lockdown 2.0
May Gibbs, a famous Australian author and illustrator, sketched this in 1919 as part of a public health poster about the Spanish flu. It's a gum nut baby and a kookaburra with eucalyptus leaves wrapped around their mouths in the manner of face masks.
There is a scurry of little feet up and down our stairs right now. The sound of Shea's voice drifts upstairs as he teaches his year 6 class online. I'm hearing something about yeast and sugar and warm water, and then Shea asking,
"And you know what else we're making right now? Beer!" I feel relief that that is not the focus of the lesson. Sometimes, you never know with ol' Mountain Dad, just where you might end up.
It's clearly such an exciting lesson that it's drawn my kids away from their own lessons upstairs to observe the science. And to run objects down to Teacher Dad the he has forgotten to bring to his class. It makes me ponder about the merging of our professional and personal lives as our lockdown continues and our kids make more of an appearance in our online lessons. Lox dropped off a little gift to me mid-lesson last week, and won the hearts of all the teenage girls in my mentor class. I know that both Shea and I have wandered through the background of our own kids zoom lessons, looking absurd in top-half-well-dressed while bottom-half-is-trackie-daks-and-slippers. Their teachers are getting small insights into our home life, as are our students when the mountain kids join our lessons. As a teacher, I love these sneaky-peeks into the homes of my students; it often makes them make more sense and I'm curious to have a good sticky-beak whenever the digital, blurred background is removed. As a parent, I'm mortified at what Mrs. Thomas and Mrs. Smith might glimpse of our gong show of a kitchen that I scuff around during a break in lessons to snatch a snack and refill my mug of tea. The backside of my tracksuit pants bag out like a parachute and my fluro-green socks clash in a headache-inducing way with my red slipper-clogs. Socially presentable, we are not.
But, as we wrap up our fifth week of lockdown and the fifth week of us all learning and teaching from home, we're mostly happy and content. Though scruffy.
We've found a happy rhythm to our working days whereby I will set up the kids learning-from-home-workbooks the night before. This means they have everything ready to go, with instructions spelt out, for their schooling the next day. In the morning we can then go for a run or a walk together before Teacher Dad and I descend to the basement and our respective rooms, to login to our online classes. Though we don't get to teach our own kids very much, I love that we get to see them throughout the day.
Of an afternoon, we try to get out and about in our beachside suburb. This is harder than you would think. We live a five minute walk away from the beach. Our sleepy peninsula is barely above sea level and so very flat; it boasts a beautiful 10km bike path that runs all the way around along the waters edge. There is a rocky break wall that stretches out into the ocean, with a paved pathway running along it called Shipwreck Walk. It honours all the old marine vessels that wrecked here during the 19th and early 20th centuries and you can still see the rusting hulk of one, the Adolphe. From the end of the break wall you can watch the huge coal ships lumber into Newcastle Harbour and occasionally sight dolphins and seals playing in the surf.
As we walk the pathways, swim the ocean or play at the beach, we frequently run into local friends and, as we chat at a covid-safe-distance, at some point, someone will invariably marvel that of all the places to be locked down in, haven't we just struck it lucky? Isn't Stockton just the best place to be locked down (these Stockton-ites are pretty staunch).
And with all this human positivity and natural attractions and features, trying to get our two homebody children out of the house for an afternoon adventure is like pulling teeth from the proverbial chook. Little Laide, especially, doth kick up a stinketh.
"But you always saaaaay," she will wail, "that it's going to be quick, but then Dad will go off some street and it will be, like an hour, or something!"
Even the invite to 'accidentally' bump into friends at the beach on a hot afternoon, is not enough to rouse some enthusiasm in her.
To her credit, she will always come along with us, though definitely not willingly, and she will invariably shake her mood and have a ball. But the leaving the house is always a trial. Sometimes, I wonder if we've adventured the kids out and therefore, they cling to our house and home like an Adolphe shipwreck survivor, adrift in the sea. Or, I wonder, is the reason that this lockdown is going so well for us because it's like our adventure pendulum has swung away from activity and into the zone of home? If balance is what we always strive to find in life, does it take five weeks of a government enforced stay at home order, for us to counterbalance the camping/hiking/sailing/cycling/exploring agenda that we usual inflict upon our offspring?
I don't know. But I will say, thus far, lockdown has been treating us well. And we wish the same to our Covid comrades both near and far. Who knows, with all this home time, we just may get onto our Christmas cards this year in time to send them out to y'all for the actual Yuletide. A true Christmas miracle. 
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