The next milestone

I see now that it's been around a year since I've lost written. I am trying to think about all the things that have changed in the past year. In some ways, life is definitely very normal. More normal than it has been over the past two crazy years. Yet, it always seems to be in transition. The boys are getting older. I now have a high schooler and a middle schooler. It was weird to think that the other day was one of last four first day pics I could try to even take. Four years sounds like nothing...like a blink of an eye. No parents at the bus stop wishing their high schoolers off. Today I had to go to SuperTarget since I forgot some dishwasher pods at Costco and was also looking for a scientific calculator for my high schooler. As I was walking out, I saw a mama pushing her two kids in one of those big carts. I think I only ever used one of those once at the Target with my kids. Pro tip: If you have littles, it's so helpful to be able to contain them in a cart of a big cart like she was using rather than worrying about one of your toddlers or pre-schoolers running off in the parking lot if they won't hold your hand. I smiled as I watched her and another mom of two littles make their way into the store. I remembered for a brief moment in time what that was like to be able to go to SuperTarget as your big outing of the day when I didn't have to worry about getting kids off the bus. I remember then feeling overwhelmed trying to manage to take two littles to the store and longed for some quiet time alone at a Target and being able to browse the aisles aimlessly. It's funny how being in a different role now changes your perspective as you long or even wish to have one of those days back at least for a moment in time. So I smiled at both moms remembering then and thinking about the here and now. I guess I'm feeling a little lost. Not sure what my role is in life when the kids need me less. That's kind of scary, but at the same time a little freeing. It's nice to know that they can be home for a short while when I run an errand. It's nice to try to sleep through the night. How I miss those snuggles of soft mushy cheeks up against mine though. I totally get why the grandparents dote on and love their grandbabies so. The time when they are little is so fleeting. As my husband says, "The days are long, but the years are short."

Does anyone feel this way?

It's been a minute since I've updated or written. It's a few days before the start of the school year. The pandemic continues. I have started doing more things with people and things that I enjoy since being fully vaccinated in April. This feels like a must do. My mental health struggles if I would have continued on the path of staying home and not seeing people. Yet here we are...with a highly contagious variant on the brink of sending my 11 year old who is not eligible or old enough to be vaccinated into school without any mask requirement so far. This alone is controversial. If you disagree with me, I'm just gonna have to say we're going to have to agree to disagree on this matter. This weekend I find myself feeling very fatigued. I aimlessly scroll social media and then feel regret after doing it. More bad news...hospitals filling up, more people dying, and the controversy over the kids. So much fighting. And I wonder why my mental health struggles. So I am existing and trying the best that I can to continue to get through the pandemic without actually looking for mental health resources. I have returned to my workout location. Classes are very small, I know most everyone and we are all vaccinated. I know that this doesn't mean that I can't catch or won't catch Covid. Besides mental health suffering, my actual physical health is suffering. I haven't been able to pull together enough to try to lose weight, even though I need to. My skin is wreaking havoc and I feel like it's hormonal changes but in addition to that from what I Google point to signs of pre-diabetes or possibly insulin resistance. I have an appointment for a functional nurse practitioner to draw up some bloodwork to check hormone levels in November. I'm hoping to be in better shape by then. I also haven't had the energy to go see my new PCP to get the bloodwork drawn, but I know I need to. The list is long of the things that I need to do, but feel somewhat paralyzed by current circumstances. Depressed? Quite possibly so. I also don't feel like I have the energy to figure this out right now. I feel almost numb. At times angry, but many times just kind of going through the motions. I know my husband senses this. Has questioned me about it, but I have no answers. I am fine. Some days I'm cheery and happy, other days and more often than the cheery days, less so. The world just feels so different, and it feels like it has changed for the worse and will never go back to what it was before. I don't know what I need. I just wonder....does anyone feel this way? What are you doing to help this current situation?

A year later after the world shut down

A year ago remains pretty vivid in my mind. It's hard to believe a year has gone by, but a year ago today was the last day of normalcy for me. Well, let me back up a bit. The day before today a year ago, the school district my kids go to determined that the kids would be going virtual. The kids basically took a lot of stuff home with them on Friday. If I look back, I could probably read the emails. I remember I had found a guitar on Marketplace and had gone to pick it up. I remember hearing people joking in the distance about the world shutting down. I notified the President of the company I work at about the schools going virtual as this would be a sign that our company would also be making plans to go virtual as well. Friday I basically spent the time cleaning out the refrigerator and freezer at work. I remember co-workers going out and looking for toilet paper. I had recently scored a four pack of Clorox wipes for the office. Little did I know that these would be the very items that would be so hard to find in the coming months. After work, there was a fundraiser at the place I take dance classes and that was the last "normal" thing I did before everything shut down. It was a really fun dance class with lots of energy. I remember driving home after that class and feeling like life as I had known it was about to change. I remember feeling like this was an out of body experience. Surely, I was dreaming. Maybe I would wake up from this at any moment and it would have been a horrible nightmare. Sadly, no this all was really happening. I remember when I first heard about the Coronavirus. My husband he is way more tuned into the news told me about some virus that was in China. He told me he thought we should purchase a deep freezer and buy some extra food just in case. He was always the worrier, but he is always planning ahead. I didn't really think much of anything he said, but figured we could always use extra freezer space. We ended up going to Best Buy to buy one and had it delivered to the house. The boys ended up doing virtual schooling for the remainder of the school year. They had Zooms. Teachers basically had to pivot, and like they always do, they pivoted to the best of their ability. The schools scheduled appointments for parents to pick up the remainder of the belongings. Carl and I both ended up working remotely and haven't returned to the office yet. We started to establish a new normal. We stayed home mainly. I switched to virtual workout classes. I had online chats with girlfriends and game nights with friends and family all virtually. We had very brief visits with grandparents masked up. We watched the news. We read the headlines. We thought about all of the health care workers on the frontlines of what seemed like a literal war zone, a war against Covid. We thought about the people we knew and loved. It seems like the oddest thing in the world, wanting to see people and be in the room with them could actually cause their demise from some invisible threat that you might not even know that you had. Going to the grocery store also felt surreal and strange. People lined up their carts outside. This was the beginning of the fighting. Fighting for a pack of toilet paper, masked up, and every person you came across the path of might be carrying a deadly virus. You couldn't tell who might be infected. This feels like some sort of weird Zombie movie, but no this was really happening. Just writing this out feels like some strange science fiction movie. Warmer weather brought more opportunities to be outside. We were able to socially do things. I went to some outdoor dance classes. I saw some friends periodically from time to time outside for quick chats. We saw some out of town family for one socially distanced outdoor visit. We went to dinner one time and ate outside at a Red Robin. I had dinner with a friend one time and we ate outside. No visits to the neighborhood pool, no vacation this year. I take that back, we took one trip to West Baden with the kids. We used the outdoor pool, which we basically had to ourselves. We had to choose what the kids should do for schooling. Their school system offered virtual and in-person. For middle and high school kids, they would have to go hybrid because the number of kids in the upper grades could not have the kids be socially distanced. We ended up sending the boys. Our middle schooler wanted to go in-person. Our youngest is in his last year of elementary and we decided to send him as well so he could have as normal of an educational experience for his last year of elementary. Now a year later there are several vaccines out. They started vaccinations with healthcare workers in December. The grandparents have all been fully vaccinated, which is a huge relief for us. We can now feel a little safer around them especially since the boys are in school. We now wait our turn to be considered eligible as supply ramps up. This has been the strangest year. It has been a year full of gratitude. I know we are extremely lucky that we were able to work from home, be safe, and not have our income impacted. Our families were able to stay safe through this pandemic. I know that for over half a million families in the US, this is not their story.

What are the things you've learned during the pandemic?

I've had this thought now and again....about what has this time basically pretty much quarantined taught me? I have to say as much as I hate the pandemic and the lives which are lost, jobs and businesses which have suffered, the hell basically health care workers and teachers and people in education and just so many people are experiencing, I have to say and acknowledge that there is some good to all of this. There has to be some sort of lesson to all of this. We have been forced to slow down and be with our immediate family much more. We have been forced to work differently, to learn differently. I have to say I wonder if after this is all over (which seems to be less than a year away now heading into 9 months of the pandemic), how will I be changed? Will I even want to go out any more? I certainly miss people...family and friends and going out to dinner or lunch and seeing my mom without worrying about killing her. I miss my exercise classes in-person. I miss the kids just getting on the bus without worrying that one of the kids might catch Covid. I definitely miss the before the pandemic. I have so many thoughts about the pepole who lived through the 1918 pandemic. I wonder what their thoughts were. I read this rather chilling article which could have been describing the current pandemic. People were arguing about wearing masks. Others stayed home. It was so eerie how the two pandemics were actually matching up even though the pandemics were over 100 years apart when they took place. It makes me wonder when they say history repeats itself if people actually learn from their mistakes? I must say that I feel like I am a person who does learn from my mistakes and I would never repeat this or that mistake. I'm human, though, so maybe I'm wrong.

Spoiler Alert: Didn't See That Coming: Putting Life Back Together When Your World Falls Apart by Rachel Hollis

I keep checking books out of the library. Putting them on hold and then picking them up from the satellite library location. It is a lot of effort it seems for someone to find the book, have it sent to a different library, for me to pick it up curbside only to not finish the library book. This has been the theme for me this year. It's not due to the lack of time. You do know when something is important enough to you, you just make the time for it, don't you? I think my problem has just been a lack of wanting to read the actual books I've checked out. Recommendations made to me, but when my heart wasn't into reading them then it's hard to actually exert the energy to read books that you had no desire to read in the first place. So during the pandemic, Rachel and Dave Hollis announced they were divorcing. This was somewhat shocking as this was a woman and a couple who seemed to have all of their stuff together. Their cute selves were always showing up on my Facebook pages. I never watched, but I could see that many were. I had read both of Rachel's previous books and event went to see her movie when it was released in theaters. She was also a speaker at our Arbonne annual conference last year so I had followed her. I had followed her, but not really followed her or bought any of her services, etc. When I heard the news, I felt sad for her. Then I read the comments. Hundreds of comments from people saying that she was a fraud. She and Dave had given out marriage advice to their followers. Maybe even had paid marriage retreats? I have no idea since I didn't follow her closely. Lots of people felt scammed by her, but all I felt for her was sympathy. (Or is it empathy? I always get confused). No one marries another person and has children and adopts another child only to have it end in divorce. No one ever imagines that this is how everything would play out. I don't need to know the details of her marriage to feel sadness for her and her soon to be ex-husband and their four kids. Of course there were some comments who felt the same as me and felt for her, felt for what she and Dave might be experiencing and going through. So yesterday I finished this book. I made it a point to finish one library book and it was a fairly quick read. I found myself at various times crying at certain sentences because I could relate to every painful sentence she wrote and remembering painful times in my life. However, her book was one filled with hope as well. The fact that someone could hit very hard times in their life and come out stronger and better for that experience. I feel this to the core of my very being of all of the painful stuff, has made me who I am today. I went back and looke at reviews and a lot of people didn't like this book. Found it depressing and maybe even a little redundant from her previous books, but I actually liked that it seemed a little bit more authentic. That's what I think most people want to see is authenticity. They don't want to see the perfect couple coming to give marriage advice only to have it end in divorce. I think most of her viewers would have been more compassionate had they come out and said, "We don't have our stuff together. We have problems like everyone else. We are in counseling." Instead they tried to make it appear that all was well when it really wasn't. And at the same time, I also think that they have a right to their privacy. They don't have to share with the world anything they don't want to. That's our right to live the life that we choose to and to share what we want with the world.

Schitt's Creek

I've needed to find an escape from the ugly in the world. Social media, online fighting, the news, politics, Covid-19 stats....so I started watching Schitt's Creek. I ended up finding something perfect to preoccupy my mind for a short while. I ended up seeing an episode and I don't want to give any spoilers. It made me laugh, but it was the holiday episode. And then it made me cry because soon we will be upon our first holidays without him. It's almost November, which means Thanksgiving and Christmas are around the corner. Then will come January and the one year anniversary of my dad's death. Honestly, I feel I am grieving as well as one could possibly be in the middle of a pandemic after losing a parent. Some days I think about him a lot. Some days I cry a lot. Some days there are no tears, but other days the tears and the grief and the mourning and the pain feel as painful as the day he died, and the days, weeks, and months leading up to his death. I don't want to dwell. I know he isn't suffering any longer, which brings me peace. And I know that he hasn't had to be alone in his nursing home room without visitors for months and months on end. I think to myself, "Thank God he didn't live through this." He most likely would not have made it through without my mom visiting every day. Plus there was an outbreak at the nursing home he died at in March/April and the building he lived in got hit hard and many of the residents died. Then there is the suriving parent, my mom that I have to worry about. She is taking this harder than I thought she would. She's always been so tough, resilient through everything my whole life. She cries on the phone sometimes when I talk to her. She is sad and she misses him. The other day going through some Google Photo memories on my husband's phone, this picture came up that my husband took of my dad and I. I smiled when I saw it because I can feel the love in the photo. I can feel the love that we shared. I know he wouldn't want me to be sad too long, grieve too long. I finally got myself to go through messages on the answering machine because it is almost full (yes we still have a home phone and an old fashioned answering machine). I heard his voice and I smiled. My husband laughed when he heard his voice. It's both happy and sad....hearing his voice, seeing the pictures, remembering the memories, thinking of things he would say, or the things he would laugh at, things the kids say and do that he would laugh at.

What I think might be and what actually is reality

Recently I shared my blog with a friend and told her I was thinking of starting blogging again. She encouraged me to so here I am trying to think of what I want to write about. Today the kids are off for fall break and I had all of these ideas of exploring the area and taking them on an easy hike so we could look at all of the fall colors and have them off of screens for a bit and make some wonderful memories. Last night I slept horribly. I had a nightmare and had a hard time falling asleep to begin with. It's wet and gray outside and just kind of dreary and it kind of matches my mood. So now it's 1:50 PM and I have only accomplished getting dressed and starting a load of dishes. I need to go to the store to go grocery shopping and I'll probably do that next. I wonder if others experience this and maybe this is just life. You expect things to go a certain way and then it ends up going a completely different way? I used to get really upset about it. I just wanted a nice day with the family making memories, and instead I ended up with fighting kids or a grouchy husband or whatever the case may be. I've learned to accept and know that this is real life. Real life is fighting, moods, and sometimes not timed quite well. You kind of have to learn to lower expectations and kind of roll with how the day goes. I've also learned the way that I react to situations can have a huge impact on how it impacts the rest of my family and vice versa. The boys were being silly so I went upstairs and found them both in my youngest son's bed and the oldest was tickling the youngest and he was laughing. I sat with them and talked to them about what we wanted to do today. We compared foot sizes and hand sizes. Oldest son's foot and hand are now longer than mine (yikes) while youngest isn't quite the same size as mine in terms of length. The oldest helped me load and unload the dishes without me asking him to. We laughed about me dropping a container right into the dishwasher. So although it's kind of dreary outside and the plans I had for us are now changed, I am still grateful for theses moments. Just us existing these days, and I'm okay with that.