By Amy Haller, May 14, 2020 — During this quarantine, unfortunately my entire family had the coronavirus so I was pretty sick for a while, and my husband and my two daughters from New York who had been with us for like two months.
It was my youngest daughter Lucy’s 30th birthday and she was pretty bummed out that it was her 30th birthday and she was at home with her mom and dad and was supposed to be in the Catskills in a beautiful house with like 10 of her friends and she was really bummed out about it. So we woke up and it was a really nice day. The day before was raining and the day after was raining and we took a nice long walk and I made this enormous barbecue for her and got her a cake at the bakery house where she loves it. But then, my sister-in-law in England did the nicest thing. She organized a Zoom call with everybody in England: all the cousins, all the aunts and uncles, and my mother-in-law who’s 104. It just was such a nice thing and everybody was singing “Happy Birthday” and they had a cake for Lucy and they were drinking champagne and it just made us feel connected and it was a wonderful day for Lucy.
Part 2 is on Monday, my mother-in-law turned 105 and so we had the same thing. We did another really big Zoom call and it’s hard now because we can’t go back to England right now, we’re not allowed to. You feel just kind of isolated from your family, so big occasions like that are important, and thank goodness that we had the capacity to do these Zoom calls because it really, really brought us together for important events. So I guess those two things were prominent in the quarantine.