Life Updates

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A Christmas Tradition

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There are a lot of things we’ve lost this year. A lot of traditions broken. Our annual family trip to Maine was cancelled. Birthday parties, get togethers, even the Boston Marathon is going to miss two years. So when I started thinking about what Christmas was going to look like this year, there was one thing I didn’t want to give up. Sure it’s not the most important tradition, and I’m sure the kids wouldn’t have noticed, but I realized it would make me feel a little bit better if this one wasn’t broken.

And honestly anything I can do to feel a little bit normal these days, I’ll take it. My coping strategy with this pandemic seems to be part good enough and part humor. So that’s what led me to order Tom a Santa suit back in September.

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Thanksgiving

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We pretty much jumped over this holiday and went from Halloween to Christmas, even putting up decorations a week before Thanksgiving. I was also fully prepared to order pizza and ignore it completely, but in the end we decided to create our own small celebration. It was certainly more simple than anything we’ve experienced in the past - we didn’t even cook a turkey!

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A Home Project!

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On the surface, it feels like you should be able to get all kinds of things done to your house, now that all we do is stay home. In reality, nothing is happening. Finding time to clean our floors seems impossible, let alone do all the home improvement projects my brain can dream up. So it is a VERY BIG THING that we somehow scraped together lunch breaks and half days and minutes here and there to get a big project done.

It’s way scaled back from my original plan, but we’ll call this Phase One. It’s a big improvement from what was there, super pretty and definitely functional. But I might put a hold on any other big projects for a while. It turns out doing these things in a pandemic with two small children is not easy.

We’ll get into the details, but first, a before and after!

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A Final Note on Halloween

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Look, we all know 2020 has all but turned into an expletive. There have been a lot of cancelled plans, a lot of things we’ve missed out on, and a lot of fear. But Halloween seemed like something we could do, albeit with a few modifications. So we made plans for an outdoor scavenger hunt, and as much fun as we could.

And then we had a record breaking October snow storm.

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One of Those Things

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I didn’t see it happen, which is probably why I can write about it without freaking out. I was upstairs and heard a fall, and then the normal reminder to breathe which comes after. Both our kids, but especially E, hold their breath when they get hurt, and if we can’t get them to take a breath, they’ll pass out. By the amount of time it was taking for Tom to get him to breathe, I knew it was E who had fallen.

I heard the cry, so I knew he hadn’t passed out, but since it had taken a while, I decided to head downstairs to make sure everything was okay. Sometimes after they get hurt, our kids like to get a hug from both parents.

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Halloween Costumes!

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As a parent of two toddlers (I need to stop calling the big one a toddler, huh?), I’m always looking for ways to reduce stress and anxiety. Holidays are times where those things come to a peak. There are big expectations, a lot of excitement and emotions. So instead of trying really hard to get a good picture of them in their costumes when all they want to do is get candy and everyone is tired and tantruming, I did it a little different.

The week before Halloween.

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Catching Up on Videos!

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I don’t even know who I am anymore - posting two videos in as many weeks? It makes me look like a functioning adult without a million things on her to-do list. Of course that’s not true, just yesterday I managed to bake a breakfast casserole without adding the eggs. My brain is all sorts of mush still, but photo stuff just has a way of creeping to the top of my to do list this time of year.

So while our house may be dirty, E’s bed is half made, and we’re choosing between leftovers or trying my non egg casserole for lunch, you at least benefit from another video.

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Toddler Speak

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Our littlest toddler talks, quite a bit actually. You might not know this, because I haven’t posted recent videos, but he often speaks in full sentences now. He’s long had a large vocabulary of words, but now he’s starting to put them together more and more.

A recent favorite is to ask for us to put music on, and then ask the name of ever song that comes on. “What this song? What this song?” Over and over. Even if you just told him. And then he’ll ask the other adult in the room to confirm he gets the same answer. If you’re lucky, he’ll start dancing to it. He’s been unanimously named the best dancer of the house. When he feels a song, boy can he move!

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What Month Is It?

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Oh hello there. Seems that living in a pandemic is not always easy and is certainly exhausting. Whether it’s the extra patenting, the constant fear and anxiety or something else crazy, like zoom fatigue, I’m pretty much always tired these days. By the time the kids are in bed, I can barely keep my eyes open. I barely have enough brain power to watch an actual tv show, let alone do anything fun like document our life here. I have loads of pictures that need to be sorted through, too. Ugh.

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A Senior Toddler Update

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I guess I should technically be calling him a preschooler now, but that just seems too old! I’m holding on to every bit of babyness I can at this point, even as he repeatedly tells me that he’s a big kid now. Which he mostly is, but he does still sleep in a crib…

Speaking of which, he doesn’t want to go to bed at night or go down for naps lately, so his crib is filled with books for him to read. He always falls asleep (and usually pretty quick), but I’m not minding raising a kid who reads himself to sleep every night. The other day he had his little trailblazers book and he told me he read the whole thing, but he couldn’t remember the word “trailblazer” so he used “trail mix” instead.

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We Have Kittens!

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Oh hey, a lot’s happened this week. Let me try and catch you up.

You may remember we had a pregnant cat. A pregnant cat who was overdue, according to my calculations. It was getting to the point that it was almost comical. I was posting daily updates to let everyone know she was still pregnant, because I would get so many messages every morning asking. At work, too. I have a co-worker who got some chickens at the beginning of quarantine as her project, but they hadn’t laid any eggs yet. So every time we’d have a team meeting, our boss would ask: “Are there any kittens? Are there any eggs?” Always no.

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Fall Weekend

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Our new cat is howling and pacing and I’m assuming there are kittens coming, but to distract myself from that let’s recap our weekend! I have a ton of posts in draft trying to explain how we’re feeling lately and what life is like, but I’m having a hard time putting them together. So instead let’s do something easy.

Last weekend we decided to join every other person in New England and go apple picking. Seriously, on my morning team meeting Monday, everyone was eating apple something. My boss had just finished an apple muffin and was talking about dropping an apple pie off at his son’s house, a coworker was debating apple pancakes for breakfast, and I was telling them all about the apple coffee cake and apple chips we’d just made.

I Think Summer's Over

It could also be April right now, so I’m not completely sure, but I think summer is kind of over. As odd as it was for a summer, and as many things I feel like I missed out on, it still was pretty good?

We went to our favorite farm/petting zoo twice, which is probably about average for us. We spent a ton of time outside, and used our yard more than we ever have. We’re also closer to our neighbors than before, since everyone is home all the time, and we seem to catch each other for chats more often.

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A Baby Toddler Update

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These days all blur together and disappear so quickly that I’m worried I’m going to forget everything about them. Besides the fact that my brain doesn’t seem to be working right now, I feel like I haven’t written anything down in a while. So bear with me as I try to put together some semblance of an update on not so baby G.

Currently G is napping, but I just heard “leh-low!” over the baby monitor. I can’t tell if he’s dreaming about his favorite color, or he just woke up and decided to start naming things he loves.

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Chasing That Feeling

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I am riding a high.

The type of high that can only be achieved by checking something off your list. Something that’s been on the for way too long and has been hanging over your head for too long. It’s one of those things that you end up thinking about multiple times a day, worry about before you go to bed, and just want it taken care of. It’s times like these that I often wish we weren’t the adults here, and someone else would just come along and do it for us.

But when it’s done? Boy it feels so good.

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Still Summer

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Sometimes I forget it’s summer. I simultaneously think it’s still March and can’t believe it’s not September yet. Time is an odd thing now.

Of course it doesn’t always feel like summer, either. I’m certainly not doing or experiencing the things that usually mark summer for me. Even silly ones - commuting in the heat in long pants and arriving in the office all sweaty is a thing of the past. No longer am I getting into a hot car and burning my hands on the steering wheel and finding my water too hot to drink. I’m barely getting into the car at all.