Digging Up The Daylilies

Good morning to who ever might actually be reading this. I'm back to Dreamwidth/LJland because a) posting to Tumblr often feels like shouting into the void, b) DW sent out the "Check your damn passwords!" email and duuuuuude, my password was prehistoric. I was still using my favorite password from *college*. *So* not secure!
So now, with a better password I'm going to shout into the void where my old friends are.

This whole Shelter In Place & Homeschool thing is something else. We're just about to start Day 4, which in the scheme of things is nothing. I feel like I'm writing the opening chapters to The Diary of Anne Frank, the ones where she worries about things that were important Before but won't be by the end of the book.

So far we've managed to start school and work by 10 o'clock. Drew has set up a standing desk in the library. Thank goodness it's tall -- we didn't have to move much furniture to make it fit, and it can stay there for as long as we need. Granted, the shoe rack is now under the desk, but we don't need our shoes that often these days.

Danny is doing his schoolwork at his desk in his room. The paper packets that came home from school on Friday (was it really less than a week ago?) are lame, set by grade level to what they could know in September, so Danny is diving head first into Khan Academy. His math knowledge is going to be shallow with sudden surprising deep spots, but that's ok. I told him he needs to write for 20 minutes a day and he has started writing a novel. It's remarkably good! I didn't realize that my hyperlogical kid who never met a metaphor he understood had such creativity and storytelling in him. 

Becky is trying to do her schoolwork in her room too. Many days that's just Epic Reading (yay for online education) and iReady or Starfall for math. Although on Monday we did start tackling multiplication, which was fun! Danny's old recliner is now in Becky's room, and she's very happy to sit there. Speaking of Becky, it's her 8th birthday today! My littlest extravert is having a rough time with the idea of not having anyone at a birthday party, but we'll have cake and candles, and a couple of gifts arrived in the mail. So she'll be ok.

I'm working as hard as ever. I thought this staying home thing would give me more time to read and do crafts, but so far I'm just going going going. Between keeping the kids on their schoolwork, getting paid work done for the law firm I work part-time for, and keeping the house running, I haven't had much more than 45 minutes free any given day. Needless to say I spend that time on social media. 

So here we are. Let's see where this goes.

Well isn't this an interesting place to find myself in. It's a very mild version of a mid-life crisis. I feel like I'm just waking up from the last 15 years to realize that I've become... Well actually I'm not sure what I've become. That's sort of the point.

The last time I made friends for myself was when I went off to Harvey Mudd in 1995. Or maybe not even then. My first friend there was my assigned roommate. She was an extrovert and I tagged along. Then I met Drew and made friends with all of his friends. During the Great Breakup of 1996, which lasted all of a week, my chief worry was that none of our friends were friends of mine. They did their best to reassure me that this was not the case.

When we moved to Wisconsin in 1999 I worked in a used bookstore with about 3 other people. None of them were my friends, although Mark and I were friendly (Nice guy. Retired lawyer looking for interesting work while waiting for his wife to retire.). Drew was in graduate school, surrounded by people our age with similar interests. I told him that it was his job to meet people and bring them home to me. Little surprise, then, that the majority of our friends from the last 14 years were computer geeks, gamer geeks, and the occasional friend from our synagogue. They were all people who reflected Drew's interests. I lost track of what my interests were while reflecting Drew's.

Then there are all of you loyal readers. A lot of you are from alt.newlywed, people who Drew doesn't know. But in the 14 years I've known you I've only met a small handful. And while you make awesome internet friends I've never felt a deep connection with any of you. So while you are a significant portion of friends I can point to from during my marriage and say "Those are my friends, not Drew's" I'm not sure you really count.

There's only one other group of friends I've made in the last few years who aren't connected to Drew. Those are people I met by being an active parent to my kids. Folks I met at preschool, at play groups, at babywearing and La Leche League, at the playground. But again I never felt a deep connection. And the friendship was based around my being Danny's Mommy or Becky's Mommy. Not me, Jenn, whoever she is.

Now we have moved halfway across the country. I have to start all over making friends. But this time I am going to try harder to make my own friends. People who like me for myself, not because of my relationships to other family members. I've been putting out some feelers, meeting folks for coffee. It's a lot like dating, which is another skill I never really honed before settling down with Drew. I don't really know how to do this. And why flying by the seat of your pants while meeting people is expected at 19, it's a bit of a surprise when a 36 year old is doing it.

I need to try to find more time for introspection or self-reflection. Because right now I feel like I am expecting these new friends to show me who I am. And what I really ought to be doing is showing them that I know who I am. If only I knew.

Last week the weather was just horribly humid and hot. Our house doesn't have air conditioning, and many of the cabinet doors are made from solid wood. The end result was that the child safety latch on one side of my kitchen sink cabinet didn't latch for several days. We tied a ribbon around the two handles, and that's doing the job for now. I can't wait until the latch works again.

Since the cabinet was no longer reliably child-proof, I cleaned out the cabinet. I pulled all the almost-empty bottles of cleaning formulas out of the cabinet and arrayed them on the kitchen counter. Anything that hadn't been used in a year was thrown out. I know they should have gone to the Household Hazardous Waste place but I just wanted them OUT, you know? I threw out:

• Ammonia
• Soft scrub
• Window cleaner
• CLR
• Fantastic
• Several kinds of "cleaner with bleach"
• Toilet bowl cleaner

I moved to the laundry room:

• Bleach
• Rubbing alcohol
• Goo Gone

Now under the sink I have:

• Borax
• Dishwasher soap (homemade formula)
• Bon Ami
• Shaker bottle of baking soda
• Vinegar spray
• All-purpose cleaning spray (homemade formula)
• Lemon oil
• Murphy's Oil Soap
• And tucked away at the back, silver polish and furniture polish
• Dustpan and brush

Once I get the laundry room organized and get all of my old housemate's stuff (like the stinky Febreze laundry detergent) out of there I'll probably move the silver polish down there. I just tried cleaning silver with baking soda and it worked, so I can phase out the silver polish.

One of the things I miss while nursing is being able to wear dresses on a regular basis. Nursing dresses can be hard to find or expensive or funny-looking. Today at Target with a little birthday money burning a hole in my pocket I found a wrap dress that fit me, looks good, and I think I can nurse in it. I got it in teal. I checked in the dressing room to make sure I can get my boobs out without undressing or flashing the world.

I think it's really cute, and I'm thinking about copying it for more summer dresses!

Grocery store yogurt is sold by weight; 32 oz and 64 oz tubs. Yogurt recipes are usually given by volume; 1 quart (4 cups or 32 fl oz). So in order to decide if it's worth it to make my own yogurt I need to translate and get everything in the same units. According to All Recipes, 1 cup of yogurt weighs 8.6 oz. So a 32 oz tub contains about 3.75 cups or 29.75 fl oz of yogurt.

Today I paid $1.99 for a 32 oz tub, which was 6.2 cents/oz or 6.7 cents/fl oz.  My recipe for yogurt calls for 4 cups (32 fl oz) of milk plus 2 tablespoons of yogurt to make 1 quart (32 fl oz) of yogurt. At $4/gallon, my milk costs 3.125 cents/fl oz. That means my fancy local milk is half the price of national brand plain yogurt by volume. Even assuming some loss of volume in going from milk to yogurt it's still much more cost effective to make my own yogurt. I'll definitely be making my own yogurt in the future.

I've been working on a new project: reusable sandwich and snack bags. The first couple were very basic for home use. Once I realized how easy they were to make I decided to improve them to get them to a point where I could potentially gift them or even put them on Etsy. My goal is a simple snack bag that can hold damp foods like a cut up orange without resorting to plastics.
( Pics below the cut )

It's Nap Week here at Gan Hooli*. Like Shark Week but a whole lot less active. Over the last two weeks Danny has been limiting his naps to about an hour spent dozing on my lap, half-heartedly nursing. He was also going through a growth spurt and fending off a tummy bug followed by a cold. I cut the kid some slack. :)

Yesterday afternoon after work Danny and I went to the bookstore and picked up The No-Cry Nap Solution and The No Cry Sleep Solution*. I skimmed the nap book while nursing Danny down, and was thrilled when he napped for 2 hours in his crib after I implemented just one change! Of course, I had a bunch to do so I didn't have a chance to read much more of the nap book during nap time. And then it was time for La Leche League and then it was bedtime and Danny needed help calming down so I didn't get to read any of the sleep book.

Today Danny slept in until 8, napped for half an hour for Drew, and appeared at my office at 11. He was so excited to see everyone that he got really riled up. Kiddo did not nap until 12:30pm. We usually leave the office at 1, so this was a bit of a problem. Katelyn solved it for me by watching my sleeping child while I went to the Post Office. (Robin -- your boxes are finally on their way).

Danny woke up around 1:30. So that's a total of 1 1/2 hours of sleep since waking up. Not enough time for an 8 month old baby. He was still yawning so I wondered if he might fall asleep in the car (nope), or after I nursed him. He dozed off nursing but woke up on transfer, just like last week. I tried shushing him, patting his back, yawning at him, all that jazz but no dice. My baby was complaining and crawling all over the crib. I lay down with him. Nope. So I grabbed my mei tai and put Danny on my back, hoping to bore him to sleep. We started some laundry. did the dishes, put away coats, tidied the kitchen. Still awake and now protesting. I changed his diaper and was about to take him back to the couch to nurse down again and STOPPED.

Part of Nap Week is teaching me how to help Danny nap. One thing I keep reading is that sometimes babies get confused when they go to sleep one place and wake up somewhere else, and so they don't go back to sleep. Nursing Danny down in the living room is comfy for me, but it's sunny in there and then I have to move him to the crib if I want to get anything done, and Danny rarely sleeps through the transfer. I turned around and headed back into the bedroom. It's nice and dark in there. I lay down on the bed with Danny in the cosleeper and we nursed. For half an hour (Hey, wasn't this nap thing supposed to buy me time? Why does it take so long?). But eventually he fell asleep. I rolled away from him, careful not to squash the cat who had curled up right behind my bottom, and tucked my baby in for a nap. That was at 3:30. It's 4 o'clock now. I'm hoping that he's going to sleep until 5:30, but I'll settle for 4:30.

Tomorrow we'll try to do better. I'll try to be prepared, and to tell Drew what I know so that if Danny naps for him maybe Danny can get a decent morning nap. Hopefully by the end of the week or this time next week we'll have the hang of this!



*Gan Hooli = "Garden of Hooligans" in my own form of Hebrish.
* Both by Elizabeth Pantley, if anyone's dying to know. The NCSS is so much more of a sane sleep book than Ferber. Oh my lord. I can respect an author who says "Every child is different. Try these things, and find what works for you."

Next month we are going on a whirlwind tour of Britain, showing our progeny off to my extended family. We'll have long days, lots of car rides, and no access to a dryer or washing line. Danny will be 5 months old and has worn maybe 10 disposable diapers ever (free from the hospital). On our recent holiday in the Caribbean we were able to stick with cloth because we had clothesline access, hot sun, and a breeze. Our diapers dried in 2-5 hours. That's not going to happen in a hotel bathroom in England in October.

I bought a packet of g-diapers as emergency back-up but didn't actually use them. I'd like to use them in Britain but according to the website they aren't sold there. Does anyone know if there's something similar available? They're a disposable liner that goes in a reusable cover.

Short finding the UK-equivalent of g-diapers, what brands of disposable nappies do you like? Ideally something I can find at Boots or Waitrose/Tesco/Asda. We'll be staying in Chester and Aylesford.

Thanks!