Double life

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

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

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

Favorite coworker!

Time keeps passing

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

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

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

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

Reading Update:

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

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

At least she’s wearing her helmet!

Denial

There has been a lot of discussion in the media about the 1918 flu pandemic and what we can learn from it as we manage today’s coronavirus. But as I’ve been listening to Erik Larsen’s Dead Wake, I can’t help but notice some other parallels from that completely unrelated disaster. On the surface, it’s tough to see connections between the two: the sinking of the Lusitania was a tragedy of humanity’s own making, motivated by a wartime agenda, while the coronavirus is a natural disaster that in many ways is completely out of our control. But there’s one underlying theme that runs beneath both events: denial in the face of concrete evidence.

Trump’s recent declaration that he wants the US open and “raring to go” by Easter (just a little more than two weeks away) flies completely in the face of what the medical community and public health experts are telling us about where we are in the trajectory of the pandemic. Each day, confirmed COVID-19 cases and related deaths rise, and some experts are predicting we’re at least three weeks away from the peak of the outbreak. But it’s a well-established fact by now that Trump doesn’t really care about data or facts the way most people understand them. What’s really fascinating is how he’s far from alone in this tendency. As described in Dead Wake, the denial of many, many people on the Lusitania, including a lot of the crew, as the ship foundered, is a striking parallel. If you’ve seen the movie Titanic, you’re familiar with the hubris of people stating confidently, “This ship can’t sink!” literally as the water is rising up to meet them. What is is about the human nature that we cling to hope and optimism, often past the point of rationality?

Today the stock market is on the rise as a result of the stimulus package rapidly making its way through Congress, promising $2 trillion in aid to individuals and companies. But realistically, if we’re facing down another four, six, or eight weeks of much of the country being shut down (which seems almost inevitable if you listen to the people who actually know what they’re talking about), it’s obvious that amount of money isn’t going to prop the economy up through this whole ordeal. And in a couple of weeks, when it becomes impossible to deny that fact any longer, we’ll be right back where we were a week ago, with investors freaking out and the market plummeting. It’s just so interesting how short-sighted we seem to be in the face of disaster and how desperately we want to believe that things can’t be nearly as bad as the evidence clearly shows they will become.

I don’t really have a point to make here—just musing about how very different events in very different times seem to bring out the exact same emotions and thought processes in people.

At our house, we’ve been taking walks, making pancakes, and painting with watercolors. Alice got a scooter as an early Easter present, and I don’t think there have ever been more people out wandering around the neighborhood. Clearly we’re all bored and just looking for something to do!

Casual unicorn out for a stroll

Quarantine - Days 4, 5, 6, and beyond...

It’s definitely starting to feel like Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day around here! We wake up, play, do Camp Kindergarten, play some more, eat lunch, nap, go for a walk, eat dinner, play, go to bed. Over and over and over and over…

I had been looking forward to the weekend, but it ended up being frustrating. Having Matt home just disrupted the routine and encouraged Alice to act out and push boundaries, and I didn’t actually get more time to myself somehow. Blargh. I have started up again with my tried and true 8 minute abs workout, which is kicking my butt, and I’m doing the One Hundred Pushups Project. So hopefully I’ll come out of this at least a little more in shape than I was previously (trying to give myself a break and remember that I’m less than 12 weeks postpartum when I feel frustrated about my fitness level).

I’m starting to get really stressed about “going back” to work in less than two weeks. I just can’t imagine how I’ll balance trying to be available/working during the day and watching two very young kids. I’m confident I can do my job well and put in 40 hours a week, but a lot of those hours are going to have to be early mornings, nights, and weekends when I’m not also being a primary caregiver. I know everyone is dealing with some logistics juggling but I think I have a bit more of a challenge than most of my colleagues in terms of my kids being so young and me not having a work-from-home spouse to switch off with during the day. Whatever happens, I’ll figure it out! I have a few manuscripts incoming right after I return that I’m REALLY looking forward to editing, so that will be my focus for my nights and weekends time while I focus on communications and smaller projects that don’t require as much deep concentration during the day.

I’ve been trying to stay away from book industry news because I suspect it’s mostly terrible. I can’t even imagine what all this is doing to independent bookstores and even to B&N, which relies heavily on people walking into stores and browsing. One thing I am confident in is my company’s ability to weather this and even thrive under tough economic conditions. I wasn’t working there during the 2008 recession, but the company’s proactive response during that dark time is a big part of our culture now and we’re able to draw on that experience as we meet whatever lies ahead in the coming weeks and months. I’m looking forward to reconnecting with my colleagues and my work, and figuring out what’s next for all of us.

Reading Update:

Mrs. Everything by Jennifer Weiner: I ended up liking this novel quite a bit! I’m interested in going back reading some of Weiner’s earlier novels, which I understand are a bit different than this one. I enjoyed getting the perspective of the main characters as they grew and matured, and to consider the different roles women play at different times in their lives and how society dictates those roles. I’m still a little unsure whether the main characters’ names (Jo and Bethie) are supposed to be an allusion to Little Women. At the beginning of the novel it seemed like they must be, as Jo was a tomboy-ish aspiring writer and Beth was a goody two-shoes type, but it never really became clear, so it may have just been a coincidence. Finished on 3/19/20.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata: I had read about this short, strange little novel on both Modern Mrs. Darcy and The SHU Box (I think) a while ago. It was weird, but a fun quick read! What I found most interesting was the idea of the convenience store (or any workplace, really) as its own little world with accepted rules, culture, and vocabulary. I definitely feel this sometimes at work, and because I really jive with the culture of my workplace it’s actually one of the things I enjoy most about my job. Maybe that makes me uncool or whatever because I’m not trying to rebel against my workplace and genuinely buy into and agree with a lot of the corporate messaging, but… I identified with the main character in some ways because of it! Finished 3/21/20.

Dead Wake by Erik Larson: Another audiobook from OverDrive that I think I’m actually going to get through! I love a good Erik Larson book. Totally gripping narrative nonfiction about the last crossing of the British passenger ship RMS Lusitania during WWI. Very much enjoying it!

“A” Is for Alibi by Sue Grafton: Somehow I’ve made it this far in life without reading any of Grafton’s famed “alphabet” Kinsey Millhone mysteries. I’m remedying that now, and looking forward to working my way through the whole series.

One good thing about being forced to stay at home is the number of art collaborations Alice and I are doing together!

Quarantine - Day 3

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

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

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

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

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

Quarantine - Day 2

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

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

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

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

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

Quarantine - Day 1

This weekend included a wild trip to the grocery store with insanely long lines, cleaning the laundry room (and enjoying our new dryer!), band practice, helping my mom test her work-from-home capabilities, and voting. And now we’re heading into at least two weeks of self-quarantine and social distancing.

With all schools closed in Illinois, activities canceled, and social distancing highly encouraged, we’re entering a weird period of “figure out any and all potential fun stuff to do at home.” Yesterday (Monday) wasn’t too bad. Alice slept in until nearly 8:30 and then we had breakfast and tuned into a Facebook Live event at 9:00—Miss Megan’s Camp Kindergarten, which was a fun school-like hour, even if the content is a little advanced for a three-year-old. Will snoozed on the couch through most of it, so I was able to focus on Alice and do the activities and songs with her. Then we played Barbies for a bit before I loaded the kids up in the car for a quick trip to the bank drive-through to deposit a check. Then lunch and nap (I fell asleep with them despite wanting to read instead).

When I woke up from the nap I had a bunch of texts on my phone from a neighborhood group thread with rumors that Illinois will go into lockdown soon in similar fashion to San Francisco (there has not been any confirmation of this yet). I freaked out and texted Matt, who had heard the same thing from a different source. Imagining the absolute madness of the grocery store after this potential news breaks, I got the kids back into the car and went to our small neighborhood grocery store, hoping to avoid the massive lines that have been standard at the larger stores around here. I was able to get a good amount of stuff, including eggs, milk, and bread alternatives (pretzel rolls, focaccia loaf, etc. because they were out of regular sandwich bread). So now we’re pretty well-stocked. Then I had a really frustrating text conversation with my mom, who is still in the denial/this is all ridiculous/there’s no way we could go on lockdown state of mind and insists on taking the commuter train to work even though she could work from home. Gah.

Matt came home and wanted to get quarantine cigarettes as a treat for himself (gross). I was dying to get out of the house by myself, so I went to the tobacco store/hookah bar, which was completely empty of course. The store owner was obviously stressed about the current situation and had a lot of questions for me about where I worked and whether my business was still open. When I told him I work in book publishing he looked at me quizzically and asked, “How do you make money”? I was like, well… we publish books and people buy them? It was odd. But he had roll-your-own American Spirit tobacco, so I bought the cancer leaves and went on my way. Picked up A&W for dinner because I needed to eat some feelings, and it was delicious.

It wasn’t a bad day, but definitely different from what our Mondays looked like a month ago, which included story time at the library in the morning and swim class in the late afternoon. Alice has only been going to school Tuesday through Thursday since I’ve been on leave, so today (Tuesday) will mark the first true disruption in that she will be home when she was supposed to be at school. Matt’s work is still open and will continue to be, I think, even in the case of a lockdown, since plumbers are on the list of essential workers. I’m happy he will still be working because $$$, obviously, but having him out of the house all day every day means all the childcare falls to me. Being confined to our house and yard makes this more challenging than it would be normally (and will become extremely challenging when I go back to work on April 6th). Because he’s going on jobs, I think his risk of contracting COVID-19 (and bringing it home) is fairly high. We’re not able to completely self-isolate the way families with both parents working from home are, and that means we really shouldn’t have contact with anyone else because our household isn’t a closed system. So that sucks—both the risk of contracting the virus and the social isolation our potential exposure necessitates.

I hope we don’t get sick (or if we do that we have only mild symptoms), I hope we’re all doing enough social distancing to slow the virus’s spread. I hope in four or six or eight weeks things will get better and we’ll look back on this time as super strange and temporary. Fingers crossed!

A little Peppa Pig to help get us through the day

Baby #2!

Greetings from maternity leave! Yes, it has been three years, since the last post I wrote was at the end of my maternity leave with my daughter, Alice, who is now a crazy preschooler. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours this winter reading long-running blogs from inspiring women like Laura Vanderkam, SHU, and Lag Liv, and I found myself jealous of their online records of their lives. When I looked back over the past three years, I realized I don’t have a great resource for remembering what happened when, other than the pictures I take. Luckily we are pretty good about taking pictures and storing them in an accessible and methodical way, but I suspect many everyday moments and events of my life are being lost to the sands of time. Regular blogging seems to be a pretty great way to avoid that happening, so I’m attempting to dive back in! Easy to say now while I’m on leave, of course…

The biggest event of 2020 for our family was, of course, the birth of our son, Will. His birth story was happily fast and uncomplicated—scheduled induction, quick labor, happy delivery. We were out of the hospital less than 36 hours after he was born (our departure slightly hastened by a threatened snowstorm, which ended up not actually happening).

We didn’t find out beforehand whether he was a girl or a boy, and it has been such a surprising delight to welcome a son to the Michels family. Alice is so wonderful that it was hard for me to imagine parenting anyone other than a happy little girl, but Will is closing in on two months old and has fully convinced me of the benefits of being a boy mom—he’s such a sweet little dude. Proof:

He’s making it easy to be the mom of a newborn and maternity leave has been really lovely. Alice is in school three days a week and is busy most other days with activities (swimming and tumbling) and playdates with friends. She has a new little buddy she met at swim class and we have been spending lots of time with him and his mom, which is really fun. One of the things I didn’t anticipate about parenthood was how much my social circle would expand. We have a bunch of kids in our neighborhood and get along well with all the families, so our calendar is much busier than it was pre-kids when Matt and I had a tendency to stay home and do our own thing. We still like to do that, of course, but three-year-olds need to get out of the house most days, and we’re lucky to have a bunch of friends in the same boat so we can get grown-up social time in right alongside Alice. And now Will is along for the ride!

Apart from wrangling the kids, I’ve been napping, reading, and trying to get projects done around the house. This is likely my last maternity leave (although I’m not quite ready to totally give up the idea of having a third someday, it would make our life logistics pretty darn complicated), so I’m trying to soak it all in and snuggle my baby boy as much as I can before real life hits next month!