By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (50)

May 17, 2021

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

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.

*****

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.

*****

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.”

*****

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.

Year 2, Day 58: It was my turn to sleep last night, PiC was on duty, and though the crying woke me a few times in the night, getting any sleep was GLORIOUS.

*****

I’ve splurged on a mini charcuterie plate for myself. For $6, I get a little assortment of salami, capacolla, and prosciutto and I enjoy a little slice each day.

*****

ARGH! I just remembered that we needed to return some alternate bottle brushes to Target and it’s been over 90 days. Crossing my fingers that they will still take the return since we have the receipt.

*****

I had a theory that I’d enjoy my children much more if I didn’t have to tend to them every waking moment and it turns out I was right! We had an unexpected day of good naps from Smol. Five hours of nap! In two really good solid chunks so we both got work done and we weren’t up and down and up and down like we normally would be when their sleep is broken up into a scattering of 30 minute micro naps. Whatever happened here, I want more more more please.

Year 2, Day 59: Here’s a question I keep asking myself. How many expensive adorable greeting cards can I justify buying? I love sending cards in the mail and have gone through quite a stash. Normally, because I send so many, I have a budget of $0.50 a card, usually in a box set. Sometimes I find cards that I absolutely adore because they’re so cute or cool. I’ve recently paid as much as $3 for a card and that was a splurge. But I’ve been ogling this artist’s dragon drink cards for weeks. They’re $6 a pop. If I join their Patreon, I can get 20% off the cards. That adds up to a lot. I tried putting together a cart of what I wanted and it was about $144. Before tax and shipping. That puts this in the realm of a rich person level purchase! (Whenever I price out stuff, there’s what I’d pay if I were broke, what I would be willing to pay now, and what I’d be willing to pay if I was rich and had ten times more money than now.) I don’t even want these to keep for myself. I just want to send Really Cute Cards to people and brighten their day with fun snail mail.

*****

According to the Mercury News: “The county tier system as a whole is set to be retired on June 15, when Gov. Gavin Newsom has said California will lift most of its pandemic-related business restrictions.”

I have so many mixed feelings about the shift towards more opening. (This has nothing to do with the science or the numbers, they’re purely emotions. I’m allowed!) After a long year+ operating in a pandemic-cautious-anxiety mindset, just the idea of shifting back out of an isolation shutdown mode mentally is going to take me some time to absorb. It’s very much my MO that I slam the doors or throw up defenses and go into crisis mode very easily, but I take a long time to come back out. When PiC had a potentially life threatening accident last year, and by sheer luck was ok, my entire body went into fight+crisis management even though by the time I heard about it, he was nearly safe and just needed a pickup. It took me a week to feel emotionally thawed out. I semi-joked to him that once I could feel again, all that fear and worry was going to flood in and I’d probably yell at him reactively. (I didn’t.)

This is that on a grander scale. I’ve tried to be open and honest about my feelings throughout but I wonder if I still have a lot of fear frozen in my system.

And it doesn’t help that globally this still isn’t over. The contrast between the exuberance as people get vaccinated here versus the absolute chaos in India is chilling. Our friends with family there said that where once you only knew people two or more degrees removed who were affected, now it’s the parents of personal friends who are getting sick and dying and medical care is nearly impossible to get. Oxygen is nearly impossible to get. It makes my stomach hurt.

NYTimes: “But while the virus recedes in wealthy nations with robust vaccination campaigns, it is pummeling India and threatening to swamp Southeast Asian countries that until now had largely kept the virus at bay.

Taken together, the opposing regional trends add up to a leveling of global daily new cases at “an unacceptably high plateau” that leaves the world in continuing danger, the director general of the World Health Organization, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said on Monday.

….

Scientists warn that if the virus is allowed to spread unchecked in parts of the world with lower vaccine coverage, dangerous variants will continue to evolve, threatening all countries.

“Globally, we are still in a perilous situation,” Dr. Tedros said. About 772,000 new cases are reported on average each day globally, nearly half in India, where a virus variant, B.1.617, has been spreading.”

Year 2, Day 60: Our first chat with the sleep consultant went well enough. She thought that we didn’t need a full support package, that we have a good enough idea of what to do and how to implement it that we should give it a try and then set up a check in call after we’ve given it some time to settle in. That’s mildly reassuring. Now to actually make stuff happen.

*****

So much of this is so hard, but I do deeply appreciate the fact that being stuck at home with PiC and the infant means that he shares in all the trials and the fun of having a baby at home. We trade nights now, and we do our best to swap blocks of parenting-on and parenting-off times so the other person can work. With JB, he had to work on site and this part of the childcare was all on me until we matched to an opening at the daycare. It worked out with a graveyard shift for me with work, but this time around he’s taking the bulk of the daytime care and working at night. I am grateful once again to have a full partner in this. So many people out there seem to have pretty useless spouses who expect them to do all the logistics and all the care and all the educating and basically run the household while the spouse just does their one job. It takes two of us fully committed to make this work, each day. I don’t even want to imagine how I’d feel if he were one of those dudes who expect to get by on a bare minimum and leave me to pick up the slack. (I think we both know I’d leave his sorry butt if that was the case. I did the heavy lifting in one relationship and that was enough for me.)

Year 2, Day 61: Big week for us. PiC got his second shot and no side effects except maybe some fatigue. I got my first shot and had fatigue and brain fog but odds are good that I would have had that anyway. JB’s classes were cancelled this week and so they basked in the glory of having ridiculously long playdates with their auntie instead. Never let it be said that an auntie’s period of being between jobs was not well spent. Smol had at least one good nap a day and logged three solid blocks of sleep on three separate nights. Sleep training on the first four days was ROUGH but we waited long enough that my heart was stone.

Mostly.

Ok, I felt a little bad about all the crying. But we all needed this and Smol’s transition to the crib served as the perfect transition into sleep training. And we saw some real results within days, at nights, with Smol almost immediately stretching out the previously irritating 2-3 hour first sleeps at night into 4, 6 and even 8 hours once. Naps were still iffy as we tried to figure out the timing but they will, I assume, come along. We aren’t fully trained yet. We’re still trying to find that elusive full night of sleep for the adults since Smol’s still waking up to cry a fair bit and needs one feed at least, then sings the songs of their people for an awful hour or two.

For now, I’m going to be happy about the vaccines for the adults and the fun and sleep for the kids.

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