In the second week of March, our worlds changed dramatically. John was on spring break and learned that EKU was going fully online for the rest of the semester. The girls were told that they would have two weeks of NTI (non-traditional instruction) at home leading into their week of spring break. So when they left school on Friday, March 13, they were going to be home for at least the next three weeks. And Sarah transitioned to remote work until further notice at the same time. It was weird and unsettling, but we decided to make the most of it. Initially that meant taking advantage of a well-timed Christmas gift, the Nintendo Switch. We were going to dance until Covid-19 dissipated.
The extended Bowes family was on top of the situation, and almost right away Aunt Suzy scheduled a weekly Zoom calls for us to connect and provide updates from our respective locations. That first call was memorable for a lot of reasons, but especially because Uncle Chris called in as Father Guido Sarducci. This Zoom point of view was one we are all going to become very familiar with over the months to come.
In Kentucky, this first days and week of the pandemic is when we fell in love with our governor who had just been elected months before. His positive attitude and willingness to make the right decisions for our community were very clear from the start. His 4pm daily updates became must-see TV and we often found ourselves quoting him - "You can't be doing that" and "We'll get through this together." Like many other families looking to spread the positive energy and to keep our kids busy, we had Callie and Reese do some chalk art on our driveway. This was also when we started taking regularly family walks to get out of the house.
In our neighborhood, like many around Lexington and other places in the country, some good person organized a stuffed animal scavenger hunt. We walked all over looking for stuffed animals that people had placed in their windows. This inspired us to do some outreach of our own to let the people we knew and missed that we were thinking of them. We wrote cards and on a couple of Sundays taped cards and felt hearts to the front doors of our friends throughout the city. This was a great way of channeling the nervous energy built up in our strange new world.
Everyone was trying to find ways to spread good energy and the messages we needed to stay healthy. One of our favorite local companies, Kentucky for Kentucky, put out a great shirt that Callie has on in this picture. Our state seal declares, "United We Stand, Divided We Fall." For Covid-19, they changed the slogan to "United We Stand, Six Feet Apart." Every challenge has its silver lining, and the silver lining at this time was seeing so many people taking walks as families and being creative to pass the time.
Speaking of being creative, as the weather got warmer, Callie and Reese found it easier to spend time outside. And the tree in front of our house was just right for their hammocks. But they also discovered that they could just use their hammock straps to do some routines you might see in a cirque de soleil production.
We got the news that after spring break the girls would not be going back to school but would officially be in NTI for the foreseeable future. The schools kept waiting to make it a permanent call, but we were pretty sure that they were not going back in person for the rest of the year. So as the teachers from Cassidy prepared to do a drive-by parade for their students we made the girls redo their back-to-school posters from the beginning of the school year. The reality of things had begun to slowly seep into the adult's minds at least.
That didn't mean that all was doom and gloom. Inspired by Guido Sarducci and Sarah's bins of Halloween extras we tried to bring the funny and unexpected to the weekly family Zoom calls. It definitely sparked some good conversations, if nothing else.
Puzzles, they were a big thing. When people tell the story of Covid in the years to come, puzzles will definitely deserve their own chapter. We had a pretty serious puzzle phase in the first couple of months and completed at least six or seven 500 piece or more puzzles. We knew we had to provide some manner of balance to all the screen time everyone in our house was dealing with at that time. Again, puzzles brought our family together in ways we hadn't seen before. Another silver lining.
As Covid began to take lives in Kentucky, Governor Andy Beshear asked Kentuckians to show compassion by lighting their houses green to memorialize the lives lost. It is a simple and yet powerful gesture, especially when it happens on a large scale. John started counting all of the green lights he saw on his morning runs, and as the days went by the number of green lights grew exponentially. What started out as 20-30 lights turned into nearly 100 within a couple of weeks.
No matter what color the lights were outside, things were getting a little crazy inside. Our family had never spent so much time together and all rules were starting to get thrown out the window. One night the girls decided to see if they could eat with their feet. And for some reason we let them. And not only did we let them we took numerous pictures. This is definitely not the only picture taken.
In other flexibility news, Reese spent hours on end mastering yoga poses. However, the ones she enjoyed the most were the tandem yoga poses she found on You Tube. Sarah was happy to work with her on all sorts of circus tricks. We have a few pictures of Callie trying similar poses with somewhat less artistic results. Callie is heavier than Reese and definitely not as flexible.
But Callie did develop into a better baker than her sister. After we scoured the town for flour and yeast, Callie was able to produce some very tasty desserts as well as bread. The kitchen was a mess more often than not, but the products of Callie's labor made it worth it.
All in all, this picture kind of sums up what was going on in our house. We were spending a lot of time together, making do with what we had on hand, and being creative as possible. By the way, who knew we had that many hair ties in our house? There were lots of things to be disappointed about. No in person school and the NTI was not challenging or engaging. Their spring soccer seasons were cancelled and they didn't get to see their friends. But Callie and Reese handled it all as well as we could have asked, and the entire situation reinforced what we have always known - these two girls love each other a lot and have a bond that is truly unbreakable.
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