Ps And Q

It was an up and down kind of day. In fact, in the morning I was thinking this could turn into another “boy this all pretty heavy” kind of post. But my day was ultimately saved by a couple of superheroes. More on that later. We had a nice morning walk, but it became clear that all the isolation was really starting to wear on the kids. They each got pretty emotional, asking why we still couldn’t go to Grandma and Pop-Pop’s house. I know plenty of parents out there can relate. It gets hard to answer those kinds of questions over and over again, especially when you can’t give any concrete idea of when it might end. Back home, we did some FaceTime with Grandma and Pop-Pop and that did lift their spirits. For me, I had been feeling a little worn down and increasingly bothered by what started as a sore elbow, but kept getting worse and spread down my arm. I realized on Sunday that my left forearm was all swollen and I looked kind of like Popeye.  Now I know what you’re thi...

While we’ve been in quarantine, both sets of grandparents have been great about giving the kids something to look forward to every day. Most days we call my folks back in Wisconsin and the kids read them stories. Erin’s parents have been sending the kids lots of fun arts and crafts to keep the creative juices flowing. And even more popular, there’s been a daily FaceTime session where they have Oreos and milk remotely with Pop-Pop Liddell. Sunday morning our budding artists went to work with paint and canvas. Like so many of the great masters before them, the subject was dinosaurs. Each took their own unique stylistic approach to the canvas. Amelia took on a very colorful, somewhat impressionist take on the work. Henry, on the other hand, went for more of an abstract, Jackson Pollock kind of aesthetic. Beyond that, it was a fairly uneventful day. Later on we played “shopping” once again. Amelia declared our upstairs to be a mall, with the guest room/play room bein...

Saturday morning, I was still feeling pretty zonked out from the big shopping and disinfecting bonanza the day before. Fortunately, since we are in quarantine, we didn’t have anywhere to be, so we got to take it easy for a while. Though we woke up to a covering of snow on the ground, things warmed up throughout the day and we were able to get out for a little walk. The kids and Asta desperately needed to get out some energy. Erin and I just as desperately needed to get IN some energy. Funny how that works with kids and parents. There must be some kind of law of physics or mathematics dealing with the fact that there appears to be some kind of inverse variation equation at play in most family dynamics. As a child’s energy increases, the parents’ energy decreases proportionally. For example, when Henry wakes up at 5:30am, alert and ready to play, the lowered levels of energy that make it difficult for me to get out of bed are directly proportional to the raised levels of energy ut...

On Friday, I spent the first day of my “vacation” going out on a grocery and general supply safari. When this whole thing began, we did a couple of big shopping trips and fortunately are pretty stocked up, but we did want to try to get some fresh produce and also needed some now-necessary basics like paper products, cleaning products and whiskey. I began with an early morning Target run and already hit the jackpot because I was lucky enough to find a couple of bottles of disinfectant AND a pack of toilet paper AND some hand sanitizer. Jackpot!  I should take that lucky streak to the slots in Vegas...if only I was allowed to travel, be in public places or touch anything anywhere. From there I went off to do my usual Trader Joe’s thing, and had to wait in line for a little while since they are limiting the amount of people in the store. I have to say, I went into a few stores and Trader Joe’s was by far the best set up. They had colorful circles to keep people at a safe dis...

Thursday was an exciting day for me, because it was the last day of work before "vacation." You see, we were originally supposed to be in Hawaii this week, but this pesky little virus put the kibosh on that. Still, it has been my intention to take a few of the planned days off. I originally planned to take off sooner, but my colleagues came together to launch a webinar series, and Thursday would be the first one. I was asked to do introductions and be the moderator, so I pushed back "vacation" until Friday. Since everyone involved in this webinar was in different cities, we ran several practice runs earlier in the week to make sure everything would be ship-shape. Being a somewhat meeting-averse Gen-Xer with an allergy to overthinking things, I of course thought a few times that some of this was maybe overkill. But better safe than sorry. The organizers, the speaker and I even called into the webinar an hour early to make sure audio sounded good and everything ...

Wednesdays are always tough. Even when the concept of "Wednesday" actually meant something because one particular day was different than another. They all kind of mush together in the realm of quarantine. Growing up a midwesterner, I was imbued with two very strong, if oftentimes competing, values. One is honesty. We were taught to always tell the truth, and I always have. One reason is that I am, in fact, a terrible liar. The other reason is that I was told that lies make the baby Jesus cry, and baby cries really bug me. The other very important midwest value is to always crush your feelings down as deep as you can at all times and keep on smiling and saying everything is great no matter what. You can see where these values sometimes come into conflict. So I'm going to take the unusual step of expressing an emotion and saying I was in a bit of a low mood yesterday. To be clear, this is not to elicit sympathy or pity. I write these on a one-day delay and I'm f...

Life in quarantine is weird and has lots of ups and downs, so we have been trying to keep positive and maximize the ups as much as possible when we can. For example, we had some chocolate cake left over from my birthday and Erin surprised the kids by letting them have a piece for breakfast. This was a pretty brilliant stroke, I must say, because I think at Amelia and Henry's age, I could have lived through hellfire and pestilence but the thing I would remember would be the day I got to have chocolate cake for breakfast. NOTE: I never got to have chocolate cake for breakfast. That may explain why I am not in any way a morning person. Mornings would actually be something to look forward to if they involved chocolate cake more often. We also got supplies delivered from the outside world. And by "supplies" I mean "board games from Amazon." So the kids got to play some new stuff to help pass the time. And Amelia had even more fun transforming the box the ...

Kids are little, right? Like, way smaller than the average adult. So how is it that they seem to have a constant, insatiable desire to eat? Well, I should clarify that it is often a constant and insatiable desire to eat at any moment in time other than when the family sits down to dinner. I'm pretty sure other parents working at home through this have experienced the steady stream of requests from their little ones. Whether it's asking for yet another snack or asking to watch something different on TV, Erin and I are probably fielding and responding to a request from one or both kids on the average about once every 1.7 minutes. The requests differ in tone, depending on the child. Henry is a very direct, type-A CEO sort, so he'll suddenly blurt out with a sense of discovery, "Oh, I hungry. Let's go." And then just walk toward the pantry. I imagine him running a large company someday and watching very similar scenes play out with a group of employees diligen...

On the obscure holidays calendar, March 22 is National Goof Off Day . It also happens to be my birthday. Do the two have anything to do with each other? Probably not, but since National Goof Off Day began in 1976 and I was born in 1974, I like to think I had something to do with it. But this noteworthy day also saw the births of historic names like William Shatner, Werner "Col. Klink" Klemperer and world-renowned mime, Marcel Marceau . I'm not one to usually make a big thing of birthdays anyway, but for reasons I don't really need to explain, this year felt a little weird. The state of the world being what it is, it occurred to me that Weird Al's "Happy Birthday" song has taken on all new meaning. But all that noise aside, I had a really excellent day with my family. I got a nice handmade card from Amelia, and Erin surprised me with an awesome iPad with keyboard, which I now get to use to write this blog. Perhaps an even cooler gift was the fact t...

By guest blogger Amelia Schneider, Age 6 Yesterday I had sum ice cream and a Oreo for my  half  birthday. But  we  did not play a game, but  we learned about Australia. So we went to bed. It was fun.                                                      Amelia's notes about Australia On Sunday  we played uno and had cake and watched The Princess Bride.And had sooooo much fun.                                                      Uno!

Saturdays in the Schneider Haus have typically been all about getting out and doing things like grocery shopping and running errands. This Saturday was no different. I ran into the basement to bring up some more paper towel and frozen peas. The weather has been warming up, and it was a pretty nice day, so I took a nice walk with Asta while joining my family back in Wisconsin and tuning into The Jerry Schneider show . Polka music is happy music, as Jerry always says, and it was fun to text and listen separately together. We have been taking the opportunity to connect more with people via FaceTime, and had several nice calls with loved ones around the country. Amelia finished reading her book about storms to my parents, and they read a little something to the kids, too. I ventured out for some carry out for dinner, and made a swing through Chick-Fil-A for the kids. Amelia is hooked on their Polynesian sauce, so they were kind enough to let me hoard a dozen or so of those. Erin ...

TGIF! It's Friday! Thank goodness it's the end of the week so we can launch into the weekend and...well...I guess do pretty much the same stuff we've been doing during the week. On the productivity front, it was a pretty good day for me. For one, I didn't have any scheduled phone calls so I didn't have to consider random shrieks or loud demands for more peanut butter while conducting my business. Thank goodness for the silence of email communication. I was able to knock out some small projects and was involved in some healthy industry conversation among colleagues about how the construction world is starting to deal with this change in reality we're all dealing with. All in all, while the productivity aspect has definitely been a challenge (and will continue to be), each day probably got a little better. Now that I've said that, I'm quite sure I've jinxed it. But with work done for the day, I was able to enjoy a nice Wisconsin Old Fashioned ...

"At least we can go for nice walks outside in the lovely, spring weather!" -- Me, looking at the bright side, just two days ago. "You know this is Colorado in springtime, right?" -- The Weather, being a jackass, today. As if inspired by all the posts out there about how some people are decorating their homes with Christmas lights to spread some cheer in these dark days, the skies decided to comply with that directive and dump us with about 4 inches of snow. I should note there was nary a flake on the ground during the actual holiday season, but hey, why not? It's also a swell reminder that among the life changes brought about by COVID-19 is the fact that our planned family trip to Kawaii, scheduled to commence next week, had to be canceled. I've since joked with people that I can just enjoy a Mai Tai on my back porch, but now I'd have to dig out a place to sit down first. But oh well. I can stand back and recognize that the cover of snow aroun...