Guide to family, work and a balance life in lockdown

Life before lockdown

Nothing seems easy in life when having a career and family to keep in balance. The world is so busy and I am/was no exception to that description before lockdown.

Working for me is my life blood, I love my job and all that comes with it. This includes staying late if a job needs to be finished or a deadline needs to be met. I'm a local radio producer and writer; working on a podcast, interviewing people or turning up to do the audio at a big event is commonplace to me and, I might add, a lifestyle.

Every day in my job is busy but also no two days are the same and this is what I enjoy about working in media.

It's the same with my home life and my little family. My husband and I have a small toddler who is turning three this year. She is full of energy and every day is a new adventure. I love spending time with her but I am, like most parents of a small child, often worn out by lunchtime.

My husband and myself also have very specific roles to play within our home, as play times, house chores and our little one's bedtime are organised around our busy work and hobby schedules. This way we both get a four hour shift with our daughter each day when she is not in preschool. We are able tailor our weekly routine around her, and everything else slots in between pretty well.

So given my enthusiasm for my family and my job, you may be able to imagine my fear, horror and upset when a little thing like a global pandemic gets in the way of our busy timetables.

Not that anyone should take it lightly, but right from the beginning I knew it would be a disruption to my workload, my family life, my husband and our lifestyle in general. What I was not prepared for were the surprises that were to come during the next few months, both good and bad. This is a guide to how we are facing this lockdown head on and dealing with both every day challenges and some not so every day ones too.

Finding a new normal

Most people don't like change and our family is no exception to this rule as before lockdown we had, like many, a set routine in our daily lives. Preschool runs, walking to work and spending time at the gym, doing other hobbies and clubs every evening and staying in contact with family. Meeting up for drinks and coffees with friends were just the weekdays. Weekends were just as busy and life was becoming a bit like a hamster wheel, though slightly more enjoyable I would imagine.

Unless you are a key worker, we would now all be working from home and not really leaving home unless we really need to.

In the first few weeks we could see we needed to rethink our current childcare rota to fit around working. How would we do this without disrupting our busy small person's daily routine, such as playtime, education, TV and bath times?

"Time for us to learn how to think outside of the box", I remember pondering: it's a good job that we are all creatively minded in our household.

So logically we started turning whatever space we have into some kind of work spaces for the purpose of dealing with the situation now thrust upon us. Like many families, panic did set in and yes, the need to stock up on toilet roll and hand products did cross our minds, but we were too busy trying to rearrange everything else to act upon it at the time.

This is because challenge number one for us is that we live in a small two bed flat above a local shop and apart from our home living areas, space is fairly limited. So our first obstacle was to think of a way around this and see what we could create to work for us.

We have a medium sized shared landing area with the flat next door to us. My husband has already been using this for some time as his work space. Even before lockdown it is commonplace for him within his career to work from home.

This has now, after some negotiation, became my work space also. It is has only required a little rearranging of time during each day on both our parts.

In short, our plan has been that one of us would have our daughter in the morning for four hours, while the other uses the area on our landing to work for four hours. At the end of the four hour period we would switch round.

This worked well to a degree in the first few weeks; I had the am shift with our daughter and my husband the pm shift with her, but this soon got very mundane.

So after a chat with each other one evening on our third week into lockdown, we decided to adopt an every other day shift pattern.

By this I mean that one day I would work in the morning and in the afternoon I would do the child care. The following day we would swap around to do the opposite. By the end of that week, this felt a lot less tiring with more variety within our days. I have to add at this point that variety in lockdown is so important for us all with regard to looking after our mental health. After all, we don't want to end up with cabin fever that is so bad that we are climbing the walls of our homes, begging for lockdown to stop torturing us good folk.

I also felt like we have to find some kind of joy in the midst of all this pandemic and try and still feel like we are achieving something in life and even embrace and enjoy it in some way.

This was important to us both as we have a few every day challenges within our household in a normal non lockdown setting.

Both my husband and myself are fellow creatives and both suffer from anxiety and depression, so it was very important to get a balance as soon as we could, without making too much disruption to our small daughter's routine. Of course its important for any parent to make minimal disruptions to their child's daily routine wile they are still very young.

Exercise, rethinking space and learning a lesson

Another day and another Boris Johnson / government TV briefing, with the hard guidelines clearly in place regarding daily trips, exercise and keeping safe. This is even before the rules on helping to curb the spread of infection and the already put upon NHS.

Truth be told, he had me at exercise. Eeekkkk, the thought of staying indoors and no gym trips filled me with horror. Probably not just me but thousands of other gym-goers who don't jog or won't jog I should think too.

Thus striking fear into my psyche, due to the lack of days of using the gym, for me this was the worst part to hear and I went into panic buy gym equipment mode. I ordered kettle bells, hand weights in every size, a gym mat and an exercise ball. I already had larger weights and had just signed up to Les Mills on-demand fitness classes on-line.

Thank goodness, I had the common sense to have done this before Argos sold out of equipment along with Amazon and most other online retailers.

I was all set and ready to begin my 'lets stay positive at home' gym routine. Feeling happy with my orders of equipment, I then had a challenge that burst my bubble. Where in a small flat would I set up my own home gym area? One long hard think later and I hit upon the idea of using the small hallway in the flat. By moving things around and building a home made shoe tidy, my home gym space began to take shape. After clearing a lot of stuff from the hall area we didn't need anymore by way of packing it away in the loft, the transformation was complete. As if by magic, an hour later I had my own home gym and wondered why had we been wasting so much space before hand.

In hindsight I really do think that was the real lesson here. Before lockdown we had wasted space beforehand due to lack of time - saving space requires planning which we never seemed to get around to doing. Now we had time to rethink living areas and use them in new ways. This could only be a positive going forward and a good life lesson even at my age.

However as summer was around the corner, our next challenge as a family in a flat without a garden was how do we provide an outdoor space for a toddler to spend time in during the days of social distancing?

Green spaces and small children

Our little girl, just like us, also needs exercise and space to let off some steam. Without a green area attached to our home, how on earth would this work?

Thankfully we live close to a green play area. However, since the swings and roundabout are now locked up and off limits to her, we are taking her to play football and encouraging her to run around the grassed area. Naturally this is under our watchful eyes and at a safe distance from other people.

We also discovered some new outdoor areas to go walking that are close to our home where there is a duck pond on route. Subsequently, feeding the ducks has become a common outing a few times a week. Again, these new spaces were unknown to us until lockdown happened.

Social media has had a big part in a lot of our new discoveries. Facebook has opened up local discussion groups that share ideas and tips within the local area and the community around us where we live in rural Nottinghamshire. I also really like to give tips and support to others so have been enjoying being part of a few of these groups and reading along and posting daily.

Relationships

My husband and I have found living in a small space can present its problems in a marriage in every day life and in a lockdown that pressure can feel so much worse. Giving each other time to do personal hobbies, such as gaming, fitness, music or reading has been extremely valuable and positive for us both. Just a few weeks into lockdown I wanted to keep busy and enrolled in an online course. My hope was that this would keep me stimulated mentally and that I would learn something new also. As the course topic is something I used to really enjoy as a child and wanted to get back to in my adulthood, it's great to have the time to focus on this particular goal.

It's refreshing to have made provision for this time as before lockdown, it would have been work, gym, family time for a few hours and then bed.

It feels empowering to have an opportunity for a slower life style and to be able to fit things in that (maybe) I never would have had the time for if lockdown had not happened.

But don't get me wrong, it is also very important in a relationship or marriage to spend time with one another and do things together if you have a common interest. For us its been watching films together or playing retro video games that we both enjoy. Putting aside a few hours each evening to really have a chat about the day, come up with quizzes or make up games. Just having time to be ourselves with each other and apart is really important right now. Communication is more important for us then ever before and if something is not going well, talking to each other is vital during lockdown. When you don't, it makes your small space feel even smaller and can have a negative impact on you both.

In the last few days we have found talking about issues is the best way of fixing them, as small things can turn into big things really quickly. There is a very real sense of fear that left unchecked, your children will pick up on this fast.

We were not alway good at doing this before lockdown but I think that this is changing. I am probably the worst out of the two of us for thinking things are ok when they are not. For example we recently had a problem that could have got really bad and we rowed about it. But once it was all out in the open I felt like I could begin to make changes towards helping my husband more in lots of small areas.

Handled differently this lockdown time is now very much valued and I feel it's even starting to improve our relationship. Our daughter is also benefitting from many of these changes to our lifestyle as we get to see her grow up by spending more time with her during lockdown. Some days are better than others and of course, some weeks are also, but as a family we keep moving forward.

Keeping in touch

There is a buzz online from all ages like never before. People gathering together via Zoom, conferencing for community meetings online, virtual gatherings such as church, slimming support, indoor workouts on YouTube and so much more all pretty amazing advancements.

So much so that I started my own Facebook podcast channel and YouTube Channels to connect with the local community myself and try and help others to keep being positive. https://www.facebook.com/takeover106.9/

My faith has played a big part in this as I am a regular church goer in non lockdown times and have found that my faith has helped me to keep positive during lockdown so far.

I find myself keeping busy by doing a live worship night on Facebook weekly and have also been surprised to see so many people checking in to join in with songs and prayers.

It's amazing to see people who are not young, using technology and learning to use it well. The internet seems to be filled now with young and old using TikTok, Twitter, Snapchat and Instagram as the daily norm.

To me it feels like the generation gap has become just that little bit smaller than before and this can only be a good thing during these unprecedented times.