Martin Family Stuck At Home

Hello, and welcome to social distancing with the Martins!

Last week, our family got to go to one of the most anticipated events of the year–Bible quizzing retreat. We arrived home to realize that, while we were gone, the state governor had closed down all of the schools due to…wait a minute….coronavirus?

Yup. And not just the schools. Churches, colleges (including LBC, where I’ve been taking a class the past few months), and basically every special event for the next few weeks had also been cancelled.

Since then, everything has gotten cancelled….although I’m sure, as fellow citizens of this lovely planet, you’re all aware of that…

This is quite a switch for me. Suddenly, I have no college class to go to, no work to get up early for, and no special events to look forward to. I have about three school subjects, and hours upon hours of free time. Cue confusion. It’s been months since I’ve had this much spare time.

But it’s not just me. Everyone in our family is dealing with the same feeling, to some degree or other.

So how have we been dealing with it? Here are some of the things we’ve done the past few days to entertain ourselves.

• I did more cooking in the past few days than I had for several months before that. It still wasn’t very much, but I was rather pleased with the results (I made pizza and brownies, both of which turned out rather well….unlike the waffle I attempted to make for breakfast this morning, but we won’t talk about that).
• Several of us took a bike ride yesterday, thanks to the warm weather. (“Several”, in this case, means seven, which, for the record, is too many.)
• Last night I got to play Memory with Gabriel and Callie. (Callie is undoubtedly the best.) Quote of the evening: Gabriel (speaking to me): “You’re bad at this game.” Callie: “Busted!” (They were right :P)
• My dad has occupied his time setting up a YouTube live stream to stream our church service on Sunday morning, since we’ll be closed for the next couple of weeks (will be streaming on our youtube channel)
• There have also been lots of Odyssey episodes to listen to and Facebook live videos to keep the little ones occupied (Cincinnati Zoo is currently their favorite).
• Lots of cleaning got done today, which is definitely a plus 🙂
• And of course, this has given me plenty of time to work on that novel I’d been ignoring lately 🙂

So….how has your family been handling social distancing? What have you been doing for fun?