I wouldn’t say December was a great month. We had a lot of struggles. A lot of unnecessary struggles, I might add. So, it’s just rants from me this month. Buckle in.

First, some context! We’ve spent the entire month in a 4-month sleep regression, I think, and it’s been far worse than the newborn sleep days. In those days, we expected bad sleep so we slept in shifts. This month, we’re just crossing our fingers that things will go back to normal, and that has not been effective. I’m about as low on sleep as I’ve ever been right now. So for everything we did this month, we did it in a zombie-like state of sleep deprivation.

Early in the month we had to make a drive in a blizzard. We own three vehicles, and none of them fit our needs right now. The VW bus is…obviously not great for a baby or winter. The car doesn’t have ABS, and isn’t much match for winter weather. The truck is 4WD but doesn’t safely fit a carseat. Anyone looking for a car right now knows the used market is a hot mess of low stock and high prices. But we were in dire straits.

Kyle did hours of research and decided on the vehicle he wanted to purchase, which naturally was impossible to find. We were at the point where we needed to simply find something that would work, rather than find the car of our dreams. But then, shockingly, the very car he wanted popped up for sale at an almost-local dealer. We went to see it and it looked like a great car, so we attempted a test-drive during a blizzard with a screaming baby.

It took nearly 5 days to complete the sale. The dealer kept getting our information wrong, and when we finally had everything correct and tried to wire them the money…they had given us the routing number for the wrong bank. So we wired a 5-figure sum to the wrong bank, which had a similar name to their bank. I figured the guy just googled the bank name and gave us the routing number for the first bank that came up. In an email he later told us he just googled the bank name and…yeah. If we had any other options, I would have walked away from such gross incompetence. Fortunately that glaring error only cost us a wiring fee, the receiving bank rejected the wire so within about 12 hours the money was back in our account.

The following day we woke up to a power outage (more accurately, the baby was up at 3am so we were all wide awake when we lost power) due to a crazy wind storm. But we had a wiring transaction to complete. Kyle ended up driving to my parents house to use their internet to wire the money. He notified the dealer, who said they hadn’t seen it come through yet, to which he replied we were on our way to pick up the car. Mid-afternoon we were driving home in our new car, stopping just long enough to pack up overnight bags because the house was now too cold for an infant. Power came back late that night, according to the power company.

Simultaneously, we needed to redo the master bedroom. After moving last month, we didn’t unpack our clothing because we needed to move our dressers into the master bedroom first, which couldn’t be done until after the walls were painted and flooring put in. We made an extremely aggressive 3-day plan for getting the master done. On Day 1, we moved all the furniture out, ripped out the carpet and started masking up the room for painting. On Day 2…we didn’t have power. So that whole plan got put on hold. When power came back I was behind on work projects that needed to get done and we no longer had time to work on the bedroom.

We planned on hosting Christmas, and we really needed to be able to put furniture back in the master to have enough space in the house to hang out. The days before Christmas were a huge flurry of activity as we slapped paint on and got the flooring in, then moved furniture in. We barely got it done in time but it looks so good and I’m so pleased. These cell phone photos are terrible, I didn’t realize how awful they were until now. It looks so much better than pictured.

While we were burning the midnight oil trying to get the renovation complete, I realized that this website was taken over by malware. Four days before Christmas I was absolutely sure I’d lost everything I’d ever written. We spent three days on the phone with customer service, eventually opting to pay for their security service which scrubbed the site clean of malware and we didn’t lose a single thing. It was stressful! And it seems like the timing wasn’t a coincidence, who has the time or energy to even notice such an event that close to the busiest holiday of the year?

It was a nice reminder that I would actually be quite devastated to lose everything I’ve built here, so getting appropriate backups in place is high on my list for 2022.

Christmas was a very chill event, mainly just lazing around with my family. We hosted brunch, then snacked on charcuterie all afternoon.

We took a quick walk down to the lake, but the temps had dropped significantly so we didn’t linger outside for long.

Now, you’d think that whole car debacle was the end of it. But no, the incompetence continues. They had a temporary plate for us, and told us they’d drop off the license plate that we paid for “soon.” After Christmas, Kyle started calling them daily. Our temporary plate expired on 12/31. The dealer, in true salesman fashion, told Kyle every day that “oh, someone will head to the DMV today and I’ll drop the plate off tonight.” And every day, something “came up.” Finally, on 12/30 when Kyle called, someone was actually on their way to get a license plate. Yay! However, and there was obviously no way to predict that there might be weird holiday hours, the DMV was closed on 12/30 and 12/31. They ended up giving us a dealer plate. We’re still waiting on a license plate. I don’t even want to think about how long it will be before they send us the title.

Speaking of bureaucratic nightmares! Early in the month we realized we weren’t getting any mail. I mean NONE. So we called the post office, and they said “Oh, well no change of address has been filed, so how would we know to deliver your mail to that address?” I’ve lived in at least 25 places since graduating high school. I have never once had trouble receiving mail that had my name and address on it, regardless of whether I’d received mail at that address before. We were missing bills, paychecks, Christmas cards, official documents, and who knows what else. It wasn’t being returned to sender. It was like our mail disappeared into a black hole.

So we filed a change of address. That took at least a week to process. The day before Christmas Eve we received our PO welcome packet, but no mail. On Monday Kyle called the post office, who said our mail should arrive that day. The postal carrier came and went, but didn’t stop at our mailbox. On Tuesday Kyle called again. He also went to put something in the mailbox, and found a month’s worth of mail. The carrier must have finished their route and then come back? But somehow, all the things we were missing were in that packet of mail.

These tasks seem like so much more work than they should be, but they are mostly related to – or made more difficult by – moving. For some reason, because this move was such a short distance, and it was from a house to a house, I thought it would be a piece of cake. Reader, there was no cake. Only exhaustion and complication. And a pandemic. And a baby.

Life with a baby during a pandemic has been extremely difficult.

If it were still just the two of us, who are vaccinated, boosted and low-risk, we’d be living much different lives now. But because we have an infant who has very little immunity against anything, we’re constantly trying to balance our need to be social with our obligation to keep him safe. And then we’re constantly questioning those decisions as we watch so many of our friends and family live by less stringent rules (but they’re also in very different situations than we are!). I want to ignore this virus and freely socialize! But I already feel guilty that my kiddo will grow up in a world climate crisis, how could I possibly risk saddling him with long-term complications from a virus? How can I not do my very best to keep him safe and healthy, even if I have to sacrifice a little mental health along the way? But also, how can I not feel anger at the people in my community who could, but don’t, get vaccinated and help keep my baby safe, who say “it’s a personal choice” when that choice potentially endangers all the high-risk members of their community? I wish I didn’t have to think about this so much, almost two years in.

Even Trump has spoken in favor of the vaccine at this point. I understood the initial vaccine hesitancy, but the data now overwhelmingly supports the evidence that the vaccine protects against severe cases of covid. I think that a lot of the people who were so vocally against it are probably finding it hard to publicly admit that they are changing their minds. I guess at this point I simply don’t have the patience to deal with that kind of stubbornness. It doesn’t just affect you. It affects me, every day, and it’s hard, and it’s stressful. It’s too cold to spend time with my baby outside, and it’s too covid to spend time with my baby inside any public building.

So we stay home, and we isolate, and we go crazy. And we wait for the virus to mutate, to become endemic. We talk about how we can travel to a warmer place, where we can spend time outside, and how we accomplish that without picking up a virus along the way. A thousand people die in the US every day from covid, and the hospitals are overwhelmed, and some of the most important professions (like nurses and teachers!) are burnt out and quitting. And now there’s omicron, and a vaccine will no longer save you from a positive test, just a severe case. The past couple years have brought out the worst in people. Honestly, I’m just so tired.

Life with a baby during a pandemic has been extremely difficult.

That said, this sweet boy made leaps and bounds of progress this month. Atlas has got good neck strength now, and he loves sitting up and standing. He still needs a lot of help with both, but it won’t be long before he’s sitting on his own. He’s generally a very happy baby (he started laughing this month!), but when he gets fussy in the evening sometimes he ONLY wants to stand. And that’s a real arm workout!

I’ve been thinking about my last 9-5 job a lot lately. One of the last big projects I worked on was an extremely accelerated new product build, where the customer asked for an insanely shortened timeline to go from concept to production. One of the managers said if we accomplished it he’d buy us all steak dinners. We worked our butts off, long hours, stressful days, harassing the test labs for results so that we could move to the next step in the process. Unbelievably, we shipped product on time! Naturally, everyone who worked on that project got steak dinners and a big bonus! No, I’m just kidding. What we actually got was lukewarm pizza and an “attaboy!” from the plant manager, who followed it up with “If we can accomplish all that in 6 months, next time we should be able to do it in 4 months!”

It was all just so pointless. If we’d been working on life-saving medical devices or an innovative way to reduce ocean warming or something worthwhile, I would have been on board with a high-stress environment. I had a great, supportive boss, which is the only thing that kept me from quitting before I did. I’ll always be grateful for that job, of course – without it I wouldn’t have had the financial security to do what I do now. I’ve been watching the employment market with great interest, as employees now have more freedom to seek jobs that prioritize their well-being and work/life balance. I would never say I was treated poorly at that job, but there are certainly many people who are treated like crap while earning an unspeakably low wage as their CEOs rake in millions. It’s interesting to watch the tides turn, and see workers quitting en masse in search of a better income or work environment. It’s going to take a more dramatic turn to make college/housing affordable for my cohort and the subsequent generations, but I will always stand behind people taking steps to improve their situation.

Anyway! I know that was a whole lot of stuff that didn’t need to be said. As a whole, 2021 was a good year, but I’m happy to put December behind me. Hopefully 2022 brings more sleep and less life maintenance.