On Saturday morning, I made my weekly supply run. This time, I changed it up a little bit and brought Henry along.
Going back to what we can now call “The Before Time,” the days before COVID, I usually took one or both kids grocery shopping with me every week. It was something they looked forward to, and while it was insanity some weeks trying to wrangle both of them, it was something I always enjoyed doing with them. Since everything shut down, it’s one of those little things I really miss about life before COVID.
We’ve typically gone with basic quarantine rules of having one person go to the store for safety. For some reason, this week Henry was especially insistent about wanting to come along. I hesitated, but Erin and I talked about it. The list was fairly short and it was set to be a pretty quick shopping trip, and Henry is surprisingly good about wearing a mask, so we decided to give it a go.
Of course, as per typical kid rules, he fell asleep in the car about 5 minutes before we arrived at the store. I was worried I’d get post-nap cranky Henry and we’d have to abort the mission. But to his credit, he was an ace. He wore his mask, he waited patiently with me in line, he listened to instructions and he didn’t touch anything in the store.
The true test came when he got a sucker from the cashier. I told him he needed to wait until we were back in the car to take his mask off and have it. “OK, Dad,” he said. And that was that. Nice job, buddy.
Back in the car, we used the hand sanitizer to clean up, and we were on our way back home. Mission accomplished. And it was frankly nice to have some company, like in the old days.
At home, the kids asked to have a dance party in the back play room. Who could say no to that? So we went upstairs, blasted some up-tempo tunes, and the kids showed me their moves.
Note: Even though we have a trampoline, a device literally built for jumping, they still always also like to jump on the bed. I guess that is just something hard wired into kids.
We had a good mix of music. Some from kids’ movies, but also some Bee Gees, Men Without Hats, and others. I even successfully introduced Amelia to Dev2.0, which is an actual, for-real project that Devo did with Disney about 15 years ago where a group of kids did covers of their songs. Yes, this actually happened.
As a hard-core Devo fan, I find the whole thing delightfully weird, hilariously subversive and, to be perfectly honest, the covers are actually pretty darn catchy. It is a good new wave music gateway experience for kids, Amelia loved it, and I am a step closer to having another Devo fan in the house.
It was a solid dance party, and Amelia declared that this shall henceforth be declared, “Fun Day!” You won’t find this on any calendar, but I’m good with that being a recognized holiday in the Schneider Haus. She also added that Sunday will be Paddington Day, because she really likes Paddington. No disagreement on that, either.
