Chapter 1

2020 was very bad for many. So much loss – lives, livelihoods, opportunities, social and family connections. No, not a good year at all.

But for us, at least, one thing that we did was really good family time. This is our story of 2020. Our story is not one of hardship, though I know that many (even most) found the year difficult. We did have some dramas and challenges, yes, but we also had some pretty good times, and Kat (my wife) says that we should write them down, for other people’s enjoyment. And hers too, of course.

Before I get to the good bits, I need to spend some time laying out some basic background. Let’s start with my family.

My name is Dave. I live on the outskirts of Melbourne, Australia. South east of the city, in the urban fringe. I’m on the wrong side of 40, though I’m doing my best to stay fit and healthy. I’m an IT professional, and I own a small but growing IT services consultancy that focuses on supporting Melbourne’s major hospitals. That keeps me way too busy.

Kat is my wife, and this story is really about her – she’s the centre of my life, and anything that happens in it. She’s my age, and she works as a physiotherapist helping people get their mojo back after major operations. She’s a major babe; she’s always been the hottest in the room, and she’s kept her figure and her sense of fun as we’ve grown together. She works ¾ time, and she spends the rest of her time running around after our kids, of which we have three.

Michelle is our oldest daughter. She’s 18, and in her first year of studying to be a nurse at Monash Uni – just general courses this year, - science, etc. She’s super fit, and her career goal is to be a nurse on tours and travel the world surfing etc. Michelle has a boyfriend, Tim, who’s her age too, and is doing first year engineering at Deakin Uni. He lives with a bunch of other students near Deakin.

Zach is 16 and doing year 11 this year – the first of 2 VCE years. Like most boys his age, Zach’s first love is sports – cricket, football, and all water sports, but he’s accepted that there’s not much prospect of professional success, and this year he’s doing STEM subjects, and thinking that he’s doomed to become some kind of IT person, probably working in his dad’s business (boring!). He’s got a girlfriend, Zara, who’s also 16 years old. She goes the same school and lives with her family not far from us.

Toni (short for Antoinette) is our youngest, at 14. She’s mostly a typical teenage girl, so far, interested in horses, gymnastics, and dancing. You’ll note that boys aren’t in that list; we’re wondering whether she’ll prove to be gay (we have a bet on it; I think she is, but Kat reckons not).

Our story really picks up at the start of July. We’d endured the first lock down in Australia, and then enjoyed its success. The first lock down lasted roughly from mid-March to mid-May in one form or another, and the virus sort of magically disappeared. I thought to myself “is that it?” when it was so easy, and I remember telling Kat “Winter is coming” (in eldrich tones, for GOT fans).

Once June arrived, suddenly, Covid cases were growing and just seeming to come out of the woodwork. By the end of June, it was obvious that we were heading back into lockdown, though the government prevaricated for a couple of weeks trying not to. But we could see it coming. Having hospital connections and working on Covid related projects helped there. And not only did we have time to see it coming, we knew what it was going to be like. The first lockdown, we pretty much endured in place, as we were – that is, in the family groups or living units that we had.

But the second time ... no. Once it was obvious that it was coming, people started asking themselves whether they really wanted to do lockdown with their current arrangements or not - some people really liked their family arrangements, while for others the first lockdown was almost torture.

This story is the story of how those living arrangement changes impacted my family.

Before I tell you my story, I should tell you about our house, since the story takes place wholly in our house (we were locked down!) and some of the features of our house are a little unusual. We built it ourselves, explicitly to create our family culture. We moved in there when the kids were little; they don’t remember living anywhere else.

We own 4 hectares (10 acres for my American readers) of land on the edge of the suburbs. Most of it us untouched bush protected by local zoning laws. We live in a small clearing with bush all around us, though you can see Port Philip Bay from one corner of the house.

There’s a long driveway with a big gate that we usually leave open. The driveway comes to a circle in front of a 4 car garage, though we only have 2 cars (Michelle has her license and was planning to get one this year, but didn’t bother once we could see the virus coming). The garage and some service rooms at the back are set into the ground, and are the only rooms at that level.

The rest of the house is a single story built on top of that. You go up the stairs from the garage into the main vault of the house. This is a single big room split into three sections. The front is a large lounge room with huge windows looking out west over the drive and it has a big screen to the side. In the middle, logically dividing the room into 3 parts, is a good size kitchen. On the other side is a large dining room with a table that seats 14-16 people. The east end of the room has huge sliding doors that open out to a veranda area and then a lawn.

There are two wings coming off the main room. To the south, there’s the bedroom wing. This has corridor connecting 4 bedrooms and a bathroom, and then at the end there’s our master bedroom, which has an ensuite and a walk-in cupboard with a little work area at the back. Our room has a panoramic window looking south west that has views of the forest and a little peek at the bay. The other bedrooms are actually pretty small – they just have space for a cupboard, a double bed, a dresser and a seat. That’s by choice – we don’t want our kids in their rooms for anything but sleeping.

To the north, there’s another wing. This wing has a visitor’s toilet, a gym, a large office, a movie room, a large storage room, and then the most important part of our home: the wet area. The wet area is our own imitation of a German wellness centre. As you walk in, on the left, there’s a glass partition which has a triple shower – these are wonderful showers that spray you from all directions (15 shower heads per shower). They’re awesome, believe me. Next to that, there’s a sauna big enough for 8 people, with a big triple glazed window looking out at the bush. Then there’s an 8-person spa. Opposite that, there’s a pair of massage tables. And finally, there’s a 20 metre heated indoor pool that stretches out east. The pool has lane dividers for 4 lanes but we can take them away and set up a volleyball net or water polo goals. There’s also a small water slide down the far end. The walls around the pool are all glass – it’s very open, and during summer we can open it completely up to the lawn beside it.

Off behind the house, on the other side of the lawn, there’s a granny flat, and a shed for garden stuff. Behind that, there’s a fairly large vegetable garden and fruit orchard which has got a lot of attention this year.

Our house has 3 hearts: • The organizational heart is the kitchen, right in the centre of the house. It’s from here that Kat runs the family • The emotional heart of the family is our bed; Kat sleeps there, and she chooses to sit on it with our children when she has heart-to-hearts with them • The spiritual heart of the house is the wet area. We just love it, and spend lots of time there. All of us are addicted to water sports, and it’s our safe place.

So right away, you can see that we’re not hard up – we have a pretty awesome home, and we’re very comfortable in it. It certainly made lockdown easier to deal with than being stuck in an apartment with no space around us. But that doesn’t make it that easy; we’re all highly social people with lots of friends, and our house is often full of visitors and laughter. Going without that is hard, even with space around us, and as we saw out the end of June, I was certainly concerned how my family would deal with an even longer and harder lock down. Particularly I was concerned for Toni, who suffered the most in the first lock down. I think it’s an age thing – resilience and patience comes with more years under your belt.

Don’t think we’re rich, though. We don’t own anything else but the home, and all our focus has been paying off the mortgage on it. Now that we had done that, we finally have a little more financial freedom, and we had booked our first overseas family holiday - in Europe for June / July to see the mountains through Austria / Germany (and so we could all check out the awesome German wellness centres). Of course, that didn’t happen in 2020, and I was lucky to cancel it on the advice of a doctor friend at one of our customer hospitals before the airlines stopped giving refunds.

So now you know about my family, and our house, but there’s a few other really important things I haven’t told you about yet.

The first is that we don’t really bother with clothes in our house. It started with our wet area. We built it based on Kat’s love of German wellness centres after she experienced them as part a school swap year in Koln just before I met her. So naturally, we have a rule: no clothes in the wet area. And it was very deliberate choice that we chose to make this rule for our children too. We wanted them to grow up comfortable in their own skin, and with each other. More, we wanted home to be a safe space where they didn’t feel like there was anything to hide.

We never made any rule about clothes or not outside the wet area. But as the children grew and started having their own opinions, they started to feel strongly about it – they didn’t want to wear clothes outside the wet area either, and neither should we. Toni, in particular, is quite militant about this. So, Kat and I pretty much stopped wearing clothes at home. Obviously, we get dressed when we’re getting ready to go out, to work, or church, or whatever, and there’s clothes on hooks at the bottom of stairs so we can throw something on when we have visitors. And we get dressed for some visitors to the home – though not all; if they’re regular visitors, they know that we’ll be naked, and they’ll join us.