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Some Me Time

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All three kids are in school full time now.

Somewhere, some judgmental person is like “how can you be so happy about your babies being out of the house all day???” but listen. I have spent the last eight years with someone either on me or in my uterus nonstop. Today, I got to go on a lunch date with my husband without finding someone to babysit for us. When I had to send emails this afternoon (because being a mom of three school-aged children means doing a lot of emailing), I didn’t have to worry that someone was going to get bored with whatever I’d thrown at them to distract them. I could just email and reply, email and reply. I was so fast.

So now I’m figuring out what to do with these hours between 8:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. when I used to have to spend 110% of my time making sure Isaac wasn’t bungee jumping from the top of the stairs (that still is a focus between 4:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., for the record), and a lot of it boils down to actually taking care of myself.

Anyone who’s raised twins can tell you that it’s a LOT of work. You essentially have to be in two places at once at all times, even more as they get older and more capable of causing problems on purpose (as they gleefully inform me they’re doing several times a day). Your own needs don’t just take a backseat; they get strapped to the rear bumper with some duct tape and you pray they won’t fall off when you hit a particularly gnarly pothole. And when it’s twins, it’s not a societal thing telling you that mom should give up taking care of herself while dad does whatever. If you’ve got a decent marriage, both parents are struggling and dragging themselves across the finish line at the end of every day, wondering how they survived.

Actually me at the end of any given day.

And then add autism into the mix, with its superpowers and drawbacks, and basically, I’m amazed that I made it to the twins’ first full day of school without actually being committed to a mental institution. 

(note that I did come close, but it was technically a partial hospitalization and it was under extenuating circumstances, i.e., a literal plague, so I still consider it a victory)

This week, self care mostly just looks like having very relaxing days. I was in sleep therapy for a while this spring and summer, and I’m pretty sure my sleep therapist would shit a blue kitten to see how I’m spending this first week with no kids at home. But that would be her problem because I’m sleeping not because I feel like I need to but because I can and I want to. I like sleeping, and I like sleeping even more when I know that I don’t have to worry about my kids while I’m sleeping.

After this week, though, it’s time to really buckle down on the actual self care. Not the forever naps or the eating bonbons or wearing sheet masks type of self care, but actually pulling my body back from whatever hellhole it’s been in for the past two years.

I’d written back in March, when I had time to write here semi-regularly, that I was working on getting a CPAP, and I have gotten one. And I’ve noticed a marked difference in my before and after life, though I didn’t realize the difference until one day, when I didn’t get enough sleep and suddenly, I felt cranky. That didn’t happen before because I was just in this permanent state of exhaustion that never ended, so I didn’t ever feel cranky. I just felt normal. 

But then the other day, I didn’t get as much sleep as I had been and had to function on this insignificant amount of time. And I was cranky. I was so upset about everything and I was like ??? what is going on? Until I realized that oh, I was acting like I hadn’t slept because I hadn’t, and boy was that weird. I was so used to getting such bad sleep for so long (roughly 70%-80% of my nights were spent not breathing) that I didn’t know what being sleep deprived felt like anymore because it was just my normal. 

So I’ve taken care of the sleep aspect, at least, but a lot of me is still tired. This is partly because I’m still recovering from however many years it’s been that I’ve had sleep apnea and been getting zero sleep. This is also partly because, increasingly, I’ve been dealing with absurd amounts of bizarre pain.

I say “bizarre” because it’s pain that I can’t really explain with anything simple. I can explain my knees and hips and ankles hurting because I am fat. That makes sense to me. I cannot explain why my toe knuckles and finger knuckles hurt pretty much all the time. As far as I know, I haven’t been running around all night like a gorilla, balancing on my fingers, or learning to dance en pointe. My fingers and toes have hurt for the last two years off and on and it’s just very, very weird.

When I spoke to my primary care doctor about it (not intending to, by the way; I went in to speak with her about a completely different matter, and Kyle said, “hey, while you’re there, why don’t you talk to her about your fingers and toes hurting?”), she basically diagnosed me with “being fat” and spent the rest of the appointment meticulously reading through the list of ingredients on the Dr. Pepper I confessed to drinking. Which… yeah, pretty par for the course when you go to the doctor as a fat person. And, mind, I’m not saying that I’m either healthy or not fat; quite the opposite, really, and I know the steps I need to take to improve my situation. 

But.

Anyway, my doctor thankfully also ordered bloodwork to check for autoimmune issues, because when you have the symptoms I have (nonsensical joint pain, skin that gets hot when it’s in the same universe as a day over 65 degrees, fatigue even when you’re getting decent sleep), it tends to indicate something autoimmune going on. One of the results came back elevated in a range that, from what I’m reading, tends to be consistent with autoimmune situations, so that’s exciting.

I do not want to have an autoimmune condition, I should add. They all sound wretched. Bare minimum, they sound like a lifetime of pain and medication to do away with the pain that has awful side effects of its own. But I’d also like to know what the fuck is up with my body already hurting. Like my body already hurts; I don’t need an autoimmune diagnosis to make that a thing. 

(as to why I never brought it up before, quite simply it’s because between the pandemic and raising three kids with varied special needs, my own needs were, as I said before, strapped to the back bumper with duct tape)

I have an appointment with a rheumatologist in late October, and I really hope that she isn’t dismissive, that she says, “yeah, no, drinking soda isn’t good and you should exercise, but neither of those things should cause your knuckles to hurt like this.” 

So in addition to alllllll of that, I’m looking to start exercising properly, now that I actually have free hours during the day. I don’t know when I’ll be doing that exercise, but I figure ~30 minutes a day, 4-5 days a week of moderate cardio should do the trick of getting my heart pumping and my body saying, “whoa, hey, we’re taking care of ourselves now! Neat!” We have a membership at a local community center that I plan to use for that purpose, and that’s something I’ll be doing starting next week.

And in between all of this, I’m also getting my tubes tied. With all the new bullshit laws happening across the country (side note: if you agree with any of those laws, you and I are not going to get along) and with any future children I’d want probably coming from a freezer at this point, tubal ligation just seems like a good option to me. And that is happening on October 3, and I am pretty jazzed about it. Hilariously jazzed, too, considering literally everything I went through to have the kids I do have, but honestly, having power over my own body is a good feeling and one I want to maintain as much as I can, all things considered.

(those things being everything I talked about above)

And I’ve got plans to clean out a whole bunch of stuff from our house and I’ve got plans to write again and I’ve got plans to take my camera out places and and and 

Basically, I do, in fact, miss my kids somewhat during the day… but I’ve missed myself a whole lot more.

May be.

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Have you ever had a month where everything happened so much and you didn’t have any time to really process one thing before the next was happening because that was May in our house. 

It happens roughly this way every year. From the twins’ birthday in March to the Fourth of July, I’m basically running around like a chicken with my head cut off–baking cakes, wrapping presents, organizing mini parties (because aside from the twins’ first birthday, they haven’t really been in a place to have a real party). Even in typical years, May is the heaviest chunk of this insanity, with Sam’s birthday, Mother’s Day, and Kyle and my anniversary squeezing into the mix. 

But this year is not a typical year, and unlike last year, this does NOT mean that things got quicker and easier. 

The first chunk of the month was sort of easy. It was mostly just organizing for Sam’s birthday, his seventh birthday, which feels like a monumental year. We’d hoped that by this time, he’d have been back in school and able to have a birthday party–a real party–but 2020’s claws aren’t fully extracted, so we had to make smaller plans, plans that involved a Minecraft cake (of which I am VERY proud), a trip to the Museum of Science, and trick birthday candles.

And admittedly, that’s a far cry better than last year. Last year, I scrambled to pull something slightly special together, and it was all taking place roughly in and around our house. This year, we could at least go somewhere and do something. We could go visit my parents, which we’d BARELY started doing last year. And that made a HUGE difference. 

He’s a happy seven-year-old, missing one of his front teeth, obsessed with Pokemon and Beyblade and Minecraft and science. Bouncing around the house at 9000 miles an hour when he gets excited and then flopping down on the couch talking about how exhausted he is. Begging us to have a Beyblade battle with him literally every second of every day or, failing that, to play Pokemon with him (this currently involves him telling us what to say about our Pokemon and us saying it). 

He is also, it’s turning out, not a neurotypical kid. This isn’t surprising in the least, but all of the testing that Sam has had over the last several months in preparation for him returning to public school in the fall has kind of confirmed what those of us close to him have suspected for a while. At the very least, he falls pretty solidly on the “yes” side of the ADHD scale (as in “yes this kid has ADHD”), and everyone who’s evaluated him is pretty solidly convinced that he’s autistic as well, which is giving me a lot of emotions. 

On the one hand, I’m thrilled. I’m autistic. Isaac is autistic. We’re a neurodiverse family, and that’s how it’s been from the beginning. It means that on some level, Sam’s brain and my brain work the same way, and that is just SUCH a relief as a mom, knowing that your brain and your kid’s brain are on the same wavelength. It makes sort of “hacking” those wavelengths a little easier, because even though the same things that worked for you almost certainly will not work for your kid, you at least have a common starting ground, and that’s an amazing feeling. Instead of watching your kid melt down and not knowing what to do about it, you can recognize “okay, the TV is too loud, he’s hungry and tired, and his blanket needs to be washed so it’s less scratchy.” And you can even find ways to motivate schoolwork, if you’re an A+ student (which I am. Sometimes.). 

But on the other hand, I’m frustrated at the narrowness of diagnostic criteria for younger kids. When Sam was much younger, everyone who met him said that he couldn’t possibly be autistic. He forced eye contact with everyone, literally took people’s faces in his hands and made them look at him. He’s always been a little comic and so talkative. In daycare and even up through kindergarten, he’s always been a social butterfly who makes so many friends. He’s beyond clever and, to my great envy, has none of the social signs that people look for when diagnosing autism… so he went completely undiagnosed despite the ways he melts down during times of transition and despite his sensory issues with food and despite how he shuts down when something seems too hard for him. 

ADHD and autism look really similar sometimes. 

I’m a little relieved that he didn’t get diagnosed earlier because it spared us a lot of stress with therapies that might not have benefitted him in the long run, but I’m also annoyed because now, we have to go through the whole referral process, which can take up to 18 months (I’ve filled out paperwork for a place that could theoretically offer him an appointment in July–more on that being a silly idea coming up later–but they haven’t gotten back to me since I sent it). He has an IEP now, but it’s there without the legal protections in place because he doesn’t have that diagnosis, and that frustrates me. 

So it’s a whole thing. I still have more paperwork to fill out for him to get back to school in the fall, and it’s a lot. But having these pieces to the puzzle has really helped. 

Sam turned 7. We set up his IEP. I went to the eye doctor for the first time in eight years (ah, American health insurance). And then, since Kyle and I are both fully vaccinated and it has been a YEAR, we hopped on a plane and flew down to Florida for our tenth wedding anniversary.

We went to Disney for our honeymoon, and I can go on a whole rant about how awful a lot of their business practices are, but I also tend to light up like Christmas at the idea of being there, and after this trip, Kyle does as well. It was just the two of us, no kids or anyone else. We went at our own pace–made lightsabers on the first morning, ate around the world at Epcot the second day (I love Epcot festivals, they are magical), drove down to Miami-ish to spend time with my bestie Sherrie on the third day. 

There was no real pressure. We did what we wanted to do when we wanted to do it. No worries about someone getting too tired or not wanting to eat the food at a certain restaurant. No rushing to make this Fast Pass time or that restaurant reservation. Lots of crowds, to be sure, but without the stress we’ve gotten used to on these trips. 

And it was just. Nice. Nice and earned. We’d been burning out pretty quickly, thanks in large part to my sciatica having us running on empty since November, and while this didn’t refill our tanks by any stretch of the imagination, it was VERY nice to be able to just be with each other, relaxing and having a good time. Kyle enjoyed himself so much that he actually took pictures (I’m the one with the camera most of the time) and has been talking about what we’ll do the next time we’re there, and I’m just happy. Very happy to have had that time with him. 

And now we’re back and 30 days out from my spine surgery. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t genuinely really nervous about the surgery. It’s not a complicated procedure like a fusion or fixing scoliosis; it’s just removing the herniated disc material and letting my sciatic nerve heal some, but because of my weight (let me tell you, a pandemic and a spinal injury are really not good when you’re trying to get healthier), there’s a possibility they won’t be able to reach my spine. And there’s always a possibility that it won’t work, that I’ll just leave the hospital in more pain than I had when I went in, and that scares me. 

The recovery period scares me, too. Basically from July 1 through October 1, I won’t be on my A-game, which is annoying because so much is happening in that timeframe that I need to be present for: Sam starting school again, the twins starting school in the fall, Halloween prep, picture day… it’s all stuff that I love doing about parenting, and it’s all stuff I’m either going to have to be very lazy about or else entrust to somebody else, which I HATE doing because delegating is scary because what if it’s not exactly the way I would’ve done it but HNNNGH.

I need this. I desperately need this surgery and the recovery time, but I am stressing so much about getting through the recovery. Kyle suggested (per his therapist) that I focus on something after the surgery that we’ve got planned (which is nothing right now because I’m not sure if any of our usual fall activities are even happening this year–I think they are, but who knows?), and I agree with that, but it’s so hard to make my brain see past the recovery all the way to what comes after when so much comes in between. 

I think I may need another vacation. 

Senioritis

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Do you ever get in one of those foul foul moods? Or not really a foul mood, but a mood where everything you want to talk about comes out tinged with complaining? And you don’t want to be that person that nobody wants to talk to or about because they’re always complaining, but it’s just. There.

I feel like that’s me right now, so close to the end of this pandemic, hope being dangled in front of me, but still far enough away that something or someone could ruin it, and maybe because things feel mostly good, the bad is amplified somewhat? I don’t know.

I try to do the gratitude thing, but that feels disingenuous, like yeah, I’m grateful for a LOT, but that doesn’t make the bad feelings go away any. And I want to be honest in my writing, but I also don’t want everyone to be like “ugh, Abby’s complaining again, bye.” Because I know things aren’t that bad, BUT.

Well anyway.

Hi. 

I guess I can talk about the angst first and then end on a good, or better, note. The angst stems 100% from my sciatica and how it makes me feel so… limited. Because I am limited. I don’t know if it’s fear of pain or actual pain, but I’m constantly finding myself incapable of doing things that used to be easy for me, like cleaning the house or taking a walk or standing in the kitchen cooking dinner for the kids. It’s not the worst thing ever, like my pain isn’t back at Thanksgiving levels, but I think on some level, every time I feel a twinge, I worry that it’s going back there, so I limit myself.

I’m fortunate enough to have a really understanding husband who would rather I limit myself now, before it gets bad enough that I like. Need adult diapers at not even 40 years old. But it’s still frustrating. I don’t know how to explain it, really. It’s like one day, you’re able to do things, and then the next, you find yourself stuck for an indeterminate amount of time. You forget that there’s an issue because you’re feeling better, so you start picking up stuff off the floor, but then two minutes later, you have to sit with your feet up for another ten minutes so that you stop hurting. It is SO dumb.

And it’s so easy to say “well, do two minutes at a time!” but it’s somewhat Sisyphusean or worse. You do what you can but then you’re out of commission because you pushed yourself. 

So that’s kind of colored my last month or so, and it’s annoying, and I hate it. I’m going in on Thursday to get an MRI and find out exactly what is causing this issue and if it’s something I can fix through targeted physical therapy or if it’s something I need surgery for (though the fact that it’s lasted as long as it has makes me think that probably we’re past the PT working point). Insurance companies like to go for minimally invasive steps first, but I’m like… I’m clearly having issues here that are more in-depth than just oopsie, threw out my back. 

But yeah. Background radiation of my life, etc.

The twins turned three about a week ago, and it was a fine time. They were happy with the day, even if it kind of went by in a rush (one that I’m not getting into, but suffice it to say that my annoyance at being unable to do stuff definitely made things less fun than they otherwise would have been). 

I ended up turning their day into a much bigger Thing than it normally would have been (for Sam’s third birthday, for instance, we just went to a museum and had cupcakes) because their last birthday ended up being a flop because Covid, and I guess I wanted this year to be something of an improvement. And I think it was, but man. Twin birthdays take a lot out of you. You do something that seems like the bare minimum, except because you’re doing it for two humans instead of one, it actually feels like you’re overdoing it by a lot. 

But again: they’re happy. Which is what really matters.

Happier news without the asterisk, they started school last week! Early Intervention ends when your kid turns three, so they transferred to our town’s public preschool the day after their birthday, and so far, they’re loving it. We’ve yet to have one of those separation anxiety crying days, not even on the first day (maybe them being in the NICU desensitized them to going away from us for a while), and every afternoon, they come home talking about how they had “so much fun!” Their crafts are starting to cover the fridge and walls, and I’m just relieved that they’re able to do the art projects they love so much without me picking up after them. 

It’s surreal having kids going to school in person. I’m a little worried because Massachusetts has been trending upwards in terms of cases, but at the same time, the school of ~600 people (kids, teachers, staff, etc.) has only seen about 12 cases in the entire year, so whatever they’re doing seems to be working. I wonder if it will still work once the schools are forced to go full time in person in April (which I do NOT agree with–it’s two months, y’all, just take the L and prep for next year), but the kids are so good with their masks that at least I feel like they’re protected on some level.

I have no idea what their days at school look like. I know they’re getting speech therapy, physical therapy, and occupational therapy, but I have no idea what the schedule is, anything like that. And I’ll be real: it feels SO GOOD to not know. SO GOOD. Because it means that I’m not the one coordinating it! I don’t have to shepherd them into a Zoom call that they won’t pay attention to, I don’t have to freak out because I forgot a meeting, I just get to use the mornings to do Sam’s homeschooling and then let them sleep the afternoons away. 

It’s very nice.

Sam, meanwhile, is in the process of being evaluated by the school to see how he’s done this year and what accommodations he’d need in the next school year, if any. His therapists across the board have suspected that he’s not neurotypical, but waitlists to get a diagnosis from a doctor are a year long at least because of Covid, so we’re trying to push things through with the school first and see what they say. Last week, he spent three days doing academic testing, which went very well. His tester remarked that he’s clearly VERY smart, and that he does seem to have some executive dysfunction issues, but that he’s also good at getting himself back on track. 

(at least when I’m not around, but I figured that would be the case, because he’s comfortable enough around me to melt down completely and know that I’ll never stop loving him or being blown away by him)

We’re next going to talk with the school psychologist, just to see where he is there, and hopefully, we’ll have a game plan in the next couple of weeks. I’m committed to sending him back in the fall, partly because I’m getting to the academic point where I’m a little out of my depth (he’s already learning area and perimeter, and algebra can’t be far behind), partly because he needs to be with his friends again, and partly because we both miss me just being his mom, not his mom and his teacher. It’ll take the pressure off both of us for him to be back in public school, and I’d be surprised if it weren’t safer for him to do so by fall.

And I think he’s in a good place to go back. It usually takes some cajoling, but he’s been keeping up with his schoolwork, and he’s on track with other first graders in that regard. I’m excited to see what second grade brings for him, and what life with the kids out of the house for a couple of hours a day brings for me. 

(I just realized that I haven’t been home alone with nobody else in… probably six years? Or so? Maybe four? It’s hard to say)

Meanwhile, vaccines are rolling along in our house. I’ve got asthma and am obese, so I got to be the first in the house to get a pair of Pfizer jabs, the last one on Saturday. Side effects were minimal–I was REALLY tired on Sunday (slept for ~15 hours because my husband is wonderful and hung out with the kids on his own all day) and then had pretty gnarly body aches when I went to bed last night, but things have since calmed down. No fever, no chills, certainly nothing at all compared to actual Covid. 

I’m hanging out on my phone a lot to try and get my mom an appointment for her vaccines, too, since she’s part of the group whose eligibility just opened up today. This remains a tricky thing to do, but I’ve been keeping up with vaccine news, and considering how manufacturers are ramping up production, I feel like supply will overtake demand in the next couple of months, and how good will that feel? And with any luck, that will correspond with cases going down, with hospitalizations going down, with deaths disappearing entirely. 

It’s just that end of the school year feeling, that time when summer is RIGHT THERE, IT’S RIGHT THERE GUYS, and you just. Don’t care about classes, you don’t care about homework, summer is RIGHT THERE (and GOD, so much worse when you’re a senior in high school or college, you’re just like THIS IS ALMOST OVER, HOW AND WHY SHOULD I CARE??). You can’t think about your finals or about anything but summer being RIGHT. THERE. And YET, despite that feeling, it’s important to still be careful. Still wear a mask, still be safe, still make good choices, because unlike skipping homework during senior year, skipping out on responsibilities as the pandemic starts to cool down will genuinely have consequences (see: Brazil), consequences that can be deadly.

In other words: take care of yourselves, and each other.

Until next time…

A Full Plate

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It’s finally mid-December, which means we’re ~20 days away from this hell year being over. The FDA has approved the Pfizer vaccine with shots beginning ASAP (I think someone in the Massachusetts government was saying that the first shots would be going out on Thursday), so there’s a light at the end of the Covid tunnel; and a new president will be inaugurated on January 20 (although he’s not as progressive as I’d like, it’ll be nice to wake up without that sinking sensation of pure dread for a little while). 

In my house, things are busy and have been, to the point where my body is 100% telling me to slow tf down, but it’s like… I can’t, because if I do, everything falls to pieces. I’m not saying this because I’m being overdramatic; sometimes SAHMing feels like being the manager for an entire company. 

But I digress.

I said last time that I’d been planning to write about sciatica, and boy do I have a story. Towards the end of my partial hospitalization program, where I was feeling mentally healthy and ready to get there physically as well, I woke one day with excruciating back pain. Nothing touched it–not NSAIDs, not Tylenol, not warmies, not stretches. When I went to the doctor for it, the x-rays showed that I basically have (a) mild scoliosis; (b) bone degeneration; and (c) bone spurs in my spine, which explains why I’ve been prone to throwing my back out since I was in college. 

(it was November of my junior year, I had just turned 20, and I had a lot on my plate: finishing out the semester, providing stage manager/dramaturgy stuff for our chamber choir’s Madrigal Feast, violin lessons, pulling my act together for a semester studying abroad at Oxford University, plus all the typical late-teens/early-20s drama that comes with being a college student. Oh, and that’s when I first got diagnosed with asthma and what’s probably chronic bronchitis, so yeah. A little on my plate)

My doctor had me go to physical therapy, and I was slowly getting better, but I’d also have days where I’d get worse. The pain seemed to be doing weird things, sometimes being very calm and manageable and other times being too bad for me to get out of bed. Eventually, by about mid-November, I found that I couldn’t sit up for long periods of time. I had to lounge on the couch or in bed with my legs and back in a specific position or else the pain would become unbearable. I started using a TENS unit regularly, trying to confuse the nerves in my back and leg, where the pain had now spread, and while the massage was pleasant, it didn’t do much long term. 

This all came to a head in the days leading up to Thanksgiving. Even without the usual hubbub (read: 20 something people at my uncle’s house and baked brie and so many desserts and family for days), I had plans to bake cinnamon rolls and cookies and green bean casserole for our more subdued holiday (my parents, whom we see pretty much every week anyway, were hosting and making the pies). The Tuesday before, I had physical therapy first thing in the morning and felt GREAT, but that afternoon, we did pictures with the kids…

…which, don’t get me wrong, turned out AMAZING, but once we were done, I was in too much pain to do anything but go collapse in bed. I wanted to be at my best on Thanksgiving, so I decided to spend Wednesday in bed, recovering.

Well, silly me, because that’s the opposite of what you should do with sciatica, especially if it’s caused by a herniated disc (which I suspect mine is). Being horizontal spreads the disc material out and makes it bulge out more when you eventually, inevitably stand up (because I am not going to get a fucking bed pan for sciatica). So Wednesday wasn’t too bad at first–I spent the day lying on my stomach, doing press-ups as instructed by my therapist, and listening to hypnotherapy and guided meditation on YouTube to get my mind off the pain. 

BUT sometime Wednesday night, all the things I had been doing just… failed. And Thursday morning, I woke up in blinding agony.

I have pain rankings, and this was only the second thing in my life to hit a 10. The first was gallstones, and those rank lower if only because they’re temporary. Once the gallstone breaks up or passes, the pain fades, and you go back to your life until it happens again. With sciatica, though, sitting and standing and walking and doing anything hurt like hell, and if you don’t figure out how to take care of it well, you eventually get to the point where there is nothing BUT pain. Pain is your existence, and you can’t remember a time without pain, and you can’t imagine a future time without pain, because that’s all there is. 

Eventually, I was screaming. Just mindlessly screaming because it hurt so much. My primary care doctor had suggested that if my pain got this bad, maybe I should go to the ER, but I’d been avoiding an ER visit because our new health insurance has terrible copays for everything, to the tune of “an ER visit before you’ve met your annual out of pocket maximum will cost you at least $3500, and if you HAVE met your out of pocket maximum, you’ll have a $1000 copay.” 

(MAN I am so glad that we pay 20% of Kyle’s paycheck to get THIS insurance instead of however the fuck much we would pay to get universal healthcare, like WOO this is so much better than living in Denmark and getting taken care of for the low low price of FREE)

But we called the ER and said I was on my way, and then I couldn’t even sit up at all, so we called an ambulance. I had to wait for the ambulance in the living room while screaming and crying and shaking from pain, and Sam had to see me like that, which I hate. I don’t remember anything about what I said or thought beyond “I hate that Sam is seeing me like this”–allegedly, I was telling the EMTs that I hoped they were going to get to have turkey, and I was really worried about making sure they’d have their turkey, but I don’t remember any of it. 

They were great, as I recall–they gave me a nasal shot of fentanyl to take the pain from an impossible place to a place where I could be transported, and they were really funny. The pain did not go away completely from the fentanyl, but I stopped screaming for the ride and managed to get to a point where I was just lying there, quietly hurting, with nobody helping me. 

That was probably the second worst part (the worst part was Sam seeing me like that)–being in the ER and nobody being there to even check in with me. They looked me over once I was there and gave me like… whatever generic painkillers they had available and eventually did prescribe me a nerve blocker called gabapentin, which has done WONDERS. BUT it also reminded me why I hate going to the ER for anything ever, because unless you’re dying or possibly dying, they sort of don’t pay attention to you at all. 

And that’s understandable–there are a lot of people coming in and out of the ER, sometimes just to get painkillers, sometimes just to get an ultrasound of their baby, sometimes just because they’re like. Itchy. It’s especially bad now with Covid and people having to go to the ER because they might have it (on my way out, I saw three rooms designated as Covid-only). And I didn’t WANT to go to the ER, but my pain just got to an impossible point. 

My therapist helped me with it this week. She told me that one of the hallmarks of chronic pain is that eventually, your body is too tired to try and fight it off, and the more you have on your plate, the harder it is for your body to work through the pain. Which was like, wow, I didn’t come here to be attacked like this, but that makes way too much sense.

There’s not much of a choice in the matter, of course. Kyle’s job doesn’t necessarily demand too much of him (he’s able to come out and help when I really need it, especially since after the ER), but he’s still working full time, and I’m full time with the kids. Especially during the holiday season, that means that my daytime hours basically evaporate, because there’s so much that I need to organize and do and make sure of, all while I’ve got three kids asking things of me at all times.

I’m not complaining. I love being a stay-at-home mom. But I think I might be reaching a pandemic breaking point, because said pandemic has unquestionably made things MUCH harder. There’s no chunk of afternoon time where the twins are napping and Sam is at school where I can just focus on getting household stuff done, whether it’s cleaning or setting up appointments or paying bills or whatever. There’s no time when I’m awake and not exhausted where I can just be. 

I think I’d be able to bear it much more if I weren’t prone to chronic pain, but when you add all that work to the work of bearing chronic pain, the pain gets severe that much faster. You’re already exhausted from the everything–the kids jumping on the couches and knocking each other over and batting at Christmas ornaments because they want to be kittens, the homeschool battle because even on good days it’s a battle, the trying to keep up with everyone’s therapies like ABA and speech and coordination and whatever the fuck, the socializing that starts to feel like work because you’ve been overwhelmed with people being literally ON you all day, the weekends where it used to be getting more done but are now just gasping air before being pulled under again–and then the pain creeps in. 

And pain is so exhausting. I remember when I was younger and used to get excruciating menstrual cramps (I found out while trying to have Sam that I had a tilted uterus, which has fortunately fixed itself since having kids, but let me tell you, it’s a for-sure recipe for very bad periods), I’d reach the end of the day and just fall asleep for 18 hours straight. There are a lot of ways to think about pain that involve accepting it and trying to help your body cope with it better, but sometimes, it really is just a battle that you end up losing.

So here we are in December. I can tell that if I weren’t on the meds I’m on, I’d be in a lot more pain, but the gabapentin is doing the excellent work of keeping the pain manageable, as long as I don’t push myself too hard and keep mobile. Sciatica is a weird thing where the more you’re able to stay mobile and keep exercising, the better it gets; but at the same time, when it’s at its peak, the pain defies belief, and all you want is for someone to just knock you out so you don’t have to deal with it anymore. BUT the meds I’m on make it possible for me to stay mobile, and I have a timer set on my phone that reminds me to get up and loosen up every two hours or so (I call it my dance break, and the twins participate, and none of us are very good dancers). 

I keep doing Everything because I have to, which is something I keep thinking whenever someone remarks on us having two-year-old twins (and also three four-month-old kittens, more on that in a second) and asks, “how do you do it?” The only answer is that we do it because we have to. We had these kids, and we’re going to make sure they thrive. And there’s a light at the end of the tunnel–as I’m writing this, the FDA is an hour past approving the Covid vaccine for emergency use. By the time the twins turn three in March, we should be well on our way to getting our jabs, and in any case, the twins start preschool March 15 (assuming all things run smoothly). That will make things easier. 

But in the meantime, I’m sitting here, feeling my leg be numb because it can’t hurt, and knowing that I can’t stop juggling all these balls or else everything falls apart.

And in the midst of all this, we adopted three kittens!

Honestly, they don’t add a lot to the load. We’ve been on waiting lists since Tinkerbell passed because I cannot go a long time without a cat, and the shelters we applied to wanted to make sure they paired us with kittens that could thrive in a house with three kids. I got the call Monday about a litter of five cats that had been raised with kids about Sam’s age and the caveat that I had to bring all three kids to meet them and the kids had to behave or else the kittens wouldn’t come home with us.

We went in wanting just two, but of the litter of five, two had already been adopted, and these three were the only ones left. And we couldn’t just LEAVE them, so. 

Well. 

They also kind of adopted us. Each one snuggled up to us and purred and rubbed against our legs and force pet us (you know, when cats bump their heads against your hand like “LOVE ME” and you’re like “I already do?” and they’re like “NO LOVE ME” so you do), and… well, they’re necessary. Not because we have any sort of mouse problem, not because I need more on my plate, but because they spark joy. A whole lot of joy.

Biggest brother is Duke Orlando Stinkybutt Catrissian, so named because he farts like an unholy terror. He’s a little fighty, but only with me or Kyle; with the kids, he keeps a respectful distance unless they’re petting him. He’s the most adventurous of the trio, most prone to getting into trouble and the murderer of at least one tree ornament. 

Then we have Duchess Oreo Zoomies the Experience, who has established herself as Sam’s Cat. He named her–he saw the pictures of the kittens and decided that her name should be Oreo because she’s black and white like an Oreo. She ADORES Sam–hunts him down wherever he is and snuggles up with him. And she’s been so good for his anxiety, too, helping him to calm down and feel safe enough to sleep, even when he’s worried about something. She’s almost as much of an explorer as Orlando and is highly prone to Zoomies at all times.

Last, but certainly not least, is Duchess Orla With the Chanel Boots…

…who is Mine. She established herself as Mine when we were meeting them and she only came out to socialize with me and Carrie. She’s the shyest of the three, only really coming out for cuddles when the kids are safely in bed and Kyle and I are in a quiet place. Once she’s out, though, she’s a party animal but very ladylike about it. She’ll mince around the covers and attack our feet with the same attitude as Miranda Priestly going after an incompetent staffer. She’s adamant about being held but will also fight me forever about the cat pouch hoodie I bought (yes, I am being That Kind of Cat Mom). 

And, well. It may have been biting off a lot, but I feel like the joy and stress relief they give with their cuddles make up for the buying food for three cats and scooping a litter box again and “what are you chewing on???” and “GET OUT OF THE TREE” and “Isaac, it is REALLY ADORABLE that you’ve decided to pretend you’re a kitten, but if you try to climb the Christmas tree, nobody will end up happy” and the “yes, Carrie, the kitty is sharp, have we learned a lesson?”

They’re necessary. They don’t feel like more on my plate. They feel like they’re individually taking the stress of having so much on my plate and dissolving it, and that’s a nice feeling.

Clinging

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words-
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.
(Emily Dickinson, “Hope is the thing with feathers (314)”)

I was initially doing okay with all of this, and ultimately, it was the thought of a longterm social distancing adventure that drove me to snap with rage that disappeared as quickly as it had come. 

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(this happened, like, a week and a half ago)

I can’t remember what set me off, but I think it was Kyle saying the words “…if Disney World is even open by then” about our trip that’s coming up in November. The idea of living life like this the entire rest of the year just made something break a little in me, and I sort of snapped at him in that way moms do when we’ve been carrying it all inside to keep the rest of the family from seeing, because it’s fine to vent to your partner when they’re available, but the emotions show up whenever anyway, and you tamp them down because you don’t want your kids to be scared or pick up on you freaking out.

But eventually, the dam breaks a little.

I snapped, and then it was gone, and I’ve been about as fine as I can be, considering the circumstances, ever since.

That sounds like I’m dismissing things, and I’m not trying to. I’m feeling the emotions everyone’s feeling: grief over the world changing overnight into something unrecognizable. Rage about politics. Fear about what’s coming next. But I feel like I’ve got a better handle on it than I did before, when I was still hovering in the “denial” stage of grief about everything. 

(and anyway, I will eat my hat if Disney isn’t open in November)

Which is all good, because we’re kind of floundering a lot with many bizarre emotions in this house.

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Anxiety is, understandably, the big one. I think I’ve got an okay handle on that because yay, antidepressants. Venlafaxine will probably be the reason I go crazy if the world ever does end properly, but for now, I’ve got a healthy supply of it, and it turns my anxiety into either really vivid crazy dreams or just really pleasant but unrelated dreams. Last night, I dreamed about characters from the soap opera One Life to Live, which I never even watched when it was a thing that was on often. The dream also took place in a therapist’s office, but that’s it. Nothing otherwise notable about it. No portentous 19 crows or anything like that.

Nobody else in this house is on antidepressants, which creates some interesting situations, most of them with Sam. He doesn’t have a completely firm grasp of what’s going on, but he knows that he can’t go to school, he knows that his school year is probably over as he knew it (they’re saying schools are closed until May 4, but I’ll be very surprised if they reopen before summer break), and he knows he misses his friends and teachers.

So, of course, he’s scared.

It mostly comes out at night, and he’s too old for the magic jar of dirt stuff I did when he was younger. Too smart, too. He doesn’t believe it when I rub lotion on his hands and tell him it will protect him from bad dreams, because his anxieties are too big to be vanquished with some love and lotion. He knows that the world isn’t the same, and will never be the same again, and it scares him. 

He gets out of bed every night after he’s been tucked in. We talk to him, we hold him on the couch, we tell him the truth, but we sprinkle it with generous doses of hope, because he needs that. Still, he’s scared. 

He’s kind of shut down about homeschooling, and I’m not sure what to do about it; worse, I’m sort of limited in what I can do about it. He’s in kindergarten, and he’s covered most of the basics he’ll need before first grade in the fall (this will have reached some sort of equilibrium by fall or I am punching this virus in the face myself), so I’m not terribly worried about him falling behind… but I still want to try and help him learn things while he’s at home. 

He does alright for about two days when we give him a new routine, but then on day three, he decides he doesn’t like this anymore and has a meltdown. Which… okay, fair. Maybe he should just have Wednesdays off or something? The routine was, briefly, some yoga and then a video about a subject he liked, writing a sentence about the subject, then doing math. And, of course, forever checking his messages on Facebook’s messenger for kids (he’s got a long distance friendship blossoming with my friend’s daughter, and it’s basically destroying me with cute). 

I feel bad. I wish that I could be 100% there for Sam, but the twins are another adventure during this, my everyday adventure that hasn’t changed in the slightest, except that Kyle is home for that adventure all the time now, so lunch and naptime are both easier.

But the twins seem to sense that something’s amiss as well. They don’t like to not be on my lap, which makes trying to help Sam with literally anything a struggle, particularly because the twins are not small anymore. They’re two now, had their birthday less than a day after the state started shutting down altogether. Our plans to take them to the aquarium were dashed.

Everyone senses that something’s up, and nobody can really parse their feelings on it. I can’t either, but I’m trying to at least throw positive shit out into the world to see whatever glimmers of hope will stick. 

That mostly happens outside. When the weather permits, we throw jackets on the kids and take them out to the front lawn to run around for a little bit after dinner (the backyard is a disaster area, and before all of this, we were going to see about hiring someone to clean it all up for us).

The twins like to run to the edges of the yard and get caught. Carrie especially likes to look at our crocuses nosing up through the dead leaves and greening grass, and Isaac likes to watch trucks rush past on their way to the farms up the street. 

Sam likes to run, just run. He runs from the porch to our big oak tree back to the porch then to the mailbox and back to the porch and to the lilac bushes and back to the porch. Being able to run with abandon helps him, I think, because our house is not a jungle gym, no matter what he thinks.

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I try to plan for Easter, such as it is. We have candy from the Easter Bunny, or at least half of what we’ll need (the other half I need to order from our local candy shop, which is taking orders but not in store shopping). The kids need nice Easter shoes, because even if we’re not DOING anything, I want them to look cute. It’s the twins’ first Easter able to do anything besides be confused about “why is this basket on my desk?” 

I mean, they’ll still be confused, just about more things than “why is this basket on my desk?”

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Nothing is normal, but it’s the new normal for at least the next month, probably longer, at least if people are smart about this. I’m still working through my feelings about everything, kind of picking at them a little bit day by day and seeing how my dreams/nightmares play them out. I think the only real waking fear I have is not about famine or a lack of toilet paper or anything like that but of getting sick myself, knowing that my lungs are kind of crap and that, at the very least, I’d likely be one of the young people ending up in the hospital and on a ventilator, away from my husband and kids for weeks on end. Without the kids, I think I could stand it, but just knowing what it would do to them…

I have a friend who’s an RN in an ICU, and even though I don’t really pray, I pray for her, to anyone or anything that might be listening. She has three kids, just like I do, two boys and a girl. She can’t even snuggle with them anymore, not until this has all passed, and it breaks my heart for her. 

Basically, I just want everyone to hurry up and stay home and behave. I saw a post earlier about this whole thing being like when you were in elementary school and some kids just wouldn’t stop acting up, so you kept losing more and more recess time, even though you weren’t doing anything wrong. Maybe it wasn’t fair, but the teacher couldn’t let the kids who were behaving outside while she stayed inside with the kids who weren’t behaving. So you watched as the bright spot in your day was gradually eaten away because people didn’t know how to act. 

Maybe it’s because I tend autistic, or maybe it’s because it’s in the nature of the oldest child to loathe getting in trouble for something not your fault more than for other kids (like we all hate it, but I think we oldest children hate it the most; I can see the loathing building in Sam’s mind every time we scold him for something the babies are doing too, and I have to remind him that he’s older and knows better), but GOD did I resent those kids. I don’t resent the dumbasses still going out and being Typhoid Marys around the world nowadays, but I do wish that someone would throw dirty diapers at their heads.

I think about them, and I think, “This stupid thing is just going to keep going, and it’s going to be 2021 before anything is over, and we’re going to just have this long, miserable time because people don’t know how to act. There goes everyone’s recess. There go people’s lives. Womp womp.”

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I let myself think that, and then I take a deep breath.

And I say, the first thing I’m doing when this is over is packing the kids up in the van and going to spend a day with my parents. 

I plan for going back to group with Isaac and Carrie and letting them play with all the plastic toys and watching them do more art and wreak more havoc, but this time, it’ll be slightly different havoc because Isaac will have his ABA therapist by then (let’s not get into that can of worms right now, I’m so tired). 

I imagine having a weekend day again where I go up to Michael’s and get whatever craft stuff I want for whatever dumb project I’ll never finish. Like maybe I’ll get photo albums or start scrapbooking or something, or at least think about it. And wandering through Barnes & Noble, enjoying the smell of ink on paper and coffee. And going to see a movie, taking all the kids to whatever crappy kids’ movie is out because we’re free to do so. 

And eventually going out to the mall, walking those long stretches of gleaming tile and popping my head into my favorite stores. Getting a free chocolate from Godiva. Setting the kids loose in the indoor playground after patiently wandering the Lego Store with Sam. Eating something that’s wretched for me from the food court and just not even caring. 

We’ll go to the beach this summer, plan it out a little more than our last trip. We’ll bring quilts and set up a full little camp on the sand, and take off a weekday to go (after all, Kyle has been working 7 days a week the past two weeks; who knows what it is about tech companies that drives them to think, “Ah, you’re working from home, that means all your hours are mine!”) so things will be less crowded and we can get a spot closer to the water.

(probably not Hampton Beach this time, though)

And we’ll have our road trip, in the fall or next fall, one or the other. We’ll pack the kids up in a rented van, we’ll see the roads, we’ll stop for gas and goodies. We’ll take 95 all the way down. We’ll stop at South of the Border, because I’ve always wanted to go but never have. We’ll see enormous fields of cotton and black eyed susans on the sides of the road. We’ll stay on the beach and then we’ll drive to Disney and we’ll be in that delightful bubble for a blissful week. 

This will happen, it will all happen eventually. This is what I think about to keep myself sane, because things are really hard and really scary right now, but it’s not forever, and in the end, we’re all in this together.

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Can I be blamed if I’m angry?
Can I be saved if I’m barely clinging to hope?
I’m clinging to hope

When I say oh, oh
Rain don’t change the sun
Jealous is the night when the morning comes
But it always comes
(Delta Rae, “Morning Comes”)

 

Lessons in Traveling

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WHEW.

dead

I feel like that should sum everything up in and of itself–WHEW. WHEW, that was a trip. WHEW, I can’t believe we did that. WHEW, did I mention the part where we drove for 21 hours straight because a snow storm was coming?

See, we decided this year to pack the kids up and drive down to Texas to spend Thanksgiving with Kyle’s family, largely because (a) flying five people round trip to Texas is very expensive, and (b) we hadn’t been to Texas since before the twins were born. That meant that the twins hadn’t yet met a LOT of Kyle’s family, and I’m not a fan of that. And when you factor in that Kyle and I haven’t really spent any major holidays with his family in a very long time, it sort of seemed like a no-brainer to us.

We knew going into it that the trip would be harrowing in a lot of ways, and it was–hell, the last day of the trip was that 21-hour drive straight from Birmingham, Alabama, to our home in Massachusetts to try and outrun the snow storm that was bearing down on us.

(we did outrun it; more on that later)

And here, two days home, I’m exhausted but writing this all down while it’s still fresh in my mind because we learned a lot, and I want that to exist somewhere for me to see or for someone else to see. Hence: what we’ve learned about traveling with three children under the age of 6.

#1. Rent a bigger car than you think you’ll need, and pick it up the day before you leave.

My father-in-law graciously offered to  help us pay for the rental car, since our minivan, much though I love it, is something of a fossil. I don’t mind trusting it when we’re within a tank of gas from the house (read: up to Maine, down to New York, that sort of thing), but if we’re halfway across the country, I get concerned. The problems it could have at this age would lead to us being stranded VERY far from home, so a rental car seemed our best option.

I wanted to be nice and helpful, so I chose the least expensive rental option that could seat seven passengers, and therein lay my first mistake: I didn’t calculate for luggage. We ended up with a fantastic Kia Sorento (P.S. to Kia: your 2020 Sorento is a fantastic car, and I love it and wish it was my car always) that definitely fit all three kids… but we also had to squeeze in two pack n plays, a double stroller, an enormous suitcase, three small day bags, snacks for everyone, puke clean up supplies (more on that in a minute), and Christmas presents. Kyle managed to get everything in on the way down, but on the way back… well, thankfully, my mother-in-law had been planning to ship some of our Christmas gifts to us anyway.

It was a tight fit is what I’m saying.

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I’d also scheduled the rental to begin on the day we planned to leave–that is, Friday, November 19–figuring that packing the car itself would be much easier and less time consuming than packing the bags.

I was wrong.

I think Kyle and I made record time packing the suitcases on Thursday night. We rolled everyone’s outfits like cake and stuffed suitcases without thinking twice. We had everything we planned to bring all set up by the front door well before we crashed for the night, and we even had time to spend just vegging that evening. The next day, however, even though I went to get the car pretty early, we still didn’t get everything into said car until almost 11:00, largely because we had so much stuff and so little space that Kyle had to play a game of Tetris to make sure it all fit.

(he was okay with it because, as he points out every time we do anything, he was the quartermaster for his Boy Scout troop, and he can make anything fit anywhere)

That late departure followed us for the rest of the day, because…

#2. If you will be driving through a major city, plan your entire day around being stuck in traffic.

…day one was also the drive through New York City. Had we left when I’d expected us to, around 9 a.m., we’d have reached NYC around lunch time and been long gone before rush hour. But we did not. The car needed packing and that took a year, and it was nearly–or even past, I’m not sure which–11:00 by the time we pulled out of our driveway.

And, factoring in one (1) stop for lunch and one (1) stop for a bathroom break just outside the city, we hit New York right as everyone was leaving work the Friday before Thanksgiving.

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Weirdly enough, our GPS didn’t direct us around the city, even with knowledge of the snarl we’d gotten ourselves into. I don’t imagine the Tappan Zee Bridge, which is the route around New York City, was much better, and without traffic, that route adds another hour and a half to any given drive through New York. Regardless, we planned poorly and found ourselves scooting along at two-and-a-half miles an hour through Manhattan on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

On the plus side, everyone inside the car remained in mostly good spirits, because what can you do? In that level of traffic (which was obscene, I cannot emphasize this enough), you can’t get off onto side streets because that’ll just make everything worse. You can’t pull over onto the shoulder because the shoulder is taken up by cars already. You just have to put on some music or a podcast you like and hunker down for the long haul and pray that nobody in your car gets car sickness.

We are not so lucky.

#3. If your child has ever gotten car sick, they will get car sick on your trip.

Both of my boys have gotten car sick in the past, but with both of them, Kyle and I thought we’d gotten to the route of the problem and wouldn’t have to worry about puking for the entire trip. Isaac faced forward, which helps him see the horizon (not ideal, but I wanted to do what I could to help him), and we made sure to block sunlight from his face as we drove so he wouldn’t have to deal with the strobe effect.

And yet.

An hour out from our house, it began, right before we stopped for lunch. We heard a cough, a sob, and then liquid, and sure enough, everything Isaac had eaten so far that day was now on his lap, reminding us that milk before a car trip is always a mistake. We pulled over for lunch, changed his clothes, figured he’d gotten it all out of his system, and carried on.

But it was about to get so much worse.

New York City rush hour traffic is rough on even the most iron of stomachs. The stop-and-go nature of the traffic makes your stomach’s contents lurch dangerously, even if you never get car sick. If you do get car sick, you are so deeply, wretchedly, horribly screwed.

Thus, about 10 minutes into our scoot through New York City, Isaac threw up. And did so another five times before we left the city.

I’m proud of us because we didn’t give him milk at lunch, but I’m annoyed because we didn’t plan for his pukeyness happening more than once that day. Usually, he gets the Treatment: Benadryl (which has the same active ingredient as Dramamine, the more you know), a bib of some sort to cover his clothes, and several rolls of paper towels at our disposal. For some reason, though, we didn’t expect him to keep throwing up after the first time, so when we buckled him back in after lunch, it was without any of those things.

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We eventually pulled off into some really shitty service plaza just off the George Washington Bridge so that we could get Isaac cleaned up and so that Sam and I could stretch our legs a bit. We’d gotten to New York City at around 3, and by the time we stopped, it was past 6. AUGH!

It didn’t end there, though, oh no. On the drive back, Isaac started puking again, though we were prepared for him this time, with bibs and paper towels and such. We were not, however, prepared for what happened on our last day driving, when Sam’s stomach ache turned into projectile vomit all over the back of the rental car in the middle of the night in North Carolina. Sam hadn’t gotten car sick before that point since he got ear tubes put in when he was about the twins’ age. He had nothing in the back seat to catch the puke or prevent it from going, well, everywhere.

…I totally forgot to tell the car rental place about that. Oops.

But then again, I’m tired because…

#4. You will not get any sleep ever.

This can really be broken down into 4A. No sleep in hotels, and 4B. No sleep because driving; they both play into each other, though.

We brought the twins’ pack n plays with us, but while we were on the road, we may as well have just never used them. Both twins screamed and sobbed until we held them between us in our hotel bed, and though Kyle and I don’t usually bedshare (tl;dr – we are fat people, and though we are trying to lose weight, we have not yet lost enough to fit three children between us in a queen size bed), it was the fastest way to get them to sleep.

And that would’ve been fair! Except as anyone who’s ever bedshared knows, it’s a crapshoot as to whether or not the parents get any sleep throughout the night. The last night in the last hotel, the twins arranged themselves horizontally between us, giving Kyle and I each about 6” of bed space, so we spent our precious few hours in bed trying very hard not to fall off and make a loud noise that would wake up everyone (including Sam, who was very much about sleeping whenever we were in a hotel).

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(look at all that space they left for us!)

Even when they weren’t making us into a human H, the twins found ways to make themselves comfortable at our expense. I woke up the second morning of the drive because Carrie was desperately trying to meld her head with mine or make my head softer or SOMETHING; basically, she was driving her head into my head. And my GOD did that ever hurt. Isaac, meanwhile, would wake up in the middle of the night and just be patting me all over and giggling to himself as the excess skin he gave me jiggled for his amusement. Very funny when I’m awake; kind of a nuisance when I’m asleep.

It wouldn’t have been so bad if the driving hadn’t been exhausting, but it was. Our New York day set us up for awful driving schedules; we didn’t get to our hotel that night until well past 2 a.m., and the following morning, we slept in and spent more hours than we should have washing Isaac’s clothes in the hotel’s laundry facilities. And because of that, we didn’t get to the next night’s hotel until well past 2 a.m., and even when we got an earlyish start on the third day, we still didn’t get to our final destination until past 10 at night.

I thought I’d planned our days so well, but I didn’t realize…

#5. The unexpected will happen.

I mean, that’s just life with kids, but it still hits you like a ton of bricks when it does happen.

On the way down, it was the NYC traffic kerfluffle that messed us up and had ripple effects for the rest of the drive. We had a marvelous visit in Texas that included an early Christmas, a late birthday date, and a delightful Thanksgiving feast; and all too soon, it was time to leave again.

Which… well, rewind for a minute. When we’d started talking about this trip, my in-laws had worried that we’d run into a blizzard during the drive, which made me sensibly chuckle.

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Southern New England–and especially the regions we’d drive through on later days–doesn’t really see huge amounts of snow this early in the season. We may get flurries on Thanksgiving, but the last time I remember there being appreciable snow in late November/early December, I was nine. We can typically plan for December through January to be cold but dry or rainy at the most, and for most of the snow to dump on us in February and March. The idea, therefore, of a blizzard hampering our travel over Thanksgiving was a bit silly.

But then, of course, because we’d said aloud that we weren’t worried about snow, the forecasts started talking about a snowstorm. A big snowstorm. Upwards of a foot of snow, maybe more, and ice and mixing stuff, all along the 95 corridor, which is where we’d be driving.

When we left Texas, the day after Thanksgiving, Kyle and I had no idea what we wanted to do about this mess. Should we try and hunker down somewhere until the snow was gone? Should we stick to our plan and hope for the best? Should we leave super early on the final day of our drive and pray we’d beat the storm by enough of a margin that it wouldn’t be a big deal?

We didn’t make our decision until the very last second, when we’d stopped for supper at QuikTrip in Charlotte, North Carolina. We still had another six or so hours before we could turn in for the night, but we didn’t know if anything else would come up before we reached our hotel. We’d need to spend another half hour or so getting everyone settled in the hotel once we arrived, and then we’d have to get up and start driving by 3 a.m. if we wanted to beat the storm and the traffic.

So we bit the bullet and said, “You know what? Let’s just drive straight on through.”

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I went back into the QuikTrip and stocked up on overnight snacks. We vaguely planned out our shifts but mostly just planned to switch drivers whenever we got too tired to keep our eyes open OR whenever we stopped for gas. I agreed to take the first shift and downed a grape Extra Strength Five Hour Energy, and we were off on what would end up being a 21-hour driving day.

And honestly? It was probably one of the easier days we had. The twins and Sam slept through most of it, and Kyle and I were able to switch out our shifts with relative ease. And I’m proud of myself–while Kyle snored obliviously beside me, I successfully navigated the highways and byways of both Washington, D.C., and New York City–albeit, in the small hours of the morning, so the streets were mostly empty.

Every time we looked at the road around us, we agreed that we’d made the right choice. We zipped through the Jersey Turnpike without so much as a drop of rain falling on the car; the Jersey Turnpike promised to be slick with ice the next day. As I drove through New York City, I came across an enormous truck that had failed to heed the warning signs blasting across the previous six miles of road that the bridge was too short; the truck had crumpled like a soda can, and the police were only just setting up flares around him. I can only imagine what that did to traffic afterwards.

By the time the first snow started falling, we’d been home for five hours. Kyle and I had both enjoyed naps in our own bed. We got a pizza from our favorite local place for dinner and stayed warm and safe throughout the worst of the storm. It was a great decision.

But I am still tired.

In the end, though, I have no regrets. I’ll absolutely do things differently next time–rent a minivan, pick it up the day before we leave, cover Isaac and Sam in tarps (Carrie, bless her, did so well in the car with her only complaint being a lack of cuddling), leave at midnight to avoid NYC traffic, and just plan for everything that could possibly go wrong to do so–but I don’t regret this trip or anything that happened on it. We had an amazing time! From Sam exclaiming in delight that he saw “trillions of lights” in New York City to Kyle and I giggling in a sleep-deprived giddiness as we pulled up to our house at the end, it was an amazing trip, and I can’t wait to do it all again.

It’s the Holiday Season…

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I love the holidays, though my definition of “the holidays” differs from most people’s in that I firmly believe “the holidays” begin with Halloween and end with New Year’s because those are the temporal boundaries of my other busy season (the primary busy season lasting from March through July). During what I’ll call a twelve week span (because let’s be real–October first is the very latest we all start celebrating Halloween), I’m constantly baking and getting the kids ready for things and wrapping presents and baking and traveling and baking and did I mention baking?

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(for the record: I love all the baking I do, but it’s a lot between October 1 and January 1)

As of this writing, my holiday season has been in full swing for about a month, with the first holiday happening last week. Halloween was unseasonably warm this year, and that turned it into an adventure for everyone. I baked the cupcakes I’d signed up to bake for Sam’s class party…

…and they were apparently a big hit! And honestly, they were great fun to do, at least partly because Kyle helped with the decorating. We spent two evenings together in the kitchen baking and mixing and mixing and decorating, and per his report, the whole experience was highly satisfying (his favorite part was rolling the cupcakes in sprinkles after they’d been frosted, and I can’t blame him). 

Our Halloween plans had otherwise been to attend the school’s trunk or treat (since our neighborhood is garbage for trick-or-treating–no sidewalks and halfway up a really steep hill that people like to drive down at about 300 MPH) and show off the kids’ costumes. For Isaac, we ended up getting an embarrassingly cheap dragon costume (and I say “embarrassingly” because it was horrible quality and way larger than the site suggested it would be, leading to a very difficult time when he eventually did wear it), and Carrie got a very floofy version of Rapunzel’s dress along with a gorgeous braid headband. Sam was, of course, Darth Vader. 

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But anyway, we wanted to go to the trunk or treat, but that first got rescheduled because of mosquitoes (Massachusetts was having a pretty bad EEE outbreak this year, but we had a hard frost a couple of days ago so TAKE THAT YOU BLOOD SUCKING MONSTROSITIES) and then it got cancelled because of rain. This left us without any sort of trick-or-treating for the kids (because our hill is dangerous in good weather, never mind when it’s pouring out) until my mom gamely agreed to come with me and take the kids to a local mall for trick-or-treating there.

This was something of a mistake.

Our local malls vary from “pretty nice, actually” to “why is this still open?” and this mall tends towards the latter category. Thirty years ago, it was a really nice place with fancy restaurants and a really posh feel to it, a classier version of the typical 80s mall. As is the case with most malls, however, time and changing trends in retail chipped away at its poshness and left it somewhat of a shell. It’s still got a singular anchor store (there’s a Sears, which gives me questions, and the other anchor spot is now taken by a doctor’s office) and the skeleton of a food court, along with a handful of mall fixtures (American Eagle, Victoria’s Secret, Journeys, etc.), but it’s definitely a shadow of its former self. 

A disheartening number of storefronts were vacant when we got there on Halloween, and the fronts that were open ran out of candy pretty quickly–I don’t think anyone at the mall anticipated the entire county coming to trick-or-treat there rather than face the rain. Sam had a grand time because he’s five and got lots of candy (a full set of Dum Dums! I’ve never seen one of those before!), but the twins were wailing by about 10 minutes in, and my mom and I were both exhausted at the end of the adventure.

So. Here’s hoping that next Halloween has pleasant temperatures and no rain.

(but at least the kids looked cute! For all 5 minutes they all stayed in their costumes)

And now it’s today, which is my birthday.

Did I do anything to celebrate? Well, I wanted to, but the kids shared a wonderful cold with me, so I spent most of last night with a throat too sore to allow talking and most of today wishing I could be horizontal. Kyle, being the star that he is, stepped in and made the batch of brownies I’d planned to make for myself and, since he was working from home today anyway, let me get a nap in while the twins were napping, which will hopefully help me recover from this cold quicker and without any trips to urgent care because of breathing (because the last thing I either need or want is to get pneumonia again). 

So things have been lowkey, but I need that. We’ve been juggling a lot of adventures lately with the twins especially, namely that Isaac has been fast tracked on the path towards an autism diagnosis and Carrie still qualifies for early intervention services.

Carrie first: she had her annual evaluation today to see if her development has caught up to where it should be, and the hilarious thing is that she’s basically where she ought to be when she’s not being observed. When she is being observed, as we discovered today, she’s pretty behind in a couple of areas, namely fine motor and receptive communication. 

But she’s not actually behind.

Most of the areas where she scored “behind” were items on the test that she knows how to do and does often, but today, when asked to do them in front of the EI evaluation team, she gave an impish little smirk…

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…and ran off giggling to hide behind the couch. Cue my little genius communicator getting much lower scores in fine motor skills and receptive communication than I know she’s capable of. On some level, this should bother me, but I’d rather she get services and not need them than need them and not get them. Worse comes to worse, they reevaluate in six months and she doesn’t get services anymore after that, or else she just gets a little supplemental help and EI helps with her preschool placement in 2021 (wow, that’s an actual year, that’s bizarre).

And then there’s Isaac.

A couple of months ago, I mentioned my concerns about him relating to autism… well, less concerns, more “I’m autistic myself, my entire family is autistic, I know what it looks like, and he looks like he’s going in that direction.” Our wonderful services coordinator got the ball rolling for diagnosis, but because he was only 17 months old at the time, we couldn’t do a lot because most diagnostics won’t say much until a kid is at least 18 months old (which I hate because if you’re living in a bright, loud world and can’t filter out sounds and sights, important to unimportant, and get so exhausted because of it and have a hard time having conversations or learning language because you’re so overwhelmed… like, wouldn’t you want to name that and learn coping skills ASAP?). 

But we started anyway. We took the ASQ and the M-CHAT, both of which mostly look at autistic traits–that is, traits that are common in people with autism. Things like lack of eye contact, stimming, repetitive behavior, the typical “that child has autism” traits, you know. Those both kind of bugged me because they felt like they were reducing autism to a checklist of traits, which I haaaaaaaate. 

BUT then came the RITA-T, which we did last week. The RITA-T actually looks more closely at behavior that makes sense when you understand how autistic brains function (i.e., it’s hard to split your focus because so much sensory input is competing for your attention, and you can’t automatically filter it like a neurotypical person would). The test focuses on something called “joint attention,” trying to split your attention between a toy you’re playing with alongside another person and the person sharing the toy with you. It also focuses on how you’re interpreting sensory input (e.g., how Isaac reacted to me pretending to cry, how he reacted when I called his name with a blank expression, etc.). 

And, well. Isaac scored high enough to qualify for fast tracking towards diagnosis at our local hospital. 

Fast tracking essentially means that instead of us having to play telephone games trying to get in touch with someone, the EI specialists send in the paperwork for us. Fast tracking means that instead of facing a 6-18 month wait for an appointment, we’re looking at a 6 week wait. And that’s a huge difference. Six months would put us at Isaac being two years old, skipping over a lot of development. And eighteen months would put us at Isaac being three years old and aging out of EI services altogether. That it’s been fast tracked means that if he gets a diagnosis (which seems very likely at this point), he’ll be able to receive the services and therapy he needs to help him cope with a very overstimulating world and hopefully start preschool already better prepared than he would otherwise be. 

So. We’ll see what happens there. In the meantime, I’ve got 16 days until we do something absolutely insane and pack up the whole family in a rental car to drive down to Texas for Thanksgiving! Until next time and a wild trip report…

(oh also I have purple hair now)

Decisions

/ lovescienceandnat20s / 1 Comment

You know, if you’d asked me six weeks ago what everyone in the house was going to be for Halloween, I’d have rattled things off so easily that I’d have seemed like a mythical Good Mom, someone who’s got all her shit together and actually does the stuff she pins on Pinterest. 

(I do not have all my shit together, and Pinterest scares me)

And now I’m in a wild spot because while Sam has committed to being Darth Vader (“I’m going to do every other year, Mom! This year, Darth Vader; next year, Jack Skellington; the year after that, Darth Vader…”), I cannot decide what to do with the twins. 

A few weeks ago, Sam decided that he wanted to be Peter Pan, and I thought, well, that makes things easier. He’s Peter Pan. Carrie is Tinkerbell. Isaac is Captain Hook. I’ll be Wendy, Kyle can be Mr. Smee, and life’s fantastic. 

Except the next day (fortunately, before I bought anything), Sam informed me that he didn’t actually want to be Peter Pan. He was married to Darth Vader as a costume. Historically, he’s been unlikely to waver from a chance to dress up like Darth Vader, so I went ahead and ordered that, and it should arrive any day. I’m hoping it arrives while he’s at school so I can lay it out during the twins’ nap and he can try it on once he gets home.

14222370_10153829612385592_6350598245219719049_n(the infamous Darth Vader costume when he first got one, three years ago)

So he’s set. It’s the twins. Wayyyyy back months ago, when I naively thought that maybe I could convince my five-year-old to go along with my Halloween ideas, I thought that we could do a Toy Story thing. Sam would be Buzz Lightyear, Isaac would be Woody, and Carrie would be Jessie. It would be adorable, we’d get some great pictures, everyone would have a laugh. But nope, Sam wants to be Darth Vader, and I’m not about to tell my five-year-old that he can’t wear what he wants on Halloween, and the Toy Story thing doesn’t seem worth the expense (because Toy Story costumes are expensive, at least when you’re buying them for more than one person) if we’re not going to fully commit. 

Some ideas I’ve had and discarded:

  • Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. It’s the obvious choice, but (a) finding a Luke Skywalker costume is very difficult when your costumee is younger than nine; (b) making a Luke Skywalker costume involves time that we don’t have; and (c) I kind of want to save that for when they’re old enough to understand the implications of what they’re wearing. So nope.

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  • Grapes, purple and green. On the one hand: cute, easy, and cheap. On the other hand: there’s no way the twins would do anything besides sob wearing a costume made entirely of balloons. So nope.

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  • Peter Pan and Tinkerbell. If you want the costumes to match somewhat (like, look like they’re of the same quality and you didn’t decide to save on one twin’s costume so that you can splurge on the other), you’re SOL. Tinkerbell costumes exist at every price point for kids Carrie’s size, but Peter Pan costumes seem to only exist for kids Sam’s size and older, which makes no sense to me, but I only ever did B2B construction marketing, so maybe I just don’t know the market.

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  • The tortoise and the hare. Cute, but what statement is it making about the child we dress as the hare?

    legitimatesaneitaliangreyhound-size_restricted(flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood, you’re an asshole)

  • Literally any famous male/female pairing in history. They are literally all romantic couples, and I cringe out of my skin whenever I find pictures of twins dressed as, like. Danny Zuko and Sandy or Fred and Wilma Flintstone or Mickey and Minnie Mouse. No offense intended, because finding boy-girl twin Halloween costumes is WAY harder than you’d think, but my twins are not Lannisters.

original(if you’re not up to speed on Game of Thrones, first: you are luckier than I am; and second: these are the Lannisters, Jaime and Cersei, and they are twins and they have three children together. My twins are not Lannisters)

I keep coming back to Carrie being a princess of some sort, which narrows things down basically not at all. She loves princesses and all things sparkly and traditionally girly, and a princess costume would serve possibly quintuple duty at Renaissance Faires and Disney World and a couple of Halloweens. Theoretically, I like dressing her as Rapunzel, and I like dressing Isaac as Pascal the chameleon to match…

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…BUT then it ends up getting to the heart of the issue, that being Isaac not having a lot of identifiable interests yet. Well, no, that’s not true. He has interests. He likes climbing and cleaning. He’s a voracious eater. He loves laughing and exploring and going into and out of things. He likes things being where they belong, whether it’s a shoe on a foot or toys in a toy box. He likes it when I sing “The Teddy Bears’ Picnic” to them at bedtime. 

But how do you costume any of that?

With Carrie, when someone asks me to describe her, I have the easiest time ever. Picking her up is like picking up a baby made of cotton candy and bubble gum bubbles. She’s a princess with delicate aires and a constant song, a love for sparkles and prettiness and animal companions, a need to have things Her Way Or Else. She’s a gremlin, picking up dirty things off the floor to eat, hiding in dusty places, making weird collections of stuff. She’s a bottle of Diet Coke and Pop Rocks shaken up. You can’t help but adore her.

But Isaac. He almost defies description. He’s determined and needs things to be in their place at all times. He needs his routines to be followed and will get genuinely upset if the Thing that usually follows The Other Thing does not follow The Other Thing. If he wants something, he will get it, no matter how much you try to deter him. He’s fast, voracious, and beyond clever. And then when he smiles, you just absolutely melt, because his smile is incredible, the kind of smile that makes you feel loved to the core. 

Which… I guess is a fine description, but honestly, which one is easier to costume: stereotypical bubblegum candy princess or a clever, determined, fast, voracious sweetheart? 

I think he can be a dragon. 

I know it doesn’t matter a TON one way or the other because they don’t even understand Halloween yet. When Sam was their age, I dressed him as an owl because I told myself, “oh yes, he likes owls!” which he didn’t super like owls, but whatever. He refused to wear most of the costume and cried about it a lot, and I got zero pictures of him in the full costume. It wasn’t until the following year, when he dressed up as Darth Vader, that he really started having fun with Halloween. 

So I know it doesn’t matter, and they won’t care, but I still feel a bit like I’m letting Isaac down because finding a costume that matches who he is and what he likes feels impossible.

So maybe he’ll be a dragon.

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In other decisions news, over the last week, I’ve been asked more times than I realized (at first) if Kyle and I were planning on having more kids. 

Honestly, I have no idea, which is what I’ve said. Whenever people asked me during my pregnancy with the twins, I’d say “NO” and wax eloquent about hysterectomies, but twin pregnancies are awful, and when you’re in the middle of one, it’s hard to feel positively about growing any more humans. Kyle and I were talking today about one incident during the twins’ pregnancy, when Sam told me “Mommy, the poop is everywhere!” and he’d gotten poop all over his bedroom and I was so pregnant and so exhausted that I couldn’t deal with it and begged Kyle to come home from work to save me. 

So I can say with confidence that, given a choice in the matter, I will never have more twins. Absolutely no, not ever, never. 

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And there’s plenty of reason to have an overall “NO” on the books. Three kids is a fine number. I have my girl. Our bedroom setup works very well with three kids. A fourth kid would be a wild ride, financially speaking. I don’t know how my body would handle it. I’m just starting to get my body back into normal person shape after spending upwards of seven years either trying to get pregnant or being pregnant (that’s an additional +60 lbs that came from those seven years, too, which is fun). I want to gain some sense of identity and self outside of making babies. I want to have days with all my kids at school and me writing (or playing video games or, like, cleaning I guess). 

But on the flip side, there’s seven embryos on ice, and I went through hell to make them. No, I don’t want seven more kids, but I’d love one more girl someday, if we’re speaking from an emotional sense. I’d like to go through a pregnancy where (a) I know what I’m doing (like I didn’t with Sam); and (b) I’m not high risk solely because I’ve got more than one baby in me. I’d like to just do things normally and not be in a blind panic and then do the newborn days on Comparatively Easy Mode (because after you do twin newborns, any singleton anything is Comparatively Easy Mode). I’d like to have a matched set, two boys and two girls. I’d like to go into a delivery room knowing what I’m doing and how I’m doing it and with a playlist that I didn’t get to use with the twins.

Also I love babies.

So. I don’t know. And we’ve got time to make a decision. As long as we keep paying the $85/month storage fee, our embryos will be stored indefinitely. It’s the only way we CAN grow our family again, if we decide we want another child in the future. But I’m not thinking about it now (and I very much know Kyle isn’t), not more than off and on, as a back of the mind kind of thing. I’ve earned a respite from thinking about what my uterus is doing outside of my once-a-month adventures, from spending money on pregnancy tests and obsessively charting everything my body is doing. And I’m going to enjoy that respite. 

Starting with the Halloween costumes.

12 Years, 178 Days to Go

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Our town starts school the week before Labor Day, then gives everyone the Friday before Labor Day off, so kids have exactly two (2) days of school in the first week. I like this for kindergarten because it lets us all ease into the routine–it gives two (2) days in the first week to take care of all the administrative work, like labeling stuff and teaching kids the very basics of school life, and then the second week is still short so they aren’t too tired, and likely the real intense stuff doesn’t really pick up until the third week, which starts this coming Tuesday.

But one way or another, school started this week, and it was quite an experience.

Monday afternoon, Kyle and I took Sam in for an open house at the school so that we could drop off his supplies, meet his teacher, get him familiar with the school overall, and ease into everything. Sam’s classroom is ENORMOUS, like about the size of our entire downstairs (minus the dining room). There’s a typical desk and learning space, carpet in front of whiteboard, a play corner, a table with bouncy ball chairs around it, an entire nook for the teacher… it’s amazing. I’m sure most kindergarten classrooms are sizeable (when I remarked on its size to my mom, who taught kindergarten for a few years, she seemed nonplussed), but it still kind of blew my mind. 

What blew Sam’s mind–eventually–was seeing his best friend Hunter there. The two of them warmed up to each other kind of slowly at first, for reasons that Hunter’s parents, Kyle, and I couldn’t figure out (weird new environment? They haven’t seen each other since June? Some sort of kid code? Who knows?), but once they realized that (a) oh that’s you, and (b) we are still best friends, they started frolicking about VERY happily, around the auditorium, on the school bus they had for the kids to explore, all over. It was pretty great and set a positive tone for the first day on Wednesday.

Now, granted, that great and positive tone didn’t show up again for most of Wednesday morning, but who’s counting?

That’s not completely true. The great and positive tone showed up again more quickly than it probably could have, but it was kind of like pulling teeth to get it there. Sam’s my first baby, so I went a little overboard on all the “first day of school” photo supplies, like an oversized shirt that says “CLASS OF 2032” like I’d seen in a friend’s first day of school pictures of her sons and then one of those chalkboards talking about all of Sam’s favorite things and such. I 100% did not need to do all of that, but I like celebrating my kid, and I really want to get to his senior year of high school and have these great collections of photos to look back on.

So Wednesday morning. We all got up at 6:30ish because everyone slept kind of miserably for reasons we haven’t figured out, and I used the #momprivilege card to call dibs on the shower because I’d be the one dropping Sam off that morning, and I didn’t want to look like I was heading right back to the house to spend the rest of the day in my pajamas (even though I was, because chasing after twin toddlers is so much easier when you’re in comfy clothes). As I got in the shower, I let Kyle know where Sam’s first day outfit was laid out and asked him to encourage Sam to get dressed as soon as possible. 

So quick shower later, I come downstairs with dripping hair to see Sam, bundled in a blanket and wearing naught but his underwear and a smile while watching Netflix. Cue, therefore, a lot of flipping out because we had to leave in 15 minutes, and I still hadn’t taken a single picture with all the stuff I bought. And look, if I spend money on a photo prop, I am going to use that photo prop. 

We all rushed. Sam got dressed, and then… well, he didn’t want to get his picture taken. 

It’s the duality of the five-year-old. When I’m taking candid shots of his brother and sister being cute, he jumps in the picture with just his underwear, prompting me to say, “IF YOU WANT TO BE IN THE PICTURES, YOU NEED TO PUT SOME CLOTHES ON” in the Scary Mom voice. This has the excellent effect both of allowing me to take pictures of Sam AND stopping him from running about with nothing on. But then when I want to get pictures of him specifically, he’s suddenly hiding from the Momarazzi, like I’m going to sell pictures of him with chocolate on his face to the highest paying tabloid. 

(…would any tabloids like to buy? I’m just saying, we could use some more simoleons to add to the Halloween Costumes fund)

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And, of course, because I wanted to take pictures Wednesday morning, Sam would rather have had his teeth pulled out one by one. 

But I did eventually convince him to stand for some pictures by reminding him that the oversized “CLASS OF 2032” t-shirt makes him look like a ghost. So he posed… in our messy living room, which is somewhat like a mausoleum (we have a gorgeous picture window that means we don’t need lights on most of the day, but first thing in the morning, it makes things kind of… you know, dark). 

Whatever. I got the pictures, and he and I shipped off to school. I was in a mild state of panic because we’d left several minutes later than I’d wanted, and we were supposed to meet with Sam’s best friends from preschool for pictures before we went in. I didn’t want us to be late, so I muttered angrily at red lights and moseying farm equipment the entire ten minute drive to the school (ah, the privileges of living in a tiny town). And lo and behold, we got there way too early for us to do anything but wander around the outside of the building like a pair of lost John Travoltas. 

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(I did get a good picture of him in front of the school, though)

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And then the best friends–that’s Hunter and Kaia–and their families arrived, and we all took pictures and watched our kids, now happily in the company of the friends they’ve had since they were just a year old, run off to their classrooms without so much as a reluctant look back. 

And that was that! I’ll admit to having a lump in my throat for the drive home, but then the twins proceeded to keep me so busy that I didn’t even realize the entire day had passed by when my mother knocked on the front door to keep an eye on the twins while I waited for Sam to get off the school bus. 

(I blame the speed of the day also on the return of the Weather Channel to our Verizon cable, because I’m a nerd and eat hurricane coverage up like ice cream)

For Sam’s part, he seemed to have a good first day. He didn’t get into any details about it, so for all I know, they spent the entire time rehearsing to summon the Great Old Ones and bring about the Destruction of Humanity and A New Age of Cleansing or whatever, but I’m pretty sure they mostly just practiced school things.

(I mean, not that eldritch summoning ISN’T a school thing…)

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The only problem was that he got home with a backpack that was literally dripping. We’d mistakenly given him a water bottle that he couldn’t close all the way, and as a result, his backpack was absolutely flooded. Worse, it wouldn’t zip one way or another, so as soon as he was in bed and the twins were in bed, I found my bra again and headed out to Target to find us a replacement. The pickings were slim (most were like… mint green with pastel donuts or with a mauve paisley print), but I managed to find him a Jansport backpack with stars on it, and those things last forever, so problem officially solved.

Day two was a little wilder to start, somehow. It was Kyle’s first day doing drop off, and in his haste to leave and Sam’s five-year-old-ness and my having twins on me ness, we all forgot about Sam’s lunchbox. Cue Kyle hurrying back less than ten minutes after leaving and delivering said lunchbox to the office, in the hopes that it would make it safely to Sammy (which it did). But for all that hustle and bustle, Sam didn’t really eat much. He had most of his carrots (weirdly enough), and we think? he had the pepperonis we packed him, but everything else was untouched. 

I get that, though. I never used to really like eating more than a snack at school, saving my appetite until I got home and could make myself some real food. But this stuff has basically been Sam’s lunch since he was about two so ???

Whatever. We’ll figure it out, and now he’s home until Tuesday, currently playing his Kindle quietly while the Weather Channel tells us about hurricanes. Isaac is awake after sleeping for maybe three and a half minutes, but seeming less upset about that fact by the minute, and I can shift my focus to the next thing…

…which is school picture day in less than two weeks. Ha.

idekman

What they deserve

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Sam graduated from pre-K last Friday, which I used to think wasn’t a HUGE deal because, really, must we have graduations for every transition in life? But then he graduated and I was crying the second they started playing “Pomp & Circumstance” (on his principal’s iPhone held up to a microphone, which had everyone falling out laughing). He got the superlative of “the next Luke Skywalker,” which is fair, and had lots of cute pictures with his teacher and with us.

Earlier that day, he’d had his kindergarten screening, which was less to see how good he is at the alphabet and counting and such and more to make sure that his classroom next fall is a good mix of kids. While he was busy playing games that demonstrated his abilities in things like motor skills, concepts, and socialization, I got to sit down and learn all about the kindergarten adventure awaiting us in the fall, for which Sam is most assuredly ready and I am mostly ready.

I say “mostly” because I’m vacillating in how emotional I feel about it. Many days, I think, “Please, someone take this child for the full 8 hours of school, I am exhausted” and many days, I think, “Oh, I hope he’s ready, because we’ve been trying really hard, but there’s so much different about school school compared to preschool.”

Years and years ago, before I had kids, I’d planned to homeschool, less because I think that public schools are a bad influence or because I think that they’re bad overall and more because I wanted to be able to give my kids the individual attention that we probably wouldn’t be able to afford for them to get in a public or even private school setting. That way, if any of my kids were super advanced in any area, we could push them harder; and if any of my kids were having a hard time in any area, we could give them a chance to catch up. And, honestly, I still like a lot of that and would probably be more inclined towards homeschooling them if we were ever in a part of the country or the state where the public schools were less consistently good.

(our tiny town of less than 10,000 people is also a pretty upper class town, by and large, so the public schools are pretty well funded and marked well overall for everything but activities–because the schools have about 14 total people in them–and diversity–for the same reason)

But Sam is such a social kid, and yeah, programs exist for socializing homeschooled kids, but he honestly thrives in a classroom environment, even more than I’d expected he would, and I don’t think I could do him justice teaching him at home.

(the jury is still out on Isaac and Carrie)

It’s going to be a huge adjustment for him, and we’re already seeing his anxiety about that ramp up. He’s having a LOT harder time with bedtime lately, coming downstairs multiple times after being tucked in to ask for, say, a cold drink of water or for another bedtime story or so many varied things. And then once he falls asleep, he keeps waking up in the middle of the night wanting to be cuddled and reassured or, on particularly bad nights, to set up a nest in our room and sleep there until morning (mostly because he’s gotten too big for the bed). Part of me–the part that enjoys uninterrupted evenings–is inclined to scold him for it, but most of me gets that he can’t express his anxiety in better ways, so he just struggles sleeping, and we help him through it as we can.

He probably won’t remember us working through this with him–I mean, my own memories of being five are spotty at best and mostly associated with either being constipated or being at Disney World (at one point, both at the same time, hey!), but I hope that it embeds in his subconscious that Kyle and I are here to help him work through the things he can’t figure out on his own.

Ultimately, that’s what I want for my kids. I don’t want any of them to ever have the feeling of “oh man, my dad/mom’s gonna kill me, I can’t tell them about this!” or “I’ll be in too much trouble if they find out; I have to do this on my own.” If they end up at a party and can’t trust their friends to take them home for whatever reason, even if they weren’t supposed to be there in the first place, I want them to call me for a ride. If they’re really struggling with their classes in school, I want them to ask for help. If they end up either pregnant or getting someone pregnant or with an STD, I want them to talk to me as soon as it happens so that we can work out a plan together.

If they’re queer in any way–homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, transgender, genderqueer, whatever–I want them to know that they can come out to me without fear and that I’ll always be their fiercest advocate, no matter the political climate or what anyone else thinks.

If their life path takes them in a direction that maybe I don’t agree with but isn’t hurting themselves or anyone else (objectively speaking), I want them to know that I love and support them no matter what, that they will always have a place in my home.

If their political or religious beliefs differ wildly from mine but they aren’t hurting themselves or anyone else or advocating for hurting themselves or anyone else, I want them to always be able to talk to me openly and comfortably, to know that I take them seriously, even while they’re still kids.

Because they’re my kids, and honestly, it’s the least they deserve.