Quarantine Olympics

As my self-isolation for my little bout of COVID ends today, in this week of Thanksgiving, I am trying to think about all of the kinds of media that I am grateful for in my life and this week, I am grateful for Zoom and TikTok. 

Now, obviously, I can't be super grateful for TikTok. In some ways it really is the bane of my existence. But this week as I have been stuck at home with my family with literally nothing to do with our time, I am grateful to TikTok for showing me one very specific piece of media: Quarantine Olympics. 

If you don't know what that is, you should definitely look it up. Some family somewhere started this game when their family went into quarantine at the beginning of the summer and basically they are just doing a bunch of little things (like sock sliding challenges, eating fruit roll-up races, paper airplane fights, etc...) as a family in order to stave off the hopelessness of the group-isolation. 

Well this really inspired me, and so this Thanksgiving, I hosted a Quarantine Olympics with my family over zoom. We had an opening ceremony video, a lighting ceremony, and then several activities that we were all able to participate in (the 4 of us that live together here in Utah, my brother and sister-in-law that live in NYC, and my parents that live in New Mexico). We were all able to participate together even though we all literally live on opposite ends of the country and honestly it was pretty fun. We haven't finished yet, but I am hoping to be on the winning team in the end. 

It was a little way to be able to bring our family together during this holiday that we were supposed to share but couldn't because of this dang worldwide pandemic. 

How grateful I am for technology that allows me to stay close to my family and have fun together even at these great distances.