March 6, 2023

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (144)

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 340: After a high pain weekend, it’s almost (?) a relief to start a weekday where I get to sit for more than 3 hours at a time. It was such a cold day. The rain poured down, becoming hail at one point, and chilled me to the marrow. To further complicate the week, it’s parent-teacher conference week so JB comes home at 1 pm every day. Thank goodness I put it in the Google Calendar or else I would have blown past the pick up entirely. I set new alarms for this week on my phone, both for each day and for the end of the week to go reset all the alarms again.

I promised to take a look at my cousin’s kid’s college scholarship essays if I had time today, so once time-critical work was shelved, I dove into the 6 short essays. It’s been a while since I last read a teen’s writing and I did my best to keep the edits light. It was a favor for my cousin so I didn’t expect to hear from my nibling, but they texted me a polite thanks and I was a little too surprised. Apparently I’m that geezer expecting the younguns to be brats. I recently rendered a similar sort of favor to another cousin whose child never bothered to speak to me directly, and those kids are close, so I mentally painted them with the same brush. Oops. At least I helped in the first place….

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I probably could have (should have? Naaaah…) used that time to help out my staff because they’re also having a high volume Monday but I’ve arranged more resources for them. It doesn’t always have to be me personally that does the work to catch them up.

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Lakota family: I’ve been collecting funds for this family who cares for more than 16 kids. They received an emergency placement of 2 more grandkids, but they’re out of bed space. They asked for bunk beds (and all the bedding stuff), and clothes for the kids, along with hygiene and cleaning supplies. The two grandkids that WR took in came with only the clothes on their backs. One didn’t even have shoes. Another granddaughter also needed clothes. Over the weekend, my friend with older boys gathering up clothes from her kids to contribute, and I found a set of bunk beds and mattresses that we could afford. I hate shopping at Walmart on principle but I couldn’t get it for our budget anywhere else. Now, we need money for the clothes, hygiene, cleaning supplies, etc. I tapped a few friends on the shoulder but this is where the lack of a functioning and robust Twitter really sucks. So much of our fundraising happened there.

Year 3, Day 341: It’s a real limbo-brain sort of day. I’m waiting for a replacement lantern for our emergency kit (due this week), a replacement water bottle (due ??), a reply from Contigo about the other water bottle.

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JB was exposed to COVID last week by a kid who doesn’t mask and we don’t know what day they could have contracted it. We’ve been testing them every day since the weekend. So far, still negative. It’s really not great to have to worry about this.

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Last week my mood was so dark nothing could shake it. Not comfort food, not petting Sera, not toddler giggles and hugs. I even passed on sushi night because I knew it would just make me madder to expect it to help me feel better, and then have that fail. Maybe a baby goat or lamb could have helped but Shep’s too far away. Today, it’s not great but it’s not terrible. Sushi could make a dent this time, so we picked up a few rolls and a sashimi salad to go with soba and tofu from the pantry. Smol Acrobat’s shenanigans (want this! no, that! no, I hate it! wait, I want more! but I hate it! Sit! on! Mama!) did put a damper on my enjoyment but not enough to make it counterproductive.

Grieving for my brother. He was so much more than me, better than me at doing things in so many ways, but his need to seek the quick win and talk the big talk, and then later, his mental health issues, well. He never found his way. I see a neatly groomed young man at the bank with a Vietnamese name on his name tag and my heart aches. That could have been my brother but he’s lost to us now. Alive but gone.

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Lakota family: The bunk beds shipped! I breathed a sigh of relief for that. I hope it is delivered in one piece. I put together a shopping cart of basic supplies and bedding for the kids. Friends have been contributing piecemeal and it’s adding up.

Year 3, Day 342: It’s taking longer each night for the pain subside so I’m getting less and less sleep each day this week. What a terrible trend.

Momentarily having deeply mixed feelings about going to full time daycare. That (foolish) sense of “but we managed with no childcare or only 3 days two months ago” keeps nibbling at me without regard for the reality that it sucked and that we were slowly losing the battle to keep our sanity. This may be down to getting more days of uninterrupted work but not nearly enough hours because JB is only gone 5-6 hours a day. Once upon a time, my ideal was 8-10 solid hours of not speaking to anyone per working day. Now with only 5-6 hours a day, and with the work has been expanding to fill all the hours, plus an hour or two a week catching up with family… it all adds up to feeling incredibly antsy without a specific cause.

At 6 am on Monday (the day this goes live), we have to battle for one of 12 slots in the recreational swim lesson program. Smol should be easier but JB’s classes are really tough to get into. Wish us luck?

Good things today: 3/4 of a soft peanut butter cookie with peanuts in it!

We ended the day on a real low point. Smol Acrobat came home from daycare looking like their face had been mauled. Another kid and they wanted the same toy and the other kid went full Sabretooth on their face. They had HUGE livid scratches and gouges, and lots of perpendicular scratches to the huge gouges that tell me that the kid took more than one pass at them. The teacher was busy with other kids and didn’t catch the altercation, they only noticed when the crying started. PiC has seen the likely culprit acting very aggressively towards other kids when frustrated or wanting something another kid has so we have our suspicions who it is. Smol says yes to their name every time we list the classmate names, and no to everyone else. So that’s incredibly frustrating. As much as we understand that kids this age are terrible at communicating, respecting boundaries, and regulating their emotions, this attack on Smol was much more serious than the standard toddler swipe or smack over a disagreement.

Year 3, Day 343: PiC fielded all the parent and director meetings about the incident at daycare. We discussed after and we’re in a holding pattern now. The daycare has to have a meeting with the other kid’s parents and work out an action plan. Whatever it is, it had better include a whole lot more attention to Smol’s interactions with that particular kid.

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I keep rolling over my list of weekend to-dos. Maybe writing it down means I’ll actually do it? I need to cut JB’s hair and trim the hedges. I did get my other to-do list done: Follow up on missing cashback, get a refund for an order that never arrived, and fix the home back up server.

Year 3, Day 344: Whether it’s because of pain or because of nightmares, Smol woke up several times really upset, gesturing at the scratches on their face, sobbing like their heart was broken. Unusually, when PiC went to them at 5 am, the time he normally takes over the night wakings, Smol sobbed even harder, insisting on me.

That broke my heart. Not the part where they wanted me, but the part where they were so unsettled that they needed me instead of Dad who is their usual go to parent at this time of the day.

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The trouble with putting on old shows for a background soundtrack is they don’t hold up in a lot of ways throughout. There’s just so much casual sexism.

Booth (from Bones) cracking that he and Hodgkins don’t need to talk about an issue because “we’re not girls.” Ick. There’s also the thing where it feels like a form of copaganda, also ick. Though I won’t beat up on myself for wishing we lived in a world where people cared about “justice for all” and not the world we’re actually in.

I prefer more up to date shows like Legacies: (Hope) “I know this is a fairytale and all, but a nonconsensual kiss is never the answer.” It’s just harder to relegate the better shows to background only semi-listening.

February 27, 2023

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (143)

Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 3, Day 333: Smol Acrobat was up at 530 am again. *falls on face* PiC and I split the painful morning hours but even with snagging an extra hour and a half, my body is absolutely wrecked. Over the weekend I developed another sore throat. If this is a new infection, I … well, I would want to throw things but that’s not an option right now. My everything is so off balance that I’ve actually lost muscle memory – plain forgot basic keyword shortcuts when typing.

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PiC said he wanted to spend more time with JB on their day off and I … don’t. Poised on the cliff over Guilt Spiral Bay, I had to remind myself that he spends his work day away from them. I do school pick up every day, which is fine. But that means I’m managing their activities even if minimally on week days. I have a lot less separation between parenting and work time than he does. I’m already “spending time” with them every day, albeit in the least positive way, so it doesn’t make me a bad mom for not wanting more today (on their day off when it’s not our day off). Also, see: sick again. I don’t want to spend time with anyone right now but my pillow and my blanket. Spiral averted.

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Their one chore was getting the laundry from the washer to the dryer and putting it away. Guess who repeatedly ran it on air fluff instead of timed dry, so it was still damp an hour later? Ah well.

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