Coping with Covid

These past few months have been stressful, but I know we will all get through it together. I don’t think that this outbreak is going to take over our world. Yes, we do have people out there really freaking out, but at the same time, as long as you follow Governor Tim Walz’s stay-at-home order this all will go away much faster. There are people that really don’t care about this order. Those people are the people that are making this quarantine longer. I get the fact that there is really nothing to do in your house except watch TV. Everyone needs to calm down and find different things to do each day. Some examples of activities are: walking your pet, cooking/baking, learning a new language, teaching someone something that you are interested in, biking outside, and learning sign language. Some of the activities that I have taken up are biking with my brother and sisters, walking with my dog and family, grilling marshmallows on the grill, burning our year-old Christmas tree, dying my hair brown, and playing joke frisbee with our neighbors. There is always a way to create fun of the current situation if you try hard enough.

One day my oldest sister, Tori, came over and we made an adventure out of the day. We biked all the way to Vermillion Falls. When we got to The Ruins we got off our bikes and started hiking. Everyone really enjoyed the wonderful weather outside that day. When we finished hiking, we biked to the Dairy store but unfortunately, they weren’t open so we biked to DQ instead. DQ is the way to go when it is hot outside. We then enjoyed some Blizzards. I got a mint chocolate cookie Blizzard. This was a great time to bond with my siblings. I am hoping that later during this quarantine I can go out and do more fun activities with all of them. If we didn’t have the huge restrictions it would have been fun to include some of our friends. Biking is something that I will do more with my family when the stay-at-home order is removed. I hope that more people are learning from this quarantine that family bonding time is important. I also hope people will spend more time outside after the disease is over.

Since this quarantine, I started walking my dog, Pandora, with my family. My mom told us that we need to get out of the house and do some physical activity. So every single day we go on a walk in the morning, after school hours, and later at night. When we say the word “walk” our dog freaks out. She gets really excited and hops all over the place with a huge smile on her face. Instead of saying “walk” we have to say “klawa.” Our dog is really smart and is learning the English language the longer we have her. She knows so many words, such as whip cream, walks, ride, treat, and outside. We have to be extremely careful when we say those words around our dog. She may be three-and-a-half, but she is pretty intelligent. When we go on walks, the walks are about 25 minutes. Sometimes we cut the walks a little shorter because of the weather or if we aren’t feeling very energetic. My family loves the outdoors. We wish we could go to the dog park and play with Pandora but that will have to happen after the quarantine is lifted. Walks are a great way to get exercise, fresh air, have family bonding, and have fun!

One day we decided, as a family, to make hot dogs for dinner and have s’mores for dessert. We used the grill and roasted some marshmallows and had chocolate between two graham crackers. We had dessert before we had dinner, which usually isn’t normal for our family. We ate dinner outside that night and had a really fun time. Later my mom had the idea to pick up all the sticks in our yard and burn them. Everyone helped rake the leaves and sticks up and throw them in the fire pit. Then we started the fire. Later on, we threw our Christmas tree in and it went up in flames super fast right before our eyes. We stayed out for at least five hours waiting for the whole tree to burn. We would have stayed out there for longer but it started to drizzle. My family loves the rain but sometimes we don’t want to get wet. So we went inside and watched The Masked Singer. We all crashed when we came in. Everyone was exhausted and had a really fun time. I learned from this night that sometimes trying new activities can end up being lots of fun.

My family has done many activities together and really have had so much fun. We have done many things that we wouldn’t have done if not for quarantine. We have a rough time being entertained sometimes but we learned through all this, there are many things to do to make life a little more fun, like going outside or walking the dog. We may be bored but we do have things that we can do to entertain ourselves. You just need to broaden your horizons. You may find this a struggle to start with but, once you get used to coming up with new ideas, it won’t be so hard in the end. The people who used to exercise every day at the gym have now made their own gym in their house. People who had their own businesses have found a way to keep the business up and running at home. In the end, you have things to do at home and you just need to look around, do some research, and then start it up. Just be considerate of others and everything will be okay.

—Jasi

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