The Corona Diaries - One Year Later.

Last time I wrote about the pandemic, it was the end of April 2020 and it was all just happening.

People still called it “the Corona Virus” and not Covid-19 and we were told that if we all stayed in our houses in two weeks we could “flatten the curve”

Now it’s the end of June 2021 and I got the second dose two weeks ago. It feels like the light at the end of the tunnel.

We just went to church for the first time since March 2020. People I hadn’t seen in over a year ask, “How have you been?” I feel a bit at a loss on how to summarize the last 15 months.

We made some wonderful memories during the pandemic and sometimes the limit restrictions actually made things more enjoyable like having the skating rink almost to ourselves...

I got up at 6:00 am to book our preferred timeslots for skiing and we had a lot of crazy blizzard days up at Mt. Seymour

We finally had time to work on that crazy 3D puzzle the kids got as a present

We got outside whenever we could and hiked up to beautiful viewpoints like this 

We READ so many books and so glad the library stayed open during the pandemic. It was fun to get books in a brown paper bag for pick up like dinner take out. 

We turned our house into a bakery and baked lots of treats

We learned to embrace Zoom and made Gingerbread houses online with Auntie Rainbee

We stayed local over Christmas and discovered Sasquatch is a great family mountain

We scouted bikes for the kids and Daddy introduced them to mountain biking

We made the most of our time inside and made forts and tents and slept in the living room

But there was grief too. My grandma passed away very quickly in Oct 2020. We were supposed to go see her in the summer, she was as healthy as a 98 year old could be but Ontario was in lock down and we didn’t go. And now we won't have the opportunity to be together again. That was really hard. 

She was cremated in Ontario and flown here where we had a ceremony with just our family. 

Lots of tears and sadness that day. The last phone call I had with her was the morning before she died and my heart was aching listening to work so hard to take in each breath and tell me in Chinese that she was suffering. I'm so heart broken that we won't get to see her anymore, we won't be able to make  dumplings together or have dim sum together and take a 4 generations picture like we did in 2017 but I'm glad she is now in Heaven. One day, I'll see her again and maybe I'll learn how to play mah-jong in Heaven.

I interviewed the kids back in April 2020 and I video-taped them again on video at the end of May 2020. You can watch the interview here I think Nallie sums it up the best when I asked her what she learned from the year and half during the pandemic, this wise 9-year-old simply said, "Trust in God.

Amen to that.