By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (99)

April 25, 2022

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 31: JB has another wiggly tooth and we’ve gone from the excitement of having a wiggly tooth to Extreme Angst Because It Hurrrrtttssssss. I hope we’re not stuck in this stage for long.

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JB has the day off from school and it’s PiC’s day in the office so I get to work with both kids at home with me! Yippee!

/extreme sarcasm

Since I’m still in a bad fatigue flare-up, I took my in-case-of-emergency (really bad fatigue) days pill and hoped it would help. This is the second time I’ve tried it. The first time was when my brain fog was physically painful, and I couldn’t tell if the meds were why it partially cleared in the afternoon Today’s experience: it doesn’t give me energy or reduce pain. It paused the incredibly painful crashing downward spiral I’ve been experiencing every day for the past few weeks. It’s hitting a hold button (and leaves a bad taste in my mouth). I crashed later in the night so the pause analogy seems appropriate.

JB was assigned to doing Correspondence and self directed activities when Smol was napping and to play with Smol part of the time they were awake so I could get through small bits of work. I’m doing the serious Smol stuff: diaper changes, feeding (OMG this is such a pain), and navigating transitions.

We survived until PiC got home at 430 pm. I wish I felt better but we limped over the finish line and a finish is a finish.

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PiC met a parent at the park yesterday who speaks only Japanese at home with their daughter so their daughter is primarily fluent in Japanese and man do we feel like failures. Neither of us are fluent enough in our secondary languages to pass on much to the kids, but I’d hoped to pass on at least what we have. That’s not going well.

Also under the Feelings category, I’m pretty sure that Smol isn’t hitting any of their age appropriate milestones. They have a lot of babble but no words. It worries me. Yes kids hit them all at different ages but until we get past this I’m going to worry. JB struggled with this too and that was a really rough ride for us all.

Year 3, Day 32: The kids are both big enough to be shifted out of their current car seat situations (Smol from their infant / toddler and JB from their convertible seat they’ve been using for the past 5 years). Smol will get JB’s seat and JB’s getting a new booster. I ordered the new booster yesterday with our 20% off coupon from trading in an expired baby seat and am so mentally wiped that I thought “April 21” was two weeks from now. No, it’s actually two days from today. So yay! I hate hate hate that I haven’t been able to haul the kids on my own in part because the car seat was always too hard on my hands. Now, I may be able to take them SOME places.

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My fatigue has been at “lay on the floor and cry” level” for a week. My pain was feeling left out and decided to join the party so this morning was spent hunched over my keyboard like a three toed sloth trying to get through my pile of work before I passed out or threw up. Neither would happen, it just feels like it will. Which is less than ideal.

PiC scheduled a swim lesson for JB this afternoon. They’re thrilled, of course, but that meant I had to do school pick up so he could get an hour of work done before taking JB to swim. Thankfully by the time we had to leave, Smol and I, we’d had lunch and a little time to stretch our legs and that seemed to be enough to get me up to a quarter tank of energy: enough to get to school and back.

JB chattered all the way home and finished all their after school chores in time for a stellar swim lesson. These classes are 4 kids to a 30 min period so you’re really getting, at best, 7 minutes of individual instruction. Today’s class was otherwise unattended so JB lucked into a private lesson. They did so well, they nailed every beginner survival skill that’s needed to graduate to the next level. We’re all so proud.

Browsing Bentocart for meals to order, the pork adobo on offer reminded me of the defrosted chicken thighs waiting for me. I dug up a new chicken adobo recipe since it can’t find my old one and spent the last of my energy cooking. Everyone loved it and even Smol Acrobat who has been eating about 2 tablespoons per meal dug in with extreme enthusiasm. Worth it.

It was actually a shockingly good meals-with-Smol day so it might have had nothing to do with my cooking. I’ve been working on their self feeding skills and today I made it a point to serve all snacks and meals in a bowl with a fork or spoon and they were unusually compliant with the “practice eating like a tool user” program. Normally the bowl is flipped over or off their tray with no regard for contents or my blood pressure. I hope they will cooperate with this program for more than this one day.

PiC put the kids to bed so I could try to recover a little bit. Of course, he was so tired from a late night of work and the early night with Smol that he passed out too! I did some of the tidying up he would normally have done, just the most critical stuff at least, and experimented with making him a cup of coffee in the French press for the morning. I haven’t touched that thing since we bought it. First time for everything.

Today felt like Friday. It was not. 🥴

Year 3, Day 33: Y’all, it’s April 20 and still no peep out of anyone about an under-5 vaccine. I want to scream. In a couple days, we have to decide to give up our August daycare spot or to commit to the risk of daycare with no vaccine and optional masking because the daycare has decided that the younger vulnerable kids just don’t matter. Thanks every-flipping-health-agency!

There is a lot of cursing in my head right now.

We can’t keep this up indefinitely. We are going to lose our tenuous grip on sanity for one. Smol is not getting the educational enrichment they need for another. They’re not hitting developmental milestones (that are admittedly squishy and variable at this age). While there’s no way to know if that’s because of being stuck at home with two constantly stressed parents or if it’s normal for them, I remember the huge difference in how many new toys, foods, faces and experiences JB had access to at daycare vs Smol who doesn’t. We have JB’s old toys and books and the loan of some new toys from a friend. It’s a limited collection because we gave away many of JB’s early childhood toys when friends had babies and we didn’t see a need to stock up at home anyway since JB had daycare with their myriad toys, activities, and books. We try to bridge the gap but we’re flat out exhausted.

This is a stressful crappy decision time and it feels like no one gives a hoot about us (the medically vulnerable, the kids under 5, etc).

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Bit of a bright (financial) spot, our federal tax refund was deposited today. That’s immediately going into our investing account.

Year 3, Day 34: Today is Thursday, not Friday, which means both covering for PiC’s 8 am meeting and for his on work site day. It’s going to be really anticlimactic tomorrow when it IS Friday. In good news, JB’s new booster seat arrived a day early and that’s very exciting! I’m looking forward to shifting the kids around. My art greeting cards from artists I like at Imprint are due to finally be delivered today as well. If so, big mail day!

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My three hours with Smol were full. We turned on the robot vacuum and proposed taking Sera and Smol out for a walk. Smol was highly resistant because they REALLY wanted to watch the robot vacuum. Once I wrestled them (no hyperbole, lots of pinning down involved) into jacket and shoes, and the vacuum had disappeared down the hall, they complied. We took a five-cracker meander (the amount of time it took Smol to eat five), then came back for real food. By the time their granola and yogurt face was cleaned up, I’d tidied up a little: clearing the dishwasher, refilling it, dodging Smol underfoot and pulling them out of cabinets they were trying to crawl into. They settled into a solo game of “shake the dog bowl with a little jar inside” while I scarfed down some lunch. Sera wasn’t a fan, or she was expecting that it would result in another meal for her. Not sure which.

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For my work sessions, I had Supernatural on in the background as a reliable soundtrack I can usually ignore but this time, (maybe not so random) bits of Season 8 was wrecking me. Dean’s guilt over not saving Cas and Cas telling him he can’t save everybody and it’s not his fault because it didn’t happen the way he thinks it did. Struck home with my guilt over my mom’s last years and her death. Dean with the attitude “We’re on the one yard line, it’s time to play through the pain” even though that’s not really a good plan for survival longer term. Struck home with me and my need to intensely focus along with my complete inability to pace myself. Dean’s inability to watch his loved ones suffer even though they’re adults who get to make choices too – also me. Sheesh. I never spotted all these parallels before but wow am I seeing how my old coping mechanisms evolved into unhealthy patterns in my adult life.

I’m working on it! I’m taking some steps to distance myself temporarily from family to whom I have offered a tremendous amount of support over the years while they worked to get themselves out of a bad situation. They are now making decisions that I don’t agree with and would normally call “bad” because I think they’re foolish or shortsighted. Instead of trying to get in there and nudge them or trying right their ship myself because I don’t want them to suffer the consequences, I’m taking an emotional and practical step back. They get to live their lives. “Right” or “wrong” decisions are theirs to make. I have to be ok with it when certain decisions don’t pan out for them. It’s not my job to rectify their mistakes the way it’d been my job to rectify all the mistakes my dad and brother made.

It’s one thing to provide needed and wanted support to escape an unsafe situation but I cannot be trying to rebuild their lives with them when I’m just barely hanging on to my own needs.

Year 3, Day 35: Another pre 6 am start this morning. I actually woke up before Smol Acrobat did, which is weird, and I wasn’t ready so I rested for another few minutes. Oddly enough, I didn’t get LESS sleepy. Who could have predicted that?

Pain was nausea inducing today and it’s equal parts disappointing that alcohol doesn’t numb the pain (because something should!) and a relief that it doesn’t because I’d spend mornings like this drunk as a skunk to beat back the unbearable pain. Instead I gritted my teeth and got on with it best I could.

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Every single day this week there’s been an email from the school reporting a positive COVID case on campus. This is 2x more than the average. We’d get from 1-3 a week in earlier months but it was more often on low end than not. One of the reports last week was a close contact for JB but it seems we dodged that bullet. But yes let’s unmask!

JB reports that there aren’t as many unmasked in their grade as we’d expected so that’s something.

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Thinking more today about how my negative patterns manifested this week. When PiC expressed frustration about the COVID no-vaccine and therefore our no-childcare situation, I reflexively internalized that as frustration with me. Because it’s “my fault” that I’m more vulnerable and our mitigation requirements have to be higher (we must vax Smol before starting daycare). It took several mental go-rounds to realize he was talking to me, not about me. He wasn’t blaming me, I was blaming me. He’s just as frustrated as I am with a shitty situation that’s out of our control. I just have a reflex that says “take responsibility/blame for everything and fix everything to have value”. It kept me safe in childhood and it’s no good now.

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