There’s a lot of unknown right now. We don’t really know when COVID-19 measures will end. We feel a little isolated and trapped in our homes. For most of us this is a whole new experience. I sort of feel like I have some experience with this feeling. When we were adopting our children from Colombia we played a similar waiting game. Granted it’s not quite the same as waiting for a virus to pass, but it was an exercise in waiting. Every day we waited for a report from the courts that would let us go home with our babies and get back to our families. If we made it to Friday without any news, we sat back and relaxed over the weekend because we knew we wouldn’t get any more news until Monday. We did get to go out, but typically not far and always with an escort. At night we were not allowed out at all. We lived in a house with other families and ate all our meals together, shared the same TV room and had a room the size of a hotel room for our whole family. One of the things we always said is it wouldn’t be so bad if we just knew the end date. We could just sit it out if we knew when it would end. Not so. So, we learned to just focus on each day. Our favorite day though was always Sunday. Sunday in Bogota was ciclovia. The roads close and everyone rides bikes or walks. And they made pancakes for breakfast! This day broke up the monotony of our stay and gave us something to look forward to.
Today was our first day of spring break. It wasn’t the spring break we had planned and everyone was on edge, especially without the school routine and with more news that the end was now pushed back to April 7. So, we created some things to look forward to. We held a virtual happy hour with our Colombian adoption friends in Minnesota. We cooked up one of our favorite family meals, homemade pizza. And then we went to the movies, in our family room of course. I wonder how different our Colombian trip would have been if we had some of our technology today. On our trip we could only e-mail and share photos we were isolated from our families. Even though we are isolated we can facetime a good friend, or meet up with several virtually in google hangout or zoom.
Waiting when you don’t know the end is tough. The best advice I can give from having been there once before is to take it one day at a time, connect any way you can, create things to look forward to, and I Sunday if you can, eat pancakes and go for a walk.
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