5 Years Ago, Reflecting on the Pandemic, Atlanta Family Photographer

It’s hard to believe that it’s been 5 years since I was watching Frozen 2 while refreshing the news of the pandemic. Every time I hear the song, “All is Found,” I’m still reminded of that feeling in my gut when I started to realize this virus would affect our lives in significant ways. Honestly, it’s not unlike the uncertainty I feel from my current news refreshes. (“Is this really happening?”)

I took a lot of photos during the pandemic. I shared a photo story about my pandemic experience here, but I wanted to share more from my archive of that time. I don’t want to forget the toilet paper shortage or how we tried to keep each other safe with garbage bag hugs and homemade masks.

During the extended social distancing period, we spent a whole lot of time outside, chopping wood, clearing out our little Secret Garden, sunning on the deck. We celebrated birthdays and holidays outside. We played card games outside.

We navigated how to do school from home for the rest of the school year, and then I dusted off my teacher’s hat and hosted a pandemic pod for the following school year. You can see images of that experience here.

We traded tickets to Greece for old-fashioned feet-in-the-air airplane rides. We traveled up and down our street. We explored the parts of our yard that got buried when they decided to pave a giant highway back there 70 years ago. We toured our favorite neighborhood spots and discovered some new ones.

We had lots of time at home to lean into behavior challenges. At the time, I thought the challenges we were having were all my fault. I thought that I must be getting my parenting wrong because the effort I was putting in was not producing the outcomes I expected…it would be a few more years before we would start collecting the acronyms to help frame our experience…PANDAS/PANS, ADHD, ODD, Anxiety, Dyslexia…to name a few. I’m sure I’ll share more about all of that some time too.

I know everyone’s pandemic experience was different, and it’s not lost on me that we are fortunate to be able to look back on this time with relative fondness.

We got the time to be together. We had work. We made it work.

We got covid at some point. We got better.

We languished. We lived.

The Odd Pod, Photos from a Pandemic Pod

Fall 2020 - Spring 2021

When our local schools decided to stay virtual in the fall of 2020, a group of neighbors made a plan for their kids to join together as a pandemic pod. I was connected to them through a friend I used to teach with, and we decided we would do school together at my house. I would manage their virtual learning and care for them after the school day while their parents worked.

My hope for all of the kids was that we would be able to turn a strange and disappointing year into an opprotunity for creative and playful learning. I wanted to capitalize on the opportunities that the freedom of learning together in a small group at home created for individualized instruction, unstructured play time, sensory activities, art, and social emotional development.

Of course there were many struggles as we all learned how to do school on a computer. The kids were in two different districts, in several different grades, and had different schedules. The majority of the kids were kindergarteners who had limited practice using a computer. But it didn’t take too long before everyone was able to use a mouse, mute themselves on Zoom, and submit their assignments online. In addition, the kids got to learn from each other, negotiate a variety of social situations (including having a dog and a 3 year old in their classroom), and escape into their own imaginative worlds in between and after virtual school.

I had every intent to fully document this pandemic pod experience. But as it turned out, my hands were often too full for a camera and my mind too tasked to make interesting compositions. Still, I hope the images I could get tell a little bit of the story of how we spent our days together. I sincerely hope that some day these kids look back at this historical year with a glimmer of fondness for the time we had together.