Day 268 (March 16): Stress and Structure

Now is as good a time as ever to get back to the basics.

By now, as you may have heard, there's a global pandemic endangering the lives of people with compromised respiratory systems (like my 99.5 year old grandfather and our nearly-six year old nephew) and the economies of, well, basically everywhere.

To date, our experience has been very different than most of our peers in America. When we arrived in Singapore in mid-February the country was already mobilized to contain the risks, mainly through personal hygiene but also social distancing. In Cambodia and Vietnam, where many people wear masks on a daily basis because of pollution, our guides told us that the biggest change was that tourism was way down, mostly because the Chinese were barred from traveling.

So over the last two months, this has been an everyday concern for us as we have traveled between and within countries in Asia. Our kids have gotten used to washing their hands many, many times a day and occasionally wearing masks when we go to certain public places. Meanwhile the West, especially the United States, has lost its mind. My favorite example is the hoarding of toilet paper in preparation for a respiratory illness.

For the last week we have been in Malaysia, in a suburb of a city, Johor, that is itself a suburb of Singapore. We are here because there are a dozen or more other "worldschooling" families who agreed to coordinate our itineraries for a meetup. The stories are diverse: our trip is the shortest and fastest whereas other families have been on the "road" for seven years and others have no plans to return home, whether that's in the US or elsewhere.

In the last few days, as restrictive policies have traveled with the disease from places such as China and Italy to New Zealand, Spain, Singapore and the United States, the families around us have had different reactions. In the last 48 hours, several families have made emergency departures to return to the US or UK. Others have made "visa runs" to Singapore to ensure that they have the full 90 days allowed for tourists in Malaysia available.

Any way you look at it, this is an extremely stressful time. I think we're lucky to have online social networks that connect us to travelers in similar circumstances around the world. I've told my mom that it's like having a global network of spies because it's so easy to get reports on conditions at airports and in cities almost everywhere in the world in real time. Listening to these threads, it's clear that there's a lot of anxiety. In the worst cases, parents face non-zero probabilities of being separated from their children.

The role of fear is so significant. Of course we see it in the behavior of financial markets and irrational consumers. But there are also myriad rational fears. Mine is the health of my 99+ year old grandfather. But, maybe strangely, I don't have any fear about our travel. We're in a place that has been taking this seriously for a long time and has deployed reasonable measures to contain the spread. The phrase "flatten the curve" has been in circulation here for weeks.

Also, the fact that we are in this community with other world traveling families gives us great confidence. Should we (or they) need to self-quarantine, we have people who would be able to help us with food delivery and other needs. We've joked that we're already pretty quarantined by the lifestyle that we've chosen in this apartment complex. (Portlanders, imagine a block in the Pearl District with an apartment building on top of a grocery store; that's where we live except that that one block is surrounded by nothing for at least half a mile.)

As we talk about this (every day, nearly all day), we aren't worried about getting sick because we are young and healthy. We aren't worried about being quarantined here, based on the assumption that we will still have access to groceries and the internet. We worry mostly about the things that make being here fun (our new friends, Legoland) being eliminated from the picture. We worry that our choices in air travel will be restricted in a severe way.

We also talk about the 4 months between now and our planned grand finale, which is a sailboat trip in Croatia. We've assumed the ability to move between countries in Europe so that we could spend May and June adventuring around. It seems more and more likely that we will not be able to travel that way. Even if border policies thaw in Europe, we're probably looking at spending at least three weeks in each country that we visit. This isn't bad but different and that's a lesson that we're generally eager to learn.

In the meantime, our life continues. Last week was a big transition. By Friday we could tell that the kids were frayed so we had a very low key weekend. There were a lot of art projects, quite a bit of TV time and trips to the pool.

Elise bought a role of art paper at IKEA. It was consumed within 24 hours.

Origami!

Henry got to have some guy time at the pool.

As we prepared for the week, we began to introduce a clearer sense of expectations. First, we put up a poster about daily expectations. The kids call them the Rainbow Rules:

On Sunday, we added a list of daily duties and explained a point system so that the kids could earn points by completing these basics; the points can be used for getting time on their tablets (the most valuable currency we have).

Elise has pretty handwriting and really good ideas.

The way this works is that the kids can earn up to two points in the morning and two in the evening; they need ten points to have access to their tablet. The first evening and first morning went well!

We had a Sunday night family meeting where we discussed the upcoming days. Each day this week we are doing school in the morning and then a "fun" in the afternoon. We have a school field trip to see the new Trolls movie on Wednesday, for example. School went well this morning. We started at about 9:00 and did roughly 30-minute blocks of time until noon.

One of the highlights is that we bought an assortment of Legos yesterday. The kids were excited to get up and start building this morning and were super eager to reach a break in school so that they could work on their projects. As they did in Melbourne, they have settled into working collaboratively on shared projects. I forgot how much fun they had. Of course, in Melbourne they had a much, much larger quantity and diversity of pieces. Here I bought two 900-piece sets for a little less than $30 each. I felt that was an extremely good bargain. I definitely didn't want to buy a kit that they would build once and then abandon!

Four kids and 1,800 legos

So we'll see how this goes. We need to manage the swirl of Coronavirus anxiety on one hand  and rebuild a somewhat normal school and life routine on the other hand.