By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (157)

June 5, 2023

Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 4, Day 66: It’s Memorial Day in the US. Somehow I never realized that we normally share Memorial Day with Canada. I guess the subject has just never come up? Anyway we usually have the same holiday Monday until we didn’t (this year) and Canadian friends wondering what all the moaning about work last Monday was about is how I learned we normally share it.

Usually holiday Mondays feel like punishment because the work that piles up by Tuesday hits like a hurricane but this week I’m appreciating it because the entire week’s schedule is terrible. I’ve got to take the kids to appointments both Tuesday and Wednesday mornings, have a midday Tuesday meeting, and have to take JB to activities once or twice a day every day this week. I spent some time Sunday and today doing as much work as I could squeeze into half hour blocks of time between child minding and my current pain flare which feels roughly like having an acid bath inside one’s skin. Nothing but the best fun for me! And, naturally, since my car has recovered from its fits last week, PiC’s car died this afternoon. Sigh.

Year 3, Day 67: It’s only the first day of four and already I’m ready to quit. 😅 We survived the stress of getting to our appt this morning, dashed back home to squish in some work, then had my midday call. By the time I had lunch with JB (catered by chef JB), I had an hour left to work before we had to get back out the door. Sigh. I did NOT want to go. I’m not even sure JB wanted to go. But they had a proper lazy half morning and half afternoon playing math and typing games on the computer and were ready to move around.

On the plus side, our postage has shipped and is due to arrive on Thursday. Next time we get a big enough order or three, I’ll be able to test the pricing against Pirateship to see if it’s cheaper there (thanks, Rae!). I hope it is, I really like the sound of scheduling pickup! For the small orders, the first class pricing is pretty reasonable.

Year 3, Day 68: My Tuesday ended with working until 11 pm, and today started with Smol Acrobat waking up at 4 am and again at 5 with a diaper leak. Absolutely no one was in the mood for life. But we had to haul everyone’s butts out the door because Smol had their second dentist appt and we had to get there in plenty of time to deal with any balking or bawling. JB had wanted to come along so we scheduled it for a day they could come, and they were helpful keeping Smol corralled and on track thankfully. Some days are good, some days are full of regret. Poor kiddo was so tired from the early wake up, they kept telling us they were tired. They didn’t want to go to daycare. Unfortunately for them, they had to. We warned the teachers and they caught a hefty nap in midday. Whew.

Meanwhile JB and I had to run back home for a couple hours for me to work and then run back out to their half day camp. I stayed, working, for the full 4.5 hours to mind how it was run and generally get a feel for the place. That hard folding chair was not comfortable at all and it was a huge relief to retreat to the car after a few hours.

I felt like maybe I was being a helicopter parent. They were trepidatious about being left in a strange place alone for the first time, nothing like their intro to daycare where they could not care less if we were still there. I wondered if I was negatively affecting their resilience by agreeing to stay there. But we’d never been there before and I needed to know how things ran for my peace of mind. After a half day, they were absolutely comfortable and didn’t care if I stayed or not. Thankfully! I could not camp there another solid 4.5 hours or 9 hours later this week.

Year 3, Day 69: A morning half camp for JB today meant I caught a few hours of quiet work at home before having to go pick them up, drop off PiC’s lunch, and run by two elementary schools on our way home to drop off the student prizes and my paperwork. This week has been a poorly plotted marathon of appointments and errands and I will be so glad to be done with the last one tomorrow. I wished I had rescheduled some things but the two biggies could not have been rescheduled.

We still made it to their two self defense classes and I still got my work done so we’re going to call this an Exhausted Win.

Year 3, Day 70: We made it to the finish line! Not unscathed.

JB lost their damn mind at the end of the day and interrupted me to mouth off about setting the table for dinner. Smol Acrobat went ballistic when dinner was over and it was time to brush teeth.

PHEW.

~~~~~

Going through all our home insurance and other important paperwork, I noticed that our dwelling coverage has almost doubled since 2017. It’s increased incrementally each year, and so have the premiums, but never noticed this creep. This is a bit of a surprise. I wonder if this is all automatic adjusting for inflation. Must be, we haven’t done anything.

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