Year 3, Day 157: Monday. Ugh. I’m still trying to recover from the weekend. Our Saturday afternoon plan turned into an 8 hour affair late into the night. The kids had a ton of fun, and the adults were completely wiped out by the many extra hours on our feet.
We retreated, sweaty and tired, and regrouped at our place. We all had late drinks and dinner in our pajamas. I even tried a couple sips of White Claw. That went straight to my head, but it was tasty. Sunday I worked and rested, napped even, but it wasn’t enough. JB kept me up quite late because they were crying about Seamus so I had to soothe them until they could sleep. End result: starting the week like a couple sacks of bricks are tied to my ankles. What l a bad week for this. In addition to the usual school/work/Smol Acrobat/swim lesson juggle, we have an eye appointment for JB today, a big daycare orientation tomorrow, PiC has a dentist appointment and late Friday meetings, and I’m shorthanded at work. Whoof. I needed to be at what passes for my best. But we’ll do what we can.
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At breakfast, Smol offered me their banana: “biii?” (bite) and then wiped down the peel, my knee, and their foot with a napkin. Very kind, thank you for the help.
Unfortunately our usual morning yardwork had to be postponed because I’m still broken. This was a great disappointment to Smol. Fortunately PiC was able to stick around and spell me with Smol for a little while before he had to go.
We were wrong, btw, the car battery wasn’t fine. It had to be replaced today. We expected it would be $240 but there was some prorating that brought it down to $120. Yay/boo.
After they got to observe a battery replacement, I wrangled an overtired Smol down for an early nap. They were absolutely losing it because they didn’t want PiC to leave. Or just because. It’s hard to tell, really.
I’m grateful they took a solid nap. I desperately needed those hours of sitting down even if I was still working. I’d considered moving to the sofa for a more comfortable sit but it’s too hard to set up a useful work station there now. Our new sofa fits our small space and does the job but I really don’t enjoy it. A shame that our $200 Craigslist sofa was more my cup of tea.
Year 3, Day 158: We did some really satisfying weeding but it was too much, too soon. My muscles were quite angry at me. Then my whole body quit on me. Extreme fatigue took over. You know that feeling when you’re about to be overwhelmed by sleep and can’t hold it off? That plus a feeling of my whole body being smothered under 100 lbs of weight is what the extreme fatigue is like. It is awful. I had to call it quits on Smol-care earlier than usual and set up my invalid workstation on the bed for the day. This sucks.
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Smol’s development continues to entertain. It’s funny to see someone so little be so dialed into certain things like: we weed together in the mornings, the snacks live here so push the stool over to reach them, the dog gets these treats.
I’m enjoying our together time even when they pick a patch of weeds for us to tackle together. I do all the work and they carry the results to the compost.
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A local car dealership that PiC looked at recently is asking for a $1000 (unclear if refundable) deposit to be waitlisted for a new car for 12 months. !!!!
We need a lot more details and confirmation in writing that it’s refundable to even maybe consider this but that seems like a big risk to take for too long a wait. I don’t want to have to fight with them to get my $1000 back if they never turn up a car that meets our needs.
Have you ever had to leave a deposit to be waitlisted for a car without getting an actual order / car assigned with a VIN?
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This Avatar / Bronte mashup makes me laugh.
Jane Eyre
Jane Water
Jane Erthe
Jane Fyre
Long ago, the four Janes lived togethir yn harmonye…
Until the Fyre Janes attackid.
Year 3, Day 159: What a day. The school has started minimum days again, elevating Wednesdays to be neck and neck with Mondays for the worst/hardest day of the week. My body is still struggling today, though a little less since I didn’t foolishly do yardwork again. I did take Smol Acrobat for a walk from which I had to carry them home, kicking and screaming, though and that didn’t do me any favors.
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Most days I like my mundane life but I was struck today with a feeling like I’m not doing one damn thing that matters. Some of the malaise may be related to the number of meltdowns that Smol had today but I bet it’s more related to feeling like I’ve wasted my precious time. First, my computer scare this morning which directly led to me spending more than one precious hour setting up my backup computer and fighting with a few key functions not functioning. Then, a friend asked me to help them make a decision and it turned out to be a waste of time because they’d already had their mind made up and they failed to provide key information upfront. Then, least consequentially but just adding to the pile of “ugh waste” feeling, some people changed their minds about stuff at work and that meant everything we’d done on that project will have to be thrown out.
It’ll pass. I just hate when what little routine remains to me is overturned and even more hate when hard work is wasted. It feels like I poured myself out and it was all futile. Not cool
Also! The many many meltdowns and toddler whining wasn’t my favorite. Was JB this whiny and melty? I don’t remember if I ever had to work this hard for them to just get through a day. I could go through the archives to find out but the answer to that question isn’t going to make today any better.
Year 3, Day 160: I hope we always have a Zoom option for back to school nights. We were able to fit in swim lesson, making dinner, JB’s homework which required two calls to two aunties, and the back to school night all by 710 pm.
It’s been a hell of a day and I absolutely forgot to finish a couple important things at work but in the end, we got it done. Fewer days like this, though, please.
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We need a wider variety of delicious crunchy snacks for the kids that are actually healthy and low-mess (easy for Smol in particular to self feed in the car) but I’m starting to doubt that’s possible.
JB will eat crunchy veggies but Smol won’t. They just chew them up and dribble them back out. Gross. They only want nuts, raisins, and carbs. Maybe they’ll eat dried fruit… ? We’ll try that and see.
Year 3, Day 161: Boy, my psyche is working overtime. This time it was all about being left, lost, late at night on a vaguely familiar college campus to find my way out to my best friend who could easily have driven up to pick us up but chose to park miles away. Not the most deep metaphor for feeling tired, and abandoned by people I trust. Whoof.
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Longest. Day. Ever.
I hate when Fridays act like Mondays.
Smol Acrobat was a hysterical mess to and from school dropoff, they didn’t want to walk a single step. They begged to be carried but I can’t carry them all that way, and you can’t carry them partway. Once you cave, it’s a whole thing of “don’t put me down!!!” Not that it’s better than the constant “pick me up!!!” demands.
My stomach has disagreed with every single food choice I’ve made all week and ramped it up this morning to stabbing pains just at the thought of food. Rude.
After we got through all that mess, I got bad scheduling news from one staff member and then a huge project of “bad news please fix it” from another. The latter is actually a huge problem. But I’m going to mentally reclassify it as a non urgent issue because it’s been broken so long.
We made it to mid-afternoon, when PiC doublebooked himself for a meeting and a tire repair. Whoops. He went ahead with the tire repair, taking the call while he was out, and then was trapped there for the next five hours. His appointment was at 3 and they didn’t get to our car until 8 pm. Thankfully the kids were in great moods and played well the whole time but wow what a day. WHAT a DAY.
Year 3, Day 136: 6:20 am, drat. The sleep is creeping in the wrong direction again.
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My return to work was a depressing crash landing into stressing about too much to do. It was less about the work and more about the volume of everything.
I have to: do all my work in a limited amount of time; mind Smol Acrobat most of the day before and after their ONE nap; help JB (who still has another several days home before school starts) with any tech arrangements needed for their tutoring refresher courses that I set up; follow up on the Lakota giving orders I placed.
I think the stress is compounded by my (near pathological) need to have everything tidied up and right and tight on my FIRST DAY back. That may be related to my need to depart on time when we travel, as well, which sets off no end of anxiety. I keep twisting myself up into knots trying to meet totally unreasonable standards. Huh. There’s a theme.
PiC and I are trying something new: not pushing ourselves to be all caught up on work in an unreasonable amount of time.
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I leaned into the inevitable inability to work after Smol’s nap, and took the kids out for a walk to the playground nearby. Sadly for every inch of my body, the nearest one was closed. I should have steered us home to the backyard but gave into the “try to be a better parent” impulse to give JB a proper play on a big play structure and urged Sera and Smol into this ill considered adventure. It was a huge pain getting Smol to cooperate and get there in the first place. I had regrets almost immediately. But after much coaxing and pushing and prodding, they conquered the promised playground. They also had fun playing in the dirt so I remind myself we didn’t have to go that far for entertainment.
Unfortunately, the wait list for private swim lessons at our local Y is closed. They don’t have enough instructors, and already have 120 families on their list. Sigh. I imagine that national staffing shortages will be a problem for a long time considering how many people have been ill with or died of COVID.
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PiC started the hunt for our family car again just to get a feel for the landscape. It’s bad. Waitlists are 12-18 months for new vehicles. Used cars are priced as high as new. Since when do we pay $55k before tax for a used vehicle?? We last paid an average of $10k for each car and we keep them for a decade or more.
Year 3, Day 130: Sadness. Our pediatrician is moving his practice out of town. We liked him a lot, he started his practice here when JB was born so he’s seen them, and now Smol Acrobat, since they were newborns. I hate changes like this.
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My maternal grandmother passed away. I had a lot of feelings. We haven’t spoken in years. Not even at my mom’s funeral since I didn’t even want that side of the family there after the week of shenanigans that my grandfather and aunts engaged in. They harassed me for a solid week and at the funeral itself.
On the one hand, I feel a familiar tug of “you SHOULD feel like you should go to the funeral.” But I don’t want to go. I don’t feel like I should go in spite of my feelings, either. What sense of duty I have doesn’t apply to them. I haven’t had a relationship with them for 20 years, what contact I DID have in those 20 years wasn’t good, and I don’t have respects to give, any desire to give the living any comfort over her passing, or desire to tolerate their inevitable sniping and gossip.
On the other hand, I’m still mad at them for being such selfish grasping people and I remember how much I wished they’d be family that I could be close to. I couldn’t, they’re just not capable of being considerate or kind. They’re mean and petty. I remember when I was 13, one aunt deliberately picked a fight with me when I put her shoes in our closet. On opening the door, I commented, man, our closet smells weird! She asked if I was saying her shoes smelled to which I replied, of course not! It’s our closet, I just noticed it smelled funny BEFORE I put your shoes in. It was like that before you got here. But she continued to pick pick pick trying to force me to admit I’d offended her somehow. It was so strange but very thematic.
It’s better to protect my time with the people who actually value us but I remember that when they first emigrated here, I had such high hopes of coming into more family to love. Alas.
Year 3, Day 131:
JB and I are having sobering conversations about unhoused people in the city and it’s hard to explain how much our government is failing its citizens. We shouldn’t have so many people in such terrible circumstances. We do the best we can to help but it’s hardly a drop in the bucket.
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We finally cleared out a space for Smol’s crib in the guest room. They would have been moved out ages ago but this is their main play room and I’ve lacked the motivation and energy to tackle that chore until now. I hope this is the thing that turns around their morning wakings.
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Parahawking looks so cool.
Parahawking is an interactive experience of gliding with birds of prey, combining paragliding with falconry
TIL I have to throw out the old or excess candy behind everyone’s backs, including PiC’s. He usually doesn’t even eat candy! Why was he standing there picking through the bucket as if he was going to save these old things from doom? I hate adding to landfill but don’t know what to do with unwanted candy we’re gifted for the kids.
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Smol Acrobat is BIG into sharing food now. They insist on feeding us almost as much as we feed them, they want to split breads that I give them in half to share.
They are now consistently identifying eyes on other people. By poking them with their finger while enunciating “eyeeeee”.
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I watched the Wakanda Forever trailer and was sad all over again that Chadwick Boseman is gone.
Grief was actively happening while we made this film. We pushed through and worked hard for Chad. We told stories and laughed at moments we remembered. It was hard. I honored him everyday, I wrote to him all over this movie, throughout the world we built. 1…a thread
ā The Dowager Chinchilla (@chinchilla1970) July 25, 2022
Year 3, Day 133: Moving Smol Acrobat out of our room made such a difference! They’re still waking early but so far, since they don’t see us, they’re settling back down for another round of R&R. Dragging my feet on something that takes a huge amount of energy (clearing space for their crib) was just feeding the cycle of exhaustion.
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So many chores today. I unpacked and organized a huge pile of hand me downs, incorporating it into the existing supply of next size up hand, sorted out smaller things and excess things for donation and moved Smol’s clothes to their closet. All bedrooms here are now occupied and that feels really weird! I had a dream last night about discovering a new empty bedroom (with the unfortunate addition of my leech brother), maybe it was inspired by this sense of being crowded.
My office is still 75% intolerable but I’ve been steadily moving paper and trash out to their respective bins, which makes it feel like progress is happening.
My head is chock full of sewing projects, and I’m not ready to figure out the logistics or commit to the prep work. I’ll let them simmer for a bit longer. Today, I tackled a simpler project: a small hand me down photo album. It’s the kind that holds 100 (ish) 4×6 photos stacked in a book.
The insides were pristine but the cover was this nasty tapestry fabric with leather that will flake and fall apart when it ages. So I pulled out my scissors, Kraft glue, and special Hello Kitty fabric I’d indulgently bought a while back and covered the entire cover with fabric. It’s nothing I’d give as a real gift but JB will get a kick out of it. Maybe they can use it to store pictures or stickers. Now that I’ve said that… I wasn’t going to cover the second one but feel almost obligated to since they have a LOT of stickers and probably would love to have a sticker book. We’ll see. I’ll let them have this first and go from there.
Year 3, Day 108: Alas. We had ONE good sleep night, Saturday, and it made Sunday feel 100x better than an average day. It was too much to hope for a second solid sleep like that but 5 wake-ups in the night is too much! Like a dang boomerang.
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Anyway, I didn’t want to jinx us by recording the immediate post-vax reaction but now that we’re 72 hours out, it seems reasonably safe to report the short term: Smol Acrobat seems to be taking Dose 1 very well. They hardly noticed the actual needle, which is unusual, and they didn’t seem to have any side effects. No fever, fatigue, aches. Side effects to Moderna are expected to last a couple days so I think we’re through the woods on that part.
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Gas is currently $6.06/gal. Just stating that for posterity’s sake.
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We’re not celebrating this national holiday. We’re very tired humans. And we’re humans who are very tired of this country being a place that is controlled by the Christian right and tells most of us we’re second class or lower, that we don’t deserve to live happy healthy lives unless it’s within specifically drawn out lines of “acceptability” and says that it’s ok that children are slaughtered in schools as long as they can have their guns. This is not and has never been a great place. It could be so much better. But will it?
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A little girl in my street has a very old pug with severe arthritis. Today I saw her gently strap him into a baby stroller & wait for the postie so they could chase after it, running & laughing as the pup barked like hell. You know, just in case you forgot what love means. š
ā Alison Nicolson-Rae (@Nicolsonraea) July 4, 2022
Year 3, Day 94: 12 am, 2 am, 430 am, 445 am 515 am wake ups. I’m at my wit’s end today. Yes, it was a terrible night of sleep (half was my body being what it is and half was Smol) but it’s now what, three months of trying to ride this out?
This weekend I couldn’t take it anymore and spent some time researching a dozen articles on how to deal with borked sleep and there are so many many reasons it could be and half of them contradict the other hald. Bedtime too early, bedtime too late, too much napping, too little napping, low sleep need, more sleep need.
Today specifically, I’m frazzled between needing to work and needing to fix Smol’s sleep schedule because we cannot keep going like this. Diagnosing what’s causing them their early waking has me pulling my hair out though. They might average 3-4 hours of naps at day and only sleep 10 hours at night. They’re consistently getting up way too early every morning, bright and early and happy about it, but clearly they are still tired to be napping as much as they do. My working theory is to push them to take shorter day naps and hope that means longer night sleep. We’re testing this theory today but that also means I have very very very limited time to work. At best, two hours of nap time to work.
Naturally that means my computer was a steaming pile of rotten turnips. After an hour of troubleshooting and restarting (SEVEN TIMES), the file explorer finally started working only for another thing to break. I was on the verge of screaming. Thankfully, I managed not to blow my top and moved on to other things for a short while.
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JB complained of a sore throat at 9 pm, and since I’ve had one myself for the past four days which I chalked up to CFS, we went and took a precautionary test. Negative, thankfully, so sent them to bed with a dose of ibuprofen for the pain.
Year 3, Day 95: 515 am. Experiment has not yet borne fruit. I know, it was unlikely to change overnight but I hoped. Silly, I know. If it seems like I snapped overnight, it feels like I did! It was over the weekend. Suddenly I just couldn’t take this seemingly endless early morning waking anymore. I had thought surely it’d go back to a more reasonable time by now! (more…)
Year 3, Day 80: 1045 pm, 330 am, 530 am wake ups. š On the one hand, toddler just wants hugs. On the other hand, why can’t those hugs wait until actual daytime?Especially since I’m solo all day with them. šµ I told PiC not to rush back since dun dun dunnnnn JB’s started summer camp today! (And he’s got to pick them up, it’s more on his way than not.)
He couldn’t be back in time to be help at the time I’d need a hand anyway, his meetings conflict. So it’s best for him to just do as much work as he can while he’s on site and he can run some errands on the way back. I did a VERY short Costco run with Smol the other day and was very uncomfortable with the number of unmasked people there. As a percentage, it was low, but the place was more crowded than I had hoped so we ran in and ran out with only exactly the things I remembered we needed.
So we vacuumed a lot, went for a walk (terrible walk, they wanted to be carried half the time and that’s not the point!), played in the garage a bit, played with a few toys, and had two snack times. They were terribly upset when I wouldn’t haul out the heaviest of the vacuum attachments. Life is full of disappointment, I know.
They are understanding a lot more words (today: ate more cheese when I told them to eat more cheese), but still aren’t speaking. They articulate lots of sounds and babble but no actual words. Our check up is this week so we can talk to the pediatrician about this. JB was slow to speak too, I’m really hoping Smol Acrobat won’t require speech therapy. It can be arranged but it’ll be so much harder with COVID.
It’s the US Memorial Day holiday so we all actually have the day off. We also have my most trusted relative in town and I cannot even begin to tell you what a relief it is to have a responsible trustworthy adult we get on well with here. Having an extra hand with the kids is breathtaking. Having someone that the kids RUN to, squealing, because they adore them? Absolutely priceless. Remember, Smol doesn’t take to just anyone at the best of times. Having someone they will equally go to for hugs and carrying, for playing or comfort, is such a huge help. I normally can’t nap during the day, I fight it because I don’t want to ruin my night sleep but also because my body doesn’t want to relax enough to fall asleep in the first place. After a long morning outside with the kids and doing some much needed yard maintenance, I passed out after lunch. It was WEIRD. But good. I needed that badly.
It also means that a flood of chores that we haven’t had the brainpower to nail down got done. Which also happens to mean more spending. š¬
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Smol took 2 naps totaling five hours today, are we doomed for night sleep?
Year 3, Day 74: 515 am. I suppose we ought to be grateful that wasn’t 415 am given yesterday’s naps!
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With JB spending the morning with their auntie, and Smol conked out hard, I was able to catch up on everything that had piled up from Friday. There was also a moment of relief in there that if I can work when I’m working and parent when I’m parenting, instead of both hats constantly at the same time, I can actually be a human instead of a simmering pot of volcanic frustration. (more…)
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.