Today is Grant’s birthday. A big one. A milestone. I started planning a celebratory trip back in December. I plotted our daily itinerary, booked accommodations and got ready to present the trip as my gift. We obviously didn’t end up going on that trip. When the shelter-in-place mandates for our area went into effect I had to improvise a new plan.

Grant and I are alike in that we both like surprises. It’s hard to surprise someone for his birthday though when you’re quarantined together. Still, I found a way to do it.

I created a Facebook event and invited family and friends to join me in singing happy birthday to Grant. It took me a while to figure out the best way to host the video party. Zoom was an obvious option, but I was worried that not everyone was familiar with Zoom and I didn’t want potential unfamiliarity with the platform to be a deterrent for guests. I decided to create a massive video conference on Facebook Messenger, which I’d never done before. I figured it would be easy enough to just add people one at a time. Wrong. It didn’t quite work out that way. I kept hitting a limit with the number of people who could be on the call at the same time, so we ended up adding people in shifts. It wasn’t a perfect system, but it worked.

Grant was completely surprised and loved getting a greeting from family and friends from all over the world. This will definitely won’t be a birthday celebration that we’ll forget any time soon.

This daily blog post series is our way of sharing our experience with you, our readers. We’ll talk about our daily routines, adjustments to working from home, recipes based on limited ingredients and any other topic that comes to mind. It’s our way of connecting with the “outside” world, while also giving us the opportunity to look within and reflect on what we’re experiencing and how we’re feeling. Thanks for your interest in sharing this journey with us. Stay tuned and be well.