Quarantine

Staying in Flagstaff as an exemplary citizen during the quarantine has not been very challenging so far. Besides all the beautiful surroundings, Vėjas keeps us busy all the time so it is hard to get bored.

While swiping through Instagram stories, I tried to understand what people are dealing with and what we can possibly expect soon to go through. These were my thoughts so far:

• Social self-isolation? Check. Since the beginning of the trip we have been pretty isolated anyway.
• Shopping trips only once a week? Check. Usually there are no good grocery stores around us, so we try to plan ahead each time we find a bigger store. It is the same now just for a different reason.
• Family together 24/7? Not a problem. We chose to be closer to each other eight months ago and we have already survived our crises.

Overall, I think we have already been living a quarantine lifestyle for a while. This is why we hit the road in the first place - to slow down and get closer to each other. The only thing we are missing right now is the bigger reason for staying in such a small house. I am missing the travel that gave us purpose.

We dream to hit the road freely again, and, until then, we are reading, exercising, cooking complicated recipes and having lots of video dates with friends and family. Also, there were lots of reasons to have feasts: Vėjas has existed for more than 365 days on this planet and the Easter Sunday!

The first year of Vėjas life brought extreme clarity to my days. For the very first time in my life I can recall what happened and when. The time passed neither too fast, nor too slow. Now I know exactly how a year feels. We decided to celebrate this occasion by baking banana bread (since Vėjas likes bananas) and video calls with his closest family - grandparents and godparents. Not sure if Vėjas will remember any of it, but hopefully he will have some fun reading his first birthday letter, where we summarized his first year with us.

Furthermore, Easter Sunday was cozy and memorable. Since we have already gotten used to celebrating bigger occasions without family and friends, it was nothing new this time, but cozy as usual. Comfort food, board games, good movies and memories of the three of us. I think the only exception this time was that people had time to call and chit chat with us.

So overall nothing to complain about. I just hope, that everything gets back on track soon. Meanwhile, we will live very slow, do things which we would never probably have time for, like taking care of old traveling videos and pictures, creating family albums and etc. I wish you to stay positive and creative!