This morning, we enjoyed breakfast while watching my cousin in England live-streaming his “Family Rave.” He’s a DJ, and has a great business doing family-friendly raves in the London are. With the whole lockdown going on, his monthly events have been cancelled. What did he decide to do? He’s doing them for free, live-streaming them on FaceBook and YouTube. So, at 8:00 Central each Saturday for the past 8 weeks or so, we have joined the “Isolation Nation” and danced our booties off as we made and ate our breakfast. Little Man loves it, because of the music, but he also gets to see his 5 month old cousin who joins her dad to “help” DJ a few times each show.

What a great idea, right? He’s also getting paypal donations, because his business is effectively closed. He needs some way to bring in income, and this is helping him out.

Tomorrow is Mother’s Day here in the States, and we are planning on having ribs, and I’m making a trifle (keep an eye on the FaceBook and YouTube pages for some peeks into how I make it!). MIL’s birthday is Tuesday, so we are doing Mexican and FIL is making an apple pie.

The other thing is we have Little Man’s second birthday next week (OMG, I’m dying over here. How is he going to be 2?!?!?!). When I was pregnant, Squatch and I had discussed how to handle birthdays, and we agreed to do a big 1st birthday and then just do a dinner with the grandparents (and uncles, if we’re by my family) for each successive birthday. So, the whole “safer at home” thing doesn’t have any impact on his birthday.

Squatch and I picked up his birthday presents (2 new trucks) today, along with two smaller trucks to put on his birthday cake. The one issue I’ve run into was that I wanted to do a “construction” themed cake: I’ll make it in the shape of a “2”, and it will be a construction site and road, and I wanted to put a few Matchbox construction trucks on it. Well…no small construction trucks at Wally World this morning. So, we found some cool “Monster Trucks” and the construction site is now going to be a race track with a mud pit. I’m a fan of baking, and I love making cakes, so that will be my plan for next Saturday, and we will enjoy his cake on Sunday. I think we will make some mostaccioli, Italian Sausage, and garlic bread, because he does like to eat it all, and it’s not pizza.

I’ve also done a ton of Zoom calls with friends. We’ve had happy hours, trivia parties, and just have enjoyed seeing each other’s faces. It has really helped beat the isolation blues, and Little Man also gets a kick out of seeing all of the different faces on my screen.

How are you beating isolation? Are you having your own isolation parties? I know some states are starting to open up, but a lot of us are still living under the draconian lockdown rules. Let’s find a way to make the most of it and be social again!!!