Growing up, one of the many moments that I will always cherish is spending time with my immediate family. For the most part, family time was rare as most of us had jobs or meetings to go to. However, with recent events happening in the world, family time has become more common and I’ve never been this close to them even though were worlds apart.

There are only two times in the year where my family is all together in one place without having work involved. Those times are the winter and summer seasons. During the winter, we’ll all go to the movie theaters and watch the latest films and during the summer, we’ll all fly to either Japan or California for a family trip. All of my family memories come from those times we were together, however as the years went on and as we got older, those moments happened less.

In my family I have my mother, father and two older sisters. My oldest sister moved to California to work for Disney and just this past February, my second sister moved to Japan to be a performer at Universal Studios. If you add that distance into the mix along with my parents at work all day and me at school, family time started to become non-existent.

Over time that family connection started to fade away, that was until Covid-19 came into the picture. With many businesses and countries shutting down because of the pandemic, myself as well as my family are all home. And now with nothing to do other than stay home or exercise, we have started to video chat with one another and started to catch up with what everyone has been doing.

It was so much fun having the family sit down together in a room and just talk about life. As we were video chatting with my sisters, a rush of childhood memories came in and started to hit me. Although we were far from each other, it felt like they were in our living room just sitting down and talking story. This would just be the first of many video chats and other ways of keeping strong communication with one another on a daily basis.

During our first video chat we decided to try and play charades, although there was a challenge of spouting the answer quickly without having connection issues, it was fun. After that we decided to experiment with other ways of entertaining each other, one of them involves baking shows. How this works is one of us will find a recipe on the internet and create a video of you making said food. Another family time activity we’ve done it playing Uno, we’ll usually make a group call and start playing the game all the while calling each other out on who has what cards left.

When I pictured my family coming together again, I didn’t think that a pandemic would be the reason. However, over these past few weeks of video chatting and voice calls, I’ve never been so close to my family. I’m starting to meet all my sister’s friends that they made while they were away, and I have an outlet to vent to whenever I am stressed out about my personal issues.

After this global situation is said and done, the question that runs in my head is, “will we as a family continue this is constant stream of communication?” No matter where we are in the world, no matter how busy we all are, I hope that we can find a way to keep in contact with each other the way we’re doing it now.