Looking back over lock down

Last week here in Cyprus the country started to open up and attempt to get back to some sort of normality after many weeks of lockdown.  Not a huge amount has changed for us personally as the boys are not going to school and we are mainly working from home but it is liberating to be able to go shopping without requesting permission to, and most importantly to be able to see our friends. 

We had a lovely afternoon in the park and an afternoon round our friends house,  the boys were so happy to be able to get out and play with their friends. 

I am very grateful though that for us, lock down wasn't too terrible.  It sucked of course generally but thanks to us always finding '3 good things' we had some good times among it all and mostly focused on the positive things rather than dwelling on those we couldn't change. 

PE with Joe was a lifesaver, especially at first and it started off many of our days on a good note. Louka wasn't so keen but would hang around doing the bits he fancied. Leo was mainly humoring me and just doing it as I made him but we had many laughs together as we bunny hopped, Pikachu'd and Spider man crunched our way around the balcony.  It's just got a bit too hot, and we got a bit lazy to do it every day now but we've not abandoned it completely, just tending not to do it live anymore at 11 am here. 

Not loving the squats here! 

We celebrated Easter, a little differently to usual but it was still a good day.  The boys had made cards with 'marble painted' eggs on them and we popped them in the neighbours postboxes.  I made a full on roast dinner with all the trimmings for Easter lunch,  and I even made Hot Cross buns for the first time on Good Friday. 

A surprising success.

The plan had been, as in several recent years to have our friends round on Easter Saturday for food and drinks but of course we couldn't do that so we jumped on the Zoom bandwagon and had a different kind of catch up. It was still good as it was the only time we did it all together and we still managed to have several drinks over the course of the 3 hour call!

In my ongoing attempt to get them off tech for even just a little bit we did manage a few other activities, mostly quite short lived but it's always better than nothing I guess. 

There was some baking - cookies, shortbread and pizzas by the boys,  and cake, flapjacks, millionaires shortbread by me - they all helped in eating it all though. 

We made Nerf targets out of Lego,  sorry, I made Nerf targets out of Lego which took me longer than they spent shooting at them. 

Aaron taught Leo how to play Crib, which went a lot better than when he taught me. For some reason I really struggle with the rules!

Overall I think the boys will remember this time as being strange, but they at least will generally remember it as a fun time where bedtimes were later, games were played and tech time was plentiful. 

The restrictions started to be lifted at the beginning of May and so we are in a kinda 'new normal'. We can go out freely, visit the beach, restaurants and meet up in maximum groups of 10 adults.   There are some people wearing masks and gloves, many more not.  There is hand sanitizer and stickers on the floor everywhere you go, and the tourist areas are looking lovely but depressingly quiet. 

So, it's good for us to be able to see our friends and get outside but still a very strange world out there.