Andrew Surman may not be able to pull the strings in the midfield at the moment but he and his wife are instead trying to stay on top of home life in lockdown with their three children.
Surman and wife Laura have sons Alfie and Teddy and four-year-old daughter Lily to look after, with the tasks of home schooling and not being able to leave home familiar ones for parents at this often challenging time.
The 33-year-old spoke to afcb.co.uk to detail five ways in which he and his family and making the best of the current situation.
1. Finding a structure
It’s been alright so far. It’s a strange situation because it’s not quite normal, you think to yourself ‘Shall we go here?’ then you suddenly remember that you can’t. Instead we’re trying to utilise the house and the garden to find things to do.
It’s been quite nice in that we’ve had a bit of structure to our days. The kids have had schoolwork to do and with my wife we’ve been nailing that down with them. They’ve now had their Easter holidays and then we were trying to find good things for them to do.
It’s been really nice to actually spend some quality time with them, rather then them getting in from school, seeing them for an hour or so and then they’re off to bed.
2. Explaining the situation
We’ve been quite open with them about what’s going on in the world, it’s everywhere really and you hear so much stuff on the TV and the radio. They’ve taken it all in their stride, it’s not really been a problem, and they’ve been speaking to their friends on FaceTime or on Google Classroom for their work at school.
I think they’ve enjoyed being at home. One of the hardest things to do from our perspective is trying to keep them off their devices, it’s easy for us to just let them go on the iPad, they do have goes on it but it’s trying to not let them spend too much time on it as it’s probably not good for them.
3. Staying occupied
We’re really lucky that we’ve got a garden, a lot of people in this situation live in flats or possibly don’t have access to a garden. That must make it nigh-on impossible to know what to do with the kids day-to-day.
Apart from the school work, at this moment in time they’re actually carving weapons out of sticks. They collected the sticks from walking round the garden and they’re now carving them in the front garden.
My sons have been playing football, actually I think every sport under the sun. From football, cricket, some golf with a little chipping challenge and with our little girl, she’s not quite school age, she’s in reception, so Laura’s been doing little projects with her. They’ve been making a little potion today and now she’s out in the garden as well.
4. Home-schooling
The school have been really good. They’ve sent everything through using Google Classroom, so everyday they have logged on in the morning and they have the subjects that they’ve got to do and all the work on there.
Alfie, my eldest, he created a board game yesterday with Laura. He designed everything, using a sort of snakes and ladders design, based on the coronavirus, so if you wash your hands you go up a ladder and if you’ve coughed on someone you go down a snake, that sort of thing. He’s quite inventive.
They’ve been given quite a lot of work to do, that’s good because it keeps their brains active and busy.
5. Finding time for yourself
I’m sure everyone is finding it difficult because we’re all spending so much time together in close quarters. Laura and I get on really well anyway and we’ve just sort of said that we’ll need some space at times, we have a dog but we’re also looking after Laura’s mum and dad’s dog. We have a little brown dog and theirs basically looks the same but is twice the size.
We try to take them out for two walks a day, so in the morning I’ll take them out by myself and then in the evening Laura will take them out by herself. That way they get that time to go out and that seems to be working for us.
It’s just about working things out, helping out with the kids. Laura’s amazing with all the teaching and the classroom stuff, thinking of the best things to do creativity wise and I’m there helping out – being the fun one and taking all the credit!
