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. 🤦🏻♀️ 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.
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I unearthed some lamb and beef curry from the freezer for lunch, still good five months later.
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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.
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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.
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Yay I nabbed a sale on Poshmark! I don’t use the app often but I’m glad it still works on occasion.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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, Day 8: My sleep debt is starting to resemble our mortgage. It feels impossible to overstate how tired I am and have been. I’ve been exhausted and undersleeping for a year now between the pregnancy and whatever the heck is waking Smol up 2-3 times at night.
That, plus the Monday meetings and weekend work pile ups, equals a despair the likes of which I clearly remember at this exact stage of JB’s life. Why didn’t I learn my lesson then??
We dragged ourselves across the finish line of dinner, bath, and bed, though PiC had to stay up late to work while I had to try and sleep a little before Smol woke me three or four times overnight. Our lives. So glamorous.
Year 2, Day 9: I hit the wall today. I kept feeling this buzz of “shutdown imminent” in my muscles so every no-baby moment I had to rest. I’d gotten to the point of being so overtired I couldn’t sleep given the opportunity. Oh. Babies can’t either. We are not in a good boat here!
PiC gently but adamantly steered me to take some long rest periods. I wanted to fight it but with absolutely nothing left in the tank, couldn’t even put up a token resistance. Thankfully I was able to clear a good swath of work on autopilot and then fall over in bed. (more…)
Year 2, Day 1: Hell of a day, I tell ya. A terrible confluence of events meant that PiC had to sleep from 3-8:30 am and then go into meetings most of the day. His meetings overlapped with Smol’s awake times so I ended up covering from 8 pm Sunday through 8 pm Monday, just in time for me to start the next night shift. I got absolutely no work done.
Luckily for him I was able to but this is a once in a long while kind of thing. I can’t sustain that physically or mentally or professionally.
Year 2, Day 2: Smol took a bit of pity on me and managed one 5 hour stretch of sleep which granted me about 3 hours. Blessed three hours. But then they woke up again at 430, hungry and squalling, and so much hungrier than usual that I had to nurse them intermittently for the next two hours. Sigh. By the time we woke up again, PiC was running late for his super early morning meeting and I had to shake him awake. That set a bit of the tone for the day.
I rested during Smol’s nap, which I usually don’t do but it was sorely needed after that 430-630 stretch. Unfortunately JB didn’t have their Zoom Fitness class after kindergarten today but they had a post class craft in mind so I left them to it after I unloaded the dryer. They’re responsible for putting away the laundry later after crafting.
I resigned myself to getting nothing done for the first half of the day because the tardiness spawned another meeting for PiC and I was just too mush-brained to do much during their admittedly decent nap (THANK YOU SNOO). I made lunch for the kids but stopped short of making lunch for adults because Smol Acrobat demanded to be picked up again. They are going through some serious clinginess and doesn’t like to play alone for more than 5 minutes before squawking up a storm. They used to play alone happily for 15-20 minutes, what happened?? Do we have to train them to enjoy solo time now that we finally get a decent nap more than not? I’m not enjoying this, whatever it is. There also seems to be some cluster feeding going on which I also don’t appreciate.
In any case, we survive til mid afternoon when PiC emerges from his den of stress and takes Sera out before taking the kids out. I sit like a lump of dough on the recliner for a while, just resting, while JB does some art. Eventually I finally drag myself up and out to join them for a walk but annoyingly my steps weren’t counted in my MapMyWalk app. That feeds data to the Achievement app.
By the by, if any of you use the Achievement app and haven’t maxed out your referrals, you’re welcome to give me your referral code and I’ll share it on the blog so you can get some referral points. Just email me! (more…)
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.