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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September 21, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,797.23; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Responsibilities
JB has daily chores to do now. The process of getting a habit formed has been painful. The whining, the complaining, the moaning and flopping about! They were easier to train as a 3 year old! But they are perfectly capable of performing the tasks assigned and so we stick to it.
One chore is setting the table. On a day I wasn’t feeling well, they took the initiative. Without any reminders, they set the table with all the usual, then filled a water bottle and brought it to the table to serve as a refill pitcher. I’m not sure where their idea came from but it made me laugh. A water pitcher for the dinner table has been on my wish list for a while but I had never mentioned it!
They were originally motivated by filling out a weekly chore chart for earning a prize but with my fatigue and the fires and smoke, and Seamus’s condition, we’ve had to skip a couple weeks. However the baseline of their having daily chores to do, on a rotating basis depending on the things needing to be done, has finally stuck.
They do want their chore chart back though, and I’ve promised to get that up again.
JB’s reads
They are absolutely loving the Catstronauts (Amazon, Indiebound), Baltazar’s Itty Bitty Hellboy (Amazon, Indiebound) and Superman Family Adventures (Amazon, Indiebound) comics. They’re also starting to get into the Judy Moody series. I saw Judy Moody at Comic Con last year but didn’t realize it was age appropriate already.
More parenting!
Some quick math: Seamus + JB who is definitely not a baby any longer + Sera + one baking baby makes four.
Just in case we had failed to add properly, JB likes to tell us we will have FOUR kids to take care of.
Yes. Yes we know.
They’re pretty excited about the new sibling. Seamus may care when the new arrival actually arrives but he’s too old to worry about helping me like he used to. I’m trying to train Sera to come help me when I get beached but she’s still too twitchy. She gets scared when I try to lean on her a bit to get up. She’s into babies, though, and is going to have trouble resisting bestowing dog kisses. We know where that mouth has been, no dog kisses thank you.
Pupdate
It’s been a while since I did a separate pupdate and I have decided *grand gesture* that we’ll combine them with kid updates. Why not. They’re all my dependents.
Seamus is aging more rapidly than we can bear. We adore him and it’s hard to see this. He’s got moderate to severe arthritis which we’re treating with All the Things to help keep him comfortable. He’s been developing neurological issues, like knuckling when he stands and walks, or misjudging distances and overcompensating or falling. He always gets back up but I dread the progression of this aging. We baby him as much as we can, he’s earned every bit of it and more, and I have pangs of regret wondering if there’s anything else I should and could have done for him. I know I’ve been doing everything that I actually can but it’s hard. He’s been prone to UTIs this year and he had a rough several months with them. We thought it was in our rear view but yet another nasty infection cropped up this month.
The funny thing about his getting older though, he’s finally less saintly with his patience. Where he once regularly let Sera share his water bowl, they would drink at the exact same time which is a hilarious sight, or even taken a step back and let her have the bowl first, he now just takes first turn at the bowl as his due. He always should have, he’s twice her age! But even as recently as last year he’d defer to her politely.
While she doesn’t understand most dogs, any kind of signal from him is respected. He only had to knock her head out of the water bowl once when she started to crowd him. She’s never again tried to shove her way in to share like she has done for the past two years. Since then, she just behind him to wait her turn. Some days, she won’t even drink if he’s outside until he’s back in and has had his drink first! She gets very little direction from him but whatever she gets, she takes very seriously.
We were working with a dog walker before COVID to give her some extra exercise once a week but that wasn’t very long before we all had to shelter in place. Since then we have had a lovely friend share some reactive dog training tips and information which has helped us recalibrate our expectations and our approach to her training. We’d hit a plateau in April and I was despairing. But we came to understand her fear a little better thanks to the dog training advice of @themariadawn and we’ve been seeing small but real improvements. I’ve noticed her looking at other dogs that would normally put her on high alert but then look up at us for a treat instead of lunging for the other dog. Previously, even dogs a block away would set her on alert. She’d stay alerted and tense until they were long out of sight. Now she might bounce with a bit of anxiety but she’ll stare at dogs across the street intensely, and then allow herself to be redirected. Lots of treats, lots of positive tones, and lots of forward motion all help us stay safely on our side of the walk. I hope she’s not reactive forever but it certainly felt that way for a while. We’re making some progress.
Precious Moments
Mindreading
JB: Mom, what’s that thing we eat?
Me: The what?
JB: That thing!
Me: … what color is it?
JB: Pink.
Me: What shape is it?
JB: Round.
Me: When did we eat it?
JB: That time with T!
Me: ….. cotton candy?
JB: YES!
When Avatar: The Last Airbender and reality collide
JB: Why are there SO MANY FIRES.
Me: Well for some of them, people are making bad choices and making sparks in dry areas where they can catch fire. That’s not all of them but the ones we know about are because people are being careless.
JB: What if it’s actually the FIRE NATION?
Me: Well, the Fire Nation isn’t real, that’s from a story.
JB: BUT WHAT IF.
:: Do you remember having wild flights of fancy as a kid? (Or do you now?) Also it occurs to me that the titles of these monthly updates should change to plural now.
September 18, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,763.51; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. I spent a lot of time perusing tax code to make sure I’m prepared to record all the relevant details from the rental sale if it actually goes through soon. I hate our tax code, it’s ridiculously convoluted even for someone who is interested in combing through the fine print to collect all the necessary details. It scratched a particular itch in my brain but it’s still absurd.
2. Halloween is definitely not happening, nor are the rest of the holidays in 2020, happening in any way like normal so I am pondering what small things we can do to make our own Halloween. JB LOVES the dressing up and spends the whole year planning and plotting their costumes. It’s still not clear whether they’ve made up their minds but I need to start planning way ahead of anything we might do.
Maybe a Zoom costume playdate with their friends? With spooky themed dinner foods? I found a few ideas to mull over: mummy dogs which make me laugh, spider deviled eggs for which I need a good food substitute for the spiders because I hate olives, mummy loaf, a baked brie spider.
It shouldn’t be a carb fest though. Maybe I’ll fashion orange and green spiders from carrots and celery somehow.
What are y’all planning for Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas if you observe them?
Challenges this week: ruff. It feels like every single time we get our feet under ourselves, making some new normal and making the best of what we have facing us, the kaleidoscope shifts again and we’re scrambling to make it work. Again. This is exhausting.
Seamus has been struggling again with incontinence AND a need to wake up between 3-5 am. Sometimes he needs to be let out, sometimes he doesn’t. Sometimes he needs to be let out twice in an hour or he won’t stop pacing. Thanks to a chat with a friend, we finally figured out this wasn’t just arthritis or old dog insomnia or bad timing with too much water intake. We have a course of treatment finally and thankfully it seems to be helping. It’s been so rough for him and we haven’t gotten a good night of sleep for weeks.
I have a lot of sadness and grief this week about the shitshow this year has been in so many ways. Dear friends are going through sickness and grieving, we’re doing our best to show up for them in remote and safe ways. We’re going through a lot of changes mostly unsupported and alone outside of our small family unit. I’m learning to accept that I do need emotional support and cannot just be a robot and what a terrible time to be discovering THAT tidbit about being human. Couldn’t I just robot my way through this pandemic at least? (No, I cannot, it makes my physical pain exponentially worse.)
3. A friend sent us a small box of pastries as a pre-thank you for helping them with some manual labor. I was tolerating those carbs ok so I really enjoyed the unexpected treat with our breakfast for a few mornings.
4. We finally got some clean air!
:: Was your air breathable this week?
September 17, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,763.51; Rural libraries, $321.62.
I didn’t know there were so many kinds of possible plastic eating fungi! Or that I could be so excited about it because I need SOME kind of light in this hellscape world.
Publishers are suing the Internet Archive
History repeating itself with the pandemic and the realization that overly hot radiators were an intentional design. Who knew? “It turns out that the prodigious output of steam-heated buildings is the direct result of theories of infection control that were enlisted in the battle against the great global pandemic of 1918 and 1919.”
Burnout: Running on Fumes. This is a good reminder, particularly at this time, that running on fumes isn’t any kind of a heroic move. It’s not good for us at all.
Ladies! Here’s how to unmask that “anonymous” Twitter creep!
This Ask A Manager is a doozy. I can’t stand the thought of healthcare professionals actively spreading harmful nonsense about COVID.
Mel from brokeGirlrich: My COVID Unemployment Story in the Decimated Arts Industry
Done by Forty on Equality or Equity? Companies really need to be handling this better at a work management level, not just giving some people (sorely needed) time off and then dumping their work on other people.
REVENGE
September 14, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,763.51; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 26 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 26, Day 178: I hate that living and working in a pandemic with all these restrictions in the hopes of avoiding a horrible illness, with severe, long lasting and still uncertain effects even if death isn’t the end of the story, has hit some kind of normal for us.
We had to adapt, and we have, and we had to adopt a long term mindset because our government is worse than a failure, but I hate that this and ever-creeping fascism are what we have become accustomed to in 2020. It’s perfectly normal to have a President who commits multiple unconscionable acts, who proudly and openly violates all the rules and norms and the Hatch Act and isn’t called to account even once by “his” party.
It’s depressing that our mental goalposts have moved to such low standards.
Week 26, Day 179: This long day of labwork completely wiped me out. I expected that it would require rest time after but I didn’t expect it to knock me for such a loop that I’d fall asleep after laying down for “just a rest”.
I took the rest of the day “off” so I’d only be doing parenting and home life and household management without also trying to work. I spent some time working through forms and paperwork, some time working on finance related research and sending our CPA a bunch of questions for the 2020 tax year prep. I work on this all through the year so that my 2021 tax prep isn’t awful.
JB spent some of the afternoon using up my thank you cards to write short not-thank-you notes to people. Their phonetic spelling is spectacular / interesting and I’m tempted to take pictures of all of them for an archive. They’re pretty funny.
Week 26, Day 180: We woke up to DoomSky which is so very 2020.
My phone absolutely refused to take an accurate picture and kept filtering out all the yellow / orange / red but our skies were approximately like this:
It was dark at noon.
It was really unsettling to feel like we should be doing SOMETHING but I didn’t know what since we’re a fair distance away from actual danger.
Week 26, Day 181: Day 2 of DoomSky. At least it wasn’t dark today though, it’s been yellow-orange rather than orange-red.
I had a headache all day though and I couldn’t decide if it was because our air quality was absolute trash or because I didn’t sleep well (this is normal, though).
JB woke up in a great mood but that didn’t last long. Combination of air quality, not enough physical activity, no outside time and being five? Who knows.
Week 26, Day 182: Day 3 of DoomSky.
We’re starting to feel a bit trapped. The air quality is positively dismal so we can’t even go outside for long walks or hikes or biking. PiC and JB are really struggling mentally and emotionally with that.
Seamus has been having (urinary) accidents this entire week. I’ve scrubbed floors, beds, and rugs, and PiC has done six loads of dog laundry. It wasn’t until confirming with PiC today that their walk durations haven’t been short all week as I had mistakenly though, plus mentioning it to @WindyCityGal that it occurred to me this might be a UTI again. AGAIN. Or worse, Cushings. I’m hoping for a UTI, even if it was a major bummer to knock out last time.
I can’t tell you the number of times that being exasperated and mentioning a problem to a friend by text has resulted in pieces clicking together and possible answers!
PiC and I agreed that this week has been one of THE toughest in the past six months. We had comfort pizza night.
:: How was your week? Were you affected by any of terrible air and smoke?
September 11, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
1. I finally made time to go return a couple purchases to Michael’s. We usually only do curbside pickup for shopping but we had to go inside for the returns. I wanted to be surprised the lines were so long but I can’t be and I felt a touch guilty about that because I was briefly part of that problem. I’d purchased several organizer boxes for our small things early last month and threw in a stack of paint pads for JB. The paint pads are terrible! They were no better than printer paper and I don’t see the point of buying that thickness of paper for painting. The paint will soak right through. So they all went back and then of course JB begged to look around the store. We were masked, armed with sanitizer, had an ironclad rule that they could not touch anything which they’re pretty good about doing and strictly enforced a six foot rule while included not going down any aisle with any people in it, so it seemed like we could reasonably safely do this thing for a little while and be ok.
The colors and crafts were unexpectedly hard to resist, I think I forget how much I enjoy looking at crafting supplies, and we ended staying longer than intended looking at everything. Just before we could escape safely, I was sucked into the washi tape clearance bin, ten cents a roll!, so PiC and I selected a double handful, and I allowed JB to pick one item of their choice under $2. At the register I remembered that I had a $5 reward to use which covered all but the tax. It felt frivolous but, going into our sixth month of near total isolation, I have to remember that once in a while we need a little creative stimulation outside our homes and we’ve been especially sensorily deprived these past few weeks because the air quality from the wildfires make it unsafe to be outdoors where we’d normally be soaking up nature.
2. With thanks to Hawaii Planner for the initial idea, I found this banana peanut butter chocolate chip oatmeal bars recipe and I made GF-sugar-free batch for me, and a regular non-GF with regular sugar and chocolate chips version for our friends.
3. For once, a long weekend didn’t feel like punishment and torture, either from a work or a family perspective! I ended up having to do some work to create space later in the next week BUT the actual official holiday was nice to have. I love working in even more isolation that is usual with remote work – it’s my favorite thing to knock out my inbox when no one is online to answer. 😀
Challenges this week: We are adding back a set of lessons for JB so that’s more logistics and planning and preparing. It should be worthwhile but it’s definitely a lot of work on my part to get it in order.
And of course, in order: pandemic, CA is on fire, air quality is absolutely terrible, health stuff going on, dear friend is very ill and we can’t see him, other dear friends are going through very hard times and I don’t have any more bandwidth to think of ways to help them. Seamus is currently getting PiC up in the middle of almost every night which is pretty miserable for his rest and my aching self continues to ache.
4. We discovered that JB can have a fully engaged, without real monitoring, playdate on Zoom with their babyhood bestie. Their parents have now declared that they will be borrowing our child for future Zoom playdates, no need for us to be around 😀 Which is fine with us, they have missed their friend so much. And when California stops burning, we can attempt distanced and masked trail rides for them.
:: It’s my birthmonth and I’d like to want a special treat but I just want a bag of donuts. But I don’t think sugar free gluten free low carb donuts worth eating can be found. Any other ideas?
September 10, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
In Which Teenagers Can’t Make Phone Calls. I’m approaching 40 and I hate phone calls!
The wealth divide is just that much starker during the pandemic.
30 Years Ago, Romania Deprived Thousands of Babies of Human Contac
Some thoughtful book suggestions for high school students
Under “we deserve a break” I love Allie Brosh’s announcement.
Why, mother?
September 8, 2020
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Week 25 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Week 25, Day 171: I stopped buying fast fashion many years ago but I kept the clothes bought when that’s all I could afford, and discard them only when they fell apart.
It’s kind of a surprise how long wearing some of these things are! Today, I’m wearing a shirt that I bought something like 12 years ago from Forever 21 and it still looks like new. No stains, tears, pulls or fading.
It’s a heavy work day as usual for Monday but some changes I made have borne enough fruit for me to be able to get through it in a normal work day for once. And it’s been a while since that happened. But at the same time, I still feel tremendous guilt over being an emotionally disengaged parent when I’m working. I don’t feel like this when they’re away, just when they’re here and happily bouncing everywhere and wanting attention.
Week 25, Day 172: I’m tired from not great sleep which helps nothing at all, but I’m also struggling with a terrible lack of patience and mood today. I keep hydrating with ice water to try and stave off a five alarm scream. I have a snack. I change tasks to get away from the minor irritants that are tickling the trigger. I make myself breathe deeply and speak clearly, calmly, and firmly to JB instead of letting them get under my skin.
I can’t decide if I want this day to be twice as long which would allow me to take some calming detours, so I can still get things done, or just be over already and start over.
Finally, a break to make an experimental batch of gluten free cornbread seemed to help.
Week 25, Day 173: I expected today to be a tough day because I had a long doctor’s appointment with blood work and that impacts my work schedule but I forgot the other impact. It’s utterly exhausting! And me being me, I was completely confused how much the appointment took out of me. I was so fatigued after getting home that I could barely rally my last remaining brain cells. While it was nice to chat with my doctor who I like and respect and who treats me with respect, I can’t say it was worth the loss of the rest of the day. I had to triage and ditch work early because I was approaching the point of being useless and two steps after that is worse than useless: making mistakes on important decisions. It was time to cut my losses.
Week 25, Day 174: Two hours of this morning were eaten up by technology gremlins and then another half hour was eaten by another gremlin. Then it was off to the races trying to finish a full work day in a little over half a day. Not stressful at all!
JB did their best to help out. They pronounced: you don’t have to stop working, I’ll make lunch!
As they are FIVE I had some concerns. But once I established they weren’t attempting anything that would later result in fire trucks, I sat myself back down to crack out some work and let the kid show me what they could do entirely unsupervised. And honestly, I was impressed. They made me a gluten free low carb ham and cheese sandwich with a side of carrots and two kinds of dip. They even insisted on serving it to me at my desk, a la Chef Dad, instead of just letting me know to come to lunch. They made the same for themselves and heartily enjoyed their lunch with the savor of independence at the table nearby. Really, I was impressed.
Week 25, Day 175: Unexpected letters from the IRS are never good. This one definitely wasn’t. I found out that I had missed a Pretty Big Line Item on a past tax year’s filing and I have no idea how that form never made it to me or into my records. But here’s where therapy paid off: when I tracked down the mistake and figured out it truly was a mistake, I was able to let it go emotionally. Normally I’d have kicked my own ass up and down the street for being so (insert various judgy phrases here) thus adding the pain of stressing and being angry to the pain of paying a whopper of an unexpected bill. I did have to suffer the pain of the two hours on hold to the IRS to iron out the final payment because I was disputing one small item listed, that was rough and meant I didn’t get to take a half day as I’d hoped, but I did get the paperwork finished up and ready for the mail. And thank goodness for my new habit of keeping more cash on hand than the absolute bare minimum of what’s needed to pay the next week of bills. That also saved me some heartburn.
It’s so strange learning to let myself make mistakes and not feeling terrible about them.