I made pantry dinner twice last week. A couple other nights saw us reheating leftovers, and then we had take out.
Our lives, post-baby, still revolve around dinner and what to have, and who’ll make it happen.
Things that have to happen before we can settle down and adult for the night: walk the dog(s), feed the dog(s), feed the Inchworm, play with the Inchworm, bathe the Inchworm, feed the Inchworm again, put the Inchworm to bed.
This is after a 12-14 hour day of working and Inchworm-related activities, so, at some point, it doesn’t really matter how we make dinner happen, just that it does happen. Sometimes I’m inspired and have enough short breaks to whip it up delightful oven miracles. Sometimes PiC gets home to an explosion of toys, an Angry Inchworm, épuisé wife, and that means he should magic something out of the pantry or the crisper.
We both work, and we both have to eat, and our schedules are topsy turvy most days. I’m pretty Type A and live by my calendar but these days I’m relaxed enough to count myself happy if we both get our work done in a reasonable time and we both get nourished.
Right in this instant, I’ve only ever been more tired a couple times in my life but I’ve never been this sure that this is the best life right now. I have my baby family, we’re both working and building our careers, and we both have to compromise to make it work.
I think it’s our healthy relationship barometer. When things aren’t going well, dinner is later and sketchier and more often eaten separately and standing up. When we’ve got our bits and pieces in the right bins, we have a bit of a warm potato pass off. I might have started a side or an entree cooking, leaving the finishing touches to PiC while I wrangle the kidlet, or I might have a one pot meal finishing up when he walks in the door so he gets to walk the kids. Other nights I have exactly two brain cells still keeping each other warm in the frosty cavern of a mind and he’ll arrive with a basket of Korean fried chicken to go with the cold rice I’d made lots of the day before.
Every day there’s a compromise. He takes the early morning shift (and weekends) so I can sleep. I sleep an extra hour or two so that I can take the all day shift. We split the evening duties because we’ve both worked long days and some things are easier with four hands and a knee.
In other words: symbiosis.
Frankly the only one who’s losing out on this equation at the moment is Seamus who is nursing hurt feelings over my pushing back my dining chair and accidentally running him over a little. I’m sorry!
Actually he’s having a bit of a rough time overall: he doesn’t get our undivided attention, LB likes him too much and therefore he comes in for a share of slobbery kiss attempts he’s not much into, and he’d like to play more. But all of these things would be, minus the slobber, wishful thinking even without LB because we have to be really careful of his skin.
It’s not doggy heaven but he gets fed enough and regularly, he has three beds and more warm places to rest his grizzled muzzle than he can use, he’s well loved, gets walks three times a day and sometimes we run into his fellow doggy the Titan and they have a mighty clash-romp.
Other compromises: I still do all our tax planning and financial stuff. I love it, and I’m a control freak. He does our auto maintenance: repairs, routine checks and gassing up. I do most of the laundry, he’s got the dishes and most of the sweeping and vacuuming. Travel planning: me. Grocery shopping: him. Electronics, purchasing and fixing: me. Clothing, picking out sporting goods, fun gear: him.
Nothing’s perfect, we have our little tiffs when one or the other is flat out of patience and exhausted but they’re rare. We’re getting better at saying: I’m so tired, can you do X for me please.
Like when he ran his first road race since LB came along. He does 99% of the morning duties. This time, he mentioned that he really needed a good sleep before he went out running, so at 5 am when ze was burbling away, I dragged myself up to take care of hir for a couple hours. He was immensely grateful and made sure I had some time to rest to make up for it later. We don’t keep score, per se, we’ve just been practicing listening a lot more.
Status: Flattened, with feet up. It’s the only way I can write, with the few still-functional fingers, when my hands, arms, shoulders, and back are racetracks for searing, electro-shock variety pain. After etching grooves deep in my bones, the pain creates a fatigue swamp, literally knocking me out for a few hours. By Day 5, staying conscious is an accomplishment. I spent Days 1 and 2 waking up from that haze wondering what the heck time it is and when I passed out.
Looks like I overdid it. Or maybe it was all due to fall apart right about now. I’m not sure. Navigating that balance between doing what you “can” but not taking on too much is like blindfolding yourself, spinning in circles, then trying to unlock the master lock of a door with ten identical knobs. With a toothpick. It’s a crapshoot. There are no reliable signals to follow.
Add to that, moderation was always a special sort of hell for me.
I want to do more. I know I shouldn’t actually do it but I always want to do more and usually telling me “you can’t” is like pitching a lit match into a hay bale and saying don’t burn. Before my pain became chronic, pushing myself was a treat.
When I walk a quarter of a mile, I want that next quarter. If I run a half, I want another half. That was how I worked up to my first mile under 8 minutes, was how I competed in my chosen sports, was how I fought my way up, professionally. I still remember learning about building stamina from my first great P.E. teacher. Youth was on my side back then too, but the regimen was sound. Performing exercise to failure (also known as: until you can no longer maintain perfect form) was the first of many steps to building strength and endurance.
I was never a quick study, though heaven help me, I’m some kind of stubborn. At first, the trade-off for pushing through, even if only by 15 or 20 minutes, was “only” days of crippling pain. Later on, crushing fatigue joined the party. An afternoon running errands cost two days of bed rest. A couple hours of exercise cost a week of mobility. Three weeks, once, when I was particularly boneheaded. If -no, when- I challenge myself, push myself just another eighth of a mile, just another five minutes, “just another” crashes down around my ears. It becomes a choice to sacrifice all other life activities like feeding myself or bathing. It should have been obvious, but it still took more than a decade before I accepted it.
Having accepted that fact, now, it’s a whole other struggle.
It’s battling my own instincts to get up and get out because to do otherwise is lazy except that to do so is to hamstring myself because I’m down to my last Energon Cube. It’s trying to parse the muddled and confusing signals correctly so that I don’t cross the line, but “stay active!” How do you tell when enough is enough if sometimes you’re feeling as close to fine as I get, don’t feel like you’re overexerting, but only crash the moment you stop moving? What do I go on, if I can’t trust how I feel?
To make things even more confusing, once every several months or so, for a couple hours it’s like the sun is shining on me. I have energy and only medium pain, the fatigue has backed off and I’m like unto a Tiny God of Getting Shit Done. For those brief magical hours, anything seems possible. That’s not today’s problem though.
As usual, I’m not the only one who’s had a rough few days. Abby has, as have a few other friends. I call a do-over on a crappy wasted weekend!
Lots of friends have kids in our area and it seems like they all participate in the Scouts.
I love the idea of certain things about the Scouts (the learning to do things, whether it be wildernessy or civilization related) but I never participated in the actual activity myself so I don’t have any fond memories of that experience. From afar, it seems like a bit of fun but also a lot of work. That said, I also have specific objections to the idea of Scouts for LB.
Time, money, energy: let’s be honest, in the Bay Area, we’ll be doing well to live in a place where ze can get a good education and eat well every day. 🙂 We likely won’t struggle like I have in the past, but unless something major changes, we are by no means going to have a ton of discretionary income for extras. And personally, selfishly, I’m a bit antisocial most of the time, I don’t want to have to be part of an activity that I have no personal interest in.
Discrimination: I know there’s a difference between the stances of the Boy Scouts (who discriminate against homosexuality) and the Girl Scouts (who maintain an anti-discrimination policy) so that may inform my decision later but for the purposes of this conversation LB could be male and I’m not ok with supporting an organization that supports any kind of discrimination for any reason. We may not be LGBT but I see very little difference between the reasons for discriminating against those who are as the reasons given for being sexist, racist or age-ist; I’ve had a cropful of justifications for racism and sexism and ultimately, discrimination and the rationale for it isn’t something I want LB to learn is an acceptable practice. It’s one thing to decide that something isn’t for you personally but a whole other thing to impose that expectation on others.
Desire: If LB is anything like me, ze would HATE having to do Scouts. If LB is more like PiC, ze would enjoy it. The only thing I know about LB right now is ze eats like a fiend and gets into everything I want hir not into.
Getting back to the point, there are things I’d love LB to learn in a Scout-like fashion (concrete steps, earning merit badges to commemorate the skills or accomplishment, etc.) and I’ve been pondering doing our own little Family Scouts.
Focusing on things that ze is not likely to learn in school, and not arranged in age-appropriate categories, PiC and I could reasonably impart the following skills to LB in the first ten to fourteen years. Most categories would probably have to be broken down into 1-3 smaller subcategories in order for LB to earn any merit badges before the age of 10, though 🙂
Financial Skills (of course!)
Balancing checkbooks. Not because I expect LB to be using a checkbook but the idea of debits and deposits are really easy to understand in checkbook format
Setting up bill payment, automated and one-time only, and when to do which one
Understanding and explaining the composition of a paycheck. Explain who/what SSI is and how that works
Navigate online banking
Personal Finance Management
Saving. Saving first, then spending from the remaining amount
Investing and compound interest: When and how to invest, and why
Needs vs. wants
Budgeting disposable income
Identifying fixed expenses and learning how to reduce them, and why
Basic tax implications
Health
Staying active regularly and enjoying it
Maintain a balanced diet with all the good stuff and the good for you stuff
Compassion – thinking of others, within reason, is good for both of you
Don’t run with scissors, aka, basic health and safety
Cleaning and bandaging wounds
Automotive
Routine: Check your fluids
Change a spark plug
Clean your brake pads
Change a tire
Jumpstart a dead battery
Change a dead battery
Drive a car (manual and auto)
Drive a truck (manual and auto)
Parallel park
Parking on a hill
Household maintenance
Keeping appliances clean, safely, and in good working order
Keeping furniture clean and organized
Sew a straight seam
Doing the laundry for humans, canines, athletes (a whole other level of stinky)
Kitchen Patrol
Handwash dishes without wasting water.
How to load a dishwasher
Kitchen Tetris: putting things away efficiently
How to clean and prep most common fruits, vegetables, and meats
Cooking basic meals
Baking a decent dessert
Make a decent cup of coffee and tea
Keeping the refrigerator sanitary
Rotate and eating the pantry
Animal Husbandry (dogs or cats)
Clean dirty ears
Trim toenails
Groom a coat
Bathe a pet
Check and brush a dog’s teeth
Check skin and bandage minor cuts and abrasions
Feeding a regular diet and picking up after them
Differentiating between normal behavior and indications of ill health
Outdoors-kid
Safely build a fire
Efficiently pack a backpack
How to use and set up any of the disaster gear in case of evacuation: flashlight, thermal sheet bivouacs, prepping emergency meals safely (choosing when to use flame versus flameless heaters in case of gas leaks), etc.
Travel
Pack for a short trip.
Pack for a long trip.
Reading a map
Using public transit
STEM
Creative problem-solving!
Libraries are great resources
Now we just have to make some cool badges!
::Did you do Scouts? I know I missed other important stuff, what would you add to the list?
::What would you think is an essential life skill?
As not the most helpful PF blogger ever, I took a most laissez-faire approach to saving on newborn and infant expenses. I set up Amazon Prime/Subscribe & Save orders for diapers after price comparing the Swaddlers we use to Target prices.
PiC won’t let me switch because he insists he needs the yellow/blue stripe and I’m not gonna argue with the guy who always says it’s his turn to get up with the baby tonight. We might save a hundred bucks or so over several months of diapers but that wouldn’t buy me sleep.
We happen to love the Amazon branded wipes and they’re the same cost as the best bulk price at 2¢/wipe. Fine. We save on having it shipped free so we’re not wasting time and gas.
Sticking to breast milk as much as possible.
LB eats like a fiend, anywhere between 20-30 ounces a day, and I can provide from 50-90% of that depending on the day’s yield. Formula costs nearly $1/oz so we can see that I’m saving us an average of $20/day. This is a lucky choice: not everyone can breastfeed and I choose to because I can.
We did buy a handful of bottle brushes at $2.50/each. It’s necessary to keep the bottles and nipples clean and sterile.
Almost everything else is optional or preloved.
We have some baby soap and ze is bathed about twice a week to fend off that old shoe funk.
Almost all hir clothes, towels, cloths, gear and toys are hand me downs. Ze has a lovely pile of books to look at (and try to eat) and a couple sets of blocks to play with when ze gets older.
Of four hand me down baby carriers, we picked out the two that fit us each best and didn’t splurge on the lovely $200 wrap sling thing that I yearned for.
We don’t do baby swings but we have a reclining chair that was handed down. The wipes warmer was a luxury concession on baby real estate and also a hand me down. We don’t use it anymore since ze has gotten old enough not to have five changes in the middle of the night.
Everyone kept insisting the Diaper Genie was a Must Have. We just used the plastic bags that the diapers came in, still smelling faintly fresh, as a trash bag and take it out daily. One benefit of living where we are, the dumpster is easily accessible and doesn’t stink up the place.
We’re staying within our allotted cash flow pretty well, only dipping dangerously low in the checking account once or twice when I pulled a large sum out for retirement contributions.
We’re in between childcare helpers, still, so these days my schedule is a really weird non-routine routine. It’s not terrible, but it’s a really incredibly full day. I still log at least 8 hours of work, not continuously, but thank goodness my work allows this kind of flexibility.
If we’re really lucky, LB actually stays asleep after we put hir down at least til 8 hours later. Someday, I dream of this someday, maybe ze will even sleep 10 or 12 hours. In the meantime, every weekday is looking something like this:
Between 4-4:30am: get up, change diaper, feed, PiC gets up and tries to get hir back down to sleep, while I collapse in bed. Between 7-7:30am: If I’m lucky, ze did got to sleep and is still sleeping which means I have time to brush my teeth and get to work. If not, ze probably got me up again and PiC is too beat so it’s my turn to play with hir for a couple hours til the next nap because ze is up for good. Between 8-9am: Zip through some work before PiC leaves for the day. PiC makes me breakfast, I absentmindedly scarf that down with one hand, the other hand still working. LB lands in my lap to “help” for a while. If ze’s cooperative, ze will play with toys. If less so, ze will attempt to take over typing. 10-12pm: Try to get LB down for a nap. Wash dishes, wash bottles. Work like the wind while ze is sleeping.
If I get a 3rd hour of nap, I can do some household stuff: Pay bills, update tax filing info for 2014, get the laundry going, put food in the crockpot, follow up on weird things with billers. 1-3:30pm: feeding/diapering, play with a very awake Wiggle Worm. Read books, dangle toys. Take hir and Seamus out for a walk. Let hir “crawl” on the floor while I catch any easy to answer emails. 3:30-4pm: feeding, convince The Angry Inchworm to take another nap if ze is tired. Sometimes it’s a 30-45 minute third nap, sometimes this is the second nap of the day and lasts an hour or two. Seamus will start angling for his medications because after he takes them, he gets dinner. Whip through any dishes, knock out some more work. Between 5:30-6:30 pm: LB will be up and at it again so I’m all hirs. Feeding, diapering, and playing again. Feed Seamus. PiC gets home at some point and takes over for an hour of daddy+baby time. Sometimes they go out for a walk with Seamus. 7 pm: I start gathering a change of clothes and we’re blasting some tunes for hir bath. We’ve got this down to a science, now. Ze was terrified by the big bathtub but with music, toys, and a super efficient routine, ze’s cool with it now. 7:30-8 pm: If we’re in good odor with the baby gods, ze is finishing up the bedtime bottle and nodding off. If not, ze demands another bottle and is wide awake. 9 pm: Adult people dinner. Talk through anything we need to discuss, if we still have brainpower. Sometimes PiC can get in a workout before dinner. Sometimes we BOTH get to take showers. Sometimes I’m still catching up on work. Other times, I’m trying to arrange travel or figure out what’s up with our commitments. 11 pm: Remember that thing called sleep and stumble to bed wondering why the hell we didn’t do this earlier.
I have a half dozen friends who were onlies and happy about it. Half a dozen others who wish they were onlies, and dozens more who are glad they had siblings.
PiC always wanted a crowd. I wanted none. Or rather, I was open to the idea of raising kids generally but never felt the urge to procreate. Adoption always seemed like a better way to go but, either way, having a family of humans wasn’t imperative.
It’s decidedly disconcerting to be pondering this mere months after having LB but it started as a practical question. We do have to figure out what to do with the pregnancy clothes and new baby accoutrements and with very little storage space, the question becomes even more pressing.
Now that we’re on the other side of a somewhat difficult pregnancy and survived a few months of a baby that hated sleeping, neither of us are under any illusion that having a baby is fun. There are rewarding moments, absolutely, and it is true that the first time (and pretty much all subsequent times) your child sees you and is so pleased ze grins like a loon is something else. It’s pretty awesome figuring out how to extract baby giggles, too.
But the survival of all involved is no mean feat either.
The physical demands: We’re not young anymore. All nighters were terrible when youth was on my side, they’re far worse now. The emotional demands: We solely existed as parents in these months, there’s no time or energy to be partners and adult individuals. And that’s exhausting in a whole other way. The first time ze went to sleep and stayed asleep even after being put in bed, we had no idea what to do with ourselves. (We ended up having dinner and a conversation.) Financially, good grief. Diapers, and wipes, and hiring help. Breastfeeding was a must for LB’s health and saving money but despite having it really easy compared to some, it was chemically difficult. When I was tired (All The Times) feeding or pumping triggered a serious dopamine drop and a wave of depression overtook me. I had to talk myself off a ledge every time. I even started a Twitter hashtag to distract myself from the awful feelings. Still I provided the bulk of hir nutrition because formula is so expensive.
This may sound coldhearted but on the point of sheer exhaustion alone, before we consider how hard the pregnancy was the first time, neither of us are inclined to do this again.
And yet, strange twist. Despite my own life experience, despite always ranking sibling fighting alongside death and taxes (all are certain, all suck), there is a part of me that wants LB to have a companion who could, for as long as they’re inclined to be around each other, be there to reminisce about childhood things that they’d not share with anyone else.
I can’t do that now because my sibling is, bluntly, a shit. He almost always has been but in 30+ years, we did have 2-3 years when we got along and shared that bond. This isn’t a glass half full thing, that made his later choices a far worse betrayal, but I can’t deny that I did get to have that relationship for a short time. Later, his mental issues complicated things further. Much like having gotten a couple good years with my parents before life fully hit the skids, it reminds me that though I loved and lost, LB isn’t necessarily doomed to the same fate. Some people do get to enjoy good relationships with their parents. Some people do get to share life with their sibling in a positive way. Knowing that, there’s a small part of me that wonders if I’d be depriving hir of one of the most important relationships ze could have.
Looked at another way: having this sibling was hugely formative. Would I be who I am today if I had had the older brother I yearned for? If he’d been someone who excelled and applied his numerous talents, someone who looked out for me and guided me professionally? Would I be half as strong if I hadn’t had to learn how to act both as my own advocate as well as kick my own butt to forge a road of my own? Life could have been so much easier if he worked alongside me to support our parents but would I have had the same fire and determination to grow my career to this point so that I’d have the freedom to live a real life, the ability to choose to put my family first? Or would the easier road have left me softer, somewhat less ambitious, more willing to accept less because there was a safety net rather than a chasm gaping at my heels?
Maybe I would have. But I suspect that I would be a much different, much less successful, much less driven person.
I was a born follower. I always wanted to follow big brother and so follow him I did, right through a morass of trouble and back to safety and, never incidentally, punishment. Every time. My heart was not adventurous, my dreams were nightmares, and rarely did it occur to me that there was more to life than the books I devoured. I needed someone to follow and, as charisma and vision were his domains, I would have trundled along after him like an ant following a chemical trail. Without his failures, without a big push, I might still just be following.
He always wanted a brother so he did his best to remake me in that image, manipulating me into doing his dirty work like killing the spiders, climbing fences and other stereotypically boy escapades. Scion of a matriarchal family, I was a born scrapper but I learned to throw a real punch fighting with him. And fight we did, physically and emotionally, for nearly all of our lives. Bullies, wanting a bit of superiority marked me, all bookwormy and solitary, as an easy target only to rapidly retreat when I gave as good as I got. In the process of making me his “little brother”, he preyed on my every weakness, teaching me that the very existence of fear was a soft underbelly you never showed people. To this day, I won’t confess aloud that anything scares me because that’s an invitation to be pounced on.
High school was the first time I had to make my own way and my 12-year-old knees trembled at the unfamiliar ahead of me. Mom scraped up the cash to send him to private school, worried that he’d fall in with the wrong crowd at the public school, but as the academic and responsible kid, I was on my own. That was the first time that distinction between us had been made so clearly and that would follow us the rest of our lives. I often wondered how much of the family joke, subverting the usual expectations assigned to birth order that I would be the successful one and he’d depend on me, was a self fulfilling prophecy and how much was merely an accurate read of our characters.
The truth is, in many ways, my sibling’s inability to cast a shadow was as influential in forming the person I am as anything my parents instilled in me. I learned from them: facts, figures, morality. But I became more by pushing away from him, from our friction, in my need to redeem our family reputation.
Many people take comfort in their siblings. I am grateful when an encounter with him doesn’t give me weeks of nightmares. So it’s perhaps strange that I seemingly credit him with some large part of who I am. But it only seems fair to say that adversity tempered me and boy howdy did he throw challenges my way.
It’s not a theorem that can be solved for the best possible outcome. Much as I abhor math, I’d be working those numbers in a heartbeat if it could be done. So many “what ifs” crowd together: What if LB is like my sibling (terrible)? What if a future second kid is that awful person? What if LB would do so much better with a sibling?
All I can do is hope we do a good job with LB and have a LOT of help if we try again.
What say you? If you had them, were your siblings a joy or a bane? If you didn’t, did you wish for them? Or are you glad you dodged a bullet? How does that inform your choice to have or not have kid(s)?
Unlike the slippery slope argument, which is generally fallacious, my problem here is utterly logical.
After not buying clothes for almost a year, focusing solely on feeding the family and paying actually necessary bills, I got an itch to pick up one nice thing. We have a few events coming up and some of them are formal enough that my mom-capris and loose shirts wouldn’t pass muster.
(mom-capris: the same capris I had since before getting pregnant but only buttoning one of the buttons. Doubles as buffet capris.)
Despite my ban on buying any new dresses because how many dresses does a single human need, one dress that actually fits me wouldn’t be a bad idea since it is basically an all in one outfit. If I played my cards right, I could maybe find a dress that will fit me now AND work later if my size changes again. (Side grump: this is not a thing men have to worry about when they talk about growing the family.)
Naturally I still don’t want to actually GO shopping. You know, in a shop. This makes it difficult to figure out what size I am though. Instead I hit the internet and ordered multiple things in different sizes. My home is the most comfortable dressing room.
Having clicked order (twice), you’d think that was the end of Step One. It is, I suppose, as Step Two is trying everything on but there’s a nasty side effect of clicking Order: I got a thing. A thing? Yes, says my brain, a thing! What about these Other Things You Like? Turns into a staring contest.
A nicer lightweight bag.
A hair clip.
Some shirts.
A stand mixer.
A house.
…… No no and no!
Mind, this isn’t just an exercise in self deprivation. Not entirely. Some of these things may yet come home with me. Or that house may probably happen because terrible neighbors are terrible and Seamus would love a yard (think I can teach him to do yardwork?).
But the other stuff? I just know that over the years, I’ve bought my fair share of things that became clutter much more quickly that I anticipated which would then have to be purged and be a net loss. In fairness, I was younger, stupider, and even less stylish. Regardless, I’d rather not do that again and again and again. I’d also rather keep my money and use it on investments to grow our future free from regular jobs future. That is not the same as not wanting anything nice, though, and therein lies the problem. It’s all fine and dandy when I’m not buying anything at all. But once I do, the brain keeps on rolling: why not this? And also… this?
Then I have to burn some willpower telling it to SHUSH and NOPE.
