Staying sane

Lots of ups and downs around here of late. Five kids in the house all day is no joke. But I’m making sure to get a half hour run in each day, in order to escape if nothing else. In this bid for maintaining sanity, I’ve hit a 14-day running streak. I have a ways to go before I hit my 1000+ day total from the last one! Still, you have to start somewhere (I don’t actually think I’m starting a run streak. But hey…)

The flowers are beautiful. The weather has been decent. We had a picnic dinner last week! We’re also having a lot of family dinners. It’s been nice to see those stacked up on my time logs. I took the big kids for a walk on a local trail. They’re reading a lot and playing together…

…and of course fighting and spending a ton of time watching screens in one form or another. The 5-year-old has been engaged in outright mutiny at times, and at other times is doing his best to have some sort of incident that will send him to the ER, at the exact worst time. As an experiment the other night, he stuck a bead up his nose. I kid you not. I managed to coach him to get it out with some snorting.

So…I am trying to focus on the positive. For instance, I’d planned to start traveling for speeches when the baby was about 4 months old. But now that all conferences are canceled for the foreseeable future, I won’t wind up leaving him for a while. That’s a silver lining. Breastfeeding is a lot easier when you never leave the house. Not traveling also gives me time for other things, like a big potential project arising partly out of all this, which I hope to announce soon.

In any case, there is much to be grateful for, and I try to keep reminding myself of that. My husband and I can work from home. Spending so much time in my house has reminded me that I do really like it — an important realization given that we had been considering moving. The kids can be ornery, but they also come up with some creative stuff when their backs are against the wall. They’ve found a lot of great hiding spots for hide-and-seek in the backyard that school, camps, and general activities meant they’d never sought out before….

18 thoughts on “Staying sane

  1. Bead up the nose! That takes me back! My older one walked into the kitchen one day with “a stick up his nose”. That was the day he learned how to blow his nose. It was either a grape stem or a tiny Star Wars piece, 25 years later it’s hard to remember. But when we asked why he’d done it, he said “because I didn’t have any pockets”. Fair enough, if not clear enough. All his pants since have had pockets.

    1. Oh, the bead up the nose trick. Our doctor found one in our daughter’s note at her 5-year checkup. She couldn’t get it dislodged and neither could the ENT. It required a 5-minute, $6,000 outpatient procedure to clear. *face palm*

  2. The daughter of a friend of ours did get a bead stuck up her nose last weekend – it was a trip to urgent care, then an ENT 45 minutes away to get it out. She has it in a special foam- cushioned box awaiting the arrival of the bead fairy.

  3. My sister stuck a tiny shell in her nose and a small rock into her ear -and got ER visits for both. I remember my dad being extremely ticked about the second ER visit. My brother also go the magnets from magnetic earrings stuck in his nose (but he was older, probably 12) and was able to get them out himself with a stronger magnet.

    My kids are also watching a lot of movies and enjoying our new bigger house. We moved in February and am so grateful for the bigger space and bigger yard. Even though it has been chaos getting things set up.

  4. My oldest (now 23) stuck the spring from a pen up his nose when he was like 4.

    It’s funny now. Then, not so much!

  5. Yesterday my kids got too rambunctious (it was rain/hail/snowing here) and my six-year-old had a tooth knocked out. Fortunately it was a baby tooth and kind of loose anyway, but my son (the instigator) got a bigger lecture than the standard don’t-be-so-rough-with-your-sisters speech, since our dentist is closed for the foreseeable future and I pointed out that it’s not very kind to our neighbors to take up space in an ER with preventable antics since other people need critical care and resources. Maybe I went a little overboard. 🙂

    We were planning to list our house for sale in early April to downsize into a smaller house downtown where all of our activities tend to be. Now that said activities are canceled, I’m kind of glad we still have our big, inconveniently located suburban house for the quarantine!

    1. @Catherine – yes, now is not the right time to downsize! I, too, made the point that we want to stay out of the hospital if at all possible. Who knows if it sank in.

      1. I have been saying the same to my husband and 16yo! They often play fight, and hubby has ended up with a broken finger in the past, so they did actually heed my lecture and have reduced, if not stopped altogether, during this lockdown.

  6. Next time you have a bead-in-the-nose emergency search “Mother’s kiss” on YouTube. In my personal experience it works like a charm.

    1. The first day that I went back to work, when my identical twin boys were three, one of them stuck a baby carrot up his nose. Watching the (high school) sitter’s freaked out reaction, his twin stuck a baby carrot up his nose too. I’m told the first boy then pushed his carrot up further into his nose., both of them giggling the whole time. I got a frantic phone call from the sitter right as I was about to sign the employment contract. I dropped everything and rushed home. By then, my dentist (now ex) husband had gotten home. He managed to pull out the carrots with dental forceps. Each boy went on to calmly finish his lunch while I bawled.
      That prompted my decision to stay home (and have two more children)!

  7. I have been homeschooling for a week now. It has been hard. I feel cranky and anxious. I have been baking a lot ( because I can do it in the kitchen while supervising the schoolkids ) and I have been going for a lot of walks. There is not really anything else to do. My country (Norway) has closed down almost everything that would be fun/entertaining and has also said people are not allowed to visit their own vacation properties. It feels a bit dismal for now.

  8. Your five year old sticking a bead up his nose reminds me of when I was a kid. My brother convinced me to stuck a button up my nose, and no matter what me and my parents did, we could not get it out. We had to go to the emergency room so they could suction the button out of my nose! I’m laughing just writing this!

  9. After reading CNN articles and looking at pictures from around the world, thank you for blogging and being the last thing I read online before going to bed 🙂

    It’ so appreciated!

    1. @Cindy- thanks for reading! And maybe consider skipping CNN. I read a reported newsletter or two that gets emailed to me and then that is the end of my news consumption for the day. I’ve decided to stay off Twitter too. It’s really a key part of staying sane.

      1. It’s totally true. We are limiting our news intake to only certain times of the day. I just got sucked in last night!

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