Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (39)
March 1, 2021
Week 50 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 50, Day 345: We’re trying a new sleep aid, we’ve gone nuclear, and I am reserving judgement for a couple weeks but at least last night’s observation was: I only had to change and feed Smol 5 times between 7 pm and 7 am. That includes the initial bedtime round, and the final “oh it’s morning and we are UP” round, which means there were three middle of the night rounds. Of late there have been six middle of the night rounds so this was an improvement. Whether it will be consistent or get better remains to be seen.
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Last night I couldn’t sleep for three hours because my hips and back felt like they were on fire. Thankfully I’d booked a session with my very careful of COVID massage therapist and she worked on them today for a good hour. It was desperately needed but also wore me right out. I ended up taking an unplanned nap after.
Week 50, Day 346: I’ve been doing so much stretching to try to ease my lower back pain but it’s only moderately reducing the pain. I think this means I need to address the floppy midsection laughingly referred to as my (very weak) core. I’m looking up easy no equipment needed exercises to work the core.
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JB was having some mood issues and I did my best to maintain my calm throughout. They were not pleased that I continue to enforce my rule about energy-in-energy-out when it comes to extra treat / junk food. We do our best to have a generally balanced diet with treats in moderation. Because it’s so easy for us to be inside and sedentary too much given our isolation, whenever they want something particularly sugary, it’s permitted after they’ve done a good amount of physical exercise. I don’t want it to have any obsession with weight develop, I just want to pay attention to balancing what we take in and how much we exert ourselves.
Week 50, Day 347: WOW. We got THREE nearly-3 hour stretches overnight! I only get a portion of those sleep times because I have to settle down to sleep after changing, feeding, burping, and settling Smol in, which is made much tougher because I had to force myself to stay awake for the changing, feeding, burping, and settling in, but those are decent enough stretches that I’m getting actual naps instead of just floating on sleep deprivation from one round to the next. I’m trying to just appreciate it in the moment without worrying about jinxing the next sleep.
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Did my first plank in .. oh I have no idea how long. It liked me about as much as I liked it.
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PiC reminds me that we have a time change coming up on Sunday, March 14. That’s going to be so much fun with an infant. As I get older, I find myself feeling cantankerous about the time changes. No more changes!
Week 50, Day 348: I keep noodling with our various calculators trying to figure out our future expenses and projected retirement date if I was really aggressive with our investing and so on. I’ve been estimating what feels like a very high (but realistic given our HCOLA) annual expense ($100k-120k) and was surprised to see that range is where Jeremy of Go Curry Cracker calculates they spent in 2020 and will spend in 2021 for a family of four. Granted they’re living a nice lifestyle overseas and that same money buys us about half the amenities. It both validates my assumption and also makes me nervous that I’m missing something. The healthcare piece is certainly still one unknown factor. I don’t want to underestimate those future costs no matter when we retire. I’d like to think I won’t be paying so dang much out of pocket for brain and massage therapy in retirement but we’ll also no longer have the platinum, mostly-employer covered health insurance either so even if I dropped my two expenses, it might end up being an even trade in cost.
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I did TWO planks today. With JB. We also did 15 minutes of stretching together, amusing Smol Acrobat who was laying on the floor with us and watching JB.
Week 50, Day 349: THREE planks today. We’re working our way up to a respectable number.
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Speaking of respectable numbers, Smol Acrobat had two decent naps today. Thank everything! More specifically, thank Snoo and the white noise app.
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I spent two hours working on photos for Seamus’s memory book and it was too much. I had to stop because the sadness was overwhelming. I’ve got to limit these sessions to one hour.
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I caught myself wanting to get take out just for the novelty of something new or different in our day or week. Pizza was on my mind today even though we have plenty of food. I think this is because our options for fun are so limited now. We get one park outing a week, whatever we can stream on TV, and food. I don’t mind the slower pace in general but a little variety and choice would be appreciated. For fun, I pretended I had $300 to spend at Zingerman’s and flipped through their catalog making a pretend shopping list. It’s like when I was 8 and we didn’t have money to shop so I’d just pretend to shop catalogs.
