the nap wrangler

December 4th

I’m optimistically waiting for my toddler to nap so I can too, guilt free (also I hate being woken up two seconds after I’ve fallen asleep when it took me 45 minutes to get to those 2 seconds). In the meantime I’m hiding in my room reading The Bloggess’ blog. Like all of it. From the beginning working to the more recent stuff. Still in 2007 at the moment. And so, responding to her statement to try this:

SUPERHERO NAME: (”The” + 2nd favorite color, favorite drink)
The Green Kombucha

STRIPPER NAME: (the name of your favorite perfume/cologne/scent, favorite candy)
Lavender Twix

SPY NAME/BOND GIRL: (your favorite season, holiday/ flower)
Spring Marshmallow

CARTOON NAME: (favorite fruit, article of clothing you’re wearing right now + “ie” or “y”)
Blackberry Sweatshirtie

HIPPY NAME: (What you ate for breakfast, your favorite tree)
White Chocolate Chip Flax Seed Oatmeal Willow (which is literally the perfect name for me).

My takeaway from this is that my interests and habits haven’t changed in years. I’m not bummed by that. Also I want to grow most of those things in a few years (lavender, marshmallow, willows, blackberries… kombucha… white chocolate chips… you know, garden staples).

December 4th, a little bit later

The little one didn’t nap long at all. So no sleep for mama. UGH. In the words of Cristine of Simply Nailogical, “drink slave!” (the context being that her boyfriend always bring her Starbucks during her videos so they started calling him drink slave… so I am wishfully thinking that my husband who is currently 500 miles away will surprise me with a peppermint latte in two seconds).

Also I imagine most of my posts will be posted very much after the fact of when I started writing them. I get distracted by my mini me a lot as she is both cute and demanding of attention (both literally and through her general disregard for common sense safety).

December 5th

It’s a new day! Jake is home from his business trip (yay).

Again I am waiting for the little one to take a nap (surprise surprise). She just gets so self destructive when tired… like she yell more and be increasingly clumsy and when it gets to a point of no return she’ll start biting clothes in frustration of her impending siesta.

However today, I might have been able to get the little one to nap earlier (maybe…). In a past life, she used to have a nap that started between 9am and 10am and lasted ’til like 1230pm but since we moved she’s been an anarchist to that schedule. Alas.

December 5th, even later

Update: So she eventually did nap! But… she fell asleep like this:

Which led me to worry about her leg circulation so after attempting to cover her for a bit in this fashion:

I snuck back into her room to push her leg back into the bed. Naturally she cracked open an eye to see what the fuck I was doing and then promptly became full scale alert, so I tried to breastfeed her to get her to sleep (successfully) but then as I slowly put her back into her crib, the degree of downwards sloping in my movement triggered her no-nap-this-is-bullshit-o-meter. So now I am listening to the sounds of a groggy, grumpy toddler-ite and hoping she will slip back into sleep in a minute (but am not optimistic).

late night tangential rants of insomnia

Middle of the night

I tried my hand at cooking.  I won’t say proper cooking because I winged most of it and have no culinary finesse, but I had some successes. Not the intended ones but whatever.

The spur to cook came from starting Susan Herrmann Loomis’ book last night called On Rue Tatin and it reminded me why I keep falling in love with the French language. The provençal love affair with the harvests of their lands feels so wholesome,  so hobbit-y, which is my constantly reoccurring aspiration. So I tried to dabble. I won’t say it was fun but if nothing else, I got a better diversity of vegetables in me than I have in months.

My goal is to learn how the south-of-France French prepare dishes, and then twist the dishes to be inclusive of native seasonal plants growing in my home state. Step two is to prepare to grow some lovelies for ourselves this coming year. And step three is to work towards sustainable harvests and/or local buying. These steps can be simultaneous.

I feel as though every action and thought I take these days is all just a step towards becoming a hobbit because as Tolkien’s (or Peter Jackson’s) character of Bilbo says, “it is no bad thing to celebrate a simple life.” As I get older, I feel it more and more in my bones, that all I want to so is live a simple life. But defining what that means in a modern era proves to be endlessly frustrating.

I also feel like I have to keep discovering mentally myself because I don’t know myself at all. Pretty clear that I do in fact have some form of OCD given the increase in intensity of certain habits (getting bursts of dopamine from picking my skin of “impurities” when I have severe eczema and doing so instead of sleeping, scrolling back through years of content to start at the beginning of blogs, my aggressive aversion to sticky things touching my hands, my tendency to ruminate on my future “path” ad nauseam to the point that I have notebook after notebook of unfinished plans of what I will do with my life starting since before college.

I definitely also suffer from anxiety, but at a more manageable level, given how often I freak out that my little one will die from my negligence (the newest edition today being that she somehow manages to break her own neck in her carseat while we are driving home). I lose sleep over trying to figure out how to make a successful career and balance being a stay-at-home mom, and also how to not become part of any pyramid schemes.

And given how much happier I am since the move, I fear I did in fact have postpartum depression. It got to the point where trying to muster energy to leave the apartment at all felt like a chore, and really the only time I did it was to take baby to her toddler music class or to drive Jake to work. I didn’t want to cook for myself, I didn’t want to  make plans with others, I didn’t want to do anything really. Which naturally triggered my anxiety for Fi because I knew I was doing her wrong by being a recluse.

Thankfully it seems that era of my life is over. Maybe I needed to be back in a familiar territory. Maybe I needed to be near my parents who know when I need to be dragged out of the house, and/or when I just need help. Who knows. Either way, I’m glad that mental hurdle is lessening, and wish I had caught it earlier.

I think my other issues are that I undervalue any impact my mental health may be having on my actions because I blame everything on my skin, which probably is part of the problem, but at the same time addressing my anxiety and compulsive picking would definitely help the skin heal as well.

Also my other constant struggle is that I still love blogging but I don’t like how it became so trendy. Now I can’t disentangle myself from thinking about my standing in the interwebs, how to get more likes, comments, followers, etc. I don’t want to follow a theme, but man it would be sweet to make a career out of just spewing my thoughts. Dream job? “Yes, yes” (said in the voice of Eric Foreman from That 70s show).

Also I feel like at some point I have to accept that nighttime and sleep don’t work for me. I think I oscillate between 2-5 hours most nights and the causes of disruptions vary. Lately, I stay up because it’s the quiet time when I have the world to myself, so I usually stay up reading. Other times I wake up (or stay up) from anxiety (or recently fear of my new home), and sometimes it’s due to itching or sweating that I wake up/can’t sleep.

Also sometimes I make typos that crack me up. Like robin –> ribib3. I’d blame the autocorrect (because it doesn’t work… or I may have turned it off on my phone) but honestly it’s usually that I don’t care to correct myself anymore if I think my point still got across. This usually applies only to texting. For blog posts I care a lot and will randomly go back and read posts from months ago and find mistakes to fix. But not systematically in a way that actually gets anything done. Oh no. Just randomly here and there.

I feel like Maury the hormone monster is yelling at me, saying “Rage, rage, fucking rage!” But instead replace rage with rant. I bet I’m feeling so ranty because I didn’t get to chat with Jake as much as usual since he’s out of town for tonight for work and apparently I dump most of these thoughts in him or else they spill over into the blog. Oops. So you should all be happy for the dam that is Jake to the diverted water flow that is my mind.

Maybe I should have stuck to google’s blogspot. They didn’t charge for changes like wordpress does. And  I want to change my url all the time. But wordpress looks so clean and pretty and now I’ve got years of posts on it, and I love chronicles. Ugh.

I should drink more water.  That’s not a tangent but just a stand alone thought I have multiple times a day. And yet, I never quite achieve a moderate amount of consumption. Hmm.

The next two paragraphs I had to delete because in my infinite sleep wisdom, I copied and pasted a previous two.

Another OCD tendency: I start a notebook with one thing… say it’s things I need to do. Then after a little while I realize I want to write about something else say books I want to read, but I don’t want to use the same notebook for this new topic. So now I either have to start a new notebook, which seems wasteful and excessive, or rip out the original pages which seems needlessly destructive. Or I share the notebook with both ideas and over time the book becomes a crazy incoherent ranting pile of all kinds of ideas and lists and notes to self.

This is a complete tangent but I just wanted everyone to know that it is possible to breastfeed on demand and still have a baby that sleeps through the night.  Pediatricians I encountered all told me I’d have to at least night wean to get my little one to sleep through the night but they were wrong. Haha!

Andddd I’ve got less than 2 hours before the little one wakes up. Fuck.

Later

Posted much later. I breastfed the baby in bed and put baby shark on repeat to gain me another hour and a half of being horizontal. Life hacks.

blue light filter

A poem

I am a romantic of old:

I dream with eyes open,

I remember life by specific scents and vivacious colors.

But straddling the line of before and after,

of life pre and post infinite connection,

I find myself falling more towards the latter side,

the untethered,

and further away from the screen-lite kind of life.

I have forgotten how to thrive in the recesses of my own mind,

with no eye to the audience,

pure expression,

without the likes and follows.

And yet,

I am not and have never been,

by any means a purist.

Though I long for past eras,

of strong communities,

non-virtual,

I love (or am addicted to) the appeal of the always available.

There is always more to learn,

experiences to witness that I didn’t know of

and life to try.

Though, do I want to?

Is it that I now desire the domestic,

or that I long for stable roots from which to grow?

Is the constant creeping cloud of worry due to not knowing how to say “my experiences are enough”?

From wanting, when sharing occurs,

for it to be from others via their own lips,

or some other slower, less show-y manner?

Can I not just miss out on what I don’t know,

the fear of regret assuaged by the realization that what makes for a good life,

is still yet the most subjective of all?

So perhaps if I just follow my ephemeral heart and gut,

they won’t lead me astray.

---

Hey, if what you read seemed dated or familiar, I’ve been combining all my other blogs’ content to this site. Please bear with me as I post older content.  🙂 This poem was written May 5, 2019.