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sprout you have to stay on your chair at dinner sprout i m sad i need a snuggle from mama gets off chair 3 sprout tells us daily that she doesn t like daycare when pressed she says she likes the food playground people her little cot naps some of the toys and that there are other kids but none of the other kids in particular when asked what she doesn t like about daycare she says i have beautiful days there pea and i have decided what she means is that daycare is not as much fun as being at home with nanny c and with mama and dada there at lunch and periodically through the day which fair spud 1 spud is liking kindergarten we don t get any information from him aside from claims they are learning the chicken dance every day and that there is excrement on the lunch tables both of which we eventually reluctantly had to ask his teacher about false on both counts he is pleased to go he eats his entire lunch except when he runs out of time and then it is the vegetables he doesn t particularly like that suspiciously had no more time allotted he came home one day with a drawing of a tiger on top of someone s head which was the most elaborate drawing we ve seen from him 2 concurrent with spud liking kindergarten spud s intense violent phase of the past 2 months has evaporated big transitions are hard when you are four but you aren t allowed to take it out on your mother or your smaller sister when that isn t getting results i am much relieved to no longer be a punching bag or goalie preventing lobbed objects from hitting sprout we are working with him to find other ways to express emotions there s a lot of yelling at ceilings at the moment which is vastly preferable but still not particularly enjoyable 3 spud got quite into extreme weather this summer thanks to the endless thunderstorm and tornado warnings i draw him little notes in his lunch boxes on a theme each week last week was weather and after three notes on hurricanes and the like and on a day when he had chosen dinosaur pants t shirt sweatshirt lunchbox and backpack to have a theme day so i can show my teachers he came home with a drawing of a hurricanisaurus and a tornadactyl clearly a collaboration between him and his teacher it was fun spud was selectively mute in daycare for the first 8 months so it s really neat to see him enjoying and interacting with kindergarten pea 1 pea s team at golden company is being reassigned again it s the first time i ve seen him seriously consider recruiter emails for other companies as this is now three straight years of him gearing up to a project only to have it fizzle move or be assigned to others since starting at the office here five years ago he has been forcibly moved off of teams and onto new projects four times it is golden company s way and pea is performing well he s probably going up for promotion next round but it is frustrating to constantly be starting over 2 pea has risen to the spud won t eat dairy and school doesn t allow any nuts or nut substitutes challenge by adapting his previously walnut filled sourdough to fully seedy and filling our pantry with odd seeds spreads and enriched flours to bake things like tahini and coconut bliss balls and date based home baked spelt granola bars mainly we need his afternoon snack to be more than just carbohydrates or at least contain some semblance of complex nutrition spud smells the new offerings with suspicion but has been eating them happily enough 3 pea is still introspecting and examining his relationship with alcohol he read a million tiny pieces last month which is a memoire of addiction rehab and recovery i had read it last year and was surprised he picked it up feeling it was a bit close to home he says most of the depictions of addiction really didn t resonate with him that he feels his actions were more strongly rooted in habit than addiction from everything he s said this feels true to me but does not remove the requirement for caution and vigilance he agrees lab monkey 1 september always catches me off guard and it did so again this year i m perilously behind but am coping by applying my mat leave tactics a laser focus on the important things with occasional dedicated hours for all the other noise as otherwise the admin tasks will subsume all my available time this was made worse by sprout being home for three days this week for a close contact isolation stint which started late day 7 post last exposure before a positive test was reported we re all negative so dodged that bullet i d been working as though the kids might be home any moment and while that was exhausting and nerve wracking as a modus operandi it did mean there was precious little i d procrastinated coming into this week pea and i split the days home with sprout and each got about a 4 5 hour work day thank goodness for naps with some top up time in the evenings 2 i saw a tiktok where a woman was saying she never worries about being a good wife the way she worries about whether she s a good mother she worries about the state of her relationship with her husband so why not do the same with kids i ve been thinking about it all week and thinking of ways to strengthen my relationship with each of the kids at the end of the day that bond that trust and love is so much more important than the myriad little check boxes required for achieving motherhood accomplishment i get mired in the checkboxes that if they have shoes that fit and lunches that are interesting and well balanced and if they spend time outside that i m doing ok and all of those things are important but it was a good reminder to me in my busiest season that the silly songs and the deeper talks and the little moments where i specifically dedicatedly cherish them and the firm but clearly explained boundaries those are the bits that will stick 3 my extroversion goes in waves where i need people and where i m ok to just have check ins with my inner circle i set up the next two weeks as though i need people and i overdid it not because i am in an extroversion trough but because we re trying to keep the kids weekends a bit relaxed as they adjust to busier days at school and daycare and because i m writing a big grant that is due in five days and i ve needed still need extra time for it luckily sprout s isolation and the continued inclement weather this fall have scuttled a number of plans this week which i ve been able to reschedule spread out over more time and critically after the grant is due and that s us both kids are doing well with transitions both parents managed our first foray into what is sure to be a rotating door of kids in and out of school this fall and we re each of us and collectively doing better than i would have guessed two months ago i specifically moved my family north inland onto a geologically stable land mass in a region with abundant freshwater in hopes of mitigating our early experience of climate change and i am taking the recent uptick in tornados here as a personal affront tornados were exceedingly rare here ten years ago and we had six tornado warnings and two actual tornados this summer in a wide region but still i feel personally aggrieved he wasn t fully mute but basically only spoke if asked direct questions and then in as few words as possible i didn t even know it was happening they just thought he was quiet shy then one day his educators told me very excitedly that he had told them a story about our fish we had bought new fish and the story was we bought new fish five of them and that is when i realized he didn t actually talk at daycare two weeks later he came in and aggressively chanted the entirety of anna dewdney s little excavator at them and then told so many stories they had to ask him to be quiet part of me is reading this spud update and wondering if i don t need to go get my kid tested or possibly some therapy i think he s ok he s introverted and he struggles with big feelings but he s empathetic and he s bright and once he s comfortable in a situation he s charming and engaged it s just been a tough two months for transitions and changes this entry was posted in uncategorized on september 24 2021 by labmonkeyftw sure kid sure leave a reply spud can read but spud won t read if anyone is watching i sent him to school with notes in his lunchbox this week but eventually resorted to just sending drawings because he was insisting he couldn t read the notes but then explained to his father when i was out of sight but not earshot that he had read them but thought the pictures were funnier and then asked why school is spelt wrong on that sign mama when one o had fallen off and then corrected me when i purposefully read a sign at the park to have an opposite meaning spud during an evening story no mama i don t think that s a cactus wren it s a hmmmm flips to the back glossary finds the bird squints a gilded flicker see mama spud at lunch why does your mug say coffee on it when you have tea in it what is a starbuck spud at lunch same lunch mama those aren t plain chips those are classic see onna bag classic all this to say i am 99 sure he can read a note that says have a great day i love you spud started school this week so far his days have been terrible horrible no good and very bad stated calmly and contentedly he says it is like daycare but with more kids and less toys he is delighted that his grandmother picks him up on wednesdays he is resigned to having much less time with nanny c who picks him up monday tuesday and friday he was entirely non plussed to be picked up by me on thursday but i was very pleased to be out of the house and spending some one on one time with him pea and i are trading thursdays which i think will work well sprout had her first week of full time daycare and was quite emotional the first few days and then all smiles no crying the next two she had quite a few new kids in her room for september which i think threw her off also she spends quite a lot of her days with us crying so am not sure emotional isn t just baseline sprout who feels personally injured whenever something isn t exactly to her specifications ah to be two we survived the week and while both kids were fried at the end of each day they both did really well pea and i are planning another quiet week of easy meals in case the other shoe drops this week but so far it s been pretty smooth sailing this entry was posted in uncategorized on september 12 2021 by labmonkeyftw rolling progress 2 replies a few years ago a colleague laughingly mentioned that he was becoming more and more comfortable with just moving his entire to do list over month by month i had goals and plans for the summer i worked hard for almost all of the summer my people also worked hard we made some great things happen and made progress on nearly everything my goal list sits largely unchanged because nothing actually got finished i am not yet comfortable with this i am part of the problem though often a delay when something is on my plate because my plate overflows weekly this post brought to you by my near total burnout after completing a 20 page tutorial for a workshop as well as a 10 page grant application that i thought was just a formality style form in the past three days amidst meetings a conference and a workshop which the tutorial is for i wanted to be editing my students papers 3 on my desk at the moment and starting a massive grant application that is due at the end of the month but the urgent and important column in my to do list is now entirely deadline driven anything important but not urgent might have to wait til october and the only non urgent non important things that get done are administrivia that will otherwise make my life harder or prevent my people from being paid appropriately i like this job but honestly it is a bit much i d so love to be able to take a week s vacation and not be punished for it take a week and not be doing work in every brief moment alone i haven t figured out how to do that and make life even plausible on the other side it s the start of the school year and i m fried but also hopeful i ll be able to get some of these goals actually accomplished this semester she says not yet ruefully laughing at the prospect this entry was posted in uncategorized on september 2 2021 by labmonkeyftw cottage o clock 1 reply we are back from a cottage a week away on a lake with walks along a rail trail to a playground jaunts into town for ice cream paddle boating along the shore and many happy hours wading on our tiny private perfect beach it was a lovely week sunny if cool we ve had an intensely rainy summer so much so it is threatening the crops almost as much as the droughts out west it has been rare to string two sunny days together and last week we had five in a row a spot of luck renting this cottage was like an extreme sport with nowhere to go but our own backyard ontarians flooded the cottage rental market i was lucky to have a savvy older sister who helped me find a site where as long as you saw the email quickly you d have a decent shot at booking a cottage of interest the owner of this cottage and i chatted a few times over the week and he told me to call him next winter if we knew we wanted to book with him again perhaps it was a great cottage especially for tiny kids as the beach was very shallow for ages and they could wade and paddle with confidence this week was our one week of vacation that isn t visiting family this year it was a chance to relax have new scenery spend time with the kids exploring it was honestly wonderful neither of us gravitate to cottages as a first choice for vacation but we both had an excellent time i didn t want to leave but we weren t allowed to stay so made our way home yesterday via a conservation area for a very hot hike and picnic a discovery i need to prioritize swimming in some meaningful fashion i love swimming there is something about the sensory deprivation coupled to cardio that i find deeply lastingly soothing it is an intense anxiety panacea i haven t swum regularly since my phd but it was a staple of my decade at various universities it s a hassle with specific swim times and requirements for showers and needing a locker or good swim bag and needing to either not be a yeti or not care about being a yeti and and and but i think i need to figure it out a second discovery sprout hates the travel crib this is problematic as we have another trip planned in two weeks she says the crib is too bubbly which we think means the sides are mesh and she can t mash her head against them as firmly as she does against the crib rails she absolutely cannot be in a bed yet she is nothing but trouble when tired and unsupervised so i have no solution to this she rejected sleep at nap and bedtime all week so is a very tired kid today this was unexpected because spud loved the travel crib but my kids delight in their opposite ways so i should perhaps have been less surprised this week was my mark...
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