About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
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March 30, 2021
Consequences
JB was a big grump about having me trim part of their hair. It’s no fun for me, either. They won’t stay still, they won’t look up, they keep whining. Finally I warned them that they had better stay still and look up for a full minute, but since they didn’t, I just chopped large chunks out of their hair and let them go inside. It was 2 minute cut and it showed.
They burst inside: Dad look! It wasn’t even that long, I’m all done!
PiC: Great! Looks great!
They ran out of the room. He turns to me and mouthed: WHAT HAPPENED???
It was really that bad. But too bad! If they didn’t want a hack job, they should try standing still for more than 0.2 seconds.
From our perspective
We’ve had some good talks about parenting lately. Of course these stem from frustration and conflict, which doesn’t feel good, but from conflict comes understanding and growth for all of us. We’re trying to do our best to parent in a non authoritarian way and that’s completely uncharted territory in both our experiences. We tend to repeat what we know because that’s easiest and familiar. Going away from that deliberately means we’re writing new to us paths and feeling our way sometimes. The good thing is we talk through our conflicts as much as we can and try our best to create new patterns. Sometimes it feels like the stakes are lower for me because JB cares so much more about what PiC thinks, says, and does than me. It lowers the pressure when I screw up. They don’t have a problem having a rough time with me and saying it’s a rough time or acknowledging later that they know it was a frustrating time.
*****
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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…)
March 23, 2021
The last two times we tried meal delivery services was a free trial of Gobble three or four years ago, then maybe a free trial of Blue Apron two years ago? I honestly can’t remember.
The point is, we’ve tried our best to keep doing our own shopping and cooking because we prefer doing our own grocery shopping and most of the time I enjoy cooking.
As with so many other things in 2020, the pandemic has shifted our thinking on that a bit. Or a lot. We got pretty sick of planning, prepping, and cooking every single meal every single day. Still, it wasn’t until Smol Acrobat arrived and until friends gave us a nudge that we actually did anything about this. They gifted us a gift card to the Home Chef service which we’d never heard of before and we had to set up a subscription to use it. At first I was mildly annoyed, mostly at the way Home Chef is set up, but once we were in the system I found that my annoyance was more than abated by how much it helps us each week.
We only opted for 2 meals (4 servings of each) per week to start and used it for several weeks. I appreciate the assist on two meals twice a week. Here are some of my observations from using the service. (more…)
March 22, 2021
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 16, 2021
We watch too much Moana
JB is constitutionally incapable of eating a banana without saying after their first bite, “You’re NO ONE’s hero.”
PiC does it too.
Missing Seamus
JB has known about loss at a little bit of a distance for a long time. They know my mom died a long while ago, they know their great grandparents have died in the past few years. They know our friends’ dogs have died. They’ve been to three funerals. That was all academic.
Nothing comes close to the tearing emptiness of losing Seamus. Not even a little.
“Thinking about him doesn’t fill my bucket,” they sobbed.
No. Thinking of his memories still makes me cry a lot too. The memories are just too fresh.
I still reflexively look for him when I go from one room to the next. I still reflexively reach for his head when I pass by his bed.
They cry for him most nights of the week and we talk about him a lot.
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March 15, 2021
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.
*****
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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March 9, 2021
*Wow I started this about a year ago. Now we have ANOTHER tiny human squawking frequently.
Not the perseverance kind of grit, we want to keep that in our lives.
The other kind that’s annoying and makes you feel itchy and irritable, like minor unnecessary arguments. I started the new year with a whole load of grumpiness. I was way behind in work, even though I’d worked all the holidays, because we also had a truckload of personal stuff to do (financial, family time, wanting to write for the blog after not feeling the urge to write for weeks, eating dinner every single night what is that why can we not just eat once a week??)
Solitary Diner talked about changing some things to make taking call less stressful. She can’t make call itself less stressful. But by figuring out that it’s the uncertainty of call, and how that uncertainty derails her, she was able to find a decent solution. By choosing not make a lot of plans on call days, she was able to appreciate it when call went her way instead of being upset when it didn’t go her way.
I had to make similar changes.
As parents: In our first year as parents, we had a tiny human squawking frequently. That derailment of my plans was doubly difficult when I’d had my heart set on getting some things done and getting some sleep that night. I tried to get everything done as things came up: caring for JB, answering emails, troubleshooting, admin work, walking the dog. But as my agent of change and chaos, while JB was the biggest variable, they weren’t the only one. As a result, I felt pulled in thirty six directions at once and I was always cranky. I finally tried compartmentalizing. When JB was awake, the only thing I did was handle JB and JB-adjacent tasks: laundry, clearing up, cooking, eating, organizing, packing lunch. All tasks during which JB could hang out with me and splitting my attention was no problem. There was no gourmet cooking happening, nothing on the stove ever needed my constant attention. When JB was asleep, the only thing I did was work.
Sectioning my day like that meant that while I still had to work a third shift, I was just tired, not tired, cranky, and frazzled.
I have to do something similar now that the pandemic is eating my brain and we’ve had JB home constantly. When I get tetchy, I have to do JB-adjacent things that don’t require my full attention.
Household 1: We recently just got my Roomba that I’ve been saving for. It’s been a 5 year dream in the saving! PiC pointed out that the dogs and their inability to drink without slopping half the bowl of water across the entire floor was going to be a problem. Roombas are not water bots. We’ve long been annoyed by the need to constantly mop up after our beloved pups who wanted to double as spraying hoses every time they drink but we’ve not considered what to ever actually done anything about it until now. I finally realized there was an area in the house I could move the food and water bowls to reduce the sloppage significantly, so I made the experimental shift. Mopping is down about 80%.
Household 2: I saved for years for this one. The Roomba itself is another way we’re gently removing some frustration. I want the floors to be vacuumed more frequently but I don’t have the energy or time to do it myself. The Roomba is a useful tool to help us out. Thanks to Wall-E, I imagine Ronnie has a personality as it scales minor obstacles, or gets stuck. I’m vastly enjoying being able to set Ronnie on the move and know my house is being cleaned while I work.
Household 3: We’ve stopped hand-washing all our dishes and instead run the dishwasher 2-4 times a week. If you told me ten years ago that PiC would relent on this chore, I’d have laughed my butt off. But here we are!
Work: I reconfigured software to give me quick access to my frequently used tools. Then I redesigned some templates that I were both clunky and didn’t work great. Now they are aesthetically pleasing and I get the job done faster! There has yet to be software to stop me from accidentally hitting “cancel” instead of “save” or closing a tab I didn’t mean to close, though.
All of this makes me think of that West Wing scene when Bruno tells the President that he would be a fool to ignore any tactic that won’t hurt them and can reduce drag on the campaign. I agree with the sentiment and really need to practice this more.
:: What things bother you? Can any of them be fixed with a small adjustment?