One-Day Weekend

I realllly needed this weekend, mostly to deal with house stuff that just isn’t getting done during the week (good thing the children and I don’t need to put on real clothes to go anywhere because the laundry situation is out of control). But I stayed up late Friday night to watch a documentary I needed to see for work, then got up at 4:30 on Saturday morning to try to get some editing done. By the time Will was ready to go down for his morning nap around 9:00 I was totally exhausted. I slept for a couple hours, went on a 30-minute walk around the neighborhood (big mistake), and lay on the floor next to Will for an hour until Matt took him and Alice outside. Then I slept until dinnertime. So nothing got done on Saturday!

Today was much better and we had a nice, uneventful day hanging out at home. I cleaned up the kitchen. Matt fixed the lawnmower. I took my tomato seedlings outside so they could get some extra sunlight. We’re running a little low on food so I’m probably going to have to go to the grocery store at some point this week (wearing one of the cute masks my aunt sent us!). So that will be an exciting trip in the car. You know how some old people like to just “go for a drive”? I get it now. I really, really get it.

My old band director lives in our neighborhood and has been going out on her porch nearly every night since the stay-at-home order started to play a “Corona Concert” for whoever is walking by. Sometimes other people bring their instruments and join her. It is my very favorite thing to come out of all of this, and I kind of hope she’ll keep it up occasionally after we’re all back out in the world again.

Reading Update:

Liberty Falling by Nevada Barr: The Anna Pigeon series is my very favorite mystery series (national parks + murder, what could be better?) and I usually devour them, but this one took me a long eleven days to read—mostly because I was reading it over my first days back at work and partly because this is my least favorite AP book to date. It takes place in New York City with the Statue of Liberty as a centerpiece and I just really missed having a more typical national park as the setting. The mystery was compelling, though, and the ending was pretty gripping. Just not my personal fave (for the record, my favorites so far in the series are #2, A Superior Death, and #11, Flashback. Finished on 4/17/20.

The Hypnotist’s Love Story by Liane Moriarty: I really like Liane Moriarty’s books and I just started this one today and am already sucked in. She knows how to tell a story!

Corona Concert Series

Easter 2020

There have been a lot of moments over the past month or so that have felt strange—”returning” to work in my living room, wearing a mask to the grocery store, realizing I could unpack the extra clothes in Will’s diaper bag because we never take him anywhere… but I hadn’t really felt sad about what we were missing until this weekend. Since I was just coming out of maternity leave and living that newborn-mom life, we didn’t have much on our calendar this spring. But I was sad on Easter when the grandparents came over and stood in the parkway to watch while Alice did her Easter egg hunt in the front yard. I had gotten the kids all dressed up because it felt weird not to, and then we just went back inside, put our quarantine clothes back on, and went about our lives in our house. We are so lucky in the grand scheme of things and I know that, but I kept thinking about how Will is never going to be this little again and his grandmas are missing out on getting to hold him. Stuff like that.

But Alice was very cute! She and I dyed eggs on Saturday (something we usually do with my mom) and she got way too much candy in her Easter basket, so she has been very happy and sugared up. Hopefully we’ll be able to celebrate with our extended family next year!

So proud of her eggs!

Photo is a little grainy because Grandma used the zoom on her phone to keep herself social distanced

Double life

Mom and editor—today I did it all! Will woke up to eat at 4:!5, and after he went back down I headed downstairs to make tea and dive back in to work. I had a manuscript waiting for me and I spent a couple of hours editing before anyone else was awake. Then Matt left for work and I started juggling. Overall it wasn’t too bad. Alice read books for a bit until I needed to get on a long conference call, and then she got to dive into 90 minutes of Blippi. Will alternated between sleeping and wanting to sit with me and wiggle excessively on camera. He is the cutest coworker!

We took a quick walk before lunch and nap. It was beautiful outside and Alice is in love with the scooter we got her as an early Easter present. While she was sleeping I got some more work done and caught up with co-workers. Inspired by 168 Hours, I’ve decided to track my time. When I shut my work stuff down at 6:00, I had worked 9 hours, so I spent 4 hours during the day on childcare and lunch. It might seem inefficient to drag out the workday so long, but I saved an hour on commuting and would have taken the hour for lunch anyway if I had been in the office (or, more likely, worked through it). So today the kids basically extended my work day for 2 hours. Not bad! And not having to pump and being able to go for a walk with them over lunchtime are definite perks.

Tomorrow I’ll have fewer conference calls and hopefully will be able to get more some more “real” work done as a result. We have our biannual seasonal launch meeting coming up later this week and I need to get my head around all the presentations I’m responsible for. Nothing like jumping back in with both feet!

Favorite coworker!

Diving back in

The weirdness of the past several weeks has been compounded for me because I’ve been on maternity leave… but tomorrow I’m diving back in to work from the comfort of my home workstation set up on a dining table in my living room. Matt is still going to work, so I’ll be here watching two young children and doing my job simultaneously. I am nervous. I sat on 2 1/2 hours of conference calls on Friday and while it wasn’t a disaster, it was pretty exhausting. This is how I’m expecting my schedule to basically function:

4:45 a.m.: Wake up, brush hair and teeth, put on professional-ish shirt (no one can see my pants on conference calls!), make highly caffeinated tea

5:00 a.m.: Sit down at computer, edit or do other focused work (no checking email until after some real work gets done!)

7:00 a.m.: Check email, probably feed Will

7:30-8:00 a.m.: Get Alice breakfast and set her up with some kind of activity

8:00-10:00 a.m.: Conference calls, manage email, work on small projects, cater to children’s whims as necessary

10:00-11:00 a.m.: Take kids outside, run Alice around as much as possible, manage urgent emails from phone

11:00-12:00: Manage email, work on small projects

12:00-1:00 p.m.: Unavailable for work, making lunch and putting kids down for nap

1:00-3:00 p.m.: SACRED NAPTIME! Edit or do focused work, participate in extremely important conference calls that require no child drop-ins

3:00-5:00 p.m.: Work on projects (Alice will get screen time after nap)

5:00-6:00 p.m.: Clear out inbox and close things down for the day (Matt will hopefully be home at 5:00 or before most days)

And of course I can always hop back on later at night and on the weekends as needed. I’ve had several conversations with Alice about how I’m “going back to work” and will need her to play by herself a lot more, but she’s three—she has no idea what work is or why it’s important. So we will see how it goes. I’m really hoping to limit her screen time to two hours every afternoon. Wish me luck!

Reading Update:

The Highway by C.J. Box: This is Book 2 in Box’s Highway Quartet thriller series. I read the first book, Back of Beyond, a few weeks ago and enjoyed it a lot. BoB is set in Yellowstone National Park, which is why I picked it off the shelf at the library—any book set in a national park is a book for me. The Highway takes us out of that setting into small towns in Montana and features a really sinister villain who doesn’t get his comeuppance in the end, leaving a clear path to Book 3. Box’s writing is fast-paced and engaging, and while I didn’t enjoy The Highway quite as much as BoB (mostly because of the lack of national parks content and because the story felt a bit more grim), I'm definitely planning to finish out the series as soon as our library system opens back up. Finished on 4/1/20.

168 Hours by Laura Vanderkam: I read one of Vanderkam’s other books, I Know How She Does It, on my maternity leave with Alice, so it felt fitting to dive into her best-known work now. 168 Hours reminds readers that we all have the same amount of time in a week, but some people make much better use of that time than others, and gives us ideas for how to optimize our hours. There wasn’t really anything new for me here since I’m pretty familiar with Vanderkam’s thoughts on the subject via her podcast “Best of Both Worlds”, which I wrote about recently in my favorite podcasts roundup, but I enjoyed going into a bit more detail and reminding myself as I head into what is likely going to be a fairly busy and stressful period of time working from home and caring for children simultaneously that I have a lot more control over my time than societal narratives may tell me I do. Finished on 4/3/20.

When We Were Vikings by Andrew David MacDonald: I first heard about this quirky debut novel from an editor at Book Expo last spring and I immediately added it to my TBR. Fiction, about a young woman named Zelda who was born on the Fetal Alcohol Syndrome spectrum and is obsessed with vikings. I loved the narrative voice and all the references to Norse culture, and I devoured it in less than a day. Also, the packaging of the hardcover edition is beautiful, and it’s definitely earning a forever place on my bookshelf. Highly recommended! Finished on 4/5/20.

Our neighbor has a flag for every occasion!

Time keeps passing

In some ways it has felt like time has almost stopped over the past two weeks, what with staying at home 98% of the time and cycling through the mundane but comforting routines of our lives right now. But just as I was opening up this blog post, Will rolled over onto his belly for the first time, reminding me that time does keep passing and we’re not stuck in some kind of eternal holding pattern, no matter how much it might seem like it sometimes.

Matt and I are in a friendly (read: highly contentious) competition about who can get more “ripped.” Given that I just had a baby and he has put on about 15 pounds over the last few years, our version of ripped is pretty unimpressive. But I have been doing 8 minute abs every day along with working on the 100 pushups challenge, and I loaded the kids up into the Burley this morning for a 2+ mile round trip walk. We delivered some handmade cards to Alice’s best little buddy’s house, and I took advantage of Alice and Will falling asleep to get some extra walking in.

Some neighborhood friends stopped by to visit with us through our glass storm door around lunchtime, which was fun and also sad because Alice couldn’t go out to play with them. We have one of those doors where the glass part can come down to reveal a screen that slides in and out of the door, so I can pull the glass down and leave about 12 inches of screen at the top—perfect for being able to easily hear people standing on the other side while blocking all potential germs! Then we got on a Google Hangouts chat with two other families before dinner, and Alice’s other little friend put a card for her through our mail slot. All in all it was a pretty social day, with zero actual physical contact!

Alice and I also mixed up a batch of bread dough this morning (recipe here) and it’s in the oven right now. We’ll see how it turns out—the dough seemed awfully wet even after its 7+ hour rise. I am the opposite of an expert baker, so it’s possible I managed to mess up even this extremely basic bread. Annnd I just looked out the window and saw that Matt and Alice are riding his (one-person) motorcycle down our driveway, across the street, up our neighbor’s driveway, and then back to our house again, over and over. Yay quarantine!

Reading Update:

Dead Wake by Erik Larson: A great read! Probably my favorite I’ve read of his after Devil in the White City. Also really made me want to re-watch Titanic. Finished on 3/26/20 (audio).

“A” Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton: It’s fun to start a new-to-me series with so many books lined up to read. I’m usually not a big fan of first-person POV in crime fiction, but it worked for me here. Grafton is one of the greats and it’s exciting to dive in knowing how beloved these alphabet mysteries are and looking forward to the character development of Kinsey Millhone. I thought these lines summed her up well, as she muses about how she doesn’t care to admire scenery as she drives: “Driving anywhere looks much the same to me. I stare at the concrete roadway. I watch the yellow line. I keep track of large trucks and passenger vehicles with little children asleep in the backseat and I keep my foot pressed flat to the floor until I reach my destination.” Finished on 3/27/20.

At least she’s wearing her helmet!

Quarantine - Day 3

It’s only Day 3 of our self-isolation and the days are already starting to blend together. This is exactly why I’m blogging—to be able to remember my life, especially this extremely strange period of it! We went through our morning routine of breakfast and Camp Kindergarten. Alice and I made a trek to the basement to get our guitars and brought them up to the living room so we could play band together. Then Will woke up from his morning nap and I loaded Elton John and Adele into the CD player. One of my goals for maternity leave was to organize our very large CD collection (we’re so old school!) and it hasn’t happened yet but I think it will over the next week or so. Thinking about what music to put on for the day is a little bright spot, and it’s fun to go through all the CDs and remember forgotten favorites.

Nap was kind of a disaster, after the first fifteen minutes when I laid down between Alice and Will and had many grateful thoughts about how lucky we are to be together and healthy and have everything we need. Both kids were simultaneously asleep for only about 20 minutes and neither of them slept nearly as long as they should have, so I didn’t get to learn the bass part to “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” the way I had planned. I’m trying out a FaceTime band practice with some friends tomorrow!

It rained most of the day so we didn’t go outside, but Alice did a great job playing by herself and with me, and the screen time was reasonable, probably two hours or a little less. She cracked me up wanting to play “Miss Megan” from Camp Kindergarten and give me lessons and homework to do. Fish sticks, baked potatoes, and frozen vegetables for dinner, nothing fancy. Matt let her take the longest bath ever but I didn’t fall asleep putting her to bed, so now I get to go read!

It’s supposed to be warm tomorrow and we need to get out of the house (and I need to get some exercise—this is something I need to find a solution for and build into our routine). I don’t know how I’m going to keep Alice away from her friends if we see them in the neighborhood and I don’t think she’ll understand if I try to explain why we can’t go to the playground. UGH. Not being able to see her buddies is going to be the worst part of this whole thing. In some ways I’m glad my kids are so little while we go through this—the social isolation would just be worse if they were older and I would feel a lot more stress about school being closed and feeling the need to do educational stuff at home, but it’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on in a way that’s not scary. And then of course there’s the constant physical and emotional drain of caring for two kids nonstop in a closed environment!

I didn’t do a very good job of staying off the internet today, which is probably why I’m feeling blah. Time to stop computering and go do something else!

Quarantine - Day 2

Posting this just after midnight! It was super sunny this morning, which helped me feel a little less doom-and-gloom, although both Alice and Will were up and ready to start their days before 7:00. We played for a bit, had breakfast, and joined the Facebook Live for Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten again. Alice was much more engaged this time! My favorite part about it is all the new kid-friendly songs I’m learning. After “school” was over, she played by herself while I cleaned up the house a bit and made lunch. Something puzzling—she almost always does a good job eating her lunch, but we often struggle at dinnertime to get her to eat more than a few bites of whatever we’re having. One contributing factor could be that lunch tends to be less of a “real” meal and more of a snack plate. Today was, for example, was carrots and cherry tomatoes with salad dressing, sliced pear, cheese, and veggie straws on a plate. But I’m not sure whether the difference is because of the food we eat or if she’s snacking more than I realize before dinner. ANYWAY.

Will was already snoozing in our bed by Alice’s naptime, so I tucked her in with him and told her I was going to take a shower. By the time I came back, she was asleep! It was amazing—usually I have to lie down with her to get her to go down and half the time I fall asleep myself. But today I was clean and then had more than an hour to read and putter around with both of them unconscious. Win!

We had planned a playdate with her swim buddy before the social distancing recommendations got so strong and I didn’t have the heart to cancel it, so he and his mom came over for what will likely be our very last social interaction for some time. It’s so hard to explain to Alice what is going on, and I’m expecting many, many questions about why she can’t see her friends. Ugh.

Matt came home, realized he forgot to vote and went out again to take care of that, and then he and I tuned in to a webinar by my investing guru Phil Town while Alice watched a show. Chicken stir fry for dinner, a long, drawn-out bedtime that resulted in me falling asleep in Alice’s bed again, and then some anxious social media scrolling rounded out my evening.

The only thing I did to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day was to take a picture of Will in the same onesie Alice wore three years ago. Who wore it better??

Frantic Friday

It feels like I woke up this morning, started running, and didn’t stop until after dinner! Yesterday I learned that a regional furniture store, Art Van, was going out of business and liquidation sales would start today, so I steeled myself to take Alice and Will to see if we could score some deals. Matt and I have been incredibly lucky to inherit most of our current furniture from family and friends, but I’m sloooowly trying to upgrade some things and fill in the gaps with new or vintage finds (fighting my penny-pinching nature all the way).

One thing I’m in the market for is a narrow table to put in the little room next to our kitchen, and I needed to find a tape measure to figure out the dimensions I would be working with. Of course, this morning none of the half-dozen tape measures we own could be found. While I was in the basement searching, I popped a load of laundry in the dryer. Five minutes later, I smelled something burning. When I opened the dryer door, the smell got MUCH stronger. I freaked out, unplugged everything I could see, and climbed into the thicket of spider webs behind the dryer to feel for hot spots. Matt hasn’t had a chance to go down there yet and figure out what happened, but thank god for those missing tape measures because if I hadn’t stayed in the basement to look for them, the house probably would have burned down—or at least gotten very, very smokey.

Tape measure-hunting helper

Tape measure finally found and dimensions in hand, I set out for the furniture store with a three-year-old and a newborn. There was a line at the door five minutes before opening, but we got in with the first rush of people and cruised around to scope everything out. Alice bopped around trying out every chair and couch, Will fussed and then eventually slept, and I pestered Matt with too many texts and pictures to make sure he wouldn’t hate whatever I bought. We ended up with two lamps and no one to help us carry them to the car, so we took two trips across the parking lot, with each lamp balanced very carefully above a snoozing Will on the stroller handle.

We hustled straight from the furniture store over to Alice’s tumbling class, sprinting in ten minutes late. I sat on the floor in the hallway and nursed Will, not the comfiest experience ever. Then a meltdown over veggie straws and the shortest nap ever launched us into the afternoon. We had a playdate at Alice’s swim buddy’s house, which involved Connect Four, painting, trying on of many old Halloween costumes, and many other activities, all while bouncing a fussy baby. By dinnertime I was happy to drop Alice off for a sleepover with her beloved Aunt Katie and head home with Will to find Matt grilling burgers. I had grand plans to go grocery shopping after dinner but we took advantage of our toddler-free evening and watched Lady Bird instead (it was okay—mostly it just made me desperate to see Little Women again for more Saoirse Ronan in my life). So there’s no food in the house, the dishwasher hasn’t been run, and the trail of magazines Alice laid out on the floor two days ago to avoid stepping on “hot lava” hasn’t been picked up, but I’m going to finish my ice cream and hop into bed with Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner because it has been A DAY.