GUIDE: Boredom Busters in the Age of COVID-19
BY EMILY TAYLOR | GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
What bizarre days we’re living in right now, friends. Never in remembered history – my 91-year-old grandmother couldn’t even recall a time such as this – have we been asked to hunker down at home for the health and safety of ourselves and our community. There is a lot of uncertainty and stress revolving around this situation, but I’m typically one to look for the silver lining. One thing that has really struck me about this crazy and unexpected time is how it has forced innovation and fostered creativity in people. From business owners to parents, folks are discovering new ways to connect, to promote, to teach and learn, to shop, and much more. Nothing really looks the same in our daily activities, but life must go on. It’s pretty amazing how adaptable we can be when we have to.
Kids especially are known for their adaptability, so this time of major disruption and adjustment is really their time to shine – and, in turn, our time to shine for them. From a parent’s perspective here are a few of the best ways I’ve seen this adaptation happening over the last couple of weeks:
EXPAND YOUR HORIZONS
From the art museums of Paris to Betty White in Hollywood, countless institutions and beloved celebrities are releasing online content specifically designed to engage, teach, inspire, and entertain our kids during this time. Never have I seen so much quality material in easily digestible formats. being distributed on a daily basis One of our favorites has been Lunch Doodles with Mo – a livestream series on YouTube in which children’s book author Mo Willems virtually takes kids into his studio and gives them a mini drawing tutorial each day. His commentary is funny and relevant and has inspired some really entertaining sketches from our boys and a new “after-dinner doodles” tradition at our kitchen table. Another favorite is the Home Safari episodes from the Cincinnati Zoo. These daily half-hour Facebook Live events give kids an up close and personal look at a different zoo animal each day as the handlers share interesting facts and answer viewers’ questions and then leave us with a related craft or activity to work on after the show. These are just a couple of series that have been hits in our house, but in this time of physical isolation from school and friends, thankfully the great options are pretty much endless. Find a couple that your kids love and set reminders for them, then help your kids hop on the computer each day to watch. They will look forward to those times, and you will too.
Connect with your Neighborhood
Not long after staying home clearly became the safest thing to do, I began to see neighborhoods around town connecting with their residents through new and innovative approaches, such as putting Christmas lights or yard inflatables back out or organizing scavenger hunts and bear hunts. Our midtown neighborhood quickly adopted the bear hunt method, where neighbors display teddy bears (or whatever stuffed animals they have on hand) in their windows and on their porches for kids to discover as they take walks. This has been such a fun way to connect neighbors of all ages because the kids are delighted to spot each stuffed friend along the way and our elderly neighbors who are wisely staying inside can enjoy watching the “hunters” from their windows. As we walked a few days ago, we saw an older neighbor dancing and waving from her front window so we danced and waved right back. It was just a brief moment of connection but it brought a smile to all of our faces and a sense of comradery and silliness to a very isolating time.
Join Forces with Local Businesses
Speaking of bringing smiles to people’s faces, there are many businesses that I’ve seen coming up with new ideas to promote themselves and provide a service to families at the same time. Earlier this week, Joy Yeh, the owner of Asia Garden caught wind of the bear hunts and contacted neighborhoods to see if she could take the hunts up a notch. She spent a couple of sunny mornings this week taping gift card prizes to the mailboxes of participating homes for the “hunters” to find. To me, this is a great example of a local business going out of its way to invest in its community, and it was a clever promotion for Asia Garden as well. Another example is my fellow photographer, Cari Griffith’s fun idea of offering “Porch Portraits” to her neighbors in LANA. For a minimal price and from a safe distance, Cari will snap a few photos of your family in front of your house as a keepsake of this time in your lives. Photographers are moment-freezers and, with this pandemic being the historical moment that it is, I think it’s worth documenting the people and places that came out on the top of our priority lists during this time. Investing in a Porch Portrait session for your family will not only benefit you, it will benefit Cari’s small business, which normally depends on the close face-to-face interactions that are a no-no right now. I believe that’s what you call a pivot – way to go, Cari!
Get Resourceful
In these days of increasingly forced minimalism due to store runs being questionable and stock online being limited, my family has quickly resorted to a rediscovery of all-the-things-we-already-had-at-home-but-never-had-time-to-do. We have completed a treehouse addition that we have been meaning to get to for over a year. We have dug a bag of old electronic parts out of the attic and let the boys explore it and create inventions with its contents. And, as long as we are self-isolating, we will probably just keep digging in attics and closets to find supplies and materials for the purpose of engaging these kids. Admittedly the Taylors are collectors of unfinished projects so we may have more of these types of things than the average family but, if you think outside the box, I bet there are items that every household already has that can be used for entertaining kids. For example, you definitely have the supplies for collage-making. I recently went through some drawers and cabinets and was able to assemble a box of wonderfully random materials I’ll save for the next rainy day – scraps of fabric, pipe cleaners, stickers, old stationery, wrapping paper pieces, finger paints, etc. You can find tons of inspiration online to jump off a collage project with your kids and the variety of materials is sure to spur their creativity and hold their interest, at least for a while.
GO Outside
While we have had seemingly endless rainy days during this time so far, thankfully spring is here and we will start to see more and more sunshine. And as we do, I’m reminding myself (and you) that self-isolating does not mean that we have to stay inside our house – it just means that we should avoid public places as much as possible as well as close physical proximity to people not in our household. Fortunately we have some great parks close by that can provide us with wide open spaces for kids to run off energy and for parents to breathe some fresh air and clear our heads. I hope this crazy period will give us a renewed appreciation for local gems like Cypress Grove, Pinson Mounds, Chickasaw State Park, Lake Graham, and Reelfoot Lake State Park. Connecting with nature is usually close to last on the daily priority list for so many of us, but being outdoors can be so beneficial to our bodies and minds, and with more time on our hands and stress in our lives than normal there’s no better occasion than now to bump it up the list.
Having the things that usually fill up our days to bursting taken away has brought into abrupt and pretty complete clarity what is non-essential versus what is most important – connecting with friends and loved ones in any way we can, family dinners, learning, playing, and just being together. As stressful and uncertain as this time is, one thing is certain – we will not come out of it unchanged. We will no doubt have a new awareness of how we spend the hours in our days. In the end, we will all hopefully be less frivolous and more mindful, less “bored” and more resourceful, less consuming and more creative, less busy and more thankful.
Emily Taylor is a Jackson, TN native; a mom to a soccer-loving 8-year-old and a mischievous toddler; and a wife to her high-school sweetheart. She loves books, cooking, and animals; but her passion in life is photography. She opened Grasshopper Studios in 2013.