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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February 18, 2022
1. We get one week of summer a year and this was our week! Actual sun and heat and a light breeze: pure heaven. We got to spend a lot of time in the yard with Smol without having to bundle up in four layers, wash Sera, sit in the sun and read a book.
2. For the first time in the ten(?) years I’ve had my ibotta account, we bought a thing that had an actual bonus attached! It was for a $1 back for buying any brand seafood!
I’ve only been redeeming receipts for ten cent rewards in all this time so I haven’t even cashed out once. It’s a real bummer compared to other people’s earnings and I’ve been tempted to abandon it but I’m at the $16.50 now. I figure I’ll stick out until I get one $20 redemption and then I’ll close my account.
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February 15, 2022
Everyone handwaving COVID and omicron makes me want to bite something. It’s “just a cold”, it’s “no big deal”. Except for a lot of people, it causes Long COVID and there is not one thing in the list of Long COVID symptoms that makes me say yes sure sign me up! That’s because I know better – I already live with most of the COVID and Long COVID symptoms. In a nutshell, it sucks.
I talk about fatigue here a lot these. I talked about chronic pain here a lot over the years. I’ve lost a LOT to my chronic pain. My ability to enjoy most parts of life. My ability to function completely independently. My favorite hobbies in the world. My ability to care for myself. My ability to sleep. My ability to trust healthcare can help with anything. I was gaslit about my pain for over 20 years because they didn’t have the tools or training to help me.
I didn’t realize how much I was losing to my chronic fatigue, which I always chalked up to being tired of being in so much pain all the time – it’s exhausting walking around feeling like your entire body is on fire! It’s exhausting to experience inflammation in every joint. It was logical! After all if you’re twisted into knots with tension from pain, that’s tiring! Turns out that wasn’t the only problem.
Over the past two years, as my chronic pain baselines started to get lower, I noticed that my fatigue continued to get worse. That didn’t make sense. I’m not at all cured and I still hurt every minute of every day, but it’s less than before. Before was the equivalent of having various body parts clamped into a vise, cranked tight until just before you lose feeling, all the time. Now it’s more like it’s cranked halfway there. There’s a significant difference. Why is my fatigue still so deep?
I’m not just tired. Though, honestly, I don’t clearly remember how it feels for an adult human to have energy, I have an intellectual recollection. Once upon a time, if I could sleep, I’d wake up and feel like I’d slept. Not like I’d gone twenty rounds in a boxing ring. In the before times, if I ran to catch the bus, I’d huff for a while, catch my breath, and then feel ok enough to walk to my next stop. If I went for a run, I’d feel the burn, walk for a bit and then have a second wind to run back home.
That’s not how it works with chronic fatigue. When I sleep, I wake up feeling like I just hit pause on my downward spiral. I didn’t recharge or reset, I just slowed down the drain. When I walk or run, if I feel good enough, and I hit breathlessness, that’s where I’m stuck the rest of the day. But if I feel good, I have to take advantage of it because it’s going to go away no matter what I do. I can’t conserve it for later. There is no later for that very momentary bit of bliss where I almost feel like a human. If I choose to do an activity on the weekend, that’s the only one I get. I have to factor in a two hour rest period after the activity in hopes that will let me stabilize my tiredness enough to continue to function. If I’m fool enough to schedule two activities in a weekend, I will be scraping the bottom of the barrel for at least a week, probably two. If someone is a big enough jerk to expose me to their “just a cold” (a real cold), I will struggle to get back on track for six weeks and I will hold a grudge.
I start each day with the weight of an anvil on my chest. Bonus mornings bring with it 50 pound weights on each limb. Even worse mornings include all the above benefits PLUS the feeling of having been hollowed out so I could blow away with the next little breeze. Lucky I have those weights weighing me down! That’s how my day STARTS before I plunge into child caretaking, making breakfast, school dropoff, dog walking, more childcare, work, more childcare, more work, school pickup, more work and dog walking and household management and dealing with dinner and bath and bedtime or more work, then bedtime. I am (non sarcastically now) very lucky that PiC and I share the shareable load a lot without ever having to ask – he’s a fully capable responsible adult who wouldn’t dream of leaving it all to me. He always takes as much of the physical load as possible to spare me and I do much of the planning and logistics wrangling. But half of too much work is still a ton of work and I never start any day with a full tank of gas. If I’m particularly well off, I start with half.
All this to say: I DO NOT WANT COVID. I’ll never understand how people can blithely dismiss the risk to others if they had an easy experience with it. “We had it and we were fine, why vaccinate?” I hear way too often. I knew people were selfish but this is a PARTICULARLY awful kind of selfish that truly doesn’t care if it destroys lives.
In any case, I have no interest in arguing with those people. I’m not going to change their minds and my energy is far too precious to throw away on knuckleheads.
On the chronic fatigue front, I have been getting some medical guidance on managing it a bit better than I have been.
I used to take magnesium for restless leg symptoms I’d get now and again and a Vit B complex. We have added Vit D, zinc, coQ10, omega3 fatty acids, and Vit C. My doc also prescribed a medication recommended for fatigue as an off label use for days when I’m flattened and really cannot afford to be. It becomes ineffective if taken it on a regular schedule so it’s prescribed as “take on random mornings as needed.” Hilariously my doc apologized that the prescription sounded so weird but that’s exactly what I wanted. I’m not looking for a habitual medication-based fix, mainly because I know there isn’t one short of going with hard drugs (I hear that’s one reason cocaine was so popular and I get it boy do I get it but also boy do I not want to get addicted to cocaine), I just need some help to survive on the worst days. For the days that range between the worst and the best, I’m relying on lifestyle-based changes.
In some ways the lifestyle changes are a disappointing route to take. The major theme is don’t do the things. Don’t do all of them. Don’t do most of them. Only do the ones you can do without hitting your hollowed out, point of collapse, feeling.
You know how little that leaves me? With MAYBE one fun thing per week for up to two hours. Sometimes I don’t even feel up to that much.
It’s a hell of a way to live but I’m still more fortunate than most and I do want to make the most of what time I have. That doesn’t mean I’m willing to gamble with what I do have in the lottery of “will it be ‘mild’ COVID with long lasting effects or not?” I truly don’t understand people who blithely assume everything will be fine if they get it and that they’ll get great medical care if they need it. That has not been the experience of many people with long term illness or disability.
I don’t have any grand conclusion because I’m still living this chronic life. But I refuse to voluntarily make it worse!
February 14, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 326: Third terrible night of sleep in a row as I wait out this latest flare up that feels like my bones are on fire. Tossed and turned for hours last night. PiC took Smol as soon as they were up so I could rest as much as possible before we absolutely had to get out the door but it wasn’t nearly enough.
Monday workloads suck to begin with. It’s extra weighted down with fatigue and underlying pain that won’t go away so it’s Molasses Monday. The kind of extra Molasses Monday that destroys even your muscle memory so that you try to crack the eggs into the compost and throw the shells into your bowl, and you turn off the lights as you go into the room instead of turning them on.
It’s going to have to be the little things today.
Smol, having gotten a later start than usual, this morning, got to spend the hour after we dropped JB off at school with me indulging in their current favorite pastimes: throwing all the socks out of their bin, throwing all the shoes out of their bin, unmatching socks, and carrying diapers around like a football. It’s good to have interests.
PiC pulled together a magnificent simple pantry dinner of steak, risotto (frozen from Trader Joe’s) and roasted broccoli. We enjoyed that after a short family walk through the neighborhood to let Sera do her business, JB run some laps and Smol stretch their legs a little.
I came back to my desk to put in some work on our Lakota family orders. For the orders already shipped, those tracking numbers needed to be shared. FedEx needed more information for a shipment. Diapers have been going in and out of stock since the weekend so I needed to grab what I could when it was back in. I’m juggling three families at once which may have been a bit daft for my energy levels but it’s mostly working out.
That done, I dragged myself off to bed for an “early” night in hopes of sleeping off my pain hangover.
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February 11, 2022
1. We managed things so that PiC got an outing both Saturday and Sunday morning to work out and I got 4-5 hours of daytime rest on both days. It wasn’t easy but it was doable this weekend and we both got what we needed for once. We traded the kids during that time and everyone got fed. Win all around even if it wasn’t easy.
2. Our local dim sum place started serving dim sum again! We splurged on a wide spread of dishes and enjoyed every morsel. Even Smol Acrobat got in on the dining delight. They ate up almost an entire steamed pork bun before moving on to the other yummy things in my bowl.
Challenges this week: I needed all that rest because I had a massive flare up that took the form of “molten lava replaced my marrow oh joy”.
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February 8, 2022
Feelings
As I was gently tickling a crying Smol, checking them for anything that was poking them or otherwise making them physically uncomfortable, JB scolded me: Mom, they’re sad. Don’t try to cheer them up if they’re sad!
This came from a conversation we had about how it’s ok for people to be sad and they don’t need to be jollied out of it. They just need to be allowed to have their moment of sadness and to let it pass in their own time. I had to explain that there’s a difference between having sad feelings, which are fine, and being sad because something physically doesn’t feel good that can be fixed. For babies, we’re responsible for figuring out the latter, but as they get older, we’ll be responsible for recognizing the former.
*****
JB was instructed to put away laundry and of course, even with the motivation of opening reserved gifts if they finished the entire chore instead of just the half they were assigned at first (it should go without saying that it should be without whining), they were FULL of dramatics. They don’t specifically whine about the task because they know they can’t get away with that. So instead they dramatically exclaim over and over when they do something asinine like overload one side of the laundry basket and it pitches over. Six. Times. Six freaking times. Six times we hear the basket tip over and a loud exclamation. I can’t say how utterly grating it is to hear them being extra dramatic as an equally irritating alternative to whining. And then we lose it and they lose their incentive and then it’s all tears and grouchiness and arghhhhh. I can see why some parents don’t bother to have their kids take on responsibility. It’s a right pain in the caboose. But we’re not going to give up just because this is like nails on a chalkboard. We endure. In bad moods, but we endure.
Life with Smol Acrobat
We are DONE WITH FORMULA. I have shaken my last bottle of formula for this baby! *Snoopy dance*
I have been so ready to be done with making up formula bottles. The mess, the “finish in one hour after starting” calculations, the waste when Smol decided after a taste that they weren’t hungry after all and refused to be hungry until one hour and five minutes after contaminating that first bottle we can’t use anymore.
We’ve been offering all kinds of solids since they were 6 months and they’re just now making the mental shift of preferring to fill up on solids rather than milk. Some days they still don’t want food, though.
Here’s a weird thing: they like cold food and warm milk. Can’t reverse them. It’s so strange. Feed them a bite of warm bread and they grimace like it’s bitter. Give them a bottle of cold milk and it’s BRAIN FREEZE CITY. But cold food straight from the fridge? Divine. Warm milk? Perfection.
We’re working on it. They’re slowly loosening their grip on these convictions. Our next thing is to convince them that milk IS permitted in non bottle containers. Like sippy cups. Their firm belief is that that sippy cups are only for water. They’re happy with any sippy but it MUST contain water.
Speaking of food progress, I keep forgetting that Smol has Rules. Any new food to be introduced must be the TINIEST of bites. They’re more willing to try new foods now but the first bite must always be nearly microscopic so they can check for poison. Large bites are accepted and then immediately dribbled down their front in the most disgusting possible way to teach this lesson.
Also, some foods must be hand fed, some spoon fed, others fork fed, some self fed and you have to figure out which is which purely by process of food being ejected with varying levels of force.
P.S. You’re going straight to hell if you’re using chopsticks for yourself but not for them.
Mealtimes are Such Fun! 🤯
****
Baby milestones: They have started trying to walk in earnest. It’s very exciting! I’m not ready for a toddler!
We’ve also entered a phase I tend to enjoy for its predictability: the unpacking baby. My babies, maybe most do? I have insufficient data for this, tend to have a period whereby all containers that contain things must stop containing things. Laundry in a basket must become the laundry out of a basket. Diapers in a bag must be diapers strewn across the floor. A nearly packed diaper bag must become a completely empty diaper bag. It’s easy to keep them busy at this stage. I’m never concerned by the sound of their shaking a ziplock bag, I know what they’re up to but they don’t yet have the dexterity to open sealed bags.
Segue to another thing they enjoy:
They’ve spent months trying to steal Sera’s kibble out of her bowl, never succeeding because we’d always pull them away in time. Sera, it must be noted, would probably let them take the food out of their bowl while she ate. Her only reaction to a baby sneaking up on her food bowl is to move over to make space.
Unbeknownst to me, Smol had discovered the jackpot of an unsealed dog food bag and went to town. I’d dismissively handwaved their location: they’re fine, they’re just playing with Sera’s food bag.
PiC, attentive father that he is, went to check anyway and discovered them with two hands, and a mouth, full of kibble. “Oh. They’re just eating dog food.”
Oh. Oh indeed.
Pupdate
Sera continues to demonstrate hitherto unthought of levels of patience for Smol’s overenthusiastic love pats. They really like petting Sera, but they also pet Sera like a heavy metal drummer.
They do pet all of us that way, but Sera should be the most confused about it. She will walk away if she’s not in the mood, which I am most grateful for, but she’s usually just very patient about it.
Precious Moments
JB: What do you call 2 bananas?
PiC: A pear of bananas?
JB: no! Two slippers!
Us: What? I don’t get it.
JB: It’s just a joke!
*****
The (would-be) traveler’s lament
JB: I wish travel was easier.
Me: Me too.
JB: Why can’t we teleport?
Me: Boy I wish I had the answer to that question.
*****
Are they, though? (Possessiveness)
Me to Smol: Hello, my potato.
JB: Hah, you’re calling them your potato when they’re actually my potato?
Also…
JB to Smol: You’re so cute, you’re so cute, I love you, my dinosaur!
February 7, 2022
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 319: Welcome to another week of “What childcare?” with the added twist of a random no school day in the middle of the week. It started at 430 with Smol babbling at us, WIDE AWAKE.
JB is highly offended by this day off, it’s on their library visit day and they had plans for the book they were going to borrow next. I see their pain. Though PiC did just take them to the public library on the weekend, and they did come back with about 20 books, they still want one more.
For my part, I am obsessively watching the mail for our tax forms. It doesn’t make them come any faster but I can’t quite stop stalking the mail anyway.
Smol finally had a good first nap today, and woke up in time for lunch. They were hanging out with PiC while I wrapped up some work, and had started complaining about wanting to eat. As usual, I was talking to them like they can understand me, “let’s get some food into you” and went over to set up their seat and tray. They walked right over to me as if making a conscious decision to come to me and get ready to eat! Like they know things! It was kind of amazing.
Year 2, Day 320: Some of PiC’s work frustration is encapsulated perfectly in Debbie’s comment over at Nicole and Maggie. He has to keep asking his collaborators / vendors to do their d*mn jobs and they won’t unless he CCs their supervisor. Then he found out that this incompetent lout was promoted! Unbelievable.
Parts of my work frustration is the same: sometimes it feels like pulling teeth to get people to reply to simple emails and yes we’re all still in a pandemic but when this is ultimately work that they want done and won’t do their part and will then whine at me later about why it took so long… I wish to bite them.
*****
JB doesn’t have school today, so I scheduled a couple of Outschool lessons for them to try out: some art and some language. In the hour before their first much-anticipated lesson, they were told that I was working and PiC was in a meeting so only come ask me if they needed something. They were left to their own devices after that. I snuck out to check on them about 20 minutes before their lesson and they were laying on the ground reading. It’s really nice to see that they make reasonably decent choices when not under direct observation because I can’t say much for their judgement when they ARE being observed!
Unfortunately the teacher never showed up for the second class which was a massive waste of my time. We got a refund but it was 25 minutes I couldn’t get back.
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February 4, 2022
1. I’d been hoarding my Bing points. I normally redeem for Target gift cards which either cover Lakota Giving or diapers, both of which are eminently worthwhile, but I’ve been in need of a dopamine burst that hit differently. And here it is! We were not going to do our normal Lunar New Year feast with friends, and I was a little sad about that, but mostly realistic that I simply did not want to make the extraordinary effort to make it happen. There’s a very popular place nearby that does Asian BBQ foods that’s a huge pain to buy from. You can’t call in an order, they rarely pick up and if they do pick up, they may not fill your order for hours. Also: we were gifted Doordash gift cards for the holiday. For the sake of the businesses, and our pocketbooks, we do pickup direct from local restaurants as much as we can but there are many days where we can’t deal with the pain of running out for another thing at the end of a hard day. We hoard Doordash money against serious need. (We have a lot more of those than we’re willing to admit and we should do better on that front.) But this is one way we can win win win: a combination of my points redemption and their gift card = a big order from this restaurant. This will supply some delicious BBQ for our Lunar New Year dinner so we don’t have to waste hours of energy fetching it and I will be able to freeze a few portions of it for future dinners when we are on the ropes. It’ll wipe out our reserve but I think it’s worth it.
(After the fact: the delivery was botched but we got part of our order and that was yummy!) (more…)