Tra la, tra la
V. and Noah’s 4th day was much like Thursday - he was happy to see her, mad at me for leaving, and tired and a bit strung out by the end of the morning. They went to the library together, which left me a fair bit of quiet time, theoretically. In practical terms this just gave me more time to imagine a thousand bad things and I cleaned the car off twice waiting for the call to pick them up.
We’ll get there. Someday.
~~~
Today I really felt angry at Noah. Not rageful or anything like that, but angry nonetheless - for the first time at him as a little person. He has been learning the sign for “angry” which sort of is like reverse clawing your face, but he’s got the idea that you claw at the face of the person at whom you’re angry. So first he did that, telling me he was angry by gouging at my eyes, and then he head-butted me. Then about an hour later, he bit me while nursing. I ended the nurse at that point but 10 minutes later he asked very nicely, so we started again and then he clawed at me all upset that there was blood in his drink.
It was around that point that I thought I’d better walk away, so I did, and got a car thrown at me. Then I said “Cars are not for throwing!” and took it away. But, you know, my tone was not exactly friendly. Then I got the dramatic throw self to the ground (after moving to the rug area) and wail. Why yes, he is a toddler, why do you ask? Warm cow’s milk saved the afternoon all around, and I didn’t even put rum in mine.
~~~
Speaking of which I did view the Today Show clip of Melissa Summers of Suburban Bliss fame getting hauled on the carpet for drinking a glass of wine at playgroups. I entirely agree that until men are being hauled on the carpet for drinking a beer at BBQs in front of their kids, or there’s an expose on adult eggnog containing rum at Christmas, a FAMILY HOLIDAY, this kind of piece is worse than fluff; it’s sexist nonsense. Then again this is why I don’t have broadcast television. (Because I can waste my time more effectively reading about it on the Internet.)
But Americans! The reason that your media and society are having wars about these things is because it is effectively keeping you mothers away from the real issues like parental leave. In this spirit, my post tomorrow-after-deadline (or Thurs) will be about how parental leave has helped me.
I am an attachment parenting suck
Carl and I just put our bed (mattress and boxspring) on the floor. In the corner, so that when we do bring Noah into bed with us in the morning (as we have been at about 5 most mornings) he can be put between one of us and the wall, or between us, at will.
And we put a little stool at one end so he can climb up (he can climb down fine, and it’s not toooo high for falling).
I cannot believe this because I swore up and down that no baby would stay in my room for longer than 6 months. And now we’ve essentially set it up so that Noah can come and go once he pleases.
All this is because he’s juuuust about figured out how to get out of his crib, at which point we’ll probably take the rail off and let him at it (in our closed, relatively child-proofed room).
P.S. Lyria is glad I’m finally getting a clue. It’s funny how all the astral parents cosleep at least part of the time.
Adjustments all around
Friday was really a challenging day. Noah was (predictably) off his stride and all he wanted to do was watch Signing Time, which is sort of like his own predictable universe (I think kids his age like books and TV in part because they don’t change so they can puzzle them out). I didn’t particularly want him to watch more than a half hour of TV, so we were at loggerheads, and even reading the same book 11 times (it was “Caillou’s mealtime” in case you were wondering; he is big into all the books where Caillou rebels) wouldn’t sate his need.
Then he wouldn’t nap.
After swimming I took him to get milk at the grocery store… he passed out in the grocery cart, like, over the handle. It was both cute and horrifying at the same time. I couldn’t figure out what to do with him; I took him out to hold him and he didn’t stir. Then I was stuck with a cart with a bunch of milk and a melon and 22 lbs of dead weight in my arms. So finally I put him in the seat part of the cart lying on his back with his legs out the side, and pushed him around and did some things I used to do in grocery stores before I had a kid like… compare labels on cold breakfast cereals, since Noah seems to be on the cusp of getting into that (but that store didn’t have muesli, sigh) and look at new products I have no intention of actually buying.
I got two mummy drive bys for that experience; both Monday quarterbacks thought the babe should be at home if he was that tired. No shit, Sherlock. I’ll call you the next time I run out of milk and you can pick it up for me. And no, it wasn’t exactly poor planning - I dropped the last bag that would have gotten us to Saturday and it burst, which wasn’t fun either. (And unusual too! They’re generally strong.)
In a small mercy for which I am grateful, the late-afternoon nap did NOT torpedo bedtime and he went down quite well at 7. He still got up once at night - an excellent night for him really.
I’m still not sure what to do about the whole night wakings thing. And I’m still tired out a bit from the whole nighttime parenting stuff. My gut says that this will resolve itself if I stick with it - he is learning, incrementally, how to put himself to sleep. But my tiredness says Solve It Now!
Unfortunately the only way I know of to solve it right now is move towards some variation of cry it out, and I really think that Noah’s personality is whatever type is diametrically opposed to that. For some kids I think it must be a lifesaver. For Noah I think it would be a disaster. But I’m not sure what would work.
~~~
I feel weird about work right now. The meeting on Thursday was good but I feel like there’s a “but…” coming. I think it’s because sitting with the people involved I did get a sense that so much goes on underneath, and I don’t know what it is that’s going on there. Or maybe it’s because I’m gearing up to say no to extra work, if it’s extended as an offer (looks well like it might be).
But it could just be me. I still, almost 18 months into this parenting gig, don’t feel at all settled. In fact, I feel increasingly confused and muddled. Should I embrace parenting more fully and even consider a sibling? Should I be moving towards full time paid work? Should I be finishing the novel that some days I am convinced is an unmarketable piece of shit and other days I think is just waiting to be sprung on the world? (Well yes, I should, but I mean should I throw my energy into that and let other things slide?) Should I be trying to find some other more meaningful employment like helping orphans where it’s more understandable to take time away from my kid to improve the world?
Should I run away to Amsterdam? The sad thing right now is I’d have to bring a Pack ‘N Play.
~~~
Noah’s imagination is taking off though and none of the swirling confusion can take that away. He feeds his Little People animals Cheerios and takes his dolls for drives and puts them to bed. (He also stuffed the bottom of a Little People person with kiwi, but I’m not sure he was feeding him.) He talks on anything resembling a phone, sometimes like calmly, “doh doh doh, da BA burbleburble” and sometimes like he’s on a conference call “DABABA! Itshtish! DABA-UNGH!”
The other day he handed me the remote for his (long gone) mobile and I pretended to be turning things on with it and he flipped out angrily. He pointed at me imperiously and finally I pretended to talk on it and then he was all happy. Could I not see it was a PHONE and not a REMOTE. Doofus!
Yesterday we were playing “feed the hippo” with Noah’s pretend food set and I pretended the hippo hated carrots and Noah just cracked up. He lost it laughing and then we had to play it a million times, switching off who was the hippo. It was hillarious. And the best.
This means he’s attached, right? // Editorial madness
This morning V. came and Noah was fine until suddenly he wasn’t. He cried. He threw himself at my office door, threw toys at my office door, threw himself on the ground and kicked and screamed. After a half hour of madness I opted to come work in the kitchen. He did everything - everything! - he could do to ignore V. and get my attention. She was calm and patient; I was a bit frazzled but just sort of let him go. It is a weird situation and next time I might just not come out of my office. Or they might go out (it was way cold today).
Then my mum walked him around the mall while I had a meeting at work and when I got back Noah ignored me (obviously) for 20 minutes, giving me the old silent treatment. I just carried on as usual and then he snuggled into me and babbled and was very cute, so I guess all is forgiven.
I presume this is attachment. If so it can be a headache. But this has been the most ever, ever, ever Noah has been with anyone not Carl and I, so these growing pains are to be expected I guess.
~~~
After the grossness at the seasonal party I was dreading this work meeting and not clear on what it was for. It ended up being a large scale sort of marketing meeting - how to marry sales to editorial; coming up with ideas for new things.
Although it’s always a fight at my work to keep the editorial relatively clean (I’m in the enviable position right now of having a relatively free rein that way), it was at least a pretty open fight today. I actually came away with a good feeling about it, mostly because I said what I wanted to say when I thought it should be said, and had a few funny moments where I would suggest things we already did (or that were shot down a long time ago) and people would say: oh! that’s a GREAT idea! Yeah it was 3, 4, 5 years ago too. Everything old is new again. Things just go around and around at my work. On a form that we almost had a screaming battle about a long time ago where marketing added all kinds of information, now they’re all mad there are all these boxes and want to take them all off. Ha! I win! 4 years later!
Also I suggested some editorial for the fall that would involve interviewing Romeo Dallaire who is one of my absolute top heroes for coming so clean about PTSD and I would love to interview him, and they went for it. So if we can pull in some contacts that would be like, a dream article. I never have time for that stuff but for this I would make time. I couldn’t believe they went for it.
Also two of the new staff are basically children and fun to watch in that Bridget Jones way.
In a few weeks nothing will actually happen and at that time it will be discouraging but right now it’s good.
I did feel tired, having to speak business again. I was making the distinction between an aspirational newsletter (travel, money, fashion) and a situational one (caregiving, estate planning) and I realized I haven’t used any business-of-publishing terms in about two years.
Now poopy and pee pee, that I can handle.
The nanny diaries: day three
Yesterday was V.’s third morning with us. I’m still hopeful, moving towards happy. Noah cried a bit (I made the mistake of ‘disappearing’ into my office rather than saying bye) and she was warm and calm and it seemed very genuine.
Also, we had a playdate on the heels of her time and one of the boys came in and pushed Noah out of the way, and Noah retreated to V. for protection. That to me is a really good indicator that they’re developing a good rapport.
So still good. :-)
The choice that haunts
Lots of heavy stuff lately. That’ll change, but not in this post.
This is a post about taking my daughter off a ventilator. Feel free not to read it.
I reserve the right, on this post, to delete comments if they’re bothering me, but respectful discussion should be ok. Welcome, actually. But you may want to skip it, too. A picture of Noah is just one post down!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately; partly because a story about another family making a very different decision has been in the news a lot, and partly because the weather has been slightly reminiscent of March. Or maybe it’s just been on my mind.
For me the beginning of that decision was probably the first night Emily was transferred. I was still at the hospital where she was born, still recovering from the delivery (about 30 hrs earlier) and still in shock. I still hadn’t slept and a nurse - the only nurse who ever actually examined me to check the bleeding - impatiently gave me an Ativan which did not knock me out but put me in a strange uncaring floating state.
It was in that state that I started to think about the information I had been given. The delivering ob never spoke to me post delivery except two words: I’m sorry, and he squeezed my hand. That was it. The neonatalogist had spoken to Carl and I at some length about blood gases and seizures and brain swelling, but it could not penetrate my fog at all.
I had asked her, still in a wheelchair ’cause of the epidural gone mad, what the worst possible outcome was for Emily and she had said “learning difficulties,” which my formerly-LD-brain had translated to “learning disabilities” and not the incredibly insulting unpolitically correct (but more accurate to my brain) term “retarded.” But that had been before the second intubation failed; before they stopped talking to us at all because they wanted the Sick Kids team to take over.
But then there was the Sick Kids transfer team. It took them about 5 hours to stabilize Emily enough that she could be transferred, and yet once she was encased in the incredible moving incubator/ventilator/monitoring system (that reminds me to this day of Ripley in Aliens) they wheeled her into my room so that I could see her. The transferring MD sat on my bed and said to me very clearly “I want to tell you that your daughter’s condition is extremely serious.” The code at that point was clear to me but I admit it took me 12 hours or so (and an Ativan) to push past it to hear the reality: she might not make it. If she does, her life is not going to be anything resembling normal.
So it was that night, floating on Ativan, that the switch flipped in me that must flip in so many parents whose children are diagnosed with differences. It’s the one where you go beyond your dreams - in my case, one specific one would be a child who would share literature with me - and you find a terrible love and depth of fight in you. It was probably partially the Ativan and partially shock and partially that it’s pretty easy to contemplate these things when simply looking at a newborn, but I found that for me what I feared was not being able to do the right thing - I started worrying about how we would afford special schools and moving to a wheelchair accessible home and that kind of thing.
But the decision - to see my daughter - was made. I find myself getting so unverbal about this, but there really was a decision point. It was not a sure thing. Pregnancy is only nine months and I had only seen Emily three times since feeling her slip from my body. It was a possibility I could touch and smell to categorize her as “a problem to solve” in my head; to divorce the life in my womb the way you would leave a once-beloved spouse and just take her on as a burden. I credit only grace for that: that was the divine presence, for me, not someone who would make a miracle outside in terms of a recovery, but one that made one inside me.
(Of course later all the rage about the lack of miracle would hit. Still does. If there is a personified type of God, she and I are pretty much still living in the same house but I am not really speaking to her all that much.)
So when I hit Sick Kids the next day it was with precious thin ounce-lets of pumped breast milk for her and a purpose. To get to where Emily was, not go away from her again, and love her. I brought clothes, blankets, a stuffed toy, books to read to her and a CD to play for her and a picture for her incubator, since during my pregnancy I’d read just enough to figure out that these things might be good in a NICU.
Sick Kids had oriented Carl already so he mostly oriented me: this is where you sign in; this is where you disinfect your hands; these are when the shifts change so you can’t go in for a half hour at these times; these are the pumping/sleep over rooms and if you request them early enough you might get one to sleep over. We put in for a room for that night and then I got to see Emily again.
I wish I could say I paid attention to who her nurse was and all that but I didn’t; I find now, almost three years later, none of the names have stayed with me and I am deeply ashamed, because those nurses were so good and caring. But whoever her nurse was, she talked to us a bit about how, as it was a weekend, there were a lot of tests that couldn’t be run, and about how they were stabilizing her (continuing) seizures, and about painkillers and how a nurse had managed to get a line into her so that they could hook a lot of things up to that and not have to keep sticking things in her veins. Of course all around us the machines were whirring and pinging; that NICU cacophony that most people can’t forget once they’ve heard it.
I paid attention, more or less, but I’d lost my capacity to process again. What I mostly heard was that the real tests were coming the next day. And then the nurse asked me if I’d ever held Emily and I said no, and she said we should wait there, so we did, and she arranged with what seemed like a dozen but I think was really only three nurses; all kinds of things had to be unhooked and rehooked and it was a huge fuss.
And I held Emily in my arms for the first time and it was the best thing ever. Ever. Nothing, nothing could take that away. Probably that’s the first most primary reason I ever opened the possibility of having more kids, because there was nothing else like it.
But then I looked up at the nurse whose call it had been and what I saw in her face got through, and it was that she was creating a moment, out of a belief there wouldn’t be all that many of them. I can’t tell you what it was - pity isn’t close, sympathy isn’t strong enough. But it scared me badly.
After a while - time doesn’t really exist in the NICU, or it didn’t for me - Carl and I retreated to one of the parent rooms for sleep, supposedly. What we did instead was cry and talk a little. It wasn’t all that many words, but we found ourselves utterly and instinctively on the same page which was that we were prepared to do anything for our daughter, including letting her go. That was counter to Catholic teaching, sort of, and not something we were sure our extended family would support. But there was a rightness about it for us and confirming that we were together made sleep and going on possible. (Well except for all the pumping and going to the bathroom that post partum stuff requires).
So we got a few hours of sleep and then at 2 am I woke up and the Sick Kids NICU is fine with that so I went down to see Emily and slept a bit more and went to see her. It was incredibly wonderful to be able to just go see her whenever I wanted, whatever the hour (except shift changes). Every bit of me was screaming “where’s the baaaaaaby?” and all my dreams were about losing the baby; I really believe it was the mammal instinct and being able to soothe it a little was incredibly helpful.
Then, at about 9 am or so, Carl and I walked in to find that Emily was hooked up to a EKG (??) machine (something measuring brainwaves anyway) and the technician, a young Asian guy, was - crying. He was working hard, making all kinds of notations, and tears were just flowing down his face.
That was not a good sign. Then for a while we couldn’t see her because they were doing an MRI and other tests, and after that my memory gets a little fuzzy - family came and went and I ate something and I don’t know what all else happened. I think we met with the chaplain and found that he was sort of a cool guy, and we decided that no matter what we might like to have her baptised.
And then in the afternoon we had a meeting with “the team” - the neonatalogist, nurse, and chaplain, and there was another doctor there too who was a neurology guy, I think. I can’t remember. I do remember the sense of it - these are very busy people and indeed the meeting time changed a bit, but once we were in the meeting they gave us the impression that they would stay there forever if we wanted them to. And they gave us the test results in clear and simple language.
Irreversible brain damage; they showed us how only the very base reptile functions were still working. Damage to major organs. No response in Emily’s pupils; no response to a hearing test. No swallowing reflex. Probably a capacity to feel pain which was why they kept her on morphine. We didn’t have a whole lot of questions; both Carl and I have just enough medical knowledge to get what they were saying. Then we asked what her quality of life would be like.
And they told us. She wouldn’t hear, see, or be able to move. She would likely continue to have seizures. She wouldn’t be able to swallow, so she would never eat or drink and she would have to be cared for 24 hrs a day so she wouldn’t choke on her own saliva.
And then they told us that their recommendation was that we take her off the ventilator. They didn’t know how she would do, because she had been fighting to breathe on her own now and then. They suspected that she was learning to breathe all over again. And they mentioned that if she did, we might have to consider “other measures” (meaning not feeding her).
We took a few minutes to absorb that and I asked how long they thought we had to make the decision. I sort of assumed they would give us an answer in the area of weeks.
The doctor said he would recommend within the hour.
Carl and I didn’t need to talk about it too much, because we were really on the same page in some way, but we did sit with the decision for a while. We decided that we were all right with taking her off the ventilator and seeing what she could do. I don’t know that we could have gone any further than that, but taking her off the dreadful machines seemed a reasonable middle path, at least.
For me I have to say it was the swallowing that decided me. I think I could have talked myself into the deafness and blindness and lack of brain function as being manageable, at that point in our experience. But that she might very likely choke on her own spit and die if someone fell asleep for half an hour at the wrong time - and the horribleness of having to be suctioned out all the time without any understanding of anything… that image, however imaginary or conjectured, decided me.
I also harboured a few doubts and maybe still do, because of a documentary I saw in grade 9 about hydroencephalic kids who had almost no brain but didn’t know it until they were tested for some reason. I actually asked about that in the meeting and I got a clear answer for why Emily’s situation was different - she had less brain than that and none in the higher function areas. But I still wonder, a bit.
Stem cell research haunts me a bit too; what if we could have regenerated her brain from her stem cells? Even in 5 or 10 years? But that is a big what if to continue someone’s life knowing it would be painful without any understanding or joys of the colour blue or the sound of music.
The thing about this kind of decision - I’ve said it before and I don’t see changing my mind - is that because of its weight, it is not designed to be easy. In my opinion, of course, but it’s a strong one. Anyone who is certain of the right choice scares me. I honestly believe the - penalty is too strong a word but result seems too detached - cost of that decision is living with the uncertainty, forever. I believe when you decide whether someone lives or dies it probably should haunt you, at least a little. Not dysfunctionally, but some. Otherwise maybe you haven’t understood the implications.
We told the staff and they pretty much flew into action to set it up for us. I wouldn’t say they were eager, at all. But there was an underlying feeling that they felt it was a good decision. I was glad for that and still am; they deal with these things more often and I felt that they were offering their genuine expertise. Not an agenda. For all I know they would have been the same with the opposite decision.
But I did feel like their experience was at my back. That hospital would see a lot of kids with hugely serious issues and I suspect that they had much more idea of what profoundly disabled would be like for Emily than we possibly could without going through it.
Everyone family-wise that we talked to ourselves supported our decision fully; we were pretty careful which family members we talked to, and we invited those in Toronto (my mum and dad, my sister, and my MIL) to come down to the hospital for a baptism. I know that pretty much all of them found that hard to take; a baptism is a traditionally a celebration of life and I think most people were also sort of finding it hard to dedicate a life to God that it seemed was already taken.
But for me, it was something I could do, some small milestone we could still have together, and I needed that. Also it seemed to me more likely that we would regret not doing it more than doing it, if something had to have regrets attached.
So we designed a kind of ceremony where the staff took her off the machine with whoever in our family wanted to be there. We didn’t know if Emily would die right then. Carl and I chose not to be right there for that process; I’m not sure how I feel about it now but at the time I felt like I would lose it if I were. So we waited for her in one room and they brought her in and Carl and I had about 20 minutes alone with her, because we wanted that in case, again, she didn’t make it. The only tubes she still had were water and morphine, to keep her comfortable.
Then we had a small baptism and the chaplain sat with us all for a while and then he left, and then everyone held Emily and we took pictures. She kept breathing the whole time, although if you held her head at the wrong angle she would start to go grey. She was breathing that stridor sound the whole time, high pitched noises. Then everyone gradually left except for Carl and I, and we stayed with her in the parent care room (where people going home from the NICU get a 24 hour “test drive”).
The nurses came in and out to check on her and us, and one encouraged us to change her diaper, which was - oddly neat, since we never had. She told us everything you would normally tell new parents - wipe from front to back, etc. - and also told us we were great parents. It may sound morbid but it wasn’t; it was respectful at the time and I clung to those words a long time afterwards, through all the hatred of my body that hit.
They did have to tell us now and then that we could change our minds; probably a requirement either legally or perhaps by medical oath. It was difficult to have to go over the choice more than once, but I think that’s fine: those kinds of choices should be difficult. We also had to answer the organ donation question. Everyone knew most of her organs weren’t viable in any way (only her corneas, and only for research) but that we were given the opportunity was still a big deal to us.
That was a long night. I didn’t want to sleep and lose any time with her but I did sleep about an hour, with her on the bed with us, and Carl dozed a bit too (we took turns). Her breaths just gradually got further and further apart until we couldn’t hear them any more (she did gasp a little at one point; the last fight I guess) and then we thought she had died, but the doctor said no, and we had about 45 minutes more before she was truly gone. I could tell the difference then actually but I can’t say there was a spiritual glow moment or anything. She had, it seemed, been moving away from us since her birth. The most alive I ever saw her was the first time in the East General NICU.
There was stuff after but that was all that pertained the decision. As I said, I can’t say it was the right one. Stories in the news always make me wonder. Was it fear-based? It didn’t feel it at the time, except fear of her suffering awfully only to die suffering. But the paths of the subconscious are strange and sometimes when I hear about disabled kids and the terrible choices their parents have to make over and over I wonder if I had some understanding of that and choice the easy path rather than the right one. Then sometimes I go the other way and I feel hugely grateful that we were guided in making the choice to let go and not try to be selfish about keeping her with us for us and making her suffer in the process.
So, I don’t know.
Heavy stuff, I know.
Snow day!
Today was one of those perfect winter days - fluffy snow on the ground (over ice, sadly) and the temperature quite warm enough to go out and enjoy it.
So, after V. left and after lunch, Noah and I did. We tramped around at the park (I got a shot of our foot prints side by side which I will save for a later day) and I took a few pictures and Noah pushed snow around and walked into a bush. I love taking him outside to explore, and this is just the beginning!
We barely even made it 8 feet inside the park. He had all the new stuff he needed right there.
The sunlight and air did us both good, but especially me.
I didn’t get as much work done as I’d've liked today, because I was still pacing around in my fear and terror that something will go horribly wrong with V. My instincts are her are that she’s just fine, and I like how she interacts with Noah and with Carl and I so far. But the fear, my god. I could hear that Noah was fine (no fussing) but then I started worrying about touches he doesn’t know to worry about yet… and that she would fall in love with him and steal him… and all kinds of (fairly) irrational stuff. I don’t think it helps that we are pretty close to when we believe the abuse started (meaning, Noah is almost that age).
But on the up side, knowing that she is coming is great. Having the time will be great. And most of all, after she left, I felt kind of refreshed (in that odd worried way) and had lots of energy to get Noah suited up and out in the park. Yay!
The jalapeno scale of depression
In 1992, the year my life well and truly fell apart, I went on Prozac two weeks before I went to Italy on a scholarship to study Roman Art and Architecture in situ, so to speak. I did not precisely earn this scholarship; my friend and I were the only two students in third-year Latin, and she won it and then couldn’t go.
I ended up on Prozac when the entire left side of my body went numb and unresponsive, which resulted in a trip to the ER, a CAT scan, an MRI, and an E.R. doctor who must have been one of the most perceptive doctors on earth. He turned to my parents and said “well, we’ve ruled out everything but post-traumatic stress disorder, so I recommend you find a good therapist,” and then later slipped me the name of one.
Although I am pretty sure it was due in large part to the Prozac that I somehow regained a toehold on life, emotionally I still think of Italy as the real saviour. I was so out of things at that point (and it was such a rush to get ready to go) that it didn’t really occur to me that I was going to Italy, as in A Room With A View, until I wandered away from my pensione and turned a corner and ended up in St. Peter’s Square. That was exciting in and of itself.
But then a few days later, my taste buds started working again. I had been dowsing everything - everything - in various form of heat: mango pickle, cayenne, and jalapeno peppers. I could taste tomato! I could taste bread! Of course Italy is a wonderful place for this kind of thing to happen, but I was literally high on just having a sense of taste back. I couldn’t even eat much, because the sensory input was just too much.
(I had the same experience with colour a few days later, staring at a Boticelli.)
Even since then I’ve paid some attention to what I can taste and I’ve generally found that there is a vague correlation between where I am on the depressed scale and whether I am loading everything up with chipotle peppers. Lately I’ve been stirring mango pickle into my bowl of stew, which isn’t a good sign. Not being able to exercise (foot, plus scheduling) has been bad and the last week of icky weather so not many refreshing walks by the lake either has sort of capped it.
No plan of attack yet; just an observation.
Exhaling
Noah and V. got along really well today. I’m starting to have hope that this could work out. Of course some part of me assumes that means it won’t.
I’m amazed at how quickly my stress levels are dropping at the prospect of having 9 quality work hours dropped into my week. Duh, childcare helps.
~~~
Job angst: having reviewed “tofu and yoghurt writing” I can say that despite the word tofu appearing several times in the entry below, ok, even at 4 in the morning on 3 hours sleep I don’t quite qualify for that particular stable yet. What’s one rank up?
I also was invited to an editorial meeting (!) next week so perhaps there will be some, you know, editorial. Or not.
~~~
Since injuring my foot and entering the winter darkness I have been struggling kind of hard; I now have hope that this isn’t permanent. Some more sleep would definitely help though and in that vein, good night and sweet dreams.
Fast food
While I’m thinking of it, some of the fast food that has worked during this crazy period.
Pasta tofu-esto
Whole wheat or oter pasta + mashed up extra-firm tofu + 1 jar pesto = yummy one pot goodness. For some reason tofu and pesto seems to be a match - the tofu is textury and the pesto is flavour.
Chicken leftover stew (fast to prepare, slow to simmer)
First night, chicken cooked by the grocery store (!!) + veggies (yes, includes kale)
Second night:
Chicken, or leftover chicken, from a roasted chicken, including some (like half) of the skin
1 or 2 cans your favourite white beans
3 or 4 potatoes, washed and cut up
half a package green beans