Episode 80 is another solo episode, sans guest, and the final half of my thoughts on the place we all find ourselves in currently: in the middle of this global pandemic of Covid-19 or the Corona Virus. I recorded this episode on Friday, April 3, 2020. I'm typing this on Sunday, April 5, and the current statistics are 1,266,614 cases, 69,169 deaths and 260,967 recoveries worldwide this afternoon. That means there were more than 200,000 new cases, 11,000 new deaths and 33,000 new recoveries over this weekend.

In the first half of this, from last week, I spent a lot of time talking about my feelings regarding our responsibilities, not only for a lot of us as parents but for all of us as humans and mostly... as adults.

With this episode, I still have an undercurrent of that just beneath the surface, but a lot of this episode is spent giving you more tangible and practical takeaways to your new everyday lives right now. Whatever that may be: I think nearly all of us are living in some form of a "new normal". 

One of the positives that I hope comes out of this pandemic is our newfound understanding and respect for people in many different professions. The low-hanging fruit is, of course, people on the front lines in the healthcare industry. Doctors, nurses... all of them. The risk they are putting themselves in right now is, at times, baffling how they can do it, day after day. 

Some of the other people I have really felt a need to recognize: people working at restaurants, people at grocery stores. Let's also talk about teachers. Come on. If you haven't raised a glass to the people who are teaching all of our kids at school over the course of a school year, please do so now. 

It's imperative that we do our best to consider how this all affects our children. Think about how upside-down their worlds have become. They have lost touch significantly (in some cases, they may have lost touch altogether) with their classmates. How many of you had one or more favorite teachers? Remember how great it was to see them every weekday and be in their class? Think about that giant hole in their lives now. 

With that loss of the normal school day, also comes the loss of what that schedule brings to them in regards to their health. They no longer have whatever spacing out of their food intake, which also may have included your input if you were packing lunches for those younger kids. So, how much and how often are they eating now? And what, exactly, are they eating... that maybe wasn't in their day-to-day previously?  

WHO and the CDC both recommend that children should perform at least 60 minutes' worth of moderate to vigorous levels of physical activity on a daily basis. Are you keeping that up for your kids right now? There are so many ways to accomplish this, even during whatever your community's current level of quarantine or shelter-in-place may be. 

There's a website and an app called Go Noodle that is a free resource for kids to visit to be active and stay healthy. My kids love using that site, actually and I've done a few of the dances with them, too. Cosmic Kids is another great place, that even has yoga for kids. 

You may not even know that the YMCA has something called YMCA360 (that they recently made free for people) that you can access for all of this, as well. It can be as simple, even, as looking things up on Youtube for your kids to do some activities at home. 

Stress eating is not just an adult deal, everyone. So, remember that your kids may be picking up on your stress or even have their own about this crazy time right now. So, it's important and not at all mean of you to keep track of what your kids are eating throughout the day. It's important that we don't just let everything go by the wayside just because of the state of the world right now. I'm tempted to say: if you want to, yourselves, that is fine......

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