By: Revanche

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (85)

January 17, 2022

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 302: After a too active weekend, I started this day in a bad place. Bad mood, drained of energy, short of breath, mostly zombie.

I think everyone started around the same place because our morning was no good.

The rest of the day boded ill as well with Smol waking up early from their afternoon nap, but it got better once we adults flipped our mental commitments from work to family. Though too early, we stopped trying to squeeze in work and went for a walk in preparation for an earlyish dinner.

That was better. Then having a fun Zoom call with family helped revive my spirits a lot. Some days feel like weeks, this was one of them.

Year 2, Day 303: Have you ever had dreams about your adult teeth falling out? I used to have a recurring dream where I wiggle a tooth so much it falls out and then I realize it was an adult tooth and I needed that!!

Those all came back today when JB asked me to wiggle their loose tooth, and then to pull it out. *Shiver* I’d like to pull it out but it’s not ready yet. UGH.

****

Taking my fun where I can find it: tickling the breath out of Smol when they’re up for it. They also like plonking their face on my head and smushing their face into my face. Then they rub their face onto my face like a cat, and start chuckling. They’ve also discovered bouncing today. Happy bounce, angry bounce, shrieky bounce, giggly bounce. They tuck their legs underneath them and bounce! bounce! bounce!

I also quizzed, wait, no, interrogated PiC on his retirement desires and goals.

****

There was good health news today: when I woke up, I didn’t feel the 200% horrible that I’ve been feeling daily for the past month. I didn’t feel like a hollow chocolate bunny about to go smash: I could breathe almost normally, and I didn’t feel like wheezing and keeling over after taking ten steps. My ears didn’t start ringing after heading out the door to take JB to school.

The sad thing was, I was hesitant to be happy about it because I wasn’t prepared to face the disappointment that would set in when the bad returned. I didn’t want to hear cheerfulness over a good thing that is so very temporary. It stings to hear that when it will go away.

I reminded myself that not embracing the good while it lasts is silly, it’s going to pass whether or not I enjoy it. That’s a hard thing to remember.

The bad did return after our family walk and dinner tonight. I was helping Smol for most of the walk, because I wanted to hold their little hands to shuffle along, and the stooped over walking used up all my resources. By the time dinner was over, I was winded and hollow again. But I had most of a day to feel nearly human. That’s not nothing.

*****

A friend lost their beloved pet today and my heart hurts for them. My heart still hurts for all the losses of last year. I wish turning the page into the new year meant wiping away the hurt but it refuses to work that way.

Year 2, Day 304: I’ve been sitting on this for a couple months now because the anxiety and uncertainty has been eating me up. We were offered a spot at daycare for Smol starting in February. We had to accept and file all the paperwork and put in our first month of tuition by the end of the year. I nearly forgot to get all of that done in time! Freudian slip? Maybe. But we paid our freaking $2000 and if we don’t take this spot at this time, we lose the spot and I don’t know how long it will take until we get another spot offered to us again. Could be 1 month, could be 6.

What I do know is I don’t feel good about this AND it still may not be any better later. We didn’t feel good about it in the Fall because of delta and held off then, hoping that we’d have a vaccine by the time we had another chance. Here we are, still no vaccine. Omicron is rampaging. Still can’t mask a one year old. Honestly, I doubt Smol is going to mask well at 2, either. I remember JB at 2, there was no way.

There are no good options here. By March, we will have been trying to hold it all together full time times two (work and parenting) for two solid years. All of that time minus one month (if we’re lucky) will have been without childcare or help with the kids in any substantive way. We are absolutely starting to lose hope and resilience and patience and the capacity to take another blow of any sort. We need some help. We’re only starting a few days a week, to mitigate the exposure a bit, hoping we’ll be able to cram enough work into three days a week to feel slightly more human the other days.

If we do take the childcare, we run the risk of Smol Acrobat being exposed. If they have a close contact, we have all the stress of worrying if they have it, worrying that they’ll give it to any of us, still having to pay tuition, and having to keep them home for ten days and carrying on the working and parenting grind with extra!bonus! fear and worry.

Our friends JUST had this very scenario happen.

There are no wins. There are no really less painful losses. They all suck. I hate the world for how badly this has been handled and how little the world cares about the little ones who have no protections and the parents who have to try and keep them alive and well somehow.

*****

Sera is confused about the heirarchy and how that affects rules around here. She looks at Smol Acrobat who is still an indifferent two legged walker and you can see the wheels turning: “That one is on my level and is mobile on all fours. I am mobile on all fours. If that one is getting fed scraps when they’re walking/crawling around, then…” She comes over and presents herself for some human food.

Sorry, Sera. It’s no good.

*****

Deepest of breaths. I am observing that this week feels a lot slower than usual.

I wonder if that’s because a few work stressors have been distributed a little differently. I’ve temporarily suspended one massive stressful project to focus on a smaller less stressful one that will pay dividends quite soon. The massive stressful project would too but it’s full of uncertainty along the way with lots of fails. I will eventually have to get back to it but I’m deliberately choosing to take a short breather to recover. We still have a temporary slowdown right now too, so that’s helped me get on top of my workload in a way I haven’t been in almost two years. I’m only one day behind instead of three or four. That’s huge.

We also took some time out to be in the backyard midday with Smol and soak up the rare sun. That physically felt good. It doesn’t solve anything but it’s good to remember that feeling good is worth it for the sake of feeling good.

Year 2, Day 305: In case your emergency food stash needs replenishment, Costco has their Mountain House 15-pouch emergency food pack on sale for $80, shipping included, good until Jan 20th. We did a test run with our emergency food recently and confirmed that one pouch per person is a decent meal size for us.

*****

I’m working up to cancelling my Chase Sapphire Reserve card. If we want it again, I’ll get it in PiC’s name for another bonus. For now, I’ve cashed out a bunch of points for dining charges at 1.5 points per dollar, applied for a new Freedom Unlimited card, transferred the Ultimate Rewards balance to that card, and paid off the last of the charges on this card. Once that last payment posts, it’s time to give them a call to cancel the card. I’m having a weird attachment issue, I can tell.

It’s the card we got when we were preparing for a bunch of international travel. They paid for our Global Entry as part of the card benefits, and we used it to enjoy some time in lounges at a couple international airports. That was supposed to be precursor to a big international trip buuuuut COVID. Ah well.

We had let go of those international travel plans, at least temporarily for another couple years because who the heck knows what’s going to happen with COVID but also because no thank you to flying with two kids, one of whom at Smol’s age. The headache of the car seat and entertaining a small kid for hours and hours and hours … NOPE. We did it with JB but the travel was terrible and we were younger.

Still, in a weird way, this card represented a tangible piece of those plans. So this is weird but probably makes sense. Then again, I was pretty annoyed at having my SPG card turned into a Bonvoy card so sentimentality about credit cards isn’t out of character.

*****

Friends are sharing that the daycare is offering parents the choice to pull their kids at no cost and to me that’s a sign of huge disruption. The last time they offered anything like that was at the start of the shutdowns. This says that omicron is disrupting their operations so much, and upsetting vocal parents so much, that it’s worth it for them to allow parents to proactively pull their kids without payment when those parents are already locked into an agreement that they have to pay whether or not their child attends to keep their spot.

Given Pfizer’s data for the under fives was seriously delayed (for our purposes), we need to ask them to let us move back our start date again. There are usually penalties for this, very high fees, if not just outright losing your spot, but since they’re offering parents at least one or two months of no cost non attendence, I’m hoping that they’ll give us another pass. We had no way of predicting both a lack of vaccine protection and a massive surge at the same time.

Year 2, Day 306: About this time last year, or a little before that, I had developed a slight case of agoraphobia. Though, is it really a phobia if there is an incredibly legitimate reason to not want to leave the house and be among people aka disease vectors (or racists, bigots, sexists, maskholes who all seemed to be out in droves adding to the stressors of the pandemic)? About the only good things in that period were the lack of school shootings and realizing I really like my hobbit hole. A lot. Especially since our backyard is usable now! I dislike our immediate neighbors, but our home itself is comfortable, has enough of what we need to function day to day to day to daaaayyyy, has enough space to move about a reasonable amount. We liked our former home as well but it had half as many rooms and there definitely wasn’t enough room for an active child to roam sufficiently so at a certain point the best thing about it was I could have knocked out that mortgage pretty fast.

While we could certainly enjoy a little more space in all ways, for what we could “afford” at the time, this is good.

That feeling of slight panic, rejecting the thought of being among people at all ever, has faded to a deep discomfort and stress over calculating exposures and risk to Smol Acrobat, so that’s probably a good thing.

Speaking of risk to Smol, we have decided that we can’t send them to daycare yet. No vaccine in sight for at least a few months and no masks for them is just too much risk when they will certainly be in close contact with other infant/toddlers, and there’s absolutely every reason to expect that another variant will be up to bat sooner than we want to think.

Things taking up brain space: When Smol should start daycare. How to manage the next 3-4 months of childminding while working. What we need to put together for Smol to play with day in and day out. What to replace JB’s convertible car seat with, I think they are big enough to be in a booster. How to revive my appetite for cooking. I need to schedule more of JB’s lessons.

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