The Giant Exhale ~ Social Distancing Week Three ~ COVID19

Moving Out of the Dorms

Mary Making Masks

The January Calendar

A Few of the Masks

Someone's Sidewalk Art

A Day of Social Distancing

Yep, Taking Care of Our Peeps

Ready for Online Classes

The Friends We Can Hug

My Grandpa's Barn Coat--Starting the Spring Gardening

Painting and Supporting Local Business

Distance Learning

Facetime Lessons

Turtles Have a Visit 

Get Down. . . 

Watering Plants

I Liked This

An Example of My Distance Learning Day

Hello. . . hello out there. . .

How is everybody doing?

Calvin's recital at the U of Iowa would have been tonight. I think the first wave of everyone's disappointment of the canceling of their events has passed. I didn't say it was gone, just the first wave seems to have passed. The trips and special events have been grieved and the gravitas of the pandemic seems to have sunk in.

I'm peaceful about this week. The distance learning and my Factime teaching gives us a routine. We are using the calendar blocking system, at dinner we block out who needs which room at which times. The four of us are here. I'm teaching video lessons, Mary is doing online high school, Calvin is doing online college, and Bill, well. . . Bill is just here. He's got stuff to do, like fixing the busted off knob to the baking cabinet for me. And other more important things as well.

It's surreal, the news is so bad and so many people are suffering. Yet here I am, almost more peaceful than I have ever been.  I feel a giant exhale.

The four of us are here. This is what I grieved for all fall. It's like a giant emotional tease, I finally came to a peace about the kid having flown and now he is back and we are all eating every meal together again with no parting in sight.

The calendar is just wiped. Completely wiped. No Holy Week accompanying stress. No school plays and concerts. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. A giant exhale.

It's the biggest exhale I have felt since I moved to Minnesota in 1998. A new town. Nothing to do and no-one to do it with. Well. . . I guess Bill and I  were newlyweds so we had that. . .

I've tried to cut back and fight the busyness for years. I've blogged about it and tried to come up with systems and new plans and ways to add margin and observe Sabbath and protect family time ad nauseam. I'm a helpless calendar addict. If there was blank space I filled it. Over and over and over. Now family time is almost all we have.

I guess it took a global pandemic for me to go cold turkey.

In the rush to return to normal, use this time to consider which parts of normal are worth rushing back to.  (David Hollis through becomingminimalist)

If you are like me, and think the world needs you to be active every minute or some pressing thing won't be accomplished, maybe this is a good time to reflect on how how life might be without all of it. And then add things back very carefully. Check your ego. We don't have to do it all. I'm going to be right here, right now and embrace this giant exhale. Teach. Garden. Make meals. Call people. Exhale. Take the rest that has been forced upon us with grace and gratitude. The giant exhale. 

Lord, 

Keep our world under your wings, especially the doctors and nurses and all those at risk. Be with us. For those of us safe at home, help us continue to be at peace and help us continue to reflect on what is the most important. Use us as you will through this time. Amen. 

Kindness ~ the 6th Aspiration

Mary Sewing Masks

Calvin's Freshman Recital at Home

The boy. . . 

The Audience

Saturday we had one guest and kept her socially distant

The cats LOVE the new sofa

Bill works the live stream. . .

Oliver likes the new pillow. . . a little too much. 

Post Recital Hike around Lebanon Hills

Here we are. This weekend was Calvin's recitals, his optional Freshman recital for the University of Iowa School of Music. We had no guests on Friday, we had one guest on Saturday. Other than that it was Bill, and Mary and I, we are after all, Calvin's biggest fans. We had to eat all the brownies ourselves.

Here are the links. . . the edited video will be posted when we have a chance. The video from Saturday is more smooth.
Friday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCzPUQksXM0
Saturday: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oT9Q3Vz0Gbo

Thank you to everyone who tuned in for the live streams. It could be that more people were able to watch it live than would have been able to attend the recitals, even in Iowa City. What is live music without an audience? I especially loved the Beethoven. The resilience of the human spirit. Beethoven says what we are all feeling.

You have no idea how hard the man behind the curtain worked to make it happen. Limited band width, computer batteries, camera batteries, limited file sizes on the Nikon, new applications to learn. . . myriad challenges, but for the most part Bill made it happen.

Mary is making masks for the Minneapolis hospitals. These calico masks are not front line masks, but for the other workers in the hospital. They are asking folks to make them and drop them off.

The sixth aspiration of my ten aspirations is to be kind. Compassion is not my first virtue. It fell closer to my sister, who teaches junior high special education. She is the most compassionate person I know.

I know compassion and kindness are not the same thing, but they dance together well. Maybe compassion is the feeling and kindness is the action. What do you think?

True compassion sets boundaries. For example. . . is it kinder to be very strict about bedtime for a few nights, or for your kids to argue and struggle against going to bed for their entire childhood, especially when we know that proper sleep enables all learning and other functions? Boundaries are actually a form of kindness. I probably live that to a fault.

Still. . . kindness is probably the secret of life. Being kind and compassionate does not equal a free for all. Doing your kids laundry their whole life is not kind. Teaching them how to do their own laundry is kind. Once they know how to do their laundry, doing their laundry during finals week is kind. Get it?

I guess we all have to follow our own instincts. I'm trying to look at life through the eyes of the person in front of me. . . but it's not easy. I'm balancing that voice that wants to tell the other person to "just buck up" all the time. I'm afraid if I'm too compassionate it will make the people around me weak. Compassion and kindness and boundaries are a dance.

It can be the hardest thing to be kind to the people we are the closest to. During this quarantine we really, really need to be kind to each other. Give each other some grace. Guard our tongues. Ask ourselves if what we are saying is kind. My childhood pastor Bohlman used to tell us to filter our words with:

• Is it kind?
• Is it neccesary?
• Is it true?

The greatest of these is kindness. 

Lord, 

Here we are in this pandemic. We know you are right here with us. Help us to be patient and kind to each other, always. Help us to set boundaries that are kind and compassionate. Be with all the healthcare workers and send us all your peace that passes all understanding.

Amen 

Aspiration Number Five ~ to Limit Screen Time

Suzuki Association of Minnesota Piano Graduation

Mary and her Book 7 Trophy

Warm Fuzzies All Around

Teacher's Purple Dress Code

Peter performed Bach so beautifully 

Spring Break Brunch

My newest piece

22 Years and Counting--the love of my life

The show must go on. . . 

Well. Here we are. It's Calvin's spring break. Mary's and my official spring break is next week but it's really all mixed up. COVID19 is enabling the sky to fall and we are all cozying down in our social distancing. For people like Bill's folks who live down a country road cul-de-sac in northern Minnesota, social distancing is not too hard. Sometimes a car comes down their road and sometimes it doesn't.

After the obvious victims of the actual illness, my heart next goes out to all the young people and all their spring plans. All the student musicians, and athletes and scholars. All the seniors celebrating the end of high school. So many, many disappointments. Calvin's first recital at the University of Iowa, the SAM Strings graduation. . . proms. . . weddings. . . the list goes on and on and on. We are all just having a giant sad exhale.

Our Sunday family bullet journal meeting where we go over all the events of the week and all the details about rides and rehearsals? It was very short this week.

Everything is cancelled. Calvin will still have his recital runs this weekend--Friday at 5:00 and Saturday at 1:00.  Please check his YouTube channel to catch it live or watch the video. Here is a link: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8eTT-pv5u9eEwjlOSquYjg
Or search Calvin Kotrba Piano on Youtube and you will find it. His other Youtube channel is train videos. Don't get confused. I will still serve brownies with a side of hand sanitizer after the music for the die-hards.  We will sit six feet away.

I have time to blog. Lot's of time. Trips are cancelled. The drawers are already pretty clean. Sorry if that makes this entry too long.

The next aspiration of my ten aspirations is to limit screen time. It's not really great timing as I see my screen time is up 137% during the first two days of social distancing. Eventually we don't need anymore shoes on sale and we have seen all there is to see on Facebook and we know the hourly play by play on how many confirmed cases are in our counties.

Still screen time is a big deal to me. My mom limited our screen time growing up. We could only watch 30 minutes of television (remember network TV?) per day. That meant if I really wanted to watch Little House on the Prairie on Monday nights I had to save up a day. And it took all week to earn Bob Newhart and Carol Burnett for Friday night.  Sometimes if only my dad was home he wouldn't notice me nonchalantly slink down behind the coffee table and watch Charlie's Angels invisibly behind his back. He was doing double media with a Louis l'Amour novel anyway.

It was only universal karma that my own kids should have even stricter limits. They didn't even know there was network television until they were ten and seven. Bill and I were able to carefully curate every VHS tape that made its way into our library. On Saturdays and Sunday mornings before church Calvin and Mary could put the tapes in and watch to their hearts content. This allowed Bill and I to sleep past 5:30 a.m. We collected archival Sesame Street, The Wiggles, The Bear in the Big Blue House, Teletubbies (they were weird, but that is where Mary's nickname baby sunshine came from) and as they grew we added Loony Tunes and others.

It was never, ever only about screening content, though that was an important side effect. It was about that which you are NOT doing while you are plugged in. You are not reading. You are not playing with trains and dolls. You are not putting together puzzles and playing games. You are not going outside and playing in the snow. You are not listening to your Suzuki recordings and other music. For music, the kids had a jam box in the living room and in their rooms, and we made copies of all their favorite music disks so they could listen to whatever they wanted whenever they wanted without worrying about damage to the CDs or asking mom and dad to play their disks. We also had a full set of CDs for the car. There were no limits on music.

We were blessed to not have any smart devices until 2009, when I got my phone. Each of the kids got a smart phone when they were 13. And they have computers and school and personal iPads now too. I don't limit their time now. Calvin is 18 and that would be very weird. That train has left the station. Mary is pretty self-governed as well. We are all probably a little too plugged in, but honestly, I worry more about myself than about them. They are mostly super busy with school and rehearsals and practicing and sleep. Mary loves crafts and pens more than video games and Calvin has his own array of stuff he does, like writing a fantasy novel in his spare time.

Of course, here in corona virus land, they are both playing Minecraft together at the kitchen table while I write this. We are not some kind of monks. Still it's creative and they are in the world of blocks together so I'm not too uptight. And they are 15 and 18 years old.

Back to me. . . my temptations? Facebook. Youtube content, some musical and valuable and some junky like capsule wardrobe ideas for spring and how to keep your skin looking like you are 25. I also love watching hours and hours of productivity videos. That is a joke. However, I have gotten a lot of valuable ideas about calendar blocking and bullet journaling which have honestly been very inspirational. Still, remember, it's not only about content. It's about what we are not doing while we have screen time. We are not practicing. We are not reading a book. We are NOT WRITING A BOOK. I repeat, we are not writing a book while we are watching someone else's YouTube video about how to write a book.

I also know that I'm not listening to my loved ones as carefully while I'm on my phone. See aspiration number two.

So, I asked the kids how to set limits on my phone. They were able to show me right away. Now any lack of discipline I have is at least shown to me after 20 minutes.

I'm a little long winded on this today. I always feel like there is a lot at stake about how we spend our time. Writing this reminds me how I want to spend my time. . . with family and friends, practicing, reading and writing. And gardening when the snow melts. And, I like cooking sometimes. We have enough food here in the house to cook for several horses. Socially distanced horses.

Best wishes everyone~stay well and be kind to each other. There was only ever one tattoo I considered getting and it was on my right forearm and it read This Too Shall Pass. But the feeling passed.

And, this too shall pass.
Amen.