May 10, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 50: After three extra terrible nights in a row, my anxiety had been steadily ramping up so that I was wound tight anticipating a fourth bad night and bad nights forever. It was a rough lot of months before we found a way to switch off. But! PiC caught a “good” night of sleep with Smol! They slept four hours, woke up for half an hour, and slept another four! Their morning started at 530 but that’s just shy of miraculous for us. I am working on breathing through my expectations and hopes that fuel the anxiety that crops up whenever we’re caught in a series (but not a useful pattern we can address) of bad nights.
We’re also coming to the end of our time with the Snoo so that’s contributing to my anxiety about the tools we have to cope.
Of course the trade off seems to be losing the good blocks of napping we had during the day last week.
I know these are all phases but in the thick of each tough one, it’s hard to push out from reacting and just be. I’m working on it.
Sadly, despite actually getting a few hours of sleep, my pain is much higher today. What’s that about? Does it seem “safe” to have pain when sleep is possible? How is that logical, body? Or maybe this is the anxiety backlash manifesting.
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The afternoon brought something unexpected. A friend sent some Lily’s (sugar replacement) peanut butter cups! I haven’t been able to get to the one store that carries them for a few months so this was a delightful surprise. JB has been trying to convince me to like surprises better than I have for years and this kind of thing does help change my deeply ingrained habit of expecting terrible things when I’m surprised. Long time readers will remember that there was a long period of terrible surprises with my Mom’s poor health. Car accident after car accident after blackout dental emergency after getting lost after blackout after a stroke after …. you get the picture. Surprises, historically, have been BAD.
Year 2, Day 51: Some news out of Pfizer today: if all goes well, the younger set down to age 2 may have a vaccine by the fall. This has set off a whole lot of mixed feelings.
I want to see the people I want to see. I don’t want to be rushed into a whirlwind of make up activities. We’ve already gotten a birthday party invitation for an outdoor meet up and though I love the people inviting us, my first feeling was a sinking feeling.
I want childcare but I don’t want to socialize much more than we do now. One meeting a week plus a couple video calls is enough.
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Urge to scream rising. Is this burnout? Probably. Does it matter? Nope. There’s nothing we can do about the things causing that burnout right now. AUGHHHHH.
I know the usual advice is to take a break but any little break I take makes me extra antsy to just quit entirely.
For now, today, I will remind myself not to seek a dopamine hit by way of JETPENS, and just breathe through the mini pity party I’m hosting for myself. That dopamine hit can be for another time when I can consciously choose a treat and enjoy both the choice and the eventual selections. I love stationery things so much.
It was like pulling teeth but I wrote some Mother’s Day cards and might even be in time to get them in the mail.
*****
Breathing through the discomfort worked. I found a neutral emotional setting. We ordered in falafel and schwarma for dinner so we could just enjoy a food and not fuss about cooking and clean-up. The baby took a decent afternoon nap. I didn’t get all my work done but I caught up a respectable amount so I am not going to think about it again tonight. I needed to reset my equilibrium and not trying to shut out the negative feelings helped them pass through.
Year 2, Day 52: The shopping from a box goodies are still making JB’s day. They’re wearing another new to them item that’s 1.5 sizes too big but that’s fine. They’re having fun with it and, really, their philosophy on wearing the fancy dress stuff on any day because every day is a fancy day has some merit.
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Most of JB’s schedule this week was cleared because all their tutors had personal issues. We only had two out of four Spanish lessons, their superhero fitness class is on hiatus, their tutor and their ballet teacher both have health issues to tend to. It’s left them with more free time than they had during Spring Break! We’ve been managing ok with giving them a mix of totally free time to do as they wish, some outdoor time with one of us walking the dog, some unsupervised backyard time, and some “play with your baby” time. It’s not great but I am, on principle, in favor of them having some unscheduled days like this. Just …maybe not a full week at once next time?
We are super thankful to aunties and uncles who make time to have playdate calls with them, though. Again and again I bless those beloved family who choose not to have kids but still enjoy spending time with mine. They help our world keep turning.
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We’ve been discussing how we’re going to deal with Smol’s continued horror show of sleep. A friend has recommended a sleep consultant that they used, I’ve done some research separately into some sleep consultants. We’re slowly working out a plan for ourselves but we may also need to get some help. We didn’t get any with JB but we also were in far less demanding jobs, with Seamus instead of Sera and didn’t have a 6 year old running around needing parenting in a pandemic. Help is not a bad thing, I tell myself over and over.
Year 2, Day 53: My wrist has been tender and painful for two weeks now. Just an observation. I’m practicing the habit of noticing but not winding myself up about it. I long ago learned to punish myself emotionally, deeply and intensely, for my body’s “failings” and I’m still working to undo that reflex. It did me no good and there’s no reason to keep holding on to it.
*****
I came off a short four hour sleep session last night expecting to feel like a pair of beat up old shoes. Strangely, though I didn’t feel GOOD, I also didn’t feel the expected dragging fatigue that’s sidelined me most days last week from venturing past our front door. I decided that if I didn’t feel horrible, it was as good a time as any to take all the kids out for a long walk, so we did!
Year 2, Day 54: Conundrum. Smol Acrobat LOVES hanging out with JB. JB LOVES hanging out with Smol Acrobat. The reasons they love hanging out are because JB loves singing and dancing and making loud obnoxious to parents noises for SA and SA absolutely cackles with the joy of it.
But it scrapes layers off our brains. HOW DO WE TOLERATE THIS. I think we have to if we want work time.
*****
I have turned into my mother. I can down a full glass of water without taking a breath. 30 years ago, I used to sip like a tiny butterfly.
May 3, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 43: Today was my relative’s funeral. I took most of the day to attend services virtually and just be. After the services were over, I took all the kids out for a walk. We spent 15 minutes in the backyard. JB tested out a hand me down tricycle that was gifted to Smol Acrobat far far far too early. Smol lay in their stroller contemplating belly buttons and sunbeams. I had a late lunch alone. Followed that up with a scoop of ice cream when the kids were all otherwise distracted. I did some work in the quiet.
*****
Last night was my second night in a row on Smol Acrobat watch. By the afternoon, I was tired down to my marrow. How the heck did I do this for four months in a row?? I was moving around purely automatically by 3 pm, doing what needed to be done, but none of it was enjoyable.
I cooked miso salmon and green beans for dinner, and decided to eat my feelings with a batch of Annie’s cinnamon rolls which are chock full of everything my body hasn’t been a fan of. Too bad, my brain needed it. No guilt, though, I refuse to let food become a guilt thing. I just try to maintain balance. JB thumbs upped the salmon over the green beans. They thumbs upped the cinnamon rolls over the salmon. Shocker, I know.
*****
PiC was on duty with Smol tonight, thankfully.
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April 26, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 36: WordPress is threatening to take away Classic editor in the app “soon” and that makes me mad. I don’t have time or brain to waste on figuring out the stinkin’ block editor so this may mean a forced pause in my blogging for a while. I almost entirely update on my phone in stolen moments here and there.
*****
I have been so tired that I:
- Set down my aligner case where it belongs and then spent the next ten minutes searching for it.
- Tried to place an order online without ever entering my credit card information.
- Tried to turn on the baby monitor six times and forgot what I was doing every time.
- Watched PiC make Sera get up for a last outing, then completely forgot that happened and went to take her out again half an hour later.
- Kept forgetting to close Twitter to open my Kindle or Kobo apps to read a book. I got stuck on scrolling because I couldn’t remember what else I was going to do.
*****
Is there a greater gift than a partner who doesn’t need to be told what to do next? I’m not that partner right now, PiC is. I was planning to cook dinner with my zero energy and less than half a brain. He decided we were getting take out, asked if I had a preference, placed the order and picked it up. We’re totally imperfect people but we also always try to do our best for each other and it shows. He’s the best.
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April 19, 2021
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.
*****
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.
*****
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!
*****
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?
*****
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.
*****
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!
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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.
*****
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
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
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
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…)