At the home of Catarina Macedo Ferreira, a talented photographer and instagrammer, there is no room for down time. Her four kids, Leonor, Xavier, Sebastião and Graça, bring lots of life and colour to Catarina and her husband Miguel’s lives. During quarantine, as one would expect, the story is exactly the same.
Now that the six members of the family have been forced to spend more time together, we asked this instagrammer to tell us what a day in quarantine is like in a house so full of everything: people and love.
“It’s eight in the morning. The days have started a bit differently in the last few weeks. The kids appear in the living room, one by one, silently, turn on the TV and get themselves breakfast.
As for the grown-ups, we’re both at home, one without work and the other with much less work. The stress we have now is no longer the stress of getting to school on time or picking up the children, of deadlines for work and the schedules of dad’s flights. Now the stress is all inside, in the uncertainty of the days to come. We gather at the breakfast table and discuss our day together. When the kids still had school, we sorted out our schedule and chores together. Now, in the Easter holidays, we let the kids have time to do nothing, to get bored, to play Super Mario all morning if it makes them happy. The bedrooms are a permanent mess. Some days we stay in our pyjamas until quite late. There’s always someone on Netflix, always someone playing with Lego, always someone listening to podcasts while ironing or organising the second load of dishes or clothes for the day. But there’s also time for an unexpected kiss. A smile that keeps us feeling firm in our hope. There are four kids of different ages, but they are one tribe. Now they are organising little performances that never quite go to plan, now they are playing hide-and-seek and racing around, stressing us out that they are going to end up hurting themselves. Sometimes they help us set the table, sometimes they help us take the clothes off the clothesline, sometimes they don’t want to help at all. The day is a balance between the demands of keeping it all together in a 3-bedroom apartment without a garden and the relaxation we all need to get through these days as well as possible.
There is one sacred rule, however: at 7:30pm we have dinner and 8:30pm is bed-time.”
