Year 3, Day 45: What a terrible night of sleep that was. I thought I was physically up for a walk to the play structure with the kids because I made it there and back without feeling like a hollow simulacrum at the end of it but last night’s many many hours of pain say different. Between Smol’s waking up at 1045 pm crying, and my pain, sleep was a series of catnaps, at best.
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I don’t understand why people act like divorce is a failure or bad. For example: a commenter or two here but they are just an example of what I see/hear a lot. Sure it doesn’t feel great if a relationship doesn’t work out but isn’t it better to have a way to walk away with both parties intact, should you grow apart, instead of being quietly or destructively (or somewhere between the two) miserable / unhappy? I think it’s wonderful that we have the legal option to exercise even if it wouldn’t feel great at first. Especially women.
Though, I suppose as a currently not-religious person, and who very much ignored all the patriarchal bullshit embedded in the religious background that I grew up in, perhaps that’s where the moral judgement stems from?
Personally, I celebrate all people having the legal ability to leave rather than having that limited just to straight white men with power. I wish everyone had the economic ability to leave too, if they needed.
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My 3 hours with Smol started too early because Nap 1 was shorter than usual. We went straight to playing instead of starting with a snack as normal. They were very intent on the new stacking rings toy from the Borrowed Toys box. I used that time to rest a bit, tidy a little, and pack away another bag of 9 month old sized baby clothing for our third and maybe fourth donation box. They cycled through a few more toys solo which bought me time to grab lunch from the fridge (I made the egg salad, PiC made them into sandwiches, teamwork!) and set the table. Usually I don’t have a lot of time before the hawk screeches the walls down around me so that was oddly peaceful. We ate up and then released the Acrobat to play with the vacuum while after clean up. They’re obsessed with both the floor vacuum and the robot vacuum and ask for them every day. Usually it means I’m vacuuming while they sit on my lap and observe with keen interest. It’s a sitting down activity that gets things clean, works for me. As we came up to the three hour mark, they got very cranky and started hitting themselves on the cheeks in frustration over … I don’t know what, but that was a good sign they were pooped out. For good measure, I asked “all done?” and got a very affirmative “all done” sign in return. The attempts to nap were rough and involved at least one round of me going in to give them a cuddle and help them try to settle again. That tear-soaked face was too much. But they finally passed out after an hour of fussing and slept deeply. What a relief.
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This tweet hit a little close to home.
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The SCOTUS leak about the inevitable overturning of Roe v Wade was a real winning way to end the night. I’m putting together a list of the funds we’ll donate to tomorrow. I need a little time to process and plan. NNAF’s site is down right now anyway because of traffic so I’d like to let that ease off a little for them and the smaller funds that are on our list.
PiC and I hugged for a long time as I wept my fury at the horrible people in this country tearing down our rights, left, right and center.
Year 3, Day 46: Tiny terrorist number 2 started the morning festivities at 530 am. Thank goodness for PiC.
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After school dropoff, Smol signed “all done”. They hadn’t been up 3 hours yet but I gave them a drink of water and we headed for the crib. I’m really glad they’re trying to communicate tiredness again, though I should teach them a sign for that, since “all done” could just mean all done with the thing we’re doing right now. They dropped off to sleep pretty fast for which I’m thoroughly grateful.
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After that body blow that is SCOTUS likely overturning Roe v Wade, I really needed some good today. I’ll be donating to abortion and reproductive justice funds later this week.
I put together an update for our Lakota Family contributors. We’ve helped six families directly to date with loads of food, clothing, and household basics. We also sent their Youth Center 35 lbs of supplies, mostly for babies, to distribute to the families when they need them.
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2 hours with Smol: we played with musical toys and “your toe wears a block as a hat”. They did a lot of yelling “ja ja ja ja!!!” and a lot of unexplained screeching. After a carb-y lunch, I took the kids out for a walk. PiC had to come along because Smol was being kind of a whiny pain about it. They don’t walk well with just me and Sera. With someone to chase, though, they were happy to walk at least partway around the block. We worked off some of my simmering internal rage at SCOTUS on the weeds and then we did a bit of wandering around in the sun before they pooped out. Weirdly, though they insisted they were all done and wanted to go to bed, they didn’t nap AT ALL. It was just a long solo play session.
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I finished enough work earlier in the afternoon to take Smol when they were ready to emerge from solo play, and then took the kids to do another curbside pickup. It’s time to upgrade our toothpaste to the enamel friendly stuff, my dental enamel is not happy. I waved the “old people” Sensodyne at PiC when we got home, and then we enjoyed an earlier than usual dinner of tamales and leftover chicken adobo with rice and green beans.
It was an oddly balanced day: work, Smol Acrobat / JB time, loading and unloading the dishwasher, making PiC’s coffee, and sitting down with our sample ballot for the upcoming primaries to do some research.
There are some candidates on the gubernatorial ticket whose platforms I could get behind but realistically it’s hard to believe they’ll get anywhere. There are some Senatorial candidates who will be about as useful as half a pair of scissors and are about as loopy as a ride at Six Flags. There’s an anti-vaxxer on there, several “my God and my religion will save California” types (no, keep your religion to yourself) , and a few Law and Order Dems that are absolute nos. One of them, a white male Dem who also called himself a hero and incorruptible, and thought his lineage “related to signers of the Declaration” were important to cram in there, touted his Asian-American wife which was kind of gross. It’s mildly cathartic scribbling out those terrible candidates. That leaves a small handful of possible candidates to consider and weigh the likelihood they’ll get anywhere if we vote for them. The candidate from the Socialist Workers Party has the platform I’m most in favor of right now but again, will she get anywhere? Hard to say. Down the ticket, some of the Green party candidates have the stances on issues that I want to move forward but most of them don’t sound even a little prepared to do the work. Their statements are mostly slogans with nothing useful to tell me whether they’d actually understand how to do what they want done in the system we have. One of them is “End poverty in California! Fund schools, housing and healthcare.” Ok, yes. What’s your plan? You have space for at least 500 more words and you did nothing with it. Seems to me if you can’t even write a real candidate statement, you’re not serious about the work. The candidates for AG were particularly irritating. More than half of them were fearmongering and yes, sure, the job is to prosecute crimes but there’s something very unattractive about an AG who’s all about throwing people into jail and says we should “stop emptying our prisons”, or “support the brave men and women of law enforcement”. Sir, we’ve seen the videos. We know who is disproportionately being harmed and it’s not the people in uniform. It might be throwing my vote away but the Green party candidate is a criminal defense and animal rights attorney who said the magic words of “end mass-incarceration” and “reform the criminal justice system”. Do I think he can manage both those things? Well… probably not. But I’d feel a lot less gross voting for him than another compromise candidate. I sure do wish he had a plan of some kind.
Year 3, Day 47: Another 5:30 am wake up with Smol. We spent the first hour together since PiC was crashed out after one too many late work nights.
This early waking thing has gone on more than a couple weeks now. At first, I thought Snough had a point about increasing Smol’s daily physical activity so even though we can’t take them for daily swims, I’ve been taking them for more walks outside. They do PLENTY of running around the house, lots and lots of it, but figured outside air and exertion seemed to be a good idea. Alas, it’s not making any difference at night which, combined with their rash of middle of the night wakings, probably means that they’re getting too much daytime sleep. I hate this. As it is, I’m lucky to get 4-5 hours to work a day so I’m working at hyper speed.
After doing school drop off, three hours with Smol, and school pick up, I was just on the edge of being utterly done in for the day so instead of doing the smart thing and going to rest for a while, I cooked dinner. It was a delicious dinner but I sweated my way through it. Did you know that intense pain can make you sweat? That’s a fun development.
I managed to finish enough work so I could lay down for an hour with a fistful of OTC pain meds. We made it through an early dinner and bedtime to start recovering a little from the day’s energy expenditure but this is definitely one of those wallops that will takes 3-4 more days to come back from. It hardly seems fair that 6 hours of effort translates into 4-5 days of pain and diminished capability but that’s my life.
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Also frustrating: Smol is on an anti-vegetable strike. Even when I cut them up into tiny bits, they’ll eat it up from the spoon and then spit out all the vegetables. They were always fine with the taste of veggie purees, so it seems like it’s the texture they object to, but this is so frustrating!
Year 3, Day 48: After a 230 am sobfest where Smol required a bit of comfort, and we all crawled back to our respective pillows, they slept in until 7 am. That was sorely needed. My entire body is down to the dregs again, and both my hands are feeling fragile. This isn’t going to be a day I can handle the cast iron pan.
Is this the day we go to an official one nap schedule for Smol? PiC protests but I think we should try it even though it makes my heart sad and my body sadder. PiC’s had three 8 am meetings this week and that always makes our lives extra complicated. I have to take a heavier share of the running around with the kids without the ability to take breaks or pace myself like needed. A one nap day is going to make things even harder.
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After dropping JB off at school, we did chalk art on the driveway. Or we tried anyway. They asked for more colors and after I brought out more colors, they locked onto the chalk chips from the broken piece of chalk instead and spent their outside time finding little caches for each chip. Good enough activity. I wanted to pop them in the stroller and take Sera for her belated walk but I could already feel the telltale twinges that signaled my body’s need to crash. I knew that Sera could hang out for a little longer so for once, I listened to my body and kept Smol on a low-key activity run until PiC could take over.
Even after two hours of sitting down, the pain was creating waves of nausea. I vaguely think about how much I don’t want to play through the pain but that’s not really a choice now, is it? At around hour 3 and a half, the nausea eased up a bit. Just in time for Smol to wake up from their one nap of the day. O_O
PiC and I swapped off every two hours of Smol-minding which got us through enough work to end the evening at a reasonable hour. I took the kids for a short walk for the pre-dinner hour and he started reheating the leftovers. Teamwork! Very tired team. But it works.
Year 3, Day 49: Phew. Every night gets more brutal. Smol woke up crying three times in the middle of the night, needing brief consolation before they could go back for another nap. I couldn’t get back to sleep properly between each wake up so the 45 minutes that I finally got when PiC took them out at 630 was not even close to enough. PiC took one of the wake ups, he was still working during the first one and solidly passed out for the third, but he has this gift of being able to sleep through almost anything when he’s tired. Unlike my body which makes no sense and can’t sleep when exhausted. I’m starting to think it’s something to do with my hypervigilence. Some day, I will learn to sleep soundly. Until then, willpower and water.
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After their first nap, during which I was both thoroughly mired in brain fog but still got a whole mass of work done, Smol and I shuffled to the kitchen for cleaning and cooking and snacking. They were amazingly cooperative, for them, and sat in their high chair poking and prodding their food and occasionally even eating it while I cleaned the counters, unloaded the dishwasher, handwashed all the stuff that needed handwashing and got ready for the main event: getting 16 lbs of pork shoulder cooked. The smaller half of that went into the crockpot, it’ll become Kahlua pork and cabbage for the weekend. The larger half went into the oven for a very low and slow roast. That’ll be one dinner tonight and the rest will be frozen and help us out one night and a couple lunches down the road. After you take out the fat and the bones, there’s a fair bit of meat but not as much as you’d expect.
After a full afternoon of work and a little work on the Lakota Families tracking page to log a couple new contributions, I was pleased to be cutting up the shoulder and prepping the freezer packs. Something about cutting up sale priced protein and putting it away for a later meal felt like home to me. Felt like I was myself again for a few minutes. I guess I feel most comfortable when I’m putting a lot of effort into saving money and planning ahead to feed my family.
My legs and back were not so pleased, but when are they ever happy with me these days? The gel mat in the kitchen makes a world of difference though. I wouldn’t be able to move for a week if I were on my feet on the tile for that hour. The gel mat is old and the edges are curling up and breaking but the main part of the mat is still saving my bones.
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Smol was very pleased about the boxes I’ve been leaving out for them. While JB worked on an art project, Smol was putting things in the box and taking them out again for companionship as they cruised around the house. They also like tearing bits off the cardboard and eating them or dipping them in Sera’s water bowl or bringing them to me as small temporary offerings. Then they ask for them back.
Still no luck convincing them to color with the crayon eggs, those eggs are still nothing but entertaining toys to be rotated in their tray repeatedly.
Year 3, Day 38: Yesterday was a rollercoaster day: lots of conflict with JB; made egg salad for today’s lunches; worked some but mostly laid down as much as I could. After all that, I anticipated today would be Extra Rough. BUT *happy surprise* the day started with slightly lower than nausea-inducing pain. Dare I hope that today’s pain and fatigue on a PiC away at work day will be approximately at normal levels rather than the past few weeks of awful? I need to practice having hope. I’m going to pace myself, not take the emergency meds, and hope for the best.
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These sparkly flats made me smile. A shame they can’t possibly have all the cushioning I need in shoes but I appreciate their adorableness.
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We have entered the age of tantrum and going boneless. I didn’t miss this!
Our three hours today were packed: We read two books, then had a big bowl of fruit for snack. Egg salad for lunch. Washed up and then Smol asked for some time with the vacuum. We vacuumed the closet and once it was cleaned, moved along to trying a new to us toy. Once they got bored, I suggested a walk so they brought me some socks. We took Sera for a poke-along 9-cracker walk. We all got very brisk fresh air. Smol pooped out at the end of our walk on their last cracker and kept sitting down on the sidewalk but they had plenty of energy to continue playing in the backyard once I hauled them there like a sack of squirming potatoes. Sera sunbathed while we played, and had music time. Smol was increasingly whinier with each “no” until they finally caved and admitted with their sign “all done”. They slowly settled down for a nap while I hit the books again and did as much work as I could.
Physically, I’m bone tired, even my face hurts, but I don’t want to crawl under my desk and stay there. This is definitely better than last week.
PiC picked JB up from school while I kept hacking away at piles of work and minded both kids for a bit after Smol woke. I did just about as much as I could stand and hit the leftovers for dinner. Thank goodness for leftovers. I’ll try to cook dinner tomorrow morning.
Smol development!: We got to work on boundaries over dinner. They Greatly Desired the fortune cookies across the table. I allowed them to have half of one. They wanted “more, please.” I said sorry, no, those are not ours. We had ours. Their face scrunched up in dismay and they squealed with anger. Nope. Face scrunched up and this time, actual tears. Still no. Higher pitched screech. Still no. We experienced a new octave, prolonged. Nope.
We worked through all the upset and emotion, we had a little chat about how even if we ask politely sometimes the answer is no, and we definitely don’t get things by way of tantrums. They eventually calmed down and moved on.
Year 3, Day 39: I’ve never enjoyed drinking a cup of coffee in my life, much as I want to, but I’ve made many coffees for PiC over the years and he always claims they were good. He takes it seriously enough that I don’t think he’d pander to my ego if they weren’t good. Since my experimenting with the French press a few days ago, I’ve been dubbed the superior coffeemaker. It turns out that’s because I don’t follow directions. Or rather, I don’t remember them. I asked him for his ratio of grounds to water and then promptly forgot. I feel like he said something like 1 tbsp to 4 oz? Maybe? But it was late and I wasn’t that invested in remembering so I brewed it my way, at twice the concentration and voila! Liquid gold! He was duly impressed until I revealed the ratio and then he was appalled at my profligate use of beans. What? It made an excellent cup didn’t it? So the next batch I made, he got to choose: liquid gold or meh silver?
Two months ago, when PiC started the research into swim programs, I appreciated the legwork, but also had negative desire to add anything to our schedules and decisionmaking and budget.
BUT I took my deep breaths and did my best to focus on staring into the middle distance where I didn’t obstruct, if I couldn’t embrace a future with swim lessons in it. They started up this month, once he found a weekly lesson at a time that isn’t too terribly disruptive, at astronomical prices. We used to pay $20-30 a lesson, it’s $60 a lesson with this program *faint*. But we simply cannot get back into the YMCA’s program. They’re overbooked for months out. JB is over the moon about this one. They love being back in the water, they have three swimsuits to wear, they’re all around ecstatic. I’m glad about that part. It helps a bit with my sadness over their not having had swim for two+ years. Thank goodness for PiC doing all the heavy lifting on that and on Spring Break activities and taking that week off to mind the kids.
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Kids as humans
I was struggling with JB’s transition from Little Kid to not so Little but still not Big Kid last year. Because of pandemic haze, it felt like I missed so much. Now that they are definitely Kid, even if not yet Big Kid(? I don’t know what that transition point is) I have this perhaps unreasonable fear rearing up that as much as we foster their individuality, along with civility and humanity, what if I don’t much like the person they are as an adult? I don’t like most people as it is, and we are so dissimilar. I won’t try to mold them into my image but their personality is so far from restful, and that’s great if that makes them happy and fulfilled, but am I the only parent who wonders if they’ll get along with their kids as adults? Or whether their kid will like them as a person?
I hope we’ll always love each other and enjoy each other’s company. I hope this is just a phase since everyone must have less favorite age ranges.
Life with Smol Acrobat
I’m wondering, and maybe worrying a little, how behind Smol is at this point.
They’re growing physically and are engaged with us but we don’t do directed developmental stuff with them like they’d do in daycare. I hadn’t been taking the time at mealtimes to work on their utensils use. They still don’t respond as programmed to the clean up song, they’re still in the emptying buckets and putting them on their head stage.
We do music and reading and counting and the alphabet and lots of outside time but … I’m getting a bit more concerned about what we should be fostering and how to make it happen.
I can’t quite remember what JB was capable of at this age, though I think they did have cleaning up down pat by now. I do remember that they met their now BFF around this age-ish. Definitely by 18-19 months. At that age, that kid was astoundingly articulate already. I remember that JB wasn’t but they weren’t for a long while, speaking articulately was a struggle for a long while. The two kids were at opposite ends of the verbal spectrum so that gives me no real idea of where Smol should be.
I’m wondering if all the other kids at this age are competently feeding themselves. Since first wondering this, I’ve leaned hard into making myself not feed them directly, assisting them with the spoon instead and encouraging their independent feeding more but sometimes all they do is fork around and won’t eat anything at all unless I put the food in their mouth. I can’t help but worry that I’ve/we’ve held them back because we simply haven’t had time or energy to patiently let them feed themselves (or more realistically paint themselves in food).
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Maybe my favorite thing right now is once every night during dinner, they grab my hand and lay their cheek on it. Just a little headrest. It’s perplexing but cute and they get a whole lot of giggles out of it.
They also like hugging my feet. I don’t understand that either but whatever. It’s cute.
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We learned to sign “read” and to high five this month. Not well but they’re trying and it’s fun to see a new skill stick after a few tries. We also, after I mulled it over above, worked on spoon skills and they’re slowly getting better at scooping food into a spoon and then into their mouth. Toddler coordination and instinct to fling things aside, they lack the motivation to feed themselves so I have to push. They’re used to me helping and it’s a tough thing to wean them off the expectation that I’ll help when I’m right there.
But the more we do it, the more they build up enthusiasm for self feeding. It’s incremental but it’s still progress.
Pupdate
Sera is starting to visibly show age these past couple of months. Her muzzle is getting a bit of that salt flecked look and she’s slowing down a little bit. She’s still strong as a little ox and has her zoomies but she’s lost interest in playing fetch and just wants to sunbathe. It’s weird, we adopted Seamus when he was this age and he was in his prime. I worked on him for months to combat his allergies, bring his weight up and put gloss back into his coat. At 10 and 11 years, he was strong as a bull and still enthusiastic as heck. At 14 he was doing backflips to catch a ball. I spotted some dryness in her coat and I’m going to start her on his sardines regimen to help put the shine back in.
She’s Smol Acrobat’s dog and I hope they have at least six years with her. They love trying to cuddle her even if she simply tolerates it.
They’re good for each other the same way she was good for Seamus even if he only tolerated her cuddles.
Precious Moments
Smol’s obsession with Sera’s food bowl has reached a new level. They brought their Pikachu friend to the bowl and stuck his head in – feeding time for friends! Next day, they picked up the bowl themselves and walked around pretending to eat from it. Sera had absolutely no opinion on the matter.
The moment Smol cries, JB drops whatever they’re doing and swoops in to the rescue. “I’m here I’m here I love you you’re ok!”
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JB making up an origin story for the shark plushie: “Did you know why sharkie had to come live with us? His mom and dad were trying to eat him. And his brothers and sisters were too! Because sharks eat sharks. And the other fish wouldn’t help him because they thought he was trying to trick them.”
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So this was absolutely amazing. I didn’t think anything would come of it but for a few weeks, before putting them down, I’d ask Smol if they were all done and we’d head in for their bedtime routine when they signed all done.
On Sunday, it was getting close to the end of Smol’s period of awake time. They tend to do better with 3 hours of awake time between naps now. We’d played with some toys, and then I was reading to them. We were still ten minutes out from naptime, I thought. Partway through a second book, they reached out, closed it, and signed “all done”. I said oh, ok, you’re ready for sleep? They climbed up on me and put their head on my shoulder like an emphatic yes. We went through the routine of brushing teeth, changing into pajamas and reading one more book and then they were out like a light a few minutes after being put down. It was perfect! I am still marveling that they accurately judged their own need and communicated.
That ended after a week. But it was lovely while it lasted!
:: The age difference between the two is both helpful and jarring at the same time. Growing up, everyone was always two years apart from their siblings so this is a bit out of my lived experience.
Year 3, Day 31: JB has another wiggly tooth and we’ve gone from the excitement of having a wiggly tooth to Extreme Angst Because It Hurrrrtttssssss. I hope we’re not stuck in this stage for long.
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JB has the day off from school and it’s PiC’s day in the office so I get to work with both kids at home with me! Yippee!
/extreme sarcasm
Since I’m still in a bad fatigue flare-up, I took my in-case-of-emergency (really bad fatigue) days pill and hoped it would help. This is the second time I’ve tried it. The first time was when my brain fog was physically painful, and I couldn’t tell if the meds were why it partially cleared in the afternoon Today’s experience: it doesn’t give me energy or reduce pain. It paused the incredibly painful crashing downward spiral I’ve been experiencing every day for the past few weeks. It’s hitting a hold button (and leaves a bad taste in my mouth). I crashed later in the night so the pause analogy seems appropriate.
JB was assigned to doing Correspondence and self directed activities when Smol was napping and to play with Smol part of the time they were awake so I could get through small bits of work. I’m doing the serious Smol stuff: diaper changes, feeding (OMG this is such a pain), and navigating transitions.
We survived until PiC got home at 430 pm. I wish I felt better but we limped over the finish line and a finish is a finish.
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PiC met a parent at the park yesterday who speaks only Japanese at home with their daughter so their daughter is primarily fluent in Japanese and man do we feel like failures. Neither of us are fluent enough in our secondary languages to pass on much to the kids, but I’d hoped to pass on at least what we have. That’s not going well.
Also under the Feelings category, I’m pretty sure that Smol isn’t hitting any of their age appropriate milestones. They have a lot of babble but no words. It worries me. Yes kids hit them all at different ages but until we get past this I’m going to worry. JB struggled with this too and that was a really rough ride for us all.
Year 3, Day 32: The kids are both big enough to be shifted out of their current car seat situations (Smol from their infant / toddler and JB from their convertible seat they’ve been using for the past 5 years). Smol will get JB’s seat and JB’s getting a new booster. I ordered the new booster yesterday with our 20% off coupon from trading in an expired baby seat and am so mentally wiped that I thought “April 21” was two weeks from now. No, it’s actually two days from today. So yay! I hate hate hate that I haven’t been able to haul the kids on my own in part because the car seat was always too hard on my hands. Now, I may be able to take them SOME places.
Challenges this week: Childcare. Please. But no, none for us because ….
Vaccines for under-5s, please.
Still zero reliable news on our vaccine prospects. It’s so incredibly frustrating to both of us here and all of our circle who are Still Waiting. Yesterday there was a flurry of news saying “maybe June” but they’ve been saying that since December. “Maybe Jan. Maybe Feb. Data in early April!” The goalposts keep moving and I just cannot keep hoping.
Year 3, Day 24: Well hello Monday. Starting at midnight with the utterly brutal pain that made it hard to breathe, and then moving right along to the four am wakeup with Smol who somehow managed to drape a blanket completely over themselves like a tiny distressed ghostie and cried for rescue. After a few rounds of patting and signing, they settled back down for a couple more hours. We got our real morning started around 630, that superb night under my belt, with a downpour that didn’t bode well for JB’s playground ambitions.
No wonder I’m tired before I start work. No wonder it felt like two days compressed into one.
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Work felt exponentially more repellent than it should (than usual?). Nothing was actually wrong aside from a couple annoying policy problems I have to deal with. It’s probably that I’m just worn to a thread already and now my brain must somehow turn on and do stuff. Yes of course why not.
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PiC’s work informed him that he’d had a close contact exposure to COVID at work last week and JB’s school informed us that they had a close contact exposure today. This does nothing good for my frustrations with how much we’ve endured and how stupid policies are right now. (Why did it take his work a WEEK to inform him??)
Year 3, Day 25: Two huge reliefs. My pain was a bit less than yesterday’s so I got to sleep and Smol slept right through to 7 am so I got almost 6 unbroken hours! Huge. Not restorative but at least it’s not taking two steps backwards like most nights.
Year 3, Day 3: As promised, the Things Got Even Harder edition!
Challenge 1: 3 hours of sleep, y’all. Painsomnia had me deep in the marrow and it burned until 3 am. Of course, right when I finally drifted off, Smol’s white noise app, which runs on an iPhone so old it’s literally splitting apart, shut off and up popped Smol like a chirping jack o’lantern. I fixed it and went back to bed quietly cursing, and finally slept at 4 am. Fab. U. Lous.
Perfect way to start an incredibly hard first day of a tough week.
Challenge 2: PiC had to go on site for work today. That left me with Smol most of the day. So naturally….
Challenge 3: Smol woke up after a 45 minute nap sobbing fit to wake the dead. I’d prepared myself for a short nap and so I maintained my emotional equilibrium. I sat on the floor with them patting and humming, my butt going entirely numb, waiting for them to calm down. Usually they take about 10 minutes to stop crying and then signal they’re ready to get going. Today was weird. Of course it was. They kept kneeing me in the stomach when I stopped humming or patting, so I kept it up, working on my phone as much as I could while also patting and humming. My arms and butt were losing feeling steadily. But I figured I’d enjoy the cuddle however long I had it, it’s rare that they sit still anymore. Then they finally sat up, I got ready to get up, and FLOP. They burrowed onto my left shoulder, right cheek bright red. They’d been sleeping! And were going to keep on sleeping. Alrighty. So they got a catnap laying on me while I did what little I could on my phone. Momentary regret that my phone is too decrepit to have more work apps so I could make the most of that time.
Challenge 4: When they felt ready to get up, it was time to go go go for three hours. Time for food, play, more play, try to cram in a minute or two of work here and there whenever they veered off to do their own thing for a bit. Already tired, this was a particularly rough patch.
Challenge 5: Realizing I botched my own weekly meal / dinner plans by not ordering earlier. They sold out. Sigh. I’m too tired to kick myself. I’m just disappointed. We’ll figure it out.
Year 3 of COVID in the Bay Area.
