By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (103)

May 23, 2022

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 59: La Mamá y Pequeño dia!

Ways it started right: I’d made egg salad for today’s lunches yesterday afternoon, and made PiC’s coffee in the early evening so it felt like we were a little ahead of the game for meals. Except dinner, I’m still stumped on dinner. We ate almost all our leftovers yesterday so today will require some kind of planning. Pasta carbonara again? JB calls it cheesy pasta, utterly failing to appreciate the bacon, but that’s ok. I got at least five hours of sleep. There’s nothing quite like reading on your phone to quiet your brain until it lands on your face because you sort of fell asleep but didn’t realize it before gravity took over.

Ways it started wrong: 445 wake up. I persuaded Smol to lay quietly for another 20 minutes. I had nightmares about trying to work and taking care of Smol while both my bosses were around. Then it shifted to trying to put Smol down for a nap but they were unexpectedly sweating and had a heat rash all over their body. Thank goodness it was just a set of nightmares. Then again, it was followed up by a dream about redeeming my hotel points for a weeklong vacation so that was better. I wonder where we would have gone.

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I’ve decided that the ending of White Collar was utterly unsatisfying. Yes, it was a lot of clever manipulation to achieve the ultimate end but I thought he’d learned to value his friends and family. How could he just abandon Moz??

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Smol-arity: they have an obsession with hugging my foot, and a current refusal to lay still for diaper changes, so today we put them together and had my foot sing them the alphabet while I changed their diaper.

They finally pieced together how to sign Thank You today!!! Very proud moment for mama, papa, and siblings.

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Do/did you hoard fancy hotel shampoos and conditioners too? We collected them wherever we went but we never used them it at home. Smol and I packed them up today for donation. I’m on a two week bender of clearing out things. We’re donating and handing down outgrown clothes and unneeded gear that could be put to good use by other folks. I’m claustrophobic from accumulated stuff and we need space for a dear relative to come visit. I want to be done with the mess of outgrown clothing and other household stuff well ahead of their summer visit.

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Do you feel your age more when you know eating a food will kick your butt (and you do it anyway) or when you don’t know and it kicks your butt?

Year 3, Day 60: Pizza for dinner last night kicked my butt and Smol’s 5 am wake up kicked PiC’s butt. He was a good sport and kept Smol alive until I dragged myself out to join them. 5 am is even too early for Sera, she won’t budge from her bed until I come out.

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We tackled the pasta carbonara today, Smol and I. Smol was screechily indignant that I wouldn’t share the raw diced bacon but they sort of settled down when distracted by apple slices and a bowl of pasta. A pound of garlicky bacon and a pound of diced chicken was tossed with rigatoni and it all came together with the egg/parmesan. Excellent work this afternoon! I made an enormous bowl of it since the “cheesy pasta” is popular. JB asked if we had enough to last the rest of the week. Not the way we eat! But there’s something very satisfying about making a dish that everyone likes eating.

Cooking burned the bulk of my midday time and energy. After we ate, PiC took over for the next two hours with the kids so I could sit down and work (“rest”). My hips were in dire need of rest by 2 pm.

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Progress in the room overflowing with kid stuff: toys have been organized into three baskets that will rotate every few days so Smol has the illusion of choice. More baby gear was boxed up, Smol found a brand new kid shirt in the office for the donation box. Donation boxes are piling up and may soon be ready for weighing and shipping. We’re in the stage where everything is worse, but it’s also starting to feel possible to visualize a finish.

Discovery! It’s deeply satisfying to cut out and prep new pieces of fabric for the pouches project. Prep is not my favorite part of sewing but it feels good to be setting up for fun.

My first success is a medicine pouch and it’s already in service. The second pouch will be for JB to store art supplies. The third pouch will be a mini diaper bag (literally just for Smol’s diapers and wipes) that gets tossed in the backpack for outings.

Year 3, Day 61: Huh, I wonder if inappropriately involving other people in your interpersonal relationships is a sign of something. Nicole and Maggie’s post made me recall that, many years ago, an in-law with whom I didn’t get along (but still felt entitled to my good graces despite only ever treating me badly) contacted a mutual friend. They asked this friend how to make me like them. My friend didn’t engage and reported back to me, she felt I should know that person’s mentality. I felt very betrayed at the time. I was a lot younger, I cared about certain opinions more than I should have. But perhaps it’s not a surprise that doing that, instead of speaking to me or treating me like a decent human, did not endear me to them. I didn’t appreciate that manipulation but I also didn’t realize the levels of manipulation that was until later.

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Thinking about the market and economy: I think our family is relatively prepared for a standard recession but I’m not so sure about our preparedness for stagflation if that might be on the horizon.

I’m grateful that I committed to a set investing schedule. Hindsight tells me I’d have refused to put money in the market most of this year during the highs and then been stumped when to do a lump sum deposit when it came back down because I’d keep waiting for it to go down “enough” whatever that is.

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TFW you ask the toddler what they want, because of the torrents of whining, and they have perfectly useful baby signs to communicate and instead they literally sit on their hands. 😒

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Mischievous Smol landed with their full weight on my hand and wrist at a bad angle and ouch ouch ouch it hurts. This wrist is particularly prone to triggering flare ups so now I’m paranoid this will decommission my dominant hand for weeks.

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I just remembered we need to plan to pack test kits for future travel. Test kits have to be on our permanent travel list for the foreseeable future. So second homemade pouch became the test kit pack. Tonight I cut out fabric and pieced them together for two more pouches. This next one will be JB’s surprise.

Sewing is as fun as I’d assumed it would be for retirement, only it’s fun now. Surprise! I’m learning to make simple things I need and it doesn’t always have to be a huge time commitment. I can spend 10-15 minutes a night doing some part of the fun.

Year 3, Day 62: 5:20 am wake up. 👎

My fatigue induced sore throat yesterday might not have been only fatigue induced after all. It’s back today, and I feel like someone siphoned all my energy. Smol Acrobat and PiC are also sniffling today, all bad signs. My hand and wrist are still aching from yesterday. This is not great. It’s our solo day, me and the littlest. I need to be functional!

Thankfully, they took a really solid first nap. I knocked out a lot of work, my meds finally started working on the sore throat a little, and sitting with heat directly on my aching body for two hours made a real difference. I like a lot of things about the colder weather we live in year round but my body hates it. Doing my solid best to keep away from fear and stress thoughts about my hand and being careful not to tweak it further.

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Cars made in this decade are like spaceships. We’re going to need a newer car eventually but I don’t look forward to the learning curve.

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Thanks for the reminder, Bethh! I ordered blackout curtains! They said it’d take a month for them to arrive. 🤞 Hoping it’s sooner and hoping it’s the answer to our 5 am wake ups.

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By mid-afternoon it was clear I needed a nap. I wasn’t getting one but since I cleared enough off my desk, BUT I gave myself permission to stop working at 5 and take a break. I sewed for a minute, ripped out the seam for four minutes because I sewed on the wrong side, and then sewed it again. Had to force myself to make a better call and stop with the one seam and go lay down. It feels weird to acknowledge that needing or wanting rest is a good enough reason to rest.

Thank goodness for leftovers. PiC cobbled together roasted broccoli and noodles from the pantry to go with the leftover pho broth we had left from earlier.

Year 3, Day 63: 5:20 am. Blergh.

Washing the dishes this morning, a memory surfaced. Now, I’ve never been a good napper, just like I’ve struggled with sleep for as long as I have actual memory (since 5 years old? younger?) This means napping has never been a go to for me. But my dad took an afternoon nap every day of my life. They were both up every morning at the crack of dawn, and worked 18 hour days, but Mom did all the cooking and cleaning and she never once took a nap or a rest. Seriously I can’t remember ever seeing him clean when I was a kid. He did when I was an adult but not when we were growing up. I know I thought about how unfair that was at some point, but that was more in adulthood. How much did this impact my thinking and feelings about taking needed rest? Something to think about.

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We’re both at the ends of our respective ropes. He’s burning the candle at both ends (working late and getting up early with Smol) and I’ve been sick all week with very little respite. It’s not great.

Grateful for enough leftovers to serve for dinner tonight. I forced myself to do much of the usual post dinner clean up during dinner prep so I’d have less to do when I finally hit the wall. Sadly my body doesn’t understand how to rest when it’s time to, so often I just keep trucking until the truck hits me. No different tonight, I squeezed in a half hour of sewing to make a markers pouch for JB and a giant pouch for myself for our test kits (and as an experiment in scale).

I’ve got a project brewing mentally and my sewing sister gave me enough guidance for it to brew more seriously than it was before. I needed to get an idea of what size bag would result from the latest extra large measurements. That’ll help me figure out the measurements for a lunch bag for JB. I COULD spend $30 and buy the super cute Hello Kitty lunch bag I want for them. It would almost certainly be cheaper than buying the fabric, the iron on waterproofing, and insulation to make them one. But I kinda really like the idea of making one myself now.

You can see the If You Give A Mouse a Cookieness unfolding in real time here: if you give Revanche a sewing machine, she’s gonna want to buy fabric for all the projects.

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