Amid the coronavirus outbreak, Minnesota parents are working at home and making it work

Even before the schools closed, Erika Dodge had an idea.

The Minneapolis mom was searching for ways to keep her second-grader occupied in the weeks ahead, when Dodge would be working from home as a freelance art director.

She decided to turn to the internet, where she found so many ideas that she ended up creating a crowdsourced website, kiddominds.com to collect it all. The site includes suggestions for virtual field trips, online chess matches and lists of educational television shows. It also collects some of the ways authors and artists are connecting with kids during the pandemic, like the livestreaming drawing classes that "Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!" author and illustrator Mo Willems began Monday.

"Folks from across the country are reaching out" and sending her suggestions by e-mail, said Dodge, who is trying to make this unprecedented time of social distancing an opportunity to connect with her son.

"We just better not run out of Diet Coke for me or goat cheese and salami sandwiches for my son," she said.

Parents in Minnesota, just like millions around the world, are adjusting to a new normal, hunkered down at home with schools closed. Those who can work from home are considering themselves lucky — and trying not to panic at the possibility of taking care of kids full time while working full time.

They are drawing up schedules and hustling to figure out ways to keep their kids occupied and still get some of their own work done. In Facebook groups with names like "Parenting in the time of COVID-19" and "Camp Quarantine 2020," they are swapping ideas, making plans to tag-team with spouses and trying to keep their sense of humor intact.

Some parents are taking part in the home activities that the Minnesota Children's Museum began sharing on its Instagram account, including a DIY lazer maze. Some are streaming the "Home Safari Facebook Live" from the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden. (While the zoo is shuttered to the public, it plans to host kid-friendly sessions every weekday.) Others just hope they can make it through the day.

"Day 1 of our 'Lord of the Flies' re-enactment went as well as it could," Heather Arnt­son, who works as a senior shopper marketing manager at the yogurt company Chobani, posted on Facebook on Monday. "Thankfully I was still on mute [with a work call] while yelling 'Don't put things in your underwear.' "

The Maple Grove mom of three said she is trying to find humor where she can as she and her husband, an engineer at Medtronic, switch off stints of working on their laptops and watching the kids. After the kids are in bed, they put in a few more hours of work.

When school or day care is closed, the couple typically ask their parents to pitch in, but with coronavirus, they're worried about their parents becoming infected.

"Typically we'd enact our village to help us, but we want to keep our parents safe and limit exposure to others," Arntson said. "With laptops at least we have some flexibility to move about the house to work and keep an eye on the craziness. We don't have a color-coded list of activities. We're just trying to get through this any way we can with our sanity intact."

Before Moon Palace Books closed, (they are taking only online orders), Shannon Gibney bought a huge stack of fantasy and superhero books for her fourth-grader.

Now, the dining and living room of Gibney's 900-square-foot south Minneapolis house have become a makeshift home-schooling zone, filled with markers, crayons and scissors, books and games.

"Our house is very small, so it will be tricky," said Gibney, who also has a 5-year-old. "I already know that things will get messy and devolve quickly, as they often do with children."

Gibney, a writer and single parent, said she is looking at this time as a work in progress, and knows things will be far from perfect.

"When you're on deadline, you just have to get it done, even if your kids are running circles around you while you type, and you are pulling egg out of your hair," she said. "So, it's not always ideal, but we make it work as we can. I find that in this, as in all things, a sense of humor is essential."

Because St. Paul schools were closed by the teacher strike last week, Lara Bollweg and her husband had already spent days tag teaming minding their kids, who are 9 and 7, and working from home.

"It was very challenging," admitted Bollweg, a market researcher. "My deadlines aren't shifting. Everything is still going on, business as usual, it's just at home."

After a stressful week, the strike ended, but then the schools closed. Luckily, her husband's parents were visiting from rural Nebraska, a trip that had been planned before the coronavirus upended everything. Bollweg and her husband decided to send the kids back with them.

"Our solution for the next two weeks is that they are there," Bollweg said.

While they've found a working solution for working at home with kids, Bollweg realizes it's likely temporary. "They'll come back, and we know it won't be over," she said of the school closure.

Thinking of that reminded her of the viral video from 2017 when a professor in South Korea appears live via video to give expert commentary on BBC World, only to be interrupted on air by his kids. His toddler flings opens the door to his home office and gleefully marches in, only to be followed by the baby.

"That's all of our lives right now," Bollweg said.

Erica Pearson • 612-673-4726