CLICK HERE if you are having trouble viewing these photos on a mobile device.
Deanna Knudsen is facing the same challenges as millions of other parents right now, scrambling to find things to do with her 4-year-old and almost-2-year-old twins in this time of social distancing and shelter-in-place restrictions.
So they’re #GoingOnABearHunt. Teddy bears, that is.
These neighborhood walks — inspired, perhaps, by Michael Rosen’s 1989 children’s book “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” — are suddenly popping up everywhere in the COVID-19 age. Friendly neighbors put teddy bears in their front windows. Then families like the Knudsens – Deanna and her husband Webb, Leo and twins Miles and Nora – take walks through their neighborhood searching for bears.
“This is something fun to do to feel part of a bigger community,” Deanna Knudsen says. “I hope other (neighborhoods) will participate.”
Word spreads as neighbors and friends post about their hunts on community and social media sites, often with photos and the hashtag #GoingOnABearHunt.
“I saw it on Nextdoor and thought it was a fun idea — an easy way to support and encourage neighbors with little kids,” says Joy Yankey, who tucked a teddy bear in the window of her San Jose home.
Sarah Gianocaro agrees. “These are little things that we can do to help bring the community together,” the San Jose resident says. “When (my daughter) Rachel was a baby and we would walk around the neighborhood, we would look for different things, depending on the season. I hope that these little hunts make going out for walks a little more fun for the little ones.”
Some neighborhoods, of course, have embraced the hunt to a greater extent than others. The Eastmont Hills area in Oakland has gone all in, thanks in large part to the organizational efforts of Jonathan Crane, who has three bear-hunting kids of his own – 7-year-old Ambrose, 5-year-old Augustine and 1-year-old Arlette.
Crane started posting about the hunt on social media last week. Within a few days, dozens of families were participating. Crane reckons there are 80 or 90 stuffed animals in the mix now, and he’s made maps for families who want to join the bear-hunting fun.
“It’s not just bears. I added a moose about 5 minutes ago,” he says. “It seemed like a very easy way to get everybody involved, everybody active and focused on something other than the pandemic.”
And it’s not just families with small children, either. Laura Aspling Sizelove’s kids are older, so they’re not out seeking bears — but they’ve got one merrily tucked in the window of their Los Gatos home.
“As a family, we talked about how hard this is for younger kids, who don’t know what is going on in the world. They just know that everything is different,” Sizelove says. “It’s something we could do to brighten a child’s day.”
