By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (55)

June 21, 2021

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 92: Some mornings, you have your shit together. Some mornings, you don’t even notice that you and the kids are still in your pajamas when lessons start. Guesses which today was? I can’t even entirely blame the pandemic or the kids. Pre-kids, PiC DEFINITELY had to yell “PANTS!” at me more than once when I started to wander out of the house without actual pants on.

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People are traveling again for the summer, including my teams, which means that I’ve got a massive workload with very little time to manage it. It’s got me wistfully wishing for retirement money now because I really don’t want to go to work today, tomorrow, or the next day. Maybe this is burnout talking. Maybe I just need to schedule some of my own time off even though we aren’t traveling. I don’t yet because I’m worried that it’ll make it even harder to go back.

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Mondays stink in the normal course of things but they are worse now that PiC’s Mondays and Tuesdays are so jam-packed. I’ve started taking over the bulk of childcare on Mondays so he can deal with his particularly difficult Tuesdays. Making that an expected part of my Mondays actually eases my stress factor a bit but boy it sure it still tiring.

Of course it being a terrible nap day made things extra hard on all of us.

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We spent $80 at Sprouts on the weekend to get a lot of produce and fish. I got way too much sockeye salmon (almost 2 lbs) and that’ll probably make three dinners for us.

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I had such brain fog today that I had to choose to run an errand mid-afternoon to try and clear it. It did work, thankfully. It’s such a hard thing when every single decision is so zero-sum. 20 or 30 minutes to clear my head has such a tangible impact on what I can get done, but at the same time, the less obvious impact where I can regain some breathing space and my patience also has an impact on my workday and my day.

Year 2, Day 93: Oh my aching knees. I’ve been playing and sitting on the ground with Smol too much. My knees are both swollen and hyperextending today. What a combination. I was on the overnight last night. They were squirming around 130 am but settled back on their own, and howling at 330 am and needed a feed. We’re working on weaning off night feeds to try and get uninterrupted sleep overnight and are down from 4 ounces to 2 ounces per night waking. It’s not that they’re always up for prolonged painful periods, it’s that the wake ups are always disruptive and we aren’t getting enough consecutive hours strung together. My fingers are crossed that we can get to 10-12 consecutive hours overnight without needing parental intervention.

My circles are starting to dip their toes back into circulating more. We had a masked playdate with friends we haven’t seen in person for more than a year. One friend got a haircut. Another one will schedule one soon. Yet others traveled for vacation recently.

I wonder when we’ll be out of pandemic times here. I’ve gotten in the habit of these weekly logs, I wonder when I’ll close these out.

I see there’s cause for concern about the Delta variants and I wonder how that’ll affect us here with family who are vaccine hesitant. It doesn’t feel like this is over yet but it also feels like many are putting a cap on it like it is. Our kids are still unprotected so we remain in a strange limbo.

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Going back to work with an infant felt like the worst thing. But since I couldn’t make the numbers work financially if I didn’t go back, there was really no point in debating whether I would return. (This is the one good thing about the pandemic for us, we are getting this time together, like it or not. We aren’t missing a single moment ☠️😅)

Months after my return I’m still grumbling because frankly I have more than enough to do without trying to squeeze work into the equation short term, but I have no idea whether there would be a job for me if I were to take a long sabbatical from work. I’m so much pickier now about what I’ll do and who I’ll work with, I can’t imagine having the same clout years down the road to dictate my terms. But I’ve never been open to taking risks either, maybe someone who wasn’t so risk averse would think it’d be a no brainer and I’d be recruited back no problem later on.

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Smol took a three hour nap today and that was glorious. I managed to get enough work done that once they were up, I was able to keep my promise to JB that we’d grab a snack and get outside. We went for a half hour walk together, while PiC was passed out on the sofa, and called in an order for takeout for dinner. Once we got back, PiC was up so he went to grab dinner while I got a bit of logistical crap squared away, and we got to have dinner at a reasonable hour even though we did Smol’s dinner, bath and bed routine before we sat down. It was an unrelentingly tiring day but smooth enough that I felt good about it.

As I washed breast pump stuff for the millionth time, I started thinking about when I should stop. My milk supply is way down right now, I’m not getting more than 6 ounces a day when I used to get 6-8 ounces per session. We use breastmilk for the pre-sleep feeds when Smol’s intake is variable, I hate overestimating what they will drink and then having to throw out formula. But when I’m only getting this little per day, it feels like I’m putting in way more effort than it’s worth. Maybe it’s time to consider pulling the plug on pumping soon.

Year 2, Day 94: Telling JB that we’ve lost a loved one never gets easier. The emotions hit hard and fast with this one and we sat together for a while, crying and remembering and grieving.

Once Smol was up from their nap, I took the kids out for a long wander around the neighborhood. We all needed the fresh air and exercise after the sad morning. The region is experiencing a heat wave but of course our pocket neighborhood only warmed up ten degrees.

I placed another order for paper craft supplies since JB won’t be having lessons this week and they’re had a heck of a lot of fun with the one packet of cards I gave them earlier. I put in a big order for stamps, too, they’ve nearly used up my stash.

Though JB had a very lightly scheduled day today, I managed to make serious inroads into my workload which is good because PiC has to go in tomorrow for jury duty. With both kids and no backup potentially all day, I’m anticipating getting even less work done. I have got to plan to take it easy tomorrow and just get through.

I fell down an Ask A Manager rabbithole and this post very succinctly summarizes my approach to management. I know I’m a flawed manager, but I try to set the bar high so that even if I don’t meet it, at least I tried very hard to treat people well:

In fact, I’d argue that in order to be a good, supportive manager to someone (with or without mental health struggles), you have to give honest and direct feedback. Otherwise, you’re setting them up to struggle in their role and to not know why they’re not getting the assignments, raises, or recognition they might want. You’re also setting them up to potentially lose their job at some point if the problems become serious enough, without having had the opportunity to fix the problems (ideally) or, failing that, having had clear warning that things aren’t working out so they’re not blindsided when it happens.

You should be kind when you do that, of course! You should have compassion and empathy, and you should speak to people with respect even when the message you’re delivering is a hard one. And you should care about your employees as people, and support them in all the things we need as humans — whether it’s time off or some grace when we mess up.

Year 2, Day 95: I’m on my own with the three kids for some part of today. PiC already used his one deferral when they scheduled him in for jury duty a month after Smol was born. PiC and I were up early, he earlier than I because he took Smol watch. We breakfasted and got Smol down for a nap, and while JB slept in, PiC jetted off to jury duty.

JB woke up really late. I warned them that it was just us and Sera with Smol today so we had to plan our day around that. Not only is PiC gone today, it’s been a WEEK here in so many ways and we ended up with nothing on the schedule for the day. No playdates, no lessons, nothing. Thankfully, I had planned ahead enough to have some surprise papercrafts on hand for them. Once they breakfasted and did their chores, they could tear into some surprises. Surprises are such excellent bribes for good behavior, they penguin-waddled into my office wearing a milk moustache, offering me toast. Then came back with prosciutto. So I had second breakfast.

I caught myself thinking about Comic Con logistics in the back of my mind this morning. I wonder – is this a stress response or is this hope that we’ll get back something that’s really important to us? Or both?

It’s a rare warm day here. Everyone else is in a massive heat wave so naturally we just get to maybe the mid-70s? It’s odd, our little pocket.

Year 2, Day 96: I woke up with sciatic nerve pain this morning. From sleeping. Yeeeee-up.

I gifted PiC a fancy compost bin for Father’s Day. It’s very fancy. Father’s Day was just an excuse. He’s been wanting this one for a long time, and we don’t usually give gifts to each other anymore.

My “gift” this week was organizing the sale of some employee options and depositing the proceeds into our account for investing. Whoo! Except I have serious reservations about how high the market is right now. It seems way too high.

It offsets some of the emotional pain of the wallop that’s coming our way from the discounted Target gift cards bought today, plus the two bouquets of sympathy flowers, plus the hundred forever stamps, plus the craft supplies for JB earlier this week… I think I’m forgetting something. The point is, there has been a lot more shopping than usual.

Smol had a breakthrough this week and figured out how to sit up. And had one successful crawling incident. The latter was charming in how excited the kids were, and completely alarming for us adults. This makes WFH with two kids exponentially harder. But they haven’t managed to replicate the experience. Thank. Goodness. Unfortunately it seems that all the great naps up to now were in aid of that breakthrough and now they’re having trouble going to sleep for naps. The ability to sit up and chew on the crib is too strong a draw! Phases phases phases!

We indulged my hankering for Burmese cuisine today and had a rare episode of JB dragging their heels over dinner because they didn’t like it. I reminded myself this happens less than once a year. Friends struggle with their kids dragging mealtimes out for ages at every single meal. We have it pretty damn good with a kid who will eventually eat everything they’re given even when they’re “not a fan”, as they say.

A couple years ago, I switched from shaving to using Nair for hair removal because my skin reacted badly to shaving. Unfortunately it seems like Nair only works to a degree and at a certain point, the hair refuses to budge. Frustrating! I need to find a more effective hair removal option that’s not annoying or time consuming. I’m this close to going nuclear and doing laser removal. (Ok, not that close but I am that annoyed.)

:: How was your week?

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