How I keep in touch with my family during lockdown

Staying in touch with family overseas is tricky during the social distancing and travel restrictions of the past year. As we just went into our 3rd lockdown I thought I show you how I have been keeping in touch with my parents. Since May last year we have been doing daily morning coffee dates!

A great way for my parents to see their granddaughter as she grows and changes so fast and we haven't been able to travel home for almost a year now (that's 1/3 of Kiki's life!!) These chats sometimes last 5 minutes, sometimes (most often) they are an hour long. Since Kiki has gotten into board games lately we play 2 or 3 games together while drinking a cup of coffee, rainbowcino (foamy milk with sprinkles) for Kiki.

Sometimes we just chat, sometimes we play hide and seek or tag and sometimes we read books together. These daily moments of family time are so special and we all really enjoy them.

The games we like to play are domino, lotto, memory, a few Orchard card games like Smelly wellies, Build a bug and Where’s my cupcake and we even tried Guess who, but that one was tricky :) The game you see us play where my parents have the cards and I have paper printouts is my own old Dick Bruna Lotto game I played with when I was Kiki's age!

As you might have noticed Kiki speaks mostly English to her grandparents and we all speak Dutch (sorry if you can't understand!) these daily meetups really are helping her bilingualism as she starts translating the memory and lotto cards for example. I’ve added a translation in the subtitles of the video in case you want to understand what we say.

Maybe this wil inspire you to start daily chats with your family or friends? No pressure moments you get to share bits of your daily life. For us morning coffee meetup work great but maybe you like a lunch date, so you can eat your sandwich together? Or an afternoon cup of tea chat, maybe even an evening diner or glass of wine gossip. Who will you call?