This past year, as awful as it’s been at times, has also taught me a lot. About what’s important, what makes me happy, and what I think is really important in life. I’ve also realized I no longer have the energy to waste on things like keeping secrets. And so, one of the bigger secrets I’ve had to keep in my adult life, I have no interest in keeping again.
I’m pregnant!
We woke up on Christmas morning to pouring rain, high winds, and warm temperatures which dissolved our more than a foot of snow we’d had when we went to bed. At least we’d had a white Christmas Eve? It made me glad that we’d spent the entire day before playing outside and enjoying the snow, since we stayed inside all day Christmas.
Which was fine, that’s pretty much how I like my Christmas days. At home, in my PJs, not straying far from the couch or the Christmas tree. We listened to Christmas music, watched some movies, ate yummy food and of course opened many presents.
Just because there isn’t going to be a big party, doesn’t mean that I can’t decorate like there would be! Picking out a theme, deciding what the cake would look like, those are things that are fun to me. I enjoy doing that for my children’s birthdays, so even though we’re in the middle of a pandemic, that didn’t stop me.
Well we did it. 2020 is coming to a close, Christmas is here, and I feel like I’m at the end of a marathon. I’m excited to be taking some time off of work, for staying in my PJs and watching the kids go nuts over their presents. They definitely get what’s happening this year, have been diligently counting down on their advent calendars every day, and becoming crazier and crazier as each day passes.
Sometimes I have a hard time time coming to terms with the fact that you’ll be two, since for me, time has stood still during this pandemic. Much like my desk calendar in the city, my mind is stuck in March. You know, back before you even knew how to walk? So how can it be that you’re two? On the other hand, it seems like I’ve been telling you forever that you don’t “get” to wear a mask until you’re two! Just a little bit longer to wait, we keep telling you. (Don’t think it’s lost on me that the biggest marker of you turning two will be that you need to be masked now - what a perfect snapshot of our world).
This year has been… different.
I know I like to talk about how it’s a lost year, an awful year, the worst year ever.. but it’s not that simple. This year has given us a lot of great things too. (Did everyone see our local fame on The Great Christmas Light Fight??) And while yes, a lot of things aren’t how I had planned, some things actually are.
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.
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!
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
Every single day, E wakes up and asks if we can go trick or treating.
I kind of thought he’d forget about trick or treating after a year, but three year olds have amazing memories. Besides the fact it’s the first week of October and trick or treating is not really an option, I’m not sure there will be trick or treating this year, period. We’ve been debating doing an egg hunt in the yard, or trick or treating just to the neighbor’s house, but either way, we’ll need some distractions for the next few weeks.
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.
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.