For months after LB’s arrival, the sum total of my aerobic exercise was taking Seamus for daily walks with LB strapped into the stroller or the carrier.
I didn’t have the energy for more than that and, particularly when breastfeeding, there was no motivation for yet another thing in the list of things to do.
PiC and I have access to at least one basic gym as part of non-optional fees we pay, but taking a solo trip to the gym when you have two critters at home begging for your time and attention? They’re really good at the oogly eyes, thing. Well, Seamus is. There was that once I strapped LB to my chest for a jaunt on the treadmill. It was fun in that rickety roller coaster kind of way. Turns out wearing a 20 lb weight with grabby hands leads to unexpected (totally predictable) events like the Grand Yoinking of the emergency STOP pin, or *beep beep beep* Run faster!, or the equally stumble-inducing *beep beep beep* Slow it waaaay down!
But taking a ramble outdoors, that’s easy, right? It’s free, and more importantly, free of major dangerous opportunities for the kid to kill you. Bonus: the dog can come along.
That’s the ticket! Buuuut as a sleep-deprived and chronically fatigued mom, what really happens is we mosey outside and down the road, then shuffle our shanks back into the warm once Seamus has stretched his legs and done his business. Rather than trotting a brisk mile or two, a lot of the time we (ahem, I) ended up making a beeline to the nearest appropriate spot and then turning back like Eeyore. Seamus didn’t complain but he didn’t need to. My guilt prodded me sharply – you know he’d love to do more! and of course, anything for my dog, so in the later months of last year, I made it a point to stop working before I hit the mental wall and take him for longer and better walks. It’s gone well enough that I’ve made it a part of my personal goals this year to carry on and do a bit more training.
That was well and good but both PiC and I were still feeling the flobs.
Once LB was holding hir head up easily, we created the Little Workout Routine. Give it a try with yours, so long as you’re careful and don’t hold me responsible for hurting yourself! Need a baby? Borrow a baby! (I have one right here. Seriously, borrow hir. Please.)
Disclaimer: Know yourself, know your baby. My child thinks all of these are hilarious but yours may not. If your child does think it’s hilarious, be forewarned, you might pull something because the laughing is contagious. My child is also more wriggly than a kitten, so if that’s your baby, this could result in injury. Be careful!
ARMS!
Little-lifts: Brace our feet about two feet apart, lift LB under the armpits and reach for the ceiling. Bonus points if you can do this smoothly and toss hir up in the air without straining something. Repeat until your arms like cooked spaghetti noodles and the baby can’t catch hir breath from giggling.
ARMS + CORE!
Little-bell: Pick LB up under the armpits and holding hir straight out in front of you, do a deep knee lunge forward. Keep hir steady, even if ze is giggling and kicking hir legs, with a tight core. For the ambitious, add in a baby-curl: smoothly lower the baby toward the ground as if ze was a hand weight, curl hir back up again. Repeat until the dog looks at you disapprovingly for “dropping” his human sibling. (This will take longer and longer until he no longer cares so probably stop after a few sets.)
LEGS + CORE!
Little-legs: when ze is big enough to hold on (kinda), sit down on a chair or stool where your knees are bent at a 90 degree angle but your feet remain flat on the ground. Put the baby on your lower legs, probably hold onto their arms just in case if their grip is as bad as LB’s, then lift your legs up, straightening them out. This is a massive upper leg and core workout. I go to jelly in about ten lifts.
LEGS + ARMS + CORE!
Little-lunges: Pick LB up under the armpits and holding hir straight out in front of you, do a deep knee lunge forward. Keep hir steady, even if ze is giggling and kicking hir legs, with a tight core. For the more ambitious, add in a turn and baby-dip: turn your torso to the right or left, still maintaining the lunge position with the baby still extended, dip the baby down to about waist level and then bring hir up again smoothly. Repeat on alternating sides, until you’ve gone across the room or collapse. Tuck baby close to your baby as you collapse into a ball, protecting the hapless but usually cackling infant.
Enjoy? Those of you with older ones, is the toddler and child exercise routine half as fun or do we go back to doing normal adulty exercise?
We spend a lot on food. But we also eat a lot and I don’t have FOND memories of those penny-pinching days when I’d only eat one meal a day and that was leftovers from dinner from the night before.
So we spend on food. I wondered, though, could we feed all three of us for $75? That’s what our biggest Trader Joe’s and local produce shopping trip cost.
Mostly I’m curious. I am terrible at meal planning in any sane kind of way that saves time and energy so this is an experiment in making a meal plan and sticking to it. I’ve hit a cooking rut. I typically like cooking even if I suck at coming up with vegetable side dishes, but when my cravings are for take out it’s because I’ve gotten busy and stressed or more tired than usual and can’t spare the brainpower to come up with foods we like.
What we bought, roughly, was mostly stuff for this week, but some stuff for freezing and will be used later. In turn, I’ll be using ingredients we already have but the value is generally going to balance out. This week I bought 4 pounds of ground turkey for $2.99/lb. Two weeks ago we picked up a few pounds of chicken for $1.19/lb and pork for $1.99/lb. We use more chicken or pork in a single recipe than ground turkey so it’s an even enough trade.
The menu
Caveats: Cooking really only applies to dinners. Breakfast is almost always eggs, sliced ham, toast, or a simple bowl of oatmeal.
Lunch is (PiC) ham and cheese sandwiches with chips; (LB) some combination of banana, tofu, raisins, clementines, tortillas, cheese, ham, dinner leftovers; (me) leftovers.
Monday
Turkey burgers (made with ground turkey, minced zucchini, quinoa) on honey whole wheat buns served with tomatos, red onions, sprouts, mayo, ketchup. Plus tator tots. What happened? Success! Despite a major bump in the day, we got burgers on the table.
Tuesday Homemade pizza with tomato sauce, cheddar and mozzarella, chicken What happened? Fail! Turns out my yeast is super expired. It didn’t even put up a token fizz. Of course I discover this at 430 pm, so instead I recklessly tried a miso-butter chicken and bok choy recipe. This is what happens, I was looking for a green bean vinagrette and get a whole new recipe instead. I cannot be trusted. (Justification: We had leftover baby bok choy that needed to be used! And it’s not every day I have miso in the pantry.) It was delicious, soooo, yay improv?
Wednesday
Hainan chicken with ginger garlic rice (cooked Sunday), served with cherry tomatoes and cucumbers What happened? Fail! My brain shut down at 4 pm and this is where it would have been really useful to have cooked more on Sunday. But I had cooked enough rice and mashed cauliflower to go with the Trader Joe’s packaged chicken curry we had in the fridge from last week and that was served with a side of fresh green beans. I did cook ahead a pan of roasted red potatoes for tomorrow.
Thursday
Side roasted red potatoes with dabs of butter and lots of garlic. Um. A main dish of some kind. What happened? We had turkey burgers again because I’d made 6 adult patties and 2 baby patties.
Friday
Tuna or ham and cheddar sandwiches, salad and soup What happened? Cheese sandwiches and boxed tomato soup. I could make a good tomato soup from scratch but not all days are from-scratch cooking days.
Saturday Unplanned What happened? Turkey burgers again! We wanted to use up the burger buns and veggies bought specifically for this (sprouts, red onions, etc) and we did. Good thing we love our turkey burgers and enjoyed them down to the last bite!
Meal approximations are better than planning
Ironically, I did better in the three weeks after the initial challenge. Forcing myself to follow an exact menu plan, meal and day, just didn’t seem to work well. $75 was high for our perishables but our overall costs were generally in line with a $75-100/week budget. We pick up bulk staples irregularly so that’s the extra $25-40 in the weekly spend.
Some of my best dinners were…
A) Lemon baked tilapia served with brown rice and green beans
B) Mixed cavatappi and whole wheat rotini topped with a zucchini, carrot and turkey ragu sauce served with a homemade load of bread, baked bok choy and carrots
C) Crockpot lasagna
D) Tilapia fish tacos & burritos.
Warning: if you’re baking your fish with lemon slices, the rind might leave a bitter taste on parts of the fish. Also remove all the lemon slices before serving. I missed one and wondered why my fish taco was disgustingly bitter.
Ideas for future menus
Shrimp and grits with garlic, onions, and tomatoes
Poached eggs served with polenta, hash browns, veggie
Marinated Baked Pork Chops
Pork chops with caramelized onions
Lemon baked chicken with roasted potatoes and onions
Best Takeaways
I don’t mind using the occasional packaged or prepared meal anymore. First it was about the cost, then it was about the nutrition. But overall, we’re doing a lot better on both fronts just by virtue of this experiment, more so than expected, and a few conveniences are just fine by me.
Our stress over getting a meal on the table, previously disproportionate to the crime, is incredibly low now.
I did serve pasta so frequently it’s been put on the No Fly List for a while. That was predictable but oddly disappointing, nonetheless. It’s just barely fathomable that it’s possible no one can eat pasta every day for three weeks without complaint.
If you’ve got tried and true recipes that you’re willing to share, please do! I require simplicity, though.
This weekend was a trial, made slightly less grueling by having some access to the outside world. Last week I dragged along, trying to muster some good energy pockets each day but utterly failed. The best I could manage was being patient with an increasingly grouchy LB when ze was home and becoming one with the sofa when ze wasn’t. By Saturday, it was no use denying it: another round of illness had come a-knocking and we were fool enough to open the door. PiC was on nearly solo parenting duties, I simply couldn’t stay awake. He kept sending me to bed, and intellectually it’s nothing to feel guilty about, but it’s hard to shake the feeling of not pulling your own weight.
And it’s hard to shake the feeling of uselessness when random body parts stop working. Like the left knee doesn’t bear weight so “walking” is really “wobbling”, or three fingers are so swollen you can’t bend them. Or standing up makes your head spin, dip and swim.
Thankfully, I got a little work and household management done online, amid the brain fog, so that restless need to accomplish something more than having bizarre dreams and sustaining life was fulfilled.
Tetchy Toddler
Granted, it has everything to do with being sick but LB was prone to grouchy outbursts not unlike an angry, thwarted hunting velociraptor. Keep feeding the wee beastie, y’all, a sick raptor-baby is naught to mess with.
And can you blame hir? It’s miserable coughing all night. Poor thing wakes up in the middle of the night burning up, crying, because ze doesn’t understand what on earth is going on. I feel like a heel walking away from the piercing “maaa maa maaaaa!” when we’ve done everything I can for hir and ze doesn’t want to be cuddled to sleep. Rough times.
I don’t know how single parents manage, half the time ze was sobbing because ze wanted PiC. Seamus and I were on standby to fetch and carry, slather vapo-rub and administer Motrin, but ze wanted hir dad and only hir dad for comfort.
Moody Muttley
Seamus is off-kilter too. He’s been refusing his antihistamines and vitamins for weeks. He grudgingly takes them under protest.
It’s hard to tell if something is wrong or if he’s just in an extended funk.
Could be he’s worn out being moral support from our weeks of being sick. He always gets up to join us when LB is sick and being tended to.
Dad and delinquent accounts
Dad’s been missing utility payments.
I know because I am still remotely monitoring the accounts, not because he has learned his lesson about telling me the truth.
$100 here, $80 there. $400 for the electricity, another $200 for the water and trash. They pile up month after month as he pays what he can, saying nothing to me about the rest. Add that to the more than $1000 we pay per month for his rent and and it piles up. As does the aggravation.
I’m deep breathing through it lest the frustration eat me alive. Our budget continues to bear the monetary cost, I refuse to let the cost of his silence be my sanity. But it’s a little harder each day that feels like everything is subtly wrong.
One-horse home
We’re still a single car household and the inconvenience far outweighs the savings. On days when LB and PiC are out together, Seamus and I are limited to going only so far as I can hike, and if we have to run errands, well, we can’t. Unfortunately, he’s too popular with random strangers which makes it unsafe to leave him outside while I run in to run errands. He and I only run errands where he’s allowed inside. In case you think I’m being paranoid, someone just tried to steal our neighbor’s equally cute and friendly pup when they’d run into a cafe to pick up an order. 30 seconds is all it takes for someone to walk off with our dogs. What is wrong with people??
Shaking it off
I’m getting some work filed away to make Monday less painful, and by extension, the rest of the week as well. Maybe, just maybe, we can shake this funk before Tuesday.
How was your weekend? How does your week ahead look?
Sleep-crying is a thing. It’s as pitiful as sleepbarking (by Seamus, not LB) is cute: real baby cries but you can’t comfort them because they’ll actually wake up and then you’ll regret everything.
I used to hold my breath a lot: would these snorks and soft sobs wake hir or would ze shuffle off to sleep? Don’t know why I bothered. Oxygen deprivation for me wasn’t going to affect the outcome for hir. Wakefulness was either a need for a cuddle, or a full bore scream and arched back of misery that meant FEED ME. Which, in my sleep deprived haze, would often be misinterpreted as “I’m sad, soothe me”. Less than 1% of the time is the latter, why do I always forget?? Oh right. Sleep deprivation.
But it got easier
Ze cried all the time. For months, it was a constant cycle of crying baby, change hir diaper, soothe soothe soothe, feed the baby, soothe soothe soothe, crying baby, try again.
We walked hir, we rocked hir, we patted hir, we sang, we shushed, we passed out sitting up with a baby cradled in our arms.
Not a single thing made hir sleep better or more.
Then ze stopped. Either ze got older and less anxious or hir needs were being met. Who the hell knows? All I know is ze wouldn’t sleep through the night for months. Some nights, we’d be up with the dawn because we’d hardly gotten back in bed much before that.
There was that odd night back in Month 4 ze slept through for a solid 9 hours like a horrible, torturous carrot ze was dangling in front of us. It would be 3 months later before it happened again for a few nights and then it’d stop.
Suddenly, 4 or so months after that ze did. No warning. Just started sleeping through and waking at 5 am. Then started sleeping until 6 am. Once, ze slept til 730.
Lesson learned? It can get better. But nothing we did had any influence over it. I used to be terrible at dealing with uncertainty and after a hard year of training find that while it may not be comfortable, it won’t keep me up nights.
But not easy-easy
That’s not to say we don’t still have our moments of frustration. As ze grows and explores, ze will confuse and frustrate us. We forget, every so often, that ze is just a baby still because ze has grown so fast and is so amazingly interactive.
My favorite age
A friend said that whatever age you’re at, you’ll revise that to be your favorite age. I used to love babies best at Months 3-6. But now I think he was right, I adore LB at this age even more than I did when ze was fresh-baked, or when ze was just learning to lift hir head, or when ze finally learned to hold hir own bottle.
I miss those earlier days with that sort of wistful nostalgia when I realize ze is no longer willing to cuddle. Once ze became mobile, that was the end of baby+mom liedowns together. Ze simply cannot stay still, period. But despite all the exhaustion running after hir now, I love it.
Now is: climbing onto furniture without help, proudly showing off “gentle pets” for Seamus, mischievously crawling and poking at sleeping Dad’s face, industriously pulling down books and folded laundry faster than I can put them up, mad dash crawls with top of the range squeals as ze tries to beat me to the Forbidden Anything Zones, curiously tasting anything ze touches and pulling faces, then sticking out hir tongue for me to remove tasted and rejected item.
Now is a busy time. There’s the nonstop exploration of all the same things, repeatedly. The thrill of discovering new things in the recycling to bang around and share with Seamus. The excitement of pulling out Legos to share with me. Discovering how to put things back where they came from. That last is a much coveted skill but as I understand it, it’s going to take some time. Ze’s working against muscle memory and instinct when putting things back in the box, you can see this when ze places a Lego back in the box, ponders for a second and grabs it back out.
The first step is the hardest
LB took five steps in a row, racing toward hir teacher with delight. Ze has been trying hir sealegs since, taking a step or three here and there, aiming hirself for a relatively soft landing or hurling hirself the rest of the way at us.
I adore hir face
Even when ze is crawling right over my throat to get to the toy on the other side of me, across me being the straightest line from Point Baby to Point Toy, I adore hir.
Ze might be in danger of being spoiled if I thought love was money or love was indulgence, but I think love is support and boundaries and equipping hir with as much skill, knowledge, and confidence to take on the world.
Therefore, no, I will not pick hir up every three minutes just because ze would like to hitch a ride and they always pick me up at daycare! They surely do but I am not a mule-momma and I need to conserve my strength for the most important things.
Oh, right, more importantly, as my parents always said: we say no, and we tell you the hard truths because we love you. Someone who didn’t love you would have no interest in doing the difficult jobs that help you be a better person.
May I always have the strength and clarity to love and guide LB as I was loved and guided in the early years.
Here’s a question for you
It’s been fun putting together monthly updates but now that ze has achieved a full year, we’ve stopped counting in months. Would anyone still like to see monthly updates or have you had enough?
For those of us in the latter category, if and when we escape, we often vow to ourselves never to go through that again. It was one of my strongest motivators to get the hell out of Dodge (debt, that industry, that job), build a career where I could write my ticket, and never again be subject to the unsavory whims, or drunken flirtations and grabby hands, of a petty tyrant.
People think that Michael Scott from The Office is funny, and I think I can see the hint of “but he means well” that makes it possible to laugh at him.
Y’all, take Michael Scott, take away any good intentions, replace them with pure solid selfishness and disregard for humanity, and that’s the level of bad we’re talking about. The shenanigans that people can laugh at, I suspect, are because most people think that’s a parody. An exaggeration. They don’t imagine there are people for whom that’s a reality. I could never really sit through much of The Office without feeling the urge to vomit because that, minus any funny, was three of my former managers.
Is it any wonder that the friends from those former jobs that I keep in touch with feel like friends made in foxholes?
Over the summer, my old friend and ex-colleague, C, told me that our former Toxic Manager (I’ve had a few) from 12 years ago started texting her. That TM was fired years ago for incompetence, but out of the blue, sent a mass text to a handful of former employees with a personal life update, ending with “if anyone still cares about me”. Friend who is far too kind for her own good, sent a nice reply back with a congratulations and “hope you’re well”, and worried to me that she was being uncivil in not extending a hand of friendship to someone clearly in pain. Perhaps I shed my humanity a long time ago but I pointed out that TM was piling guilt on a former employee who was never a friend, and if she’d been any good at her job, she wouldn’t have expected it. A true friend wouldn’t have, for example, have welcomed C back to work after bereavement leave with massive guilt trips about how hurt she was that C didn’t confide in her about her father’s death and her feelings. C was then forced in the awkward position of having to try to comfort TM and her hurt feelings over C’s loss. True story. But like I said, C is too kind and attributes her kindness to others who are wholly devoid of consideration for others.
Well, it’s happened again. Except this twist is magnificent.
A friend, Z, left the company specifically because of a TM, without another gig lined up, and eventually found a job at a start-up. He was far from the first. TM had driven out at least 4 other people before this, and if TM hadn’t left, Z would soon have.
He was so much happier, and he soon proudly welcomed into the world his new baby. Everything was coming up Z.
A few months ago, he said that TM was interviewing at his company! This was after TM had been fired for incompetence at a company that doesn’t easily fire. Of course, I felt strongly that he should speak up. He has strong and valid concerns about TM from personal experience, and TM’s work history is consistent. Warning: contains bullying and petulance.
Apparently, Z did. And his company went and hired that terrible TM again.
So Z quit.
And invited us to his retirement party.
Z and I weren’t close, we just kept in touch over the years, but I am ready to throw on a dress, make some sparkling confetti and pop a champagne bottle. And that’s before we even get to the retirement party!
Because, y’all. Z is maybe 40 years old and even with a new family, they can afford for him to quit instead of sacrificing his health and sanity working alongside someone whose track record for the past 20 years has been to torment colleagues and underlings like you wouldn’t couldn’t believe.
This is why we save.
*wipes away a happy tear* I entertain the notion of early retirement a lot, for many reasons, but this is a favorite. The freedom to walk away from any bad situation because you can and you want to is amazing.
Our 2016 financial goals are pretty normal. How about some personal goals this year? Setting quarterly goals last year was a good format, even if I missed the target on several of them. This year, I’m taking a different approach to the goals because, as it turns out, I don’t need motivation to work more or harder but I do need some motivation to do things that are just good for me.
In that vein, these won’t be assigned specific dates since they’re more fluid.
Reading
I have missed reading so much. 2015 was not my year for reading books. It was my year for reading comics on the phone app, but only once in a while, when breastfeeding or so tired I couldn’t sleep. This year, I have a stack of books on my shelf, by my bedside, and a subscription to Marvel Unlimited. Now the real problem is if I have some time and accessible books, I will read til the dawn breaks.
Travel
We have firmly decided to tackle travel, and flying, this year with LB. Thanks to all your reassurances, I understand that mostly it won’t be a huge world-ending thing but we do have to take a few outlier things into account: my uncertain, but certainly limited, energy levels; overall travel costs; balancing the time off with our work and vacation time.
We’ve got a late summer Hawaii visit on the books, along with a spring visit to the packed-to-the-gills Emerald City Comic Con. I’d dearly like head to New York and soak in the wonders of the Hamilton musical while visiting with dear friends we haven’t seen in ages. Even my addled mind admits that’s probably too much to manage this year though, because you start with New York and find yourself adding on New Jersey, Maryland, and Virginia/DC because how do you go cross country and miss this friend, or that friend?
If we do Maui and the Big Island, I’d love some food and adventure recommendations!(more…)
The good: I took an extended (for Americans) maternity leave with only partial salary. I needed every minute of that time to recover from LB’s delivery, so I’m grateful that we fought to make that happen.
We hosted family and friends throughout the year, traffic to our wee abode was easily four-fold higher thanks to the draw of a fresh-made baby. This wasn’t cheap between feeding them and housing them but we managed to stay within budget.
We even traveled and enjoyed some of it despite the massive increase in gear and logistics. Lowering expectations made a big difference. (more…)
We spend a lot on food. But we also eat a lot and I don’t have FOND memories of those penny-pinching days when I’d only eat one meal a day and that was leftovers from dinner from the night before.