Social distancing, Week 2

Cherry trees in the gardens of Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne / March 2020

This week we went on a little expedition to the park behind Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, to see the cherry blossoms before they wither. There were very few people and we were extremely careful, but we still went home feeling guilty and slightly anxious. We probably won’t be doing that again soon. Funny, how something so simple such as leaving your home radius suddenly became a high risk activity.

Some other things from this past week:

• Started a Coursera course on autism. This was recommended by my boss, and it’s a very well built course on the essentials of autism, which are very helpful for me to review. I hope I can get into a nice rhythm with these courses: first with the ones that are imposed, and later on with other subjects
• Read few pages of Book 2 of a Portuguese translation of War and Peace that Jo recommended a few months ago
• Watched This is Us at the end of the day, a nice and sweet series about two parents and their three children, in different time frames
• My Pilates teacher has been giving our classes via Skype, but I’ve also been trying to squeeze in some Yoga with Adriene, which made me reeeelaaaaaaaxx my childbearing-childcarrying-weak-and-tight back
• My brother is a personal trainer and yesterday he gave me a training session via Houseparty. He designed it just for me and today I am sore enough that I have the feeling of having worked out, but not enough to not make me want to again. It was very cool to be bossed around by him (not something my teenage self would have imagined me saying)
• Got my very talented sister to teach me a little about photo editing and I’ve been trying my hand at that.
• Starting to think about childproofing our apartment, because baby has definitely learned to move around!

Looking forward to this next week!

Social distancing, Week 1

Lac de Joux, Switzerland / February 2020

I am in the lucky group of people who get to enjoy this peculiar period of social distancing. Up until now, we’ve been healthy, no one we know is seriously ill and we only had to re-organise our everyday lives a little. We definitely do not take that for granted.

I’ve been using all this extra time at home to slowly catch up with my admin, taxes, organising and cleaning (blah!), but also with some little projects, such as learning to edit photographs, organising my pictures from the last years, doing some online courses and reading. Maybe we will stay in this quarantine condition long enough to form some benefic habits.

In the first week, I spent most of the time trying to get into some kind of routine, especially with having to work from home.

There was some anxiety about the virus and about how it could affect us. I can be a little hypochondriac, so I cut back on the time I spent reading news stories and data charts.

We live in a place where we can walk for miles with lots of open fields and crossing very few people, so we’ve been going on long walks with the baby. I’ve restarted running, very gently and gradually building up time spent running vs. time spent walking.

I’ve cooked: pizza made from scratch, bread, feijoada, queijadas de leite, homemade nutella, shortbread, lemon cake, pataniscas, pancakes,… and I’m making a list of recipes we can cook from cookbooks in the following weeks (being particularly careful planning meals and saving as many trips to the grocery store, of course).

Last week was Z’s first father’s day and we’ve spent the last few days watching baby learn how to crawl. Spending more time with her is definitely the best thing about this quarantine.

How lucky we are.