Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (88)
February 7, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 319: Welcome to another week of “What childcare?” with the added twist of a random no school day in the middle of the week. It started at 430 with Smol babbling at us, WIDE AWAKE.
JB is highly offended by this day off, it’s on their library visit day and they had plans for the book they were going to borrow next. I see their pain. Though PiC did just take them to the public library on the weekend, and they did come back with about 20 books, they still want one more.
For my part, I am obsessively watching the mail for our tax forms. It doesn’t make them come any faster but I can’t quite stop stalking the mail anyway.
Smol finally had a good first nap today, and woke up in time for lunch. They were hanging out with PiC while I wrapped up some work, and had started complaining about wanting to eat. As usual, I was talking to them like they can understand me, “let’s get some food into you” and went over to set up their seat and tray. They walked right over to me as if making a conscious decision to come to me and get ready to eat! Like they know things! It was kind of amazing.
Year 2, Day 320: Some of PiC’s work frustration is encapsulated perfectly in Debbie’s comment over at Nicole and Maggie. He has to keep asking his collaborators / vendors to do their d*mn jobs and they won’t unless he CCs their supervisor. Then he found out that this incompetent lout was promoted! Unbelievable.
Parts of my work frustration is the same: sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to get people to reply to simple emails and yes we’re all still in a pandemic but when this is ultimately work that they want done and won’t do their part and will then whine at me later about why it took so long… I wish to bite them.
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JB doesn’t have school today, so I scheduled a couple of Outschool lessons for them to try out: some art and some language. In the hour before their first much-anticipated lesson, they were told that I was working and PiC was in a meeting so only come ask me if they needed something. They were left to their own devices after that. I snuck out to check on them about 20 minutes before their lesson and they were laying on the ground reading. It’s really nice to see that they make reasonably decent choices when not under direct observation because I can’t say much for their judgement when they ARE being observed!
Unfortunately the teacher never showed up for the second class which was a massive waste of my time. We got a refund but it was 25 minutes I couldn’t get back.
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JB shared lunch with Smol, until it was time for Cheetos which are not a Smol friendly treat, and that was a big help. It was a novelty so Smol was dialed into the feeding most of the time and a little less fractious.
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It’s Lunar New Year today and I’m having some feelings. I think / assume it’s about the holiday. I’m unsettled and want to ditch work. I want all my tax forms now now now. Ok that part has been the case for the entire month of January. Still, it’s a feeling and it’s here.
I recognized the physical manifestations (painful twinges in the heart region) before I recognized the emotions. Typical. But this time, rather than worrying I have a heart problem, I tried identifying the likelihood this is some sort of fear or anxiety that I’ve not realized I’m feeling and that actually did help the heart pains ebbs. There’s no shortage of reasons to have fear and anxiety right now.
Digging deeper, I think Lunar New Year brings that up because there are so many superstitions around this day, so many restrictions on what you can and can’t do, and traditions we used to observe. We don’t believe in the superstitions but that doesn’t make me immune to the fearmongering some family engages in.
Not in the way they intend but because it reminds me of my mom at her worst. When she was so deeply sunk in undiagnosed depression and anxiety, which I had no understanding of at the time, and was desperate for a reason that everything was going wrong, she began to grasp at religion and mostly the superstitious aspects to explain the way things were. I associate those superstitions with one of the most painful and stressful times in my life: when I was losing my mom as I knew her. I was utterly helpless to help her through it, I was painfully ignorant of what caused her struggles, and I didn’t know how to get her back or if we could get her back. This repeated later on when she died, with Buddhist family members tell me garbage like “don’t grieve, it’ll hold her spirit back” and “you shouldn’t be sad, she’ll reincarnate as your child someday”. These are all absolutely shitty interpretations of Buddhist tenets from flawed people incapable of accepting grief. I don’t resent the religion itself, I resent the ways in which people twisted and weaponized pieces of it to clear their conscience over being totally dismissive of grief.
I miss my mom and I hate superstition.
Year 2, Day 321: Another 5 am wake up. I’m starting to think that this is Smol’s night sleep – 10 hours max. It doesn’t matter what time we put them down, they’re never making it past 10 hours these days. There is a lot of development happening but sleep is absolutely disturbed every day. Sigh. Still, if we plan on it always being 5 am instead of 6 or 7, we can roll with this pain a little better than being disappointed every morning. A little. I hate early mornings.
It also really messes with the daytime schedule because we have to figure out how to nap them. They’re not good at giving us tired signals, they’ll play until the wheels fall off most times and then they’re overtired which is a nightmare as well. Bah.
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We’ve been working on baby sign with Smol to very limited success. We’ve settled for a sort of clapping to be the equivalent of “more” and today they added grabbing their belly with two hands to be the equivalent of “please”. They’ve been resisting adding “please” to their lexicon for weeks so I’m very amused by the development.
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There’s some irony in my counting up the number of socks that I’ve worn through (5) to figure out how much longer I can hold out before buying new socks, just for sort of budgetary vanity’s sake, on the day that we got hit with a massive medical bill from last year’s exam and tests ($$$$). I suppose you can never get too out of practice being more frugal, there’s always someone ready to take the money for something you hadn’t intended.
I kicked myself for ten minutes reading over the bill. I’d forgotten that my labs would be charged separately from the exam because of our HDHP last year. I should have delayed them a couple months. Hindsight of course knows that the delay wouldn’t have mattered because they didn’t give me any useful information. PiC argues that the peace of mind was worth it but I’m not convinced.
In the end I called them and asked for a bit off the bill, got their standard 5% discount for paying in full, and decided that it was better to pay it off and chalk it up to an expensive lesson learned.
It might have stung a little less if this didn’t just follow the decision to eat a big bill from last month that was supposed to be reimbursed. I had much better uses for both those sums of money but I’m going to work on focusing on the fact that we had the money and move past it. Tanking my mental health over this would be foolish. So I keep telling myself.
Year 2, Day 322: Yesterday’s massive bills gave me extra motivation to upload a host of designs that were helping me blow off steam and maybe might bring in a few dollars here and there. I’ll be mighty tickled if they do.
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I’ve been fighting with my photos backup app to back up my videos. Would you believe that little sucker has been skipping out on backing up my precious videos for the past ten days?? Outrageous. But ultimately I prevailed and got the missing videos into the app. I also backed up all the photos directly off my phone onto my desktop for my second back up. That’s backed up to our server and then p’raps I’ll find time this weekend to get the external hard drive manually backed up too. I just want to make extra sure that all these precious photos aren’t ever lost.
Year 2, Day 323: Smol Acrobat made it allll the way to 6:30 this morning and boy, though my sleep wasn’t wholly undisturbed, it was MUCH appreciated. They even got in a decent morning nap! It’s such a relief whenever they sleep.
PiC and I had a long walk and talk today. The sun and the exercise was good for both of us and we have an interim solution to test out for at least one of our problems. We also identified the fact that when he doesn’t feel good because a need isn’t met, I feel guilty. He doesn’t understand why on earth *I* would feel guilty for his unfulfilled desires, they’re his problem.
Yes it’s not totally logical but that’s how I (still) work. I care about what my people need and if they don’t get it, it makes me feel bad! I’m working on it but I haven’t learned how to be comfortable about my loved ones not getting what they need. I’m going to have a lot of personal growth to do before the kids are teens on that front. Because kids’ wants sure look like needs to them!
After my baffling statement, he pondered a moment and ventured: “Did I ever tell you that one of my unfulfilled desires is to own a- ”
“NOPE.”
We had a good laugh because it turns out I do not care much about material desires so maybe I’m good on that front.
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TGIF!
I did two highly compressed work sessions today and got through enough to feel pretty decent about the weekend and possibly not working over the weekend.
My financial happy was that I figured out the hold up on the HSA transfer and fixed it, I think. 🤞
