We love climbing frames and wooden swing and slide sets, and we’ve seen so many benefits from taking the children to different parks over the years. Every school holiday we spend a day doing a tour of the local parks, and we try out at least one that we haven’t been to before.
This is a strange and unprecedented time in our lives. Families all over the world are in lock down. Whilst this might be a really difficult time in so many ways, it is also an opportunity to do things we might not normally have time for in everyday life.
I’ve also been trying to remind myself that this is not home schooling in the sense that home-schoolers know it. This is crisis schooling and that is NOT the same thing. No one has done this before and we’ve had little time to prepare.
Family life is hectic. We race from place to place, club to club, meeting to meeting and we keep going, sometimes for weeks at a time without taking a breath. Without pausing to reflect on the impact that can have over time.
Congratulations. You are about to have a baby, or the little one has already arrived. You are likely to feel overwhelmed with lots of different emotions, and you worry that you will forget to look closely at this special time. It is reasonable, therefore, to want to find a way to celebrate the birth of your child.
What strange times we are living in at the moment. If you’d said to me a year ago, even at Christmas, possibly even a few weeks ago that parents across the UK, across the world, would be homeschooling their children, in a bid to support social distancing and limit the spread of COVID-19 – well, I’d have thought you were crazy.
There’s no motherhood manual. Maybe you learn what you think you should do from watching others, from the way your were parented by your own mother, or other mother figure. Maybe you read books, or watch Supernanny even. I once knew someone who read Gina Ford and became an instant expert on all things baby – for about five minutes of motherhood.
As schools set to close across the UK today for an undetermined length of time, Yoopies, the largest European childcare platform, is launching an appeal to all students and childcare providers to volunteer their childcare services to help support healthcare workers and essential industries.