About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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July 2, 2021
1. Sneaking through the bedroom where Smol was sleeping, my heart squeezed. Their little tiny baby face! So tiny, so baby.
2. Our library is open to the public with precautions and we’re so grateful. We came away with a tower of books, a stack of summer activities for JB and a free board book for Smol. I love the library as much as an adult as I did as a kid.
It’s time for my annual donation to the library. My birthday gift to myself is supporting the library. Usually I just have the bank send a check but I want to write a thank you card to the staff this year.
3. JB and I did a little YouTube craft tutorial together and I only got annoyed that they didn’t follow directions once. That’s pretty good considering our track record with origami.
4. We also made brownies from a keto sugar-free mix and loaded it up with extra walnuts. It might have more walnuts than mix. It barely holds together and I don’t care. Yum.
5. We were so grateful to have dodged both massive heat waves. Instead we were wreathed in by Karl the Fog all weekend. Though I do love some heat those 115 degree temperatures were no joke. My sunburns aren’t ready to be retoasted.
6. I bought these spin pins years and years ago, and could not get them to work in my hair. I was very annoyed with myself but set them aside in hopes that eventually I’d find a use for them. It turns out when your hair is as long as it can possibly get, more than halfway down your back, it’s long enough to be held by these! Just one holds up one of my buns now. I JUST discovered this when I was inspired to try doing something new with my hair (double cone buns which did not work at all).
Challenges this week: JB is processing the loss of our friend and that’s a bumpy road. Well heck, we’re all processing.
My back pain has escalated this week. I’ve woken up with a great deal of muscle pain even though I’m laying on a heating pad for at least a couple hours each night. I have knee support and neck support and the mattress is new so I don’t know what’s wrong. I also picked up my planks and walks most days again but it hasn’t put a dent in this pain. Alas my massage therapist isn’t available until the fall.
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June 28, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 99: Smol slept through the night! But chose to end the night at 5 am. Win some, lose some. I didn’t get to sleep until midnight because of my leg pain, PiC didn’t get to sleep until 2 am because of work, so we were both in rough shape. But they had a good first nap, which freed us to get work done and feed everyone breakfast and settle into a bit of a rhythm for the rest of the morning.
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Sera’s got a dry hacking cough that started last week. It was only once a day before and sounded like she was just trying to clear her throat but today it’s acting up more frequently so we’ll need to get to the vet. I wasn’t ready to go back yet. The last time we were there tore my heart to pieces. I’m not ready.
The vet’s booking routine appointments well into July, their first available is in ten days. That’s not great but I’ll take it.
This keeps turning my mind to my second dog. He developed a heart murmur which turned into congestive heart failure and it was awful. I’m hoping so much that this won’t be anything close to that.
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JB woke up very late and was a rumpled mess in mind and body. They brushed their hair and their teeth but boy was their mood terrible. We clashed a few times. We managed to pull it out of the dumpster once in the morning, and then by mid afternoon, they were wound up again over losing one of their little art kit doodads. There’s only so many crises I can manage and work on a Monday.
Year 2, Day 100: Is today Tuesday? Friday? Wednesday? Monday? I don’t know. This is how most days start: What day is it? Weekday or weekend?
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June 25, 2021
1. Their pain, my gain: the terrible heat wave meant we got a couple nice days and I thoroughly soaked it up. Too much, in fact, and got myself quite a sunburn reading out in the sun. Whoops. (But I got to read A WHOLE BOOK on a Saturday afternoon. That hasn’t been possible for years!)
2. Therapy was helpful as I continue to work through my deep rooted instincts that flare up in times of hurt and vulnerability: to push everyone away, tell myself that I’m better off alone, that no one outside my innermost circles cares about me so it’s best to self isolate more and more. I’m not fixing anything, I’m learning to feel what I feel and understand why, and let it pass so I don’t need to revert to old habits to cover up pain. It also lets me be present for JB and teach them how to grieve instead of bottling it up.
3. I set up a subscription to The Bouqs to send flower to our recently widowed family member now, and again in a month. I may keep it up for a few more months, just because.
Challenges this week: Grieving. Too too many losses this year.
Fireworks started mid June. This is ridiculous and stressful for Sera.
I have a mouse (the computer peripheral) graveyard on my desk. I’ve been trying to get a mouse to work for weeks. It keeps disconnecting. I thought it was battery related, so I switched to a really old mouse for the interim while recharging the batteries, then trying replacement batteries, but the USB doohickey still keeps disconnecting. The old mouse is isn’t a good size and it’s LOUD whenever I click so I really don’t like using it. I finally unearthed an older version of the current mouse which works but the movement was lagging just enough to make my eye twitch. Thankfully it looks like changing the cursor speed in the mouse settings fixed that bit.
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June 22, 2021
Growth
We’ve had to have the “don’t catch things with blades when they fall” talk. After they tried to catch a five-bladed razor when it was knocked off a shelf. 🤦🏻♀️ We then had a talk about bandaging technique and clotting.
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Why do parents say “I’m not going to say this again” when we absolutely will be saying it again?
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JB had a big fuss-fit over being told to write up their notes after a Spanish lesson. I was frustrated that after a lot of lessons, they still haven’t retained hardly anything. They were angry about having to copy down notes from the class notes to practice later.
After a cooldown period we sat down and talked. They complained that they didn’t WANT to have to write the words and they didn’t WANT to have to practice and they HATE writing.
I didn’t argue about whether they do or don’t hate writing. I don’t think they do but that’s beside the point. Instead, we had a long talk about how learning something new is always at least a little frustrating and it’s always going to require some struggle and being challenged and that for important things, we don’t give up on it because it’s important and still worth doing. I reminded them that writing was hard, learning to read took years, learning to ride a bike was frustrating but all of those things have resulted in their having so much fun getting to pick up new stories, getting to send mail to people, getting to ride bikes with their friends when we don’t get to do much else.
At first they were resistant because they wanted to fuss about how they HATE writing unless it’s getting to do her own thing but they really love riding bikes with friends and that they’re allowed to independently create correspondence that people like receiving so that turned it around.
I didn’t say it wasn’t hard to learn, just that it’s worth doing even though it can be hard. And there are things in life we will pick and choose to do. We don’t have to do everything. But the important things, even for adults, we have to stick with.
I shared that I have to learn hard things at work that I don’t like, too! It’s not easy and it’s not fun but sometimes, some things, you just gotta do. Even if you can’t see the payoff right now, there is often something pretty cool as a result of that effort later. An old friend and former teacher invited us to spend time at his house in Mexico. They can go make friends in Mexico if they learn Spanish! (This is where knowing your audience is key. That proposal for me would have fallen flat.) They perked up a little: I haven’t gotten to make new friends in a long time!
Exactly! How cool would that be to sing songs with a new friend in Spanish?
So we gotta try. Not for everything, for the important stuff, but we have to find a way. It doesn’t mean we keep doing the exact same thing, we’ll talk to the teacher and see if we can change our approach a little, but we’re not going to quit and we ARE going to try and practice.
I told them that I didn’t get to learn how to ride a bike so I don’t get to have that fun! They offered to teach me so I took the opportunity to point out that if they were teaching me, how would they feel if I flopped over and said no, I don’t want to try, I don’t like practicing, I don’t WANT to?
They seem to see that would be frustrating for a teacher and that we should practice respecting each other’s time by putting in effort and practicing.
Language
The last letter game. JB’s friend taught them a game where you pick a word and the next person has to pick a word that starts with the last letter of your word. So: hawk. Knight. Timpani. Italian. Noble. Elephant.
JB and PiC play it constantly and I’ve noticed an awful lot of common words end in n, e and t so when I play, I work really hard to find words that end in more interesting letters.
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They hear a fair bit of (light) cursing type language out in the wild, whether on TV or passing by other people talking or what have you. I’ve taken the stance that curse words aren’t “bad words,” they’re adult words that children aren’t allowed to say because they’re not mature enough to use them with discretion. Slurs are definitely bad words, though.
Responsibility
We’re incentivizing taking the initiative for doing chores and doing chores without whining again. There’s been some backsliding and I don’t want to hear it. But also I’m frustrated that we can’t seem to get one method to stick because we keep forgetting to reinforce it. That tells me the system doesn’t fit our lifestyle and we need to simplify or modify until it does but who exactly has spare brain cells for this?
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June 21, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 92: Some mornings, you have your shit together. Some mornings, you don’t even notice that you and the kids are still in your pajamas when lessons start. Guesses which today was? I can’t even entirely blame the pandemic or the kids. Pre-kids, PiC DEFINITELY had to yell “PANTS!” at me more than once when I started to wander out of the house without actual pants on.
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People are traveling again for the summer, including my teams, which means that I’ve got a massive workload with very little time to manage it. It’s got me wistfully wishing for retirement money now because I really don’t want to go to work today, tomorrow, or the next day. Maybe this is burnout talking. Maybe I just need to schedule some of my own time off even though we aren’t traveling. I don’t yet because I’m worried that it’ll make it even harder to go back.
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Mondays stink in the normal course of things but they are worse now that PiC’s Mondays and Tuesdays are so jam-packed. I’ve started taking over the bulk of childcare on Mondays so he can deal with his particularly difficult Tuesdays. Making that an expected part of my Mondays actually eases my stress factor a bit but boy it sure it still tiring.
Of course it being a terrible nap day made things extra hard on all of us.
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We spent $80 at Sprouts on the weekend to get a lot of produce and fish. I got way too much sockeye salmon (almost 2 lbs) and that’ll probably make three dinners for us.
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I had such brain fog today that I had to choose to run an errand mid-afternoon to try and clear it. It did work, thankfully. It’s such a hard thing when every single decision is so zero-sum. 20 or 30 minutes to clear my head has such a tangible impact on what I can get done, but at the same time, the less obvious impact where I can regain some breathing space and my patience also has an impact on my workday and my day.
Year 2, Day 93: Oh my aching knees. I’ve been playing and sitting on the ground with Smol too much. My knees are both swollen and hyperextending today. What a combination. I was on the overnight last night. They were squirming around 130 am but settled back on their own, and howling at 330 am and needed a feed. We’re working on weaning off night feeds to try and get uninterrupted sleep overnight and are down from 4 ounces to 2 ounces per night waking. It’s not that they’re always up for prolonged painful periods, it’s that the wake ups are always disruptive and we aren’t getting enough consecutive hours strung together. My fingers are crossed that we can get to 10-12 consecutive hours overnight without needing parental intervention.
My circles are starting to dip their toes back into circulating more. We had a masked playdate with friends we haven’t seen in person for more than a year. One friend got a haircut. Another one will schedule one soon. Yet others traveled for vacation recently.
I wonder when we’ll be out of pandemic times here. I’ve gotten in the habit of these weekly logs, I wonder when I’ll close these out.
I see there’s cause for concern about the Delta variants and I wonder how that’ll affect us here with family who are vaccine hesitant. It doesn’t feel like this is over yet but it also feels like many are putting a cap on it like it is. Our kids are still unprotected so we remain in a strange limbo. (more…)
June 18, 2021
1. As a notebook hoarder, I’m pretty excited to discover that I’m within two pages of finishing up a notebook. I’ve been chronicling my day to day completed tasks and checklists since March in a single little book. It’s fun to cycle through my colorful pens and helpful to manage my expectations for work in writing. Now I have to decide which notebook to use next and do I keep the completed books? Probably for a little while, there are some reference bits in there that I may need to look back to.
2. Our insulation is helping! Our floors aren’t nearly so frigid and we don’t need to bundle up in three layers (or run the heat) to stay warm enough to function every day! It’ll be ages before we break even on the money front but I don’t care. We’re feeling the benefit every day and we’re not wasting heat when and if we do run the furnace.
Challenges this week: Our friend has passed and we’re all grieving deeply.
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June 14, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 85: Alice recommended a math app, Math Tango, but when I went on the hunt for it, I realized that w are totally outclassed. My iPad can only be updated to Version 9. Math Tango requires Version 13. And they don’t have a desktop version. Drat. I can’t justify buying an iPad for a kid’s use, much less in addition to the family laptop that I was needing to replace.
JB starts their summer schedule today. It’s a bit spotty. I didn’t get information early enough to schedule a full set of Spanish lessons for two weeks but we’ll see how it goes.
I function so much better when I have a structure to work with. Even if things have to change, even if they change last minute, I feel better having a framework. This goes for work, for handling JB’s days, for Smol’s day to day. Now that we have an idea of how long Smol can optimally function (about 1 hour and 20 minutes up to 2 hours of awake time right now), that gives us a firmer footing on when to do what to support his sleep training.
I was thinking over at Nicole and Maggie’s about which of us would be suited to being a House Spouse and realized that since we can’t do without both our incomes, the next best (also highly unlikely) thing would be both of us working part time and still getting half time for everything else. We both have a lot of household stuff we take care of in our separate realms of expertise and we’re always badly juggling the four areas of work / home / parenting / personal. The personal gets the shortest shrift under the current circumstances but if we both had half time, what glorious self care would result? It’s nice to dream anyway.
It was a long frustrating day at work, I felt myself completely tensed up as I struggled to cross things off my to do list. I very pointedly limited that list for today because I knew there was more work than even I could do on a good day but still I kept getting derailed by one problem after another. I got through but I was really irritable at several points and had to make an effort to rehydrate and refuel. Pacing myself was never my strong suit. I’m a sprinter through and through and you can see that in my work style.
On the bright side I did manage to call the medical equipment people to clear up this nonsense about them billing me when I don’t owe them a dime and got our eye exams scheduled. That bit feels good. (more…)