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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June 18, 2021
1. As a notebook hoarder, I’m pretty excited to discover that I’m within two pages of finishing up a notebook. I’ve been chronicling my day to day completed tasks and checklists since March in a single little book. It’s fun to cycle through my colorful pens and helpful to manage my expectations for work in writing. Now I have to decide which notebook to use next and do I keep the completed books? Probably for a little while, there are some reference bits in there that I may need to look back to.
2. Our insulation is helping! Our floors aren’t nearly so frigid and we don’t need to bundle up in three layers (or run the heat) to stay warm enough to function every day! It’ll be ages before we break even on the money front but I don’t care. We’re feeling the benefit every day and we’re not wasting heat when and if we do run the furnace.
Challenges this week: Our friend has passed and we’re all grieving deeply.
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June 14, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 85: Alice recommended a math app, Math Tango, but when I went on the hunt for it, I realized that w are totally outclassed. My iPad can only be updated to Version 9. Math Tango requires Version 13. And they don’t have a desktop version. Drat. I can’t justify buying an iPad for a kid’s use, much less in addition to the family laptop that I was needing to replace.
JB starts their summer schedule today. It’s a bit spotty. I didn’t get information early enough to schedule a full set of Spanish lessons for two weeks but we’ll see how it goes.
I function so much better when I have a structure to work with. Even if things have to change, even if they change last minute, I feel better having a framework. This goes for work, for handling JB’s days, for Smol’s day to day. Now that we have an idea of how long Smol can optimally function (about 1 hour and 20 minutes up to 2 hours of awake time right now), that gives us a firmer footing on when to do what to support his sleep training.
I was thinking over at Nicole and Maggie’s about which of us would be suited to being a House Spouse and realized that since we can’t do without both our incomes, the next best (also highly unlikely) thing would be both of us working part time and still getting half time for everything else. We both have a lot of household stuff we take care of in our separate realms of expertise and we’re always badly juggling the four areas of work / home / parenting / personal. The personal gets the shortest shrift under the current circumstances but if we both had half time, what glorious self care would result? It’s nice to dream anyway.
It was a long frustrating day at work, I felt myself completely tensed up as I struggled to cross things off my to do list. I very pointedly limited that list for today because I knew there was more work than even I could do on a good day but still I kept getting derailed by one problem after another. I got through but I was really irritable at several points and had to make an effort to rehydrate and refuel. Pacing myself was never my strong suit. I’m a sprinter through and through and you can see that in my work style.
On the bright side I did manage to call the medical equipment people to clear up this nonsense about them billing me when I don’t owe them a dime and got our eye exams scheduled. That bit feels good. (more…)
June 11, 2021
I had a hard time coming up with anything for this list at first, but here goes!
1. I made a sale on Poshmark! Yay!
2. That little kitchen scale PiC pushed me to get has come in handy for clearing to-do items off my list. I needed to go to the post office for two packages that had been waiting for ages but I simply haven’t had any time or energy to fit that in. The scale took care of figuring out postage for two of the four things that didn’t merit going out flat rate.
Challenges this week: My back pain is back. I’ve not done my planks in months, and I’m not even getting out for a walk once a day, so of course it’s back. I should have remembered to start them again once sleep training started taking hold, I had stopped because of neck pain flaring up and just being too dang tired to exist. Back to planking.
I’m struggling with grieving our friend as they enter hospice and their final days of life. It’s setting off my defense mechanisms where I distance myself from people, tell myself that they don’t care about me anyway, and go into my antisocial-shell in a futile attempt to protect myself from further pain. It won’t protect me at all but I’m learning to recognize that’s what my instincts tell me to do.
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June 7, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 78: Every single time I think we have a grip on our schedule for the summer …. nope! Something big shifts or changes. So now I’m back to the drawing board. I had to take one weekly remote class off the board entirely, one weekly remote class can’t be weekly any more, and their 4 days a week tutor is now down to 3 days a week. We did add a new weekly exercise class for June so that helps.
I realize that this is just practice for the shifting we’ll have to do forever and ever amen. With adults, you can fall into a rut (or deliberately stick to a routine which is my favorite), but with kids, things are constantly changing for one reason or another.
I’ll figure it out.
I have one weekly exercise class on the calendar, then we set the new schedule with the tutor this week. Once that’s done, I can add the Spanish classes in. Then I’ll see if we can add some virtual and maybe outdoor playdates. Thank goodness for aunties and uncles who generously offer their time for the virtual playdates.
Year 2, Day 79: PiC and I had a hilarious fight all the way to the baby’s crib over whose turn it was to take the first post-nap wake up period. I won because he was laughing so hard and I’m used to fighting through laughter but I conceded the baby anyway and went to work instead. I still don’t know why he didn’t want to take the kids in the afternoon instead of splitting the morning and splitting the afternoon.
It was a gloriously (and rare) sunny day today and PiC and the kids got some good backyard time in. JB worked really hard to make Smol Acrobat laugh, way harder than was strictly necessary considering they are Smol’s favorite person and almost anything they do gets a laugh. They chortle themselves into exhaustion. I tried to get some sun too but I missed the narrow window of time where conditions were good. Our blustery windows started howling through the yard, trying to blow me and my computer away. Ah well. At least the kids had their fun.
I was feeling pretty good about Smol’s napping today. They have been falling asleep on their own with less and less fighting, with better stretches of sleep more regularly. I don’t panic up half as much as I used to when I see them moving on the baby monitor because movement is normal now and doesn’t always mean they’re going to wake up. And even if they do, sometimes they just need some time to cry and protest and go back to sleep. And even if they wake up after a short nap which used to feel like daggers in the heart, I can reasonably hope that the next one will be better instead of despairing. We had so many days with just 30 minute naps, all day, before sleep training and the pain of it still lingers. So I’m deeply appreciating this right now.
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June 1, 2021
On Money
Income
Our primary income comes from our full time jobs. We have minimal income from investing in index funds and dividend stocks (all reinvested). We earn money on the side to supplement our main incomes. We get a bit of income from Swagbucks and cash back sites (Rakuten, Mr.Rebates). Some posts have affiliate links that pay a micro-commission to keep the blog running and I’ve added a way to support the blog in the sidebar to the right!
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $801.61 in dividends this month from the stocks portfolio. This was an unusually big month and that’s all reinvested.
While I work hard to cultivate our alternative income streams, they’re still too tiny for us to make any changes to our work lives. Unfortunately, we’re still very dependent on our W-2 income unless and until we live in a lower COLA. That isn’t as simple a fix as people would have you believe, since PiC’s job with the good salary and the great benefits are right here in the Bay Area. Don’t think I haven’t considered it! But there’s a bigger picture involved. It would cost us a whole lot of money to move, we’d be giving up our community we’ve taken so long to build here which is a huge deal for me because I do NOT make friends easily, and neither of us are prepared to take the risk of going down to one income / career right now. With two incomes, we have some options and flexibility. We can save aggressively, we can give money to causes we care about, we can pay to solve problems that are bigger than we can handle. I think about that for the future, though.
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May 31, 2021
Year 2 of COVID in the Bay Area.
Year 2, Day 71: I overheard kindergarten students talking about their experiences at Disneyland and other amusement parks with frequent flier style attitudes. They might have been exaggerating but if not, and this is the Bay Area so it’s totally plausible, the idea that young kids might have gone to Disney multiple times already was jarring. I grew up a mere hour away from there and we went to Disneyland once only because my school arranged a field trip when we were older. We couldn’t afford to go to Disneyland for fun. And it’s so much more expensive now than it was back in the 80s. Heck, with the money we have now, it still seems prohibitively expensive.
We go to Comic Con every year but we stay with family, we economize on food expenses, and kids attend free. Even with travel, we make it an affordable trip in a way I can’t imagine making Disney because just getting into the door is exorbitant.
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Civilizing small humans while still giving them the tools to thrive is hard work.
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We’re on Day 3 of terrible second and third naps for Smol. They were doing so WELL for a few days last week; they’d get two really solid naps. In this series, we are getting one semi-decent morning nap and then we’re lucky to get 40 minutes at a time after that.
Sigh.
*****
I missed this Ask the Grumpies when it first came around: How are you dealing with returning to post-vaccination life? I’m not anywhere near returning to post-vaccination life myself. I’m not yet fully vaccinated so it’s not a relevant question yet. Even when I am, the kids still aren’t close to vaccines yet. We still assume that we won’t be traveling this year for a lot of reasons. So their question of what do we want to keep from pandemic life is more relevant to me. A lot more stuff became accessible for me this year with the shift to remote only and curbside services. Though we never used grocery delivery, curbside pickups for retail and restaurants was so so so helpful in preserving my limited energy.
Year 2, Day 72: Here’s a sad discovery. Those little packs of powdered donuts that were such a treat when I was growing up? They taste terrible (now)! Of course JB still likes them. I too enjoyed terrible tasting desserts as a kid. And a teen. And in my 20s.
*****
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May 25, 2021
Growth
This month’s discovery: I’m not going to be able to hang them upside much longer. They’re too big. O_O
Emotionally, they’ve made great leaps and bounds. Some steps forward and some back too, of course. They were practicing mindfulness and communicating what they felt and what they needed. They’re also practicing appropriate choices given time and place.
Culinarily, I’m puzzled how we ended up with a six year old who thinks that when we split food, it should be three ways equally. But they’ve always been that way. The real question is how did a 2 and 3 year old eat adult size portions??
Language
Words have meaning but in JB’s world, they’re all the wrong words: “hitball” for baseball. “Ketchup loaf” for meatloaf.
You’d think they weren’t familiar with the English language. But they’re reading tons! Alvin Ho, Geronimo Stilton, Amelia Bedelia for young readers, Kitty and the Sky Garden Adventure, Superman Family Adventures.
Responsibility
We’ve been refining JB’s responsibilities. We’re not adding a lot, just a few small things here and there, but focusing on having them do a better job of the jobs they do currently have because what’s passable work for a 4 year old isn’t for a 6 year old who has more dexterity and can have more attention to detail. Folding laundry, for one thing, has to be neater. They should be hanging up clothes in the right places where, before, it was fine for them to make it to any closet. Cleaning more thoroughly and taking charge of cleaning up their own bigger messes: It’s easy to be in the habit of doing the big stuff because we’re adults but we want to be mindful to keep building their skills.
We’re also working on pushing them to take the initiative, in chores and in entertaining themselves.
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