LOCKDOWN 'Easing' - Day One Hundred and Three

It's the 4th July 2020 and the government has announced that as of today, more businesses are allowed to open and we're allowed to have more contact with other people (one other family is allowed to visit our house now), but there is still a way to go to get back to normal. Today we celebrated our newfound freedoms by having a 'Lockdown Easing' day, in which we have written a 'bucket list' of things we wanted to do once lockdown was finished and attempted to work through it today.

Since it seems that the restrictions are going to be lifted very gradually and it may still be many, many months before we can really say that lockdown is over, we have decided to have a rest from the daily lockdown blog - this will be the last lockdown post. We will, however, attempt to keep up to date with what we're up to and post on this blog, but on a less frequent basis.

Watching a Youtube video together

One of the things we had on our bucket list was to make food using ingredients that were hard to get hold of during lockdown. Here, we are making some lamb koftas for our lunch (it became hard to get meat during the first part of lockdown)

Finally, the playgrounds have reopened! Of course, this was one of the first things on our bucket list - the playground they have been gazing at out of the loft window for so long!

Navigating the adventure playground

They've had lots of practice for this on the many logs we have found on our walks

Enjoying the swing

They have given the play equipment a makeover, so it felt brand new

Trying out the climbing wall

Weeeee!

We had a tasty lunch of lamb koftas, with naan breads (using yeast, which has been extremely difficult to get hold of during lockdown)

Daddy's yummy lunch - with mango chutney, tzatziki, fried onions and salad

Another place on our bucket list that has been closed during lockdown has now reopened: Orange Elephant Ice Cream Parlour! We've been driving past their orange elephant many times, but it has always been closed. Now they have reopened (albeit, only a drive thru)

They only had 9 flavours on offer this time, but fortunately the ones they wanted were on list

Tasty honeycomb

Another place to visit on our bucket list was some amusements as they have all been closed during lockdown; we headed to Paignton Pier

We had a go at the grabbers - they liked the look of the alien from Shaun the Sheep (they saw the movie at the cinema)

2p machines

Many signs of the Coronavirus effect remain

Blowing the balls away with a blower gun

Rolling a coin to aim for a slot

Putting the balls into the hole as fast as possible

Choosing their prizes; Tahlia had a mini My Little Pony and Ptolemy chose some Avengers superhero badges

We decided to make the most of the playgrounds being open and head to the excellent Paignton one; the Council hadn't yet taken the closed signs down, but the playground was pretty busy

Riding on the swinging snake

Climbing the space net -  spot Tahlia - she was complaining that everyone at the top was blocking her route upwards

Jory's favourite - he's missed these a lot

Boo!

Jory goes for the top

The final bucket list item we ticked off today was visiting McDonalds. Jory is obsessed with McDonalds (although he doesn't actually eat the food very well) and has been upset about it being closed during lockdown. Although the restaurant itself wasn't yet open, we could still buy food at the drive thru, although we had to join the queue, which went all around the car park before finally reaching the drive thru.

Evidence we made it

Opening their Happy Meal boxes

Ptolemy was looking for his toy - he didn't realise it was in the small box

Jory tried his hamburger, then ate some of the roll and discarded the rest

We celebrated the fact that flour is now widely available with our mocha and vanilla LOCKDOWN easing cake (we were originally going to write 'lockdown freedom' on it, but we thought that was far too generous!)

We had other things on our bucket list that we were unable to do today, such as visiting a museum (our local museums remained closed today) and seeing friends in their home (people are still too concerned about the virus and prefer to wait). 

It's been long, but we've made the most of the 103 days at home and the kids have on the whole enjoyed the time. We're grateful to have been given a few of our freedoms back, but we are still restricted in many ways and the lockdown unfortunately seems far from over.

Thanks to everyone for reading our daily lockdown blog and for your lovely comments.