Life in Lockdown Update

I won’t lie… It’s not easy to see the rest of the world returning to school and life whilst the UAE is debating whether or not we’ll go back to school AT ALL this year (as in not until Jan 2021).

Currently, it’s a rumour, but past experience has shown that rumours end up truth.

At one point, Dave and I discussed the possibility of me heading back to the Netherlands with the kids in time for them to start school in September. We decided against it, it’s just too risky should there be a second wave of COVID and they suspend travel again, Dave and I would be separated. We agreed that the priority is keeping the family together.

The cases in the UAE continue to rise. The upside is that the UAE have tested more than a quarter of the population (the UAE is the 3rd most tested country after Gibralter and Iceland), the rate of daily recoveries is more than a quarter of daily new cases (today we had 680 new cases and 577 recoveries) and we are still employed!

Whilst Dave and I will continue to throw around ‘what if’s’ (it’s important we are prepared for anything), we will shift our focus to making do. It’s clearly not ideal to be homeschooling 3 children, but we are grateful that the school is sending so much work home (though it didn’t help that Elsie did a month of homework in half an hour!).

The kids are busy with PE, fun projects as well as core work (which is supplemented by yours truely with resources downloaded from the internet and workbooks ordered online). As parents, we will try to make learning fun, throwing in some incidental learning wherever possible. We have explained that this is the way it is and might be for a while. The children still need to maintain some learning if they are to progress to the next year.

They are generally busy until midday. Then it’s lunch, quiet time and at the moment it’s cool enough to be outside on the slip and slide or under the sprinkler on the trampoline.

This is our life at the moment. We are grateful to live on the beach, in a great compound with plenty of bike paths and green spaces for the kids to see friends (at a safe distance). This will change next month as temperatures will start heating up to 50 degrees during the day. We are also grateful that we are healthy.

I am so tired of talking and speculating about COVID and what it will mean for us in the future. We will live day by day and try to enjoy it as much as possible.