Celebrations in unprecedented times...

Birthday cake from the Cheesecake shop

This week we celebrated our youngest's 9th birthday in unprecedented times. We had to make the decision between having her celebrations at the pools as we had planned or to have a small family celebration with social distancing encouraged from the threat of coronavirus.

After some discussion, we decided to have both with the first at the pools for only a short time with portable party foods to take home for those wanting to come and go, and then continued our celebrations at home with three generations.

Our youngest had such a great time with friends and family whilst enjoying her day despite our earlier reservations. It's still something that I would carefully consider before going ahead in these uncertain times but it seemed okay at the time.

However, since then the status of NZ has been lifted to a stage 2 level of concern with social distancing encouraged and now groups of over 100 people banned. Therefore church services have been stopped with alternative arrangements made and group meetings have been postponed until further notice.

Schools at this time are still open with Early childhood centres encouraged to stay open and to have individuals who are sick stay home but I've decided to have my children stay home and glad that the Uni that our eldest goes to has decided to go to online forums to deliver lectures and notes etc.

My workplace has also encouraged me to work from home and to deliver my first class via a digital platform so will be busy this weekend working on zoom lessons, a Facebook class page, Google classroom and our TWOA Te Wananga o Aotearoa digital platform called 'iakoranga' all of which I've been using (Google classroom sparingly) since last year.

So for now, no more birthday celebrations for another couple of months until May but with Easter just around the corner, we'll see what this holds for our families in the face of the impending COVID19 (coronavirus)...