We had a quiz night last night. Dad was in the mood to win something.

Ny name is Amaia, I’m 15, I live in Napier and I am a school child. A child at school.

I’m currently in bed. I’m kind of enjoying this quarantine at the moment because I can sleep. Should I get up, or not? I think not.

My whole family is home, apart from one. Four of my five brothers are here. Only one brother usually lives at home, the rest have come back from uni. We’ve changed our house so now we have multiple spots all around where you can go if you want to be away from everybody. Like chairs out in the paddock, things like that. All over the place. We have family meetings to make sure everything’s running smoothly. Dad made a new rule that our rooms are now off limits. Doesn’t work though.

Before this, my days were quite big. I’d usually have quite a lot of things, extra-curricular stuff, after school. Now I have nothing to do. Like on a Tuesday, I’d go to school, then after school I’d have choir practice, then I’d have to leave choir early to go to volleyball training, then I’d go to this Zumba thing we used to do for the show, then I’d have rehearsal that night. So yeah, big days. The show we were doing was West Side Story. Napier Girls and Napier Boys together. Hopefully that still carries on after everything. We were only four weeks into it. They were thinking of pushing it to October now. Hopefully we can do that.

Now, I sleep in ‘til ages. When I get up I probably bake or paint – I have quite a lot of creative stuff I can do here. I go to sleep really late. I never used to, but now I just watch movies all night. We had a quiz night last night. Dad was in the mood to win something, so we all did a quiz. We wanted to beat Dad, but he won by 0.5 of a point. Afterwards, we all piled onto the back of the ute and went down to the middle of the street to play a concert for our neighbour. She wanted to hear us play music. Some grumpy old lady came out and told us to stop, because everyone was trying to sleep. It was only 8.30pm. Poutama was on the trumpet, I was on the ukulele and singing, Dad was on the guitar, Haeata on the drums and then Potiki and Tawhiwhi were trying to harmonise. The drums were just little portable ones, don’t worry.

The boys are enjoying it all ok. They’re missing their boys and socialising though. We’re doing a lot of family bonding exercises. I think we’re all doing pretty good. I always make food for them, I enjoy it and they’ll always eat it. I made 50 cupcakes, I accidentally made too many, but they’re chipping away at them just fine.

The school term has finished but we got given some stuff to do in the last week that I’m going to do over the holidays, because there’s nothing else to do. Hopefully when the two weeks are up they’ll have the digital learning thing figured out.

Before this, on the weekends, there was always something on. I’d hang out with my friends or – I don’t really like parties, there are too many people, but sometimes I’d go to them. I just like low-keys, small ones with close friends.

The hardest thing for me is probably going from doing lots of stuff and being really busy to being like this. Quiet. I do enjoy the fact I can learn new things, but yeah. I’m mastering the splits. Dad and I decided we’re going to write an isolation album. Other than that, I’m just painting, and embroidering a sweatshirt I made at school.

Looking ahead, I think it’s going to be weird to see how much we get into the flow of life online. Like everything is going to be digital. How long does that last for? How will we get back into doing stuff without digital? It’s weird to think about.

I think the slowing down of climate change is good. I saw something on Twitter that said the media only cares about coronavirus because older people can get it, and they don’t care about climate change because it’s only really going to affect young people in the future, when they’re gone. I thought it was interesting. But the smog in China lifting and the clearer water in Italy – it’s good. Really good.

Worst thing to run out of? I feel like if Mum ran out of wine we’d all be in trouble. And for me, it would have to be paints.