suggested putting up a picture of a landscape, so I’ve been going to a certain Facebook page and sharing pictures that I’ve taken over the years and I’ve been putting up one a day for them to see club races, club events, things that’s happened and are not going on right now. It’s been kind of fun, and people seem positive about it.
Haley – We did a family Facetime. My brother’s in Colorado and my family is in CA, and it’s been fun to catch up with everyone.
Stephanie – It’s kind of hard, the whole day I stay home and I try to go out and contact more of my friends and yesterday we had a Zoom party of 8. We play games together. We went to Japan together 2 or 3 years ago, and we made a video. We watched that video on the Zoom app and it was fun to look back on that together. Another thing my friend and I do is we want to support local restaurants, and I order some takeout and my friend orders cookies and we swap things.
Sara: There’s 3 of us – we have our roomate, and we’ve been trying to continue to support local as well especially the restaurants here in Sandy. We continue ordering out once a week by sending one of the three of us to get it and bring it home. Our puppy is almost 9 months old, so she’s still in training to be active and learning. Our trainers are local and so sweet trying to keep the normalcy in all of this craziness. They’ve changed the class from 10 down to 4 so it’s semiprivate, we meet at a park nearby and stand 8 feet apart to train our dogs together working on obedience skills that our dogs need and it’s been nice to keep her on a schedule.
Barton – we moved recently before all this happened, and we haven’t met anyone so it feels like this strange limbo. We wave to our neighbors but we can’t really talk to them. With a 2 year old, all he wants to do is go to the park but they’re all roped off so it’s hard to do much of anything. We’ll go drive past a field of horses or cows or something like that, and he loves to sit there and watch them. Then we’ll drive around to find the next animal. We also drive past a little airport so he can watch the planes.
Cali – It feels like extended winter in the worst way for my social, outdoor-loving kids so we play outside in the dirt and go on walks as often as we can. We try and make something to drop on their friend’s porch once a week or so to try and brighten other kids’ days as well.