April 19, 2021

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (46)

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 29: Is it just me or does every Monday feel like three days crammed into one? I know this isn’t the first time I’ve had this thought. I wonder what we can change to make it less triple threat terrible. I already do some work over the weekend so that my workload is lighter, and I try to cook at least one meal or have something to defrost so we’re just reheating leftovers. PiC’s Mondays tend to be meeting heavy which doesn’t help but it also can’t BE helped. We’ve shifted to needing take out during the week as much as we do on the weekends but we’re trying not to blow the budget out of the water by doing takeout more than twice a week.

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We’re out of Tylenol again. Only I can go through multiple Costco sized bottles of Tylenol in a year.

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My list of health issues are multiplied because of fatigue: neck pain, a severe sore throat, lower back pain. Thankfully, with PiC taking some overnights (which he’s always been willing to do but I needed some specific changes to our routines to feel ok with it), some of those are starting to feel less intensely bad. They all still hurt but not quite as much as last Friday.

Year 2, Day 30: WOW. Smol really worked me over last night. I don’t think they got as much as two hours of sleep strung together and then I wasn’t able to hand them off until 11 am. I needed a solid 2.5 hours of separation before I felt anything like human again, or able to face other humans.

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JB is really looking forward to their upcoming dentist appointment and I am grateful they’re so bribeable with goodies from the dentist.

Year 2, Day 31: It was PiC’s turn with the baby last night and on five or six hours of sleep I feel like 84% a new person. Even if I had to stumble out and pump right away (which I still hate), my severe sore throat is improving and so is my neck pain. Sleep is the magic elixir!

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Pondering on the method of scrambling eggs. I like the creaminess of the eggs scrambled in a pan that’s only warm to start but I hate how much they stick to a non stick pan after and it feels like I lose some egg to the sticking. The eggs scrambled in a hot pan with the heat turned off after I’ve added the eggs leaves a cleaner surface I don’t have to scrub and the final dish is still good. We like our eggs to still be “wet”. Do you have a favorite way to make eggs? Have you see the olive oil fried eggs?

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As I work on getting Smol down for a nap, and see they’ve dropped their pacifier again because they don’t really want it, I remember how JB would crawl around the little infants laying on the playmats in daycare and insert pacifiers into bawling mouths. They never used a pacifier themselves but they knew the wee babies liked them. It was cute.

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JB surprised us with ham and cheese sandwiches for dinner. PiC got turkey and cheese. He quietly commented that since they made it, he couldn’t make any adjustments to the sandwich like he’d do without hesitation if I’d made it. Hah!

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It’s amazing how much my outlook on life shifts when I get a night of sleep and end the day only really tired and in minor pain, as opposed to rock bottom fatigued and hurting all over. It goes from Monday which feels like a week in a day, to Tuesday which feels like death, to today feeling like just a long and tiring day. I am about to fall over by 730 but that’s still an improvement over the past two days. I need more sleep.

Year 2, Day 32: PiC and I had to navigate almost conflicting meetings while juggling Smol today and that was not fun. Luckily JB was online for school and didn’t need anything from us because as it was, Smol was one variable too many on top of two sets of meetings and no available adult. Add to that my utter inability to get them down for a morning nap and I just wanted to cry.

PiC finally wrangled them into a nap 90 freaking minutes after I tried. This child. So stubborn.

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We’ve been alternating Smol duty two nights at a time since last weekend. I’m thinking as we get better at this, maybe we can start alternating every night so no one of us gets too rundown after two nights in a row. It can be pretty demoralizing (as witness my entries here!) to be that tired if they’re two not good sleep nights in a row. Right now, they’re all bad night sleeps and I need two days to recover from two nights on.

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Coming back to work feels like running ahead of an avalanche. I can hardly keep ahead of a massive amount of work. Things got messy in my absence. I’m working through it but it’s hard to feel like I’ve got anything in hand when I’m struggling so much on every front: home, work, relationships. Still, regular paychecks and not fighting with EDD over payments is a thing I’ve looked forward to. It also makes me yearn for the security of FI. We are simply nowhere near that, particularly with the healthcare question being utterly unpredictable right now.

Year 2, Day 33: I finally set up a data backup task and have been running the initial backing up of our critical files. It’s taking a loooooong time. I have something like 50,000 files and it slows down my computer a great deal while it’s running so I run it when I’m between work time blocks. I hope running it overnight will finish that last half.

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Smol has refused to nap properly all day and that always tanks the day because one of us always has to be on. JB can take a shift now and again, loves to in fact, but we wouldn’t rely on them to actually take care of all of Smol’s needs.

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Would you believe I was working on 2017 tax amendments and utterly forgot to put the CA amended return in the mail by tax day? I’m kicking myself so hard. I hope they’ll still take it even if it’s postmarked a couple days late but I also discovered that my tax person gave me out of date advice on preparing that return amendment. Sigh.

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I still have so much work left undone but I’m going to bed early tonight and getting what rest I can. Last night with Smol was a disaster for me and I need the recovery time.

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I’m starting to think that even the compromise with Home Chef isn’t helping us enough. I need every minute I can get to create some mental buffer for the inevitable rough days. Getting recipes and food shipped to us saves some time in having to come up with new recipes but there’s still mental load in picking the meals every week, and actually preparing the food. We got a rare DoorDash delivery this week because I was scraping the bottom of the barrel in terms of energy and brainpower and I couldn’t believe what a relief it was to click a few buttons and have it show up on our doorstep. Thank goodness for a gift certificate from a friend!

I’m thinking that we need to shift over to delivery a couple times a week while we go through this particularly hard period. It’s going to double our spending on the prepared foods front which I don’t like at all but with so few other viable avenues for relief, I might have to just suck it up and deal. We might try Shef.com too but they’re definitely not a savings either.

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I tried to get PiC a vaccine appointment, expecting to see none available, but we spotted one set of appointments in the wild. We’ll keep checking semi-regularly.

:: Are there any ways you’re creating some breathing space for yourself that you can share? Have you snagged a vaccine appointment?

April 12, 2021

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (45)

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 22: The good thing about today was PiC was free of any meetings and I was able to give him the morning to work kid-free.

The bad thing was it felt like three days had elapsed by the time I collapsed in bed at 9 pm. It can’t be the same day, can it??

JB had three lessons. Smol Acrobat had two disastrously short naps and one almost not terrible nap by 4 pm. I covered the kids until 12:30 pm. Half the time I was entertaining Smol, the other half was overseeing JB who likes really hands on playtime with Smol. Smol Acrobat is highly amused / tolerant of JB manhandling them from one activity to the next and genuinely enjoys being plopped like a sack of potatoes next to their older sibling. This freed my hands so I could pack a box of hand me downs to share with a friend.

Then traded off with PiC so I could buckle down to work furiously for a few hours.

Year 2, Day 23: A thing I’ve been practicing is being ok with good enough. Good enough parenting, partnering, working, etc. It doesn’t come naturally or easily, hence practice. Today was a challenging day in that respect. We got two better than terrible nights of sleep with Smol, and then it went to hell again. So of course my body has no reserves of energy left and of course my mind takes me to task for being not good enough.

I wonder what kind of parent I’ll be on the other side of this pandemic. Will I ever get my patience back? Will I ever find my school age child fun and entertaining again? Will I ever enjoy anything again???

I do everything and anything for them but completely fall short on emotionally connecting. I plan and schedule and pay for all kinds of educational and interesting activities for them. We care for Smol day in and day out. I’m pumping milk twice a day and nursing 3 times a night. Everyone gets fed and clean and has clean clothes. Everyone but me gets some kind of outdoor time most days a week. Sera gets walked or outside time 3-4 times a day. But I can’t, just can’t, muster an iota of enthusiasm for being playful or patience for their foibles. I don’t want to be hugged. I don’t want to be talked at. I just want to be left alone. And lacking that last bit feels like falling down on the job. That’s the part they’ll remember. Not the practical stuff. You don’t notice that you always went to bed on a full stomach, had clean clothes, bathed daily if you’re being well provided for. You notice the lack of it. Like you’d notice how your mom is an angry zombie instead of the smiling hugging person they were before the pandemic. Wouldn’t you?

I hope this is all because it’s all too damn much and when we have some help again, I’ll be more of a human. I miss having the good emotions and not just the gritting my teeth to make it through one more day, one day at a time. (more…)

April 5, 2021

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (44)

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 15: I’m torn. I adore babies in the first year. Also babies in the first year are absolutely hell on the nerves and the sleep. So torn.

Last night was predictably brutal. Capped by a big surprise poosplosion (sorry) before dawn. Thanks, kid. I had to do a load of laundry after handscrubbing the pajamas to make sure the stain didn’t set.

I’m grateful that I planned ahead and did some work on the weekend, today needed up being mostly childcare because it was a meeting heavy day for PiC. In my limited time, I managed to get through 2.25 parts of 3 time sensitive tasks, cared for Smol for 6 hours, moderately assisted JB with their art activity, scheduled some classes for JB, edited a post, and did a bit of banking. I’m BEAT.

PiC emerged from his work den to make dinner while I went into mine to tackle another hour of work during Smol’s late afternoon nap. We’ve really struggled to get even one good nap a day so today qualifies as a good nap day. They slept 1.5 hours in the morning and 2 more hours in the evening. JB did a surprisingly good job of keeping themselves busy while PiC and I were unavailable.

I can’t help but wonder what life would be like in this moment of the pandemic without the added complications of infant life. It seems like we catapulted from having a pretty attention needy four year old to a reasonably self sufficient six year old. Yes, the pandemic hasn’t been THAT long and yet the transformation is unsettling. Would we be feeling a bit smug and capable of doing what needs to be done instead of tired all the time and harried? I don’t regret anything, except my loss of sleep, I just wonder.

This is Day 4 of my neck pain and it seems like it might be getting better? The muscles are still very tight and tense but the pain is lower than it’s been for the past 3 days. Crossing my fingers.

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March 29, 2021

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (43)

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. (more…)

March 22, 2021

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (42)

Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Year 2, Day 1: Hell of a day, I tell ya. A terrible confluence of events meant that PiC had to sleep from 3-8:30 am and then go into meetings most of the day. His meetings overlapped with Smol’s awake times so I ended up covering from 8 pm Sunday through 8 pm Monday, just in time for me to start the next night shift. I got absolutely no work done.

Luckily for him I was able to but this is a once in a long while kind of thing. I can’t sustain that physically or mentally or professionally.

Year 2, Day 2: Smol took a bit of pity on me and managed one 5 hour stretch of sleep which granted me about 3 hours. Blessed three hours. But then they woke up again at 430, hungry and squalling, and so much hungrier than usual that I had to nurse them intermittently for the next two hours. Sigh. By the time we woke up again, PiC was running late for his super early morning meeting and I had to shake him awake. That set a bit of the tone for the day.

I rested during Smol’s nap, which I usually don’t do but it was sorely needed after that 430-630 stretch. Unfortunately JB didn’t have their Zoom Fitness class after kindergarten today but they had a post class craft in mind so I left them to it after I unloaded the dryer. They’re responsible for putting away the laundry later after crafting.

I resigned myself to getting nothing done for the first half of the day because the tardiness spawned another meeting for PiC and I was just too mush-brained to do much during their admittedly decent nap (THANK YOU SNOO). I made lunch for the kids but stopped short of making lunch for adults because Smol Acrobat demanded to be picked up again. They are going through some serious clinginess and doesn’t like to play alone for more than 5 minutes before squawking up a storm. They used to play alone happily for 15-20 minutes, what happened?? Do we have to train them to enjoy solo time now that we finally get a decent nap more than not? I’m not enjoying this, whatever it is. There also seems to be some cluster feeding going on which I also don’t appreciate.

In any case, we survive til mid afternoon when PiC emerges from his den of stress and takes Sera out before taking the kids out. I sit like a lump of dough on the recliner for a while, just resting, while JB does some art. Eventually I finally drag myself up and out to join them for a walk but annoyingly my steps weren’t counted in my MapMyWalk app. That feeds data to the Achievement app.

By the by, if any of you use the Achievement app and haven’t maxed out your referrals, you’re welcome to give me your referral code and I’ll share it on the blog so you can get some referral points. Just email me! (more…)

March 15, 2021

Living in the time of pandemic: COVID-19 (41)

Week 52 of COVID in the Bay Area.

Week 52, Day 359: After a 4.5 hour sleep, Smol is up at midnight, then again at 320 am for changes and feedings. My painsomnia is back full force these past few days so I get mere minutes of sleep between those wakings. They start squeaking a bit at 530 am so I push Snoo’s soothing levels to Level 3 and that bought us another hour. PiC takes them at 630 and I pass out for a bit longer. A little after 8 am, I manage to pry myself out of bed and join the family in the kitchen. PiC is holding Smol while JB has their breakfast, so I leash up Sera and take her out for a quick walk. She’s pulling like a sled dog though, so after she takes care of business, I take her to the backyard and have her run laps until she’s panting heavily, then she enjoys breakfast.

All this only takes us up to 8:30 am. Gotta take the day one hour at a time.

PiC covers baby time until 10, I take over and play with Smol until they’re ready for bed at 11. My next hour is yelling at my old work computer that JB uses for school because things aren’t working. I fix it and grouchily go fix lunch. After that I yell at my new work computer for an hour because THAT isn’t working.

It took me a while to get over my grouchiness but it finally faded after I got some work done and then had a brainstorm for dinner: chicken and veggie soup from scratch.

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I got curious about rents in this area because of our discussion on Twitter of this Atlantic article. Lo and behold, 4 bedroom family homes here are still renting for $4500-6000 a month. Welp.

Our mortgage was hovering near the low end of that scale before tax and insurance and I did a lot of shuffling of money (large payments to principle and recasting multiple times and then refinancing last fall) to halve it.

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