Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (43)
March 29, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 8: My sleep debt is starting to resemble our mortgage. It feels impossible to overstate how tired I am and have been. I’ve been exhausted and undersleeping for a year now between the pregnancy and whatever the heck is waking Smol up 2-3 times at night.
That, plus the Monday meetings and weekend work pile ups, equals a despair the likes of which I clearly remember at this exact stage of JB’s life. Why didn’t I learn my lesson then??
We dragged ourselves across the finish line of dinner, bath, and bed, though PiC had to stay up late to work while I had to try and sleep a little before Smol woke me three or four times overnight. Our lives. So glamorous.
Year 2, Day 9: I hit the wall today. I kept feeling this buzz of “shutdown imminent” in my muscles so every no-baby moment I had to rest. I’d gotten to the point of being so overtired I couldn’t sleep given the opportunity. Oh. Babies can’t either. We are not in a good boat here!
PiC gently but adamantly steered me to take some long rest periods. I wanted to fight it but with absolutely nothing left in the tank, couldn’t even put up a token resistance. Thankfully I was able to clear a good swath of work on autopilot and then fall over in bed.
Year 2, Day 10: The too-tired buzz is still rumbling in my muscles and somehow I get to noon without having gotten anything done because I caught a short nap between 7-9 to “make up” for a terrible night of sleep, then Smol spent the next 2.5 hours refusing to sleep.
We both struggled with work today, our brains were mush. It would have helped if Smol would take a real nap but their three naps in the daytime were never more than 30 minutes. They were clearly still tired so I don’t know why they couldn’t get past that 30 minute waking point. I finally gave up and settled in for a good long play session punctuated with bits of work.
We played the screeching game, we played the eat mom’s hands game, we did attack the burp cloth practice, we sang songs and wiggled tiny toes and waggled tiny feet. We counted to three in different languages. They drooled a lot. I wiped up a lot of drool.
I’m noticing a pattern, for myself, too. Midweek, I get this urge to “do something fun! Or different!” Then it dies a fiery death for one reason or another. All for the best, I think.
Year 2, Day 11: PiC wanted to try a new nighttime routine wherein he takes the first night baby call. I agreed to see if it’d help, though I was mildly skeptical. It wasn’t smooth and he’s terribly tired today but it did net me an hour more rest and that made a real different.
I was surprised to be wilting by 1 pm though. I keep forgetting that a couple hours of sleep here and there do not refresh a body sufficiently.
Is it Friday yet? Every day this week has felt like the end of a very long week.
Year 2, Day 12: IT’S FRIDAY. I AM A WRECK.
I plowed through a couple hours of work at warp speed, almost certainly making a few mistakes I’ll be annoyed by later, but the important thing was to get it out for now so I could move on to the rest portion of my day. I’ve been up since 4 am and I’m so tired that I can’t fall asleep even when I make time for a nap. Trying to nap is just laying down with a thousand yard stare. You’re killing me, Smols.
The need to feed everyone dinner again is deeply irritating. Where’s the magic wand of food creation? We need one of those. We’re going to need to lean more heavily on easy food fixes as work gets more and more demanding. I’m making it work with the lack of sleep, the parenting of two humans, and somehow still being in a pandemic but it’s a heck of a slog to make it from day to day. I had to get back to the desk after a long rest period that was not at all refreshing but did let me stay somewhat functional until 7 pm.
We had a big to-do with JB at 930 pm when they misplaced a gift from their friend. It was exhausting. Parenting is exhausting.
The exhaustion is palpable here <3 Hang in there, it will get batter! We had a 30 minute napper, and it was the worst. More time spent putting her to bed than she spent sleeping.
I’m basically the living embodiment of the concept of tired right now. But we will keep putting one foot in front of the other!