Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (158)
June 12, 2023
Year 4 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 4, Day 73: You know it was a rough weekend when you’re looking forward to Monday because you can work without parenting for several whole hours.
Both kids are making me banana pants in their own special ways and to add insult to injury, it’s been ten days of this sleep regression. Smol’s waking 2x a night and refusing to go back to their crib on the second one (usually from 2-4 am). I am noticeably frayed around the edges.
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Sometimes, I feel dislocated in time. When I was 17, I felt ancient compared to my peers. Now I’m 40 and hear that my friend is sanding her deck and think: that’s what adults do. How does one both feel agéd and too young at the same time? It’s weird.
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Writing my net worth update for last month made me realize that I still have a lot of financial anxiety only half buried. It usually floats in the background but our extremely expensive summer is (probably) making it come to the surface.
Realistically, 7.5 years to reach our financial goal isn’t terrible. There are so many other factors that we’ll have to deal with in the meantime – getting small kids through daycare and primary school, prepping them for college, aging elders in our lives to care for, figuring out how to climate-change proof our lives (as much as is actually possible), activism against fascism, etc.
Five dollar bet that zeroing in on this financial goal situation is my subconscious’s attempt to hold onto some kind of semblance of (false) control. It’s following up with a tantrum because I consciously know I can’t control anything. You’d think saying that out loud would help, but it doesn’t yet. It will, I think, just not right away.
Year 3, Day 74: Between the sleep regressions and being the biggest pill in the world at every single dinner, Smol is really showing JB up in the Difficult Toddler Department. Their arms mysteriously lose the ability to convey food to their mouth but if you take them from the table, they scream EAT EAT EAT!! When you return them to the table, they sit and crumple a napkin or turn sideways to contemplate the cosmos or pick at the coasters. But those arms still can’t convey food to the mouth. 🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️🤦🏻♀️
My rule of thumb is that they’ll eat if they’re hungry and don’t worry about it during the day, but the last meal of the day is the last meal. If they go to bed after 1 broccoli floret and 6 goldfish crackers from an earlier snack, I’ll be hearing “mama milk mama eat” at 430 am and then I just might transform into a banshee and scream. So I suffer through all kinds of contortions trying to get them to cooperate and consume the minimum number of calories into their system to hopefully get us closer to “through the night”. But my GAHHH is it frustrating to spend every single dinner trying to finagle food into the toddler whose disinterest in feeding themselves closely resembles a cat presented with an inferior meal. And it’s truly disinterest. They don’t have any issues with the food taste or texture. They’ll go from “food what food” to willingly eating anything if a sufficiently motivating greater prize has been offered. A kid that’s got texture or taste issues wouldn’t flip the switch like that.
Year 3, Day 75: PiC and JB are attempting to commute to summer camp by bike. I was quietly horrified by the idea as a very weak bicyclist but I knew they were in good hands with PiC who has years of bike commute experience. This second ride was a fun adventure for JB but it’s too stressful for PiC. JB can’t listen or hear well when they’re on the road. While the cars have been unusually careful around them this week, he was sweating bullets because JB’s ability to hear instructions on the bike on the streets is terrible. This experiment may end this week.
I had to run some paperwork to the elementary school and on my way out, remembered to ask the secretary if she knew when the lost and found giveaway was going to be. It turns out I’d gotten that wrong! Last year, it wasn’t an intentional giveaway, it was an old book giveaway and so they decided to put the lost and found items out too. She offered to let me pick through to find JB’s stuff so I explained that my interest was actually on behalf of the Lakota reservation. I’d planned to pack as many as I could carry back home for them (fingers crossed). She said, oh! No one’s come to claim anything so it’s all getting donated. May I have them, then? I asked, sight unseen.
They were happy to let me have it all! We packed up a huge box and 6 large garbage bags of jackets, sweaters, and vests. About half were already washed, I’ll have to wash the other half. Sera was quite surprised when I came home after my “quick errand” with many many sacks, like a rescue Santa. My local friend can provide 3-4 large boxes for me to pack these, so for the cost of shipping, we’ll be able to send at least a hundred, probably more, pieces of outerwear.
If anyone wants to pitch in for shipping costs (or the next family), now’s a great time!
Year 3, Day 76: JB was the first up this morning. Smol had two wake ups in the middle of the night, PiC tended to both, so the two of them were out cold in the guest bed. I was aching and tired from yesterday’s haul, so I wasn’t up for another half hour.
They got up, got dressed, made breakfast, packed lunch for PiC, packed their own bags, and were ready to go without a single word from me or their dad. Amazing!
Now that I reflect on the day, I’m suspicious that we got a replacement JB. There was the whole morning thing. When I picked them up early from camp, they ran out quickly, no prompting needed, dressed for class, didn’t whine or complain when I gave them only 5 minutes to play after, didn’t dawdle when time was up, helped me at the grocery store, put on a pot of rice while I made the rest of dinner. They even bathed Smol after. I had quite the Supermom day myself, but that was very much enabled by JB being their (or someone else’s, where has THIS kid been?) best self today, unprompted. My guess is they were in an excellent mood because they had a field trip to look forward to and no school bully to deal with. They’ll be back to normal tomorrow. But I appreciated it!
Year 3, Day 77: Every day this week has felt like a highly compressed hour and also a week, rolled into one.
This was my first day all week without calls, meetings, or other out of office errands. I needed that solid block of focused work time to clear my desk before the weekend and finished just in the nick of time. Is it just me who feels this imperative to meet a totally arbitrary cutoff we set because that feels good? Because it’s very much my own deadline that I set. But it’s so nice to start the week with very long timelines on work rather than feeling crunched right from the get go because I didn’t clear enough work on Friday.
We had some commute logistics to straighten out. PiC had left the bike in longer term parking at work and JB’s bike was brought home, so he had to get that bike back before we could pick up the kids in the car. I don’t know if they’ll be doing the bike commute together again, it sounds like it was stressful.
Cars are 100% why my own fantasies of cycling to school are fantasies and not realities. We have a busy 45 mph street with highway off/onramps between our house and my kid’s school. Plus a mall and a large shipping facility. The school is close enough that it’s a not a bad ride distance. But even if we rode on the sidewalks, the drivers on the road have me worried.
It’s frustrating. I’m unhappy about the environmental impact of the driving I do, and cycling would be a great way to cut it back. I’m also pleased by thinking about woo, cardiovascular fitness, healthy thing. And it would be lovely to cut the gas/car maintenance expenses. But my husband has been hit by a car while cycling in our area. The risks are hard to ignore.
It would be a wonderful way to address so many issues, if only drivers were not a problem! PiC calls out cyclists for poor road manners as well, but I worry much more about reckless drivers racing up and down the road like they’re in the Indy 500.
I wish we had a much better cycling set up for everyone. I wouldn’t dare ever do it myself, again very weak bicyclist, but if it weren’t so dangerous, I’d be more willing to try.
So awful that your husband was hit by a car, I hope he was ok after that accident.
My husband wasn’t as badly hurt as he could have been, thank goodness. He was banged up and the recovery put a stop to his riding and other physical things that summer. His bike was totaled, though, and he was really mad at the driver. She was aghast at the scene, but chose to fight the consequences in court.
I got a bike and started riding in the rural part of our neighborhood about 2 months ago, and I don’t feel fully comfortable with it. I don’t mind the actual riding, but the cars and trucks are unnerving. Most of the drivers will move fully into the empty oncoming lane when coming up behind cyclists, but there are some that stay closer. Plus I don’t trust myself when I need to make a left turn. I worry that I’m going to miss seeing something or misjudge the speed of a car that’s coming up behind me.
Thank goodness he was ok in the end but the very nerve of her!
I hear you. Cars and trucks make me VERY concerned for all cyclists. I try to change lanes away from cyclists if at all possible whenever we see them on the road to give them breathing space.
I’m like JB, I can’t hear a blessed thing when I’m biking unless I’m riding side by side which isn’t safe. Sorry it’s so stressful! I wonder if they can practice riding on quieter roads to build JB’s commute skills.
They have been practicing a little bit this summer, when they were able to squeeze it in, which is the only reason I didn’t veto the idea entirely (for the sake of my nerve more than anything). They’re comfortable with the idea mostly but they’re still a smaller sized kid which means the ride also takes longer. They make more stops and take a longer route that’s quieter. Unfortunately there’s no way to avoid all the cars.
Yep, with you on the dinner thing! It is totally a pickiness/choosiness thing. The snack stomach vs the meal stomach. Sigh.
Also fun – the last two mornings have begun with opening the pantry to get cereal, seeing something else (biscuit packet, fruit packaged snack thing), asking for that, then a meltdown when I say no.
MUCH sigh.
Oh man, we experience that five times a day! Sometimes in the same meal. The second they see someone else eating something new, they want THAT.