Create a Pandemic Time Capsule With Your Kids
Our family wall calendar for March is a bit haunting. While we each have our own systems for keeping track of personal appointments or appointments, the calendar in our kitchen allows us to keep track of what the three of us need to know. Football training and basketball games. Out-of-town working meetings. School dropout days. The day the dog needs monthly medications. We even buy a very large calendar because we found that the squares of a regular calendar are too small to keep track of our busy lives. Or they were too small – until March.
The month started off fairly well, with notes on how to snow tubing for the first time, followed by a “misfit day,” “twin day,” and a “character day” at my son’s school. There was hockey, dinner with my cousin, meeting at the airport. But then “Mom and Dad are visiting this weekend” was deleted. Basketball matches were canceled. Day trip to Philadelphia to see friends is crossed out. Almost everything that was written in two weeks was crossed out one by one.
And then you turn the page … and April is almost blank except for a few extended family birthdays (and the date that still marks when the dog gets his medications). In a way, it shows how each day flows into the next right now. The complete lack of places to go and what to see. Yet there is much more that we are all going through now that I think we – and our children – will want to remember.
When we recall this time later, when we tell our children and our grandchildren what it was like to live, work and raise children during this pandemic, we want more than: “Well … we walked a lot, see.” something more than a calendar that went out almost overnight.
I noted the little things in my diary to help me remember through the days. The movies I watched while exercising on the elliptical trainer at home, the dinners we prepared, the takeout food we ordered. But in fact, this does not reflect the feeling that we are experiencing. One mom created what she calls the ” COVID-19 Time Capsule .”
This is not a real time capsule in which you collect a bunch of time-specific items and literally bury them in your backyard. It is more a record of memories and experiences; it is part magazine, part workbook, and part collection of memorabilia such as photographs, newspaper clippings, or abandoned family wall calendars.
Natalie Long of LONG Creations originally created this project as a way to document the daily lives of her children during the coronavirus. But when she first shared it on Facebook a few weeks ago, it was so overwhelmed that she has since added a Canadian version , a Spanish and French version, a metric version, and several versions specifically for adults. There are even bonus pages for new parents , teachers , alumni, and those celebrating birthdays during the pandemic.
In the basic version for children, they can fill in some statistics about themselves (age, weight, shoe size, etc.), In words, describe their feelings, what they learned during this experience, what they are grateful for and what they were doing. There is a page where they can write themselves a letter, a page where you can write them a letter , and a diagram to keep track of important events and how they flagged them.
Each version is a free downloadable PDF that you can print and fill out at home. When this is done, there is no need to bury him; just put it somewhere safe to reflect on for years to come.