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Before Covid-19 hit, none of us would have ever imagined we would ever be shut in a hotel room with our family for two weeks in quarantine. Nevertheless, I recently had the joy of spending two weeks on the 62th floor in two connecting rooms with my husband and four children.
I decided to share my learning from this experience. Particularly because many parents facing the same situation, are worried how they and the kids will cope spending so much time together in such little space…
When I the door locked to that room, I spent a few hours in a total mode of panic! I couldn’t breathe properly and and I walked up and down the floor condemning every civet cat and bat in China! I just had to blame someone for my misery! As there were no civet cats nearby to neither punch nor kill, I decided to take a nap. In the hindsight, I would recommend people to skip the blaming stage and simply just take a nap…
So how did I go from wanting to kill civet cats to surfing the two weeks?
Below are some of my thoughts on how to get through hotel quarantine with children. They are purely my methods and ways of doing it. They are by no means organic and healthy, nor the right way for everyone else. You may get an idea or two if you end up in this situation. Or you may read this and decide how you won’t do it. Regardless, thanks for reading and putting up with my quarantine brain dump.
Having a routine helped all of us a lot. The kids understand a routine and they argue less if they have to do reading or exercise, simply because they are used to doing that every day at that time. So help yourself and your kids by having some kind of structure to your day.
I am on purpose not sharing our routine, as you may just as well call social services and turn me in for the amount of TV time we incorporated into our routine! Besides, you should do a routine that fits your family and what you like to do.
The idea is to get some kind of daily schedule. This breaks the day into chunks and makes time pass faster. In our case I applied the ‘carrot / stick’ approach to get the kids and husband to keep up with the routine. For instance, we had a treadmill, and each child had to do 5km a day on that in order to get any sweets or Ipad time.
These are the elements we had in our routine: sleep, eat, exercise, boardgames, TV, Ipad, alone time for each individual, bath, reading, art and craft, massage salon (basically make the children massage your legs after a run or do your hair)….
Its important to like your routine, if you don’t like the one you have, then change it. This is not the time to put up with something you don’t like. It’s not the time to force yourself to do 6am yoga, if you prefer to wake up at 10am and drink coffee for an hour
I had it all in my head. The kids were going to catch up on math in the morning, then in the afternoon we would sit and write essays on Ancient Rome and the life cycle of the turtles. Books would be produced with creative illustrations – full of information that would make my kids incredible smart. In fact after this quarantine they would be able to skip an entire school year due to mummy’s quarantine home school.
Fast forward two weeks.,,,,, The kids did not even open a math book . They did zero online learning of any sort – nothing! If anything, they may have lost knowledge. In fact they may have to repeat their last school year just to get their level of intelligence back up to what it was pre quarantine.
Truth is, neither the kids nor I, had the energy to argue about online learning. You are on survival mode, and on that mode it is next to impossible to establish any quarantine home schooling programme. You need to manage your expectations, both with regards to your kids, but also yourself. Finding the energy to battle with the children to learn the times table or write about the habitat of polar foxes, is just so incredible difficult.
It is important to acknowledge that you can’t just take a blueprint schedule or activity program and impose it on your child.
What works for one child, will not work for the other. In order to make the quarantine experience as smooth as possible with children, it is vital to acknowledge what type of child you have. Some children bounce off the walls and other can sit and do colouring in for hours. Some thrive by learning, others do so when they are creative.
Sit down and think about what your child(ren) love to do and plan your activities accordingly.
Lastly, don’t expect them to start playing together for hours upon end. If they play well on a normal basis, they are likely to do the same in quarantine. If they don’t gel at home, then I’m afraid its even worse when they are locked in a room together – just saying!
In our case we quarantined with four children aged 11, 10, 7 and 4. Each of them are extremely different characters. This meant I had to come up with very different daily activities for them.
My son is seven and loves Lego. He can build for hours. Hence, I bough the Lego Star Destroyer from Star Wars, this is a huge lego set. Assembling it took 11 days and my son pretty much only did that every day on his own.
My four year old daughter does an activity for a maximum of 20 minutes. This was quite challenging, as I had to facilitate a million different art and craft activities. Many of which, I ended up doing whilst she gave me instructions. I guess not all kids can just sit and do lego for hours upon end:)
My ten year old loves art and craft. So I stocked up on ‘paint by numbers’ and 10kg of clay! The clay was a huge success, as the other children also joined in making clay figurines.
My 11 year old loves reading, easy peasy – kindle for her. And then the odd game of chess when I didn’t have my hands full with either clay or paint.
If you are returning to your home country and have a batch of friends out there, then my biggest advice is to use them! You are lucky to return home and can make use of having people who offer you to bring stuff.
Yes, everything can be ordered online! But there is nothing like a surprise meal from a friend. My happiest evening was when my tennis buddy dropped off chips and falafel as a surprise. Its the best falafel I’ve ever had.
Many people say ‘just let me know if you need anything’. At the beginning I simply told them I had averting I needed. But after 5-6 days I ran out of energy. I felt a bit sorry for all of us, not least myself. So I took those friends up on their offer ‘yes, if you could drop off some cut fruit and a board game, that would be great’!
These surprise drop offs will cause huge excitement with your children and yourself. It is honestly a bit depressing if the only delivery you get is the hotel food…
There are times for battle and there are times for peace.
Quarantine is time for peace. It is time for closing your eyes to certain things. Yes my kids ‘accidentally’ eat a few extra biscuits that I had saved for another time. And yes, they experimented with paint and I spent two hours cleaning the balcony tiles because they had painted themselves and made body prints all over the balcony! I did see this was happening, but they were laughing and having a great time. At home I would have stopped it, old them off…. But to be honest, there is far between the laughs in quarantine, so why stop them if they are having a great time. And on the plus side, I spent two hours cleaning. That is time spent on something.
We had a ‘yes day’ half way through quarantine. Parents could not say no to the kids. My children had begged for such day for a long time, so I figured it was great to do it in quarantine, as it minimised how much we actually had to say yes to.
The children spent the first week looking forward to this day. And they truly enjoyed a day with Grab food deliveries, and countless hours on the Ipad and TV.
Whatever you do you must include exercise. There is so many ways to do this. We had a treadmill and made our 7, 10 and 11 year old kids walk 5-7km a day! My four year old walked 2km a day.
It doesn’t have to be a treadmill, but this worked for us as they could watch the iPad whilst walking. Its all about incentive…..
You can also do just dance, yoga, aerobics….. Anything is absolutely perfect. But if you don’t do exercise, the mood will simply drop and everyone will become restless. Beside it is great way of breaking up the day. Each person have their own little exercise tradition. Two of my kids walked before lunch, two after lunch and I did my exercise late PM. When ever you do it and however you do, get the pulse up and sweat a bit. Healthy body, healthy mind.
Your mood will go up and down when you are in quarantine with children; this is no different to the your normal life. You have good days and you have bad days.
The main difference is, you have less to lift you up when you are in quarantine, because you can’t do what you would normally do outside to feel better. This is why it is super important to give yourself and the kids something to look forward to, and have little things hidden in the back of the suitcase to pull out on those days where things look a bit dark.
I packed a massive secret bag of sweets from Denmark. one day when all the kids had been fighting, I pulled it out out of the safe where I had locked it up for days. When I suggested a movie with Danish sweets the mood totally changed. We were back to being a family unit doing something exciting and positive. Saved by 150DKK of ‘bland selv slik’ from Rema!
Whatever it is, it is just important to give yourself some highlights. Something to look forward to. Something that gets your mood a notch up when it is down.
I won’t lie, it isn’t easy to quarantine in a small space. There is nothing joyful about it. However, I think the biggest learning I took from our experience is to simply take it easy.
Don’t do the blaming game. I spent hours blaming the civet cats, but who knows, perhaps they are innocent!?
Do yourself a favour by not expecting too much of neither yourself nor your children. Make a routine that works for you. Treat yourself to some take away food and some Netflix. Let the children make a mess and eat an extra biscuit.
Time passes faster than you expect, and soon enough the door will open the the world outside. Once out you may even wish you could go back in and do a day or two in that hotel, just to chill for a while!
Note to everyone who read to the end. Theresa is now out of quarantine and her sanity had been restored. If you wish to book in for a session either for your family or your children, feel free to contact me any time
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