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. š¤¦š»āāļø We then had a talk about bandaging technique and clotting.
*****
Why do parents say “I’m not going to say this again” when we absolutely will be saying it again?
*****
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.
*****
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?
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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…)
Year 2, Day 64: I had an imperfect weekend. I didn’t check off half the things I needed done, I didn’t get nearly enough rest or food or water. But we did get five and a half major things done, we did get Smol to have three really decent naps across two days, we each did get some sleep on alternating nights. Not bad. So when Monday came back around the corner bearing the expectations of work again, I was zero percent excited.
It’s not you, Monday, it’s me and work. I’m not in love anymore.
What would I do if I didn’t need to work today? I’d still need to finalize our taxes, our CPA has been MIA for a week and it’s our last day. I better get that done.
I’d turn those four boiled eggs into a small batch of deviled eggs. (We’ll see if I have time.) We’d still need to figure out lunch and dinner. I ordered a Monday delivery of Indian vegetarian side dishes and they tend to deliver earlier in the day so we could have that for lunch or dinner along with some salmon and rice. Maybe I’d prep some tofu to add to Indian, or cut up that paneer that was hiding in back of the fridge. I need a new recipe for cooking small frozen scallops. The last batch was not to my satisfaction.
I’d check in with JB’s tutor to confirm they’re still on for lessons this week, and get a start on crafting some envelopes for the magnets I ordered to send to family and friends.
All this would be fit in around Smol’s nap times. Who has time for a job amidst all that???
What actually happened: not that. I got some work done. I did pay our taxes and filed our return. I cooked a little bit to prep for dinner. I made it outside for a bit of a walk after JB’s lesson because they were furious that PiC and Smol were walking Sera without them.
Year 2, Day 65: I was up at 5:30 am, thinking that Smol Acrobat was up for the day, because they couldn’t soothe themselves back to sleep. I took them out for a quick feed and to play but they passed out after eating instead. Well ok then. I won’t argue with that! I dropped them back in their crib for what turned out to be a good 2 hour sleep. I put those two hours to good use, mostly: walked the dog, cut up fruit, made deviled eggs for everyone else for breakfast. I had a bit of breakfast for myself while I powered through some really complex work problems. Sadly, before I could put all of them to bed, I heard a CRASH come from the kitchen. JB had dropped my precious Pyrex and it shattered. *cries* My Pyrex! My time and energy cleaning all of that up! *cries* I was nearly wrecked by the time I swept and vacuumed.
The next two hours were spent with Smol Acrobat since they, of course, woke up right when I finished clearing up that mess and PiC had two hours of meetings. My arms were jelly by the time Smol’s nap time came back around and I’d gotten them squared away. Naturally, the moment that JB finished class, they showed up in my office demanding their baby. Whoops. The baby, they are napping. Sorry! (Again, furious. Notice a pattern?)
Then it was time to plow through a pile of work and bills to pay. So many bills to pay! I don’t know how they all came to be clustered at the end of the month.
Our utility bill has been steadily rising the past three months and I’m baffled as to why but this has to stop. That mystery has to wait though, today turned into TAX RESEARCH day. UGH. I had to dig through 11 years of returns and forms to figure out my problem with my missing 8606 forms. I went down that rabbithole because we both missed filing the 8606 this year. š¤¦š»āāļø Ugh. It needed to be done, but I’m a little worried my accountant is going to hate me. This has been the year of discovering years of mistakes. Hopefully they won’t hate me too much… some were mostly their errors originally that I’m catching. I just wish I’d caught them before.
Smol’s sleep training results are all over the map. We had increasingly large blocks of sleep and then a reversion back to multiple wakings a night. We get great naps for a day or two and then a reversion to fighting and fussing. It gives me a pit in my stomach, listening to the crying some days, even though most days I’m ok with the process. I need to compile our notes for the sleep consultant to figure out what to tweak to get to full night sleep. With no time in the day to even finish a full day of work, adding data collation sounds like a barrel of laughs. Gotta be done.
Year 2, Day 66: The day really got away from us. We managed to get through last night with just one feeding but Smol was up again at 6 am. Ghastly.
We were playing on the floor just before naptime. Sera came in to see what the chirp-shrieking was about. Smol, laying on the floor, stopped and stared at her. She looked at them, then at me, then wandered off. My throat closed up with grief anew. Seamus would have come and laid down nearby, offering his side or his tail for the baby’s inspection. He would have let the baby wiggle and lurch their way over to him and grab his tail like a lollipop. Once I’d put the baby into the crib for a nap and they started hollering, he would have stayed in the room until they fell asleep. During sleep training, he never once let the baby cry it out alone. He’d lay nearby, we’d leave and shut the door behind us. He’d prod the door to be let out only after the snoring started. He was always there. And now he’s gone. And I miss him so so so much.
*****
I unearthed some lamb and beef curry from the freezer for lunch, still good five months later.
*****
My work day was completely derailed with a series of (work) problems. I finally just gave up on getting my usual work done and shut down to go deal with dinner. Everyone was out of sorts for various reasons. PiC’s stressed by the lack of time. He can’t get his work done, or his exercise in, or a million other things. I’m frustrated by the mountains of work and my lack of patience with JB this morning. I oversaw their reading assessment for school and was a complete jerk about their inability to follow directions. I was doing my best to guide them only on navigating the platform and not commenting on their answers at all but I had to walk away to compose myself when they went back to check their answers and changed them to the wrong ones. It was right, why are you doing that?? I forced myself by sheer force of will not to affect their answers. I physically put my hand over my mouth to stop myself at times. JB was frustrated that they keep biting their cheek when eating. It’s happened twice at every meal for the past three days and they are furious. Smol didn’t want their micro nap at the end of the day and they were furious about the whole business. Sera was pretty happy though.
Year 2, Day 67: I’m still trying to knock out the more complex problems at work one at a time and it feels hopeless. The sheer volume is overwhelming right now, and nothing is helped by the constant interruptions and lack of dedicated work time. PiC and I continue to trade off work time blocks so that helps a little.
I’m struggling with feelings today. Mostly the failure related feelings: guilt, sadness, frustration.
I’m on a mission to get Smol to settle down at night better which means a combination of getting them to eat well and sleep during the day and timing the naps so that they aren’t awake for 3+ hours before bedtime. It’s a tricky dance. We spend short 10-20 minute blocks out in the ultra windy yard with JB and Sera to give Smol plenty of fresh air and natural light in between each nap.
Observing JB’s Spanish lessons has been frustrating. They don’t seem to be absorbing anything, and I can’t tell if it’s because they truly don’t remember anything or if the teacher’s soft approach lets them off the hook. It makes me bananas when they’re asked “do you remember this phrase” and without taking even half a beat, they immediately say “no”. But the tutor doesn’t press them to try, they just move the lesson along, and I’m not sure that’s always the right approach. I feel this frustration when we verbally review math and money concepts and they just wildly guess answers, mentally flailing like they don’t have any foundation to start from even though we’ve been talking about money and the value of coins for years. It feels like I’m banging my head on a wall: I’ve got a headache, I’m annoyed and absolutely nothing changes. I’m trying to prioritize – teaching them how to be a good human is probably more important than specific skills but it’s hard to let go of the desire to educate them in everything useful. We started revisiting a daily earnings chart but we’ve absolutely sucked at recording earnings and demerits regularly there too so that feels like a bust. Another bust among too many.
My dear friend’s spouse is dying and I’ve offered support in all the ways I am currently able to. They are not very responsive, understandably, but I thought that was their desired level of engagement. I just got some feedback from a mutual close friend that it’s not good enough and that sucks. There simply aren’t enough minutes in any day to rest, eat, drink, work, parent, and support and I hate that I’m coming up short.
Year 2, Day 68: I’m embarrassed to admit that for the past four years I thought our dryer was a little bit broken because at a certain point, the heat would turn off but the drum would keep rotating periodically. There’s a little rectangle on the screen, and the load isn’t always dry, so I was convinced that was an error. But it worked otherwise so I shrugged it off as a low priority problem. I just did some Googling and discovered that it’s not an error state, it’s the wrinkle prevention setting! ALL THE FACEPALMS.
It doesn’t explain why the load is still damp at times, though.
*****
Left to their own devices, JB likes to decide we’re having sandwiches for lunch. That’s fine if they’re making them. If they were always in charge of lunch, we’d eat an endless cycle of tuna salad and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. We have really got to teach them to make something else.
*****
Yay I nabbed a sale on Poshmark! I don’t use the app often but I’m glad it still works on occasion.
*****
I really need to get my eyes checked again. I’m noticing some eye strain when working.
Year 2, Day 57: I’m thinking about how people are here for a minute, in the grand scheme of the universe, and how I hope to matter in the lives of the people who know me but that in the end, my life will be over and forgotten in a blink. Just .. a thought.
*****
We’ve scheduled a free initial call with a sleep consultant for this week.
We’re also battling a reverse cycling situation where Smol Acrobat is waking to eat twice a night. We’re trying to shift those calories into the daytime and it’s been tough because they have no interest in eating during the day. On another angle, PiC wanted to replace the hand me down nipples that we were using. They finally came in stock and it turns out that might be one of the reasons Smol has been disinterested in eating. We picked up medium flow and they were much more interested, though we struggled with the nipples collapsing. We’re still figuring this out.
*****
I want to be helpful to JB when they say something doesn’t feel good but I really don’t know what to do with “My tongue feels funny.”
*****
We live, work, school, and play at home. We have no commutes right now. Yet we still can’t get done with dinner, bath, and bedtime by 730 pm every night. Why?? Related: Why am I not in bed by 8 every night? That would be the dream.
An hour later I realize the answer to this question tonight is: because we have no childcare and they chose to play in the backyard for an hour in afternoon while I worked on the patio outside. Oh right. Any changes to our routine means the schedule slips by an hour or so very quickly. (more…)
My cohort is rapidly rounding the bases to the Big 40. One dear friend expressed his feelings about that rather succinctly: “gross!” which made me laugh but also made me think.
I haven’t pinned down how I feel about it, but it made me think about what would mark this past decade as a success for me personally. It’s getting a little late in the day to do something about it if I’m not aligned with my values, but it could set me up for a great decade in my 40s. I take a look back before I look forward.
My late teens and 20s were almost entirely about survival.
I graduated from college (21), started this blog (23) while working full time at my first job out of college, paid off my parents’ debts, dated PiC for a long time with lots of life ups and downs, got engaged (28, long after I was “supposed” to be married – 25 according to family expectations), squeaked our marriage in under the wire to land that in this decade, and buried my mom who had been chronically ill.
That period was about laying a strong foundation.
My early 30s were building on that foundation.
I took a huge career risk several years ago and so far it has been worth it. We decided to try for a child and had JB before I became considered a “geriatric” mother. We set up our estate plan and trust, I accepted some incredibly hard truths about my family, and then went through the necessary steps of cutting off my dad. I’m so grateful for the friends and chosen family who have loved us in his place. My health had just been the worst for years and last year’s dietary changes brought improvements I never thought were possible. It’s not a cure and doesn’t fix everything but it helped. I started therapy last year and that wrought serious improvements to the fatigue I was struggling with, and helped me survive the first several months of the pandemic PLUS a pregnancy.
I’ve got a couple more years left in my 30s. What do I want to wring out of those years?
Year 2, Day 22: The good thing about today was PiC was free of any meetings and I was able to give him the morning to work kid-free.
The bad thing was it felt like three days had elapsed by the time I collapsed in bed at 9 pm. It can’t be the same day, can it??
JB had three lessons. Smol Acrobat had two disastrously short naps and one almost not terrible nap by 4 pm. I covered the kids until 12:30 pm. Half the time I was entertaining Smol, the other half was overseeing JB who likes really hands on playtime with Smol. Smol Acrobat is highly amused / tolerant of JB manhandling them from one activity to the next and genuinely enjoys being plopped like a sack of potatoes next to their older sibling. This freed my hands so I could pack a box of hand me downs to share with a friend.
Then traded off with PiC so I could buckle down to work furiously for a few hours.
Year 2, Day 23: A thing I’ve been practicing is being ok with good enough. Good enough parenting, partnering, working, etc. It doesn’t come naturally or easily, hence practice. Today was a challenging day in that respect. We got two better than terrible nights of sleep with Smol, and then it went to hell again. So of course my body has no reserves of energy left and of course my mind takes me to task for being not good enough.
I wonder what kind of parent I’ll be on the other side of this pandemic. Will I ever get my patience back? Will I ever find my school age child fun and entertaining again? Will I ever enjoy anything again???
I do everything and anything for them but completely fall short on emotionally connecting. I plan and schedule and pay for all kinds of educational and interesting activities for them. We care for Smol day in and day out. I’m pumping milk twice a day and nursing 3 times a night. Everyone gets fed and clean and has clean clothes. Everyone but me gets some kind of outdoor time most days a week. Sera gets walked or outside time 3-4 times a day. But I can’t, just can’t, muster an iota of enthusiasm for being playful or patience for their foibles. I don’t want to be hugged. I don’t want to be talked at. I just want to be left alone. And lacking that last bit feels like falling down on the job. That’s the part they’ll remember. Not the practical stuff. You don’t notice that you always went to bed on a full stomach, had clean clothes, bathed daily if you’re being well provided for. You notice the lack of it. Like you’d notice how your mom is an angry zombie instead of the smiling hugging person they were before the pandemic. Wouldn’t you?
I hope this is all because it’s all too damn much and when we have some help again, I’ll be more of a human. I miss having the good emotions and not just the gritting my teeth to make it through one more day, one day at a time. (more…)
JB was a big grump about having me trim part of their hair. It’s no fun for me, either. They won’t stay still, they won’t look up, they keep whining. Finally I warned them that they had better stay still and look up for a full minute, but since they didn’t, I just chopped large chunks out of their hair and let them go inside. It was 2 minute cut and it showed.
They burst inside: Dad look! It wasn’t even that long, I’m all done!
PiC: Great! Looks great!
They ran out of the room. He turns to me and mouthed: WHAT HAPPENED???
It was really that bad. But too bad! If they didn’t want a hack job, they should try standing still for more than 0.2 seconds.
From our perspective
We’ve had some good talks about parenting lately. Of course these stem from frustration and conflict, which doesn’t feel good, but from conflict comes understanding and growth for all of us. We’re trying to do our best to parent in a non authoritarian way and that’s completely uncharted territory in both our experiences. We tend to repeat what we know because that’s easiest and familiar. Going away from that deliberately means we’re writing new to us paths and feeling our way sometimes. The good thing is we talk through our conflicts as much as we can and try our best to create new patterns. Sometimes it feels like the stakes are lower for me because JB cares so much more about what PiC thinks, says, and does than me. It lowers the pressure when I screw up. They don’t have a problem having a rough time with me and saying it’s a rough time or acknowledging later that they know it was a frustrating time.
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.