Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (131)
December 5, 2022
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 3, Day 253: *creak* go my bones and *creak* goes my brain. Having gotten up with Smol several times overnight, I’d logged maybe three hours of sleep by the time it was time to get up for the day. This mystery illness is the pits.
After seeing everyone off, I made the call that laying down first, rather than last after I’d done the majority of my work and felt like a herd of elephants had trampled me, was the wiser choice. It was but I didn’t feel refreshed after a 45 minute liedown during which my back started complaining. What’s with our bodies getting hurt from laying down?? Honestly.
Work itself was happily uneventful. I ironed out more details for holiday stuff and when my brain stalled out, hopped over to organizing the administrative details of the Lakota orders. Several are pending or starting to ship.
I have several orders of my own pending. Some things are for packing, some things are for wrapping. All the things I bought already have a place to go: closet, or wrapped gift pile, but the combination of several boxes of hand me downs and shipped goodies overwhelmed my brain.
One last package arriving tonight hit my limit of patience with the amount of STUFF in the office which triggered a cleaning cascade. I can’t work surrounded by mess. An hour of sorting and cleaning mostly returned us to pre holiday equilibrium mess. That’s not good. I need to do a bit more decluttering or I’m going to be a real mental mess going into the end of the year.
Year 3, Day 254: I finally got a whole night of sleep – yay!
This fall chill and wind is getting right into my marrow and my tendons are crackling as well. OR this is the accumulation of my stress about things that should have been done a month or two ago. If I don’t get these done by Dec 10, they won’t get done at all this year. I got cracking on some in hopes that I haven’t lost too much lead time (but I have on some): ordering a Flo Masks for everyone; making reservations for January events; thinking about how I need to ship nibling gifts right now; ordered replacement Kaiser cards for the kids so that PiC and I can stop trying to remember to swap cards except even this was too late because PiC needs to take Smol in this week.
This week’s stuff: chasing down Kaiser for Smol’s flu/COVID test results which are way overdue; following up with the dentist; donating to several organizations; donating to the teacher gift pool at school; putting in the catering orders for next week’s work thing.
I’ve a whopper of a headache today and kids sound terrible. Smol’s still coughing in their sleep and JB’s nose is like a leaky faucet. PiC…. let me not jinx him.
Year 3, Day 255: It’s Wednesday, we’ve made it to the halfway point! We had expected this week to be tough in a lot of ways and we were right. Smol Acrobat had their very first dental exam and I was dreading it. I’m the primary parent for dental exams because I quite enjoy them, and he doesn’t want to infect them with his ambivalence, but Smol’s still sick and cranky and at their best they’re hesitant about strangers and strange things.
Smol and I navigated the strange parking lot, strange hallways, strange doors, strange buttons, strange elevators, and more strange hallways and doors before arriving at our destination. Lots of coaxing. Lots of encouragement. They cried when they were set down on the exam chair so I could put down my coat and bag, and calmed down after safely back in my lap. It helped that they put on Spidey’s Amazing Friends. We had a lot of preliminary checking in questions with both the hygienist and the dentist, so they had time to get properly enthralled by the show. The dentist was great, she had me lay them down across both our laps and conducted the exam that way. It worked perfectly. Smol let her examine their teeth, brushed them, flossed them, and even allowed her to scale some of the deposit. I had to hold their hands down but their compliance was a huge relief. They were showered with toys after, and they even brought them an adorable little bear which they hugged and hugged.
We tried frozen Marie Callendar’s pot pies from Costco for dinner. PiC bought them to spare me JB’s incessant requests for homemade pot pie but the plan backfired. The crust was thin and salty, the gravy was watery and the whole thing tasted as if it’d never met butter. Now I want my homemade pot pie. I was fine before this. I’m thinking I should make up a triple batch of the filling and freeze it. Then I can just defrost and fill Trader Joe’s pie crusts when it comes time for a pot pie dinner. I’m no great shakes as a cook, but I’m doing better than MC.
Year 3, Day 256: Random thought: in 2020 we decided that we’d hold off on buying a new car for another two years. I wasn’t ready to spend that kind of money and wanted to get as much out of our used cars as possible first. Two years was arbitrary but felt like a reasonable amount of time where I wouldn’t feel irrationally guilty about upgrading the car just because we had a second child. It just occurred to me that we’re at the end of 2022 just about and we’ve now gone three years. It was not through any special fortitude on our parts. We threw that 2 year plan out the window after a rental car fiasco with a car much too small for a long road trip, and the second one where PiC was stranded at the agency all morning because they wouldn’t pony up the minivan. We reeled the plan back once he started hunting for a new car and found that a minivan could only be had for a truly ridiculous amount of money over MSRP. I suppose our fortitude was the resistance to paying over MSRP.
I’m still not ready to pay minivan prices but maybe it’s time to prepare myself and our savings. I’ll be ready in what? Two more years? Maybe there will be something available by then. When the interest rates were quite low, I’d planned to take a very low interest loan and leave the majority of the money in savings but with all the rate hikes, we might be better off just paying outright. Which again means, prepare myself.
Oh and speaking of truly ridiculous prices, we’ve received our daycare rate update. *Drumroll* Full time care is now well over $2000 a month and costs more than our mortgage! We’re still cobbling together a workweek with part time care and the occasional support days but we need to upgrade to full time care some time next year.
Can you hear my deep breathing as I attempt to budget for an additional $600 a month? I need to plug those numbers into the 2023 budget and see how quickly it crumbles.
Year 3, Day 257: Three of four teacher cards are done. JB is responsible for writing their own teacher’s card but I’ve washi taped in the Target gift cards (bought during the 10% off sale, thanks Past Me!) We donated to the daycare teacher’s fund too. That’s $200 in gifts for teachers.
Most of the nibling clothing gifts are waiting for me to figure out wrapping. Two more sets are being shipped now to complete that set of niblings. ($150)
I’ll need to get a big envelope of the other branch of nibling gifts into the mail this weekend so the one auntie can distribute them for me ($120). I’m thinking we need to go to the next town over where their post office has a postage meter machine. I don’t want to try my luck at the actual counter. Not even for the chance to get a bunch of cute stamps. Not this time of year!
The cute apron for our cooking friend is on the way, that’s the last one for their family.
JB has come into a surprising number of gifts from us. They will be split between Christmas and birthday. I forgot I had set aside some of my pikaole subscription stickers for them, so there’s that, the packing cubes I made, two tee-shirts, the Digger ten year anniversary collected series book by Ursula Vernon from the recent GoFundMe. Their fuzzy sweatshirt bought during Black Friday sales is way too small so I returned it but Target doesn’t want it back so into the donation box for our next Lakota family shipment it goes.
Smol doesn’t really get anything from us this Christmas. They’re 2. I bought them new socks (and underwear for when that time comes).
Last night, I was kicking myself that I was supposed to order a gift last week for delivery next week and it slipped my mind (surprise?). I got that in today. Thankfully it was still just within the window of free shipping that would also be delivered on time.
:: How are your end of year preparations coming?
Year-end prep: going reasonably well. I’m trying to keep my gifting smallish – I’m pulling from my possessions for two white elephant parties, and got several small gifts for family when I was in Africa. I have a LONG list of cool books to go look at in a local bookstore, so my niblings will get some good stuff. I have to actively counteract my gendered preference to get fiction for the girl and non-fiction for the boy.
Re: health care cards – would they accept photos saved on your phones?
Re: the shockingly high cost of child care: would it help your brain if you factored in the last two years of doing it largely at home? Like instead of dividing the next ~3 years of expenses by 36 months, divide by 60 months instead? I realize it doesn’t change the monthly outgo.
Seems like you’re busting through to-do lists like a boss!
Oh yay for book gifts! I find a good way to fight it is to pick one of each for all kids (or just pick one for all the kids and go with that theme).
Insurance cards: Apparently PiC was able to get into the app, so that’s good!
You have a fair point. I think it’s MAINLY the gut punch of now pulling that amount of money out of the bank account that is hard to get over.
On the one hand I got some Christmas prep done last week, but on the other hand every time I complete one task – my ToDo list sprouts two more tasks like a hydra! Sooo unfair. Add in 3 sick kids and well let’s just say I’m reeeeally looking forward to our homeschool winter break next week. XD
Daycare costs will be a yowchie, but at least it will do wonders for your overall stressload. Several uninterrupted hours to focus on work every single weekday! Early dinner prep instead of cleaning up the lunch highchair! No more coordinating meeting times! You two have worked SOOO hard these last 2.5 years, you have MORE than earned a break. 🙂
The To Do hydra has got you too! Quick, use the torch!
And three sick kids 😔 I’m so sorry. You must be exhausted! I hope they recover in time so you can actually get a little reprieve and holiday of some kind in.
It’s true, having five days in a row (assuming they aren’t sick alllll the time) to be alone and focused sounds like pure heaven and it will absolutely be worth it. Hard to swallow the dollar amount but worth it nonetheless.