Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (44)
April 5, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 15: I’m torn. I adore babies in the first year. Also babies in the first year are absolutely hell on the nerves and the sleep. So torn.
Last night was predictably brutal. Capped by a big surprise poosplosion (sorry) before dawn. Thanks, kid. I had to do a load of laundry after handscrubbing the pajamas to make sure the stain didn’t set.
I’m grateful that I planned ahead and did some work on the weekend, today needed up being mostly childcare because it was a meeting heavy day for PiC. In my limited time, I managed to get through 2.25 parts of 3 time sensitive tasks, cared for Smol for 6 hours, moderately assisted JB with their art activity, scheduled some classes for JB, edited a post, and did a bit of banking. I’m BEAT.
PiC emerged from his work den to make dinner while I went into mine to tackle another hour of work during Smol’s late afternoon nap. We’ve really struggled to get even one good nap a day so today qualifies as a good nap day. They slept 1.5 hours in the morning and 2 more hours in the evening. JB did a surprisingly good job of keeping themselves busy while PiC and I were unavailable.
I can’t help but wonder what life would be like in this moment of the pandemic without the added complications of infant life. It seems like we catapulted from having a pretty attention needy four year old to a reasonably self sufficient six year old. Yes, the pandemic hasn’t been THAT long and yet the transformation is unsettling. Would we be feeling a bit smug and capable of doing what needs to be done instead of tired all the time and harried? I don’t regret anything, except my loss of sleep, I just wonder.
This is Day 4 of my neck pain and it seems like it might be getting better? The muscles are still very tight and tense but the pain is lower than it’s been for the past 3 days. Crossing my fingers.
Year 2, Day 16: Sigh. I don’t know why it is that after two three-hour sleeps, Smol cannot get back to sleep through the rest of the night. Around 3-4 am, we’re up for a marathon of a couple hours. It’s awful but I’m doing my best to just breathe through the tired.
Unfortunately I can’t breathe through the massively ramped up neck pain today. I took my big pain meds and hoped that the warmed up muscles will feel less terrible. I even dug out my TENS unit and ran that for a while hoping that it would reduce the muscle tension. I think it helped a smidge.
My data backup equipment arrived yesterday and I unpacked it today. I’m not ready to tackle the actual dashboard set up but I did get the hard drives set up and made sure all the hardware was accounted for.
In more productive procrastinating, I read up some more tax implications for our IRAs and discovered that I need to file some standalone Form 8606s. I didn’t realize that was necessary to establish basis for those accounts so I’m glad that I know now. First I need to get all my Form 5498s going back several years with Vanguard and then I’ll make a list of the years that need an accompanying 8606 filed.
A thing that’s been helping me navigate this particularly tough time of pandemic + baby + school age kid + work + no childcare: listening to my moods and aligning them to the situation at hand.
If I need to work when I’m minding the baby then I do, but I pick low stakes tasks to clear. If I can’t work, them I find a chore I feel like doing instead. If the baby is sleeping and I need it, then I lay down for a bit myself. I now plan my work around making life easier for us, not my life around work. As hard as the days are physically, this makes work feel like an afterthought. I’m fitting it in around our lives and it’s not ideal as far as getting things done the way I used to, but it is what works for us right now.
Year 2, Day 17: I’m all kinds of contradictions today.
It’s sunny and warm which I love, but the loveliness has also inspired a sense of loss.
I’ve got the worst case of senioritis but I’m also grateful to be back in some flow at work.
I’m exhausted so I don’t want or have the energy to do anything other than the absolute necessary things but I need to do something because every day that I’m too tired, I’m losing hard won physical conditioning.
I’m feeling so isolated I don’t even feel part of this world anymore but also want to stay completely isolated because this world sucks. The racism that bursts out hurting my Black friends and family, my Asian friends and family, my Hispanic friends and family. I don’t want to be part of this world anymore. Example: Ex-officers acquitted in beating of Black colleague who was undercover at St. Louis protests. They beat him so badly he needed several surgeries. It shouldn’t matter that he was an undercover colleague they couldn’t identify, what the HELL justifies treating anyone that way???
Simultaneously I yearn to be out and about and eating all the food and seeing all the people I love. But I don’t want to see anyone.
I want childcare again but I don’t know that I can cope with having my infant in someone else’s care at this stage of life, particularly when I remember how many infants are usually in a single room and sometimes they just have to be bundled up like little squawking logs and left on the playmats because the teachers’ hands are full.
Year 2, Day 18: Every time I think, well now THAT was the worst night of sleep ever, I am proven wrong. This is like a slow slide into hell and I’m losing the will to live. That’s only slightly hyperbolic. Slightly.
I did manage to get on top of one area of my work and that was mildly satisfying. Mildly because there’s a LOT more work to do, and also because I just do not care that much about my work anymore. It’s a paycheck. The work is meaningful to the world but not to me anymore.
Speaking of the world, I’m not really sure how to continue existing in a world where my hypervigilance is justified. I wanted to take the kids to Sprouts and was figuring out how I’d manage the two of them on my own, intending to leave PiC at home so he could work in peace. Then I had to recalibrate those plans because I needed to be sure that that management included a way to drop everything and physically defend myself and my children in case we are assaulted by a violent racist.
Racism has always been a problem, I’ve always been alert to my surroundings, but now? Now, I can’t let down my guard for a second. I’m doing threat assessment everywhere we go. I’m not looking forward to that list being longer than “the park and the grocery store”.
On the plus side, once we were all home without incident, I was pleased with our uncharacteristically pre-COVID-like finds. We aimed to keep the trip brief so we didn’t get as much produce as usual, and I deeply regret not scouring the honeycrisp section for some acceptable specimens, but we did come home with three lbs of scallops and two lbs of ahi tuna, all on sale. Those will make a nice change of pace from the bulk proteins I’ve been cooking and putting up in the freezer.
Year 2, Day 19: You know when you’ve hit a version of tired that’s SO tired, you’re completely wired and can’t sleep? That was me last night. That would have been fine on a bad night but it was just salt in the wound when Smol sort of kind of slept in a few batches last night. Even so, that wouldn’t have mattered much since stringing together one hour of nap here and one hour of nap there is no way to live.
PiC and I were both wrecked today, the culmination of another week of poor sleep and too much work, and juggling the kids together. We’re trying to figure out some way to reset but that would involve the cooperation of one small infant who shows no signs of cooperating. We’re trying to negotiate with a tiny, inexplicably heavy, non-verbal non-mobile terrorist.
I’ve been thinking about any kind of return to “normal”, and how I both want some choices of having things to do but also I don’t want to find myself overscheduled and overbooked like we almost inevitably will be once activities are possible again. I also really really want lots and lots of quiet time again. I also don’t want my family out there in the world exposed to the multiple plagues of COVID and racism. My internal conflicts continue.
The weird day stretched into a weird night as the only long nap Smol took ran from 5-7 pm. We started dinner prep too late for our usual routine but maybe that’s a good thing for once. JB happily stole their hapless infant sibling for half an hour of enforced play and dance time and Smol wavered between mildly entertained to slightly confused. They were compliant throughout, though, so clearly whatever JB was doing to them was acceptable.
“We’re trying to negotiate with a tiny, inexplicably heavy, non-verbal non-mobile terrorist.”
Oh, friend, I know where you’re coming from there. We’re right behind you: our own bundle of terror and joy is on the way.
I’m so sorry this time is so difficult. It sucks, people all around us are proving to suck, too.
I do believe that this bad time will pass.
I really hope that your mini bundle is a lot more compliant than ours is.
It will pass, I know, it just feels like hell the whole way there XD
My mom’s favorite adaptation of that quote is: “It might pass like a kidney stone – but it WILL pass!”
Bethany: THAT IS AMAZING.
That first year is rough! Ultimately we ended up letting Kiddo #2 sleep in our bed (often, both), despite some uneasiness with the safety of co-sleeping. Any time a grandparent pressured us for #3, we offered that we would try if they agreed to fund a night nurse for a year.
I’m no longer surprised by the racism and other hatefulness seeping around the edges of every news story, but it is exhausting to see the effort expended to make others miserable. And even where it’s not purposely harmful, I still (still!) see insensitive or racist comments on Facebook. Though I try to be gentle when I call these things out, it has never gone well. So sorry for all you’ve had to deal with.
We co-slept with both kids in the first couple months so I know how to do it reasonably safely but doing so also requires me to stay stationary in exactly one place so long as Smol is sleeping. That makes for pretty stiff arms waking up and it totally incapacitates one of us during the day if Smol won’t sleep without being held during the day. Sigh.
Racists really think their right to be racist and harmful outweighs anything else. Ugh. So sick of it.
Hey, can you tell me any more about the 8606 thing? Is this for regular Roth, or backdoor, or both?
I’ve been filing 8606 for backdoor Roth, but my earlier tax returns I do not believe that I did. I do have the 5498…. I don’t see anything obvious in my old returns to tell the IRS about the roth contribution but my record keeping is not really great for old years.
I’ve been filing the 8606 for our traditional IRAs because I made the mistake of mixing pretax and posttax contributions. We don’t contribute to Roth or transfer to Backdoor Roth. I’m not sure whether you need it for your earlier Roth contributions or not. But yeah my recordkeeping for those earlier years aren’t great.
OK, that makes sense. You had me wondering if I want to take part of my Roth contributions (not gains) out early, who is responsible for keeping track of my contribution basis, and what kind of proof do i need? I did some looking and do not see anywhere that I’ve reported some early contributions. I do have all my 5498 forums, so I think I just need to organize them and have that documentation in some semi-organized place….