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I was walking to the grocery store just now with AB in the carrier. A man bumped me accidentally rushing after a woman about his age, maybe both mid-70s. He grabbed her by the shoulder and turned her to him.
“Where are you going?!”
Silence.
“You want to go home?”
She nods.
Gently turning her the opposite direction, “But home is this way.”
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This is a mega-post about our daughter AB’s arrival a little over two months ago, with a bit about BB’s birth three years ago thrown in. I wanted to note some of that at the time but never did.
It’s mostly so I don’t forget, but maybe someone else will find it useful too. Maybe AB in the future if she ever decides to have kids.
This gets a bit in the weeds. If you’d rather not read about things like breastfeeding, IVs, episiotomies, etc, probably best to skip this.
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I read somewhere that poor balance is heavily tied to memory loss later in life. Wish I could remember where…
Now I stand on one foot while brushing my teeth. The right foot and right side of my mouth for the first minute timed by my electric toothbrush, and the left foot / side of mouth for the second minute. It’s more challenging than you might think! Who knows if it would help long term, at least it makes B laugh.
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It’s been a little over four months since B arrived. These are some of my experiences or things I’ve learned so far, plucked at random.
I’d say that the books, conversations, and classes prepared me pretty decently in theory, but the physical and emotional reality is almost impossible to prepare for. Being a parent has been much more visceral than I expected.
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Read Letting go: my battle to help my parents die a good death by Kate Clanchy in The Guardian, published 6 April.
They don’t know if she will ever come off [the ventilator], but if she does, they say, she will live a very limited life in a nursing home. “We must hope she dies,” says my dad when I put down the phone. My parents are devout atheists: they believe there is no God and therefore we must live well. So do I. We pray.
This is probably one of the more moving things I’ve read in the past year. I came across it via Kate’s Twitter profile where she often shares poetry by her students.
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Cupping the water in Spicey Gill coming down from Ilkley Moor. Photo taken a year ago today.
“You are not your emotions.” Well you are, but you are not only your emotions. And you can choose not to be controlled by your emotions.
Life is made up of micro and macro decisions, and their consequences.
I chose to move back to the US, and now I am grappling with the reality of that decision, amongst other things. It has made life easier in some respects, and harder in others. Do I regret it? No. Will we be here forever? Magic eight ball says 🎱 “Concentrate and ask again”.
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I’ve been going on a few walks from the front door, no more than one a day as prescribed to maintain sanity. It’s confusing though…
The guidance says, “You can also go for a walk or exercise outdoors if you stay more than 2 metres from others”, so a walk on a quiet public footpath should be OK. Problem is that you can’t predict how many people might be on a path before you get out there, and there are a lot of stiles and latches you have to touch to get over or through fences.
But it’s not like Main Street is any better. You have to step in to the middle of the road in order to maintain distance since the pavements are so narrow, and there are 4–5 times as many people walking there at any one time than out on the countryside paths.
It’s tough to know what to do, particularly with the police doing things like shaming people via drone cameras. I get it, we absolutely have to avoid throngs of people descending on beaches and beauty spots. But, ugh. Staying 100% inside feels actively unhealthy. Just never feel like I’m doing the right thing.
I’m carrying hand sanitiser and use it after each time I have to touch some apparatus. I’m planning to carry antimicrobial wipes from now on to open / close gates and get through stiles. Maybe it’ll help others too? Who knows. I’ll also spend some time coming up with more bodyweight exercise routines that I can do from “home” or a random park. Definitely one of those times you long for a garden.
The photos above are from a walk along Marchup Beck (see walk 8, the shorter version) with Sam and the photos below are from walk towards Addingham Moorside (see walk 6, the shortest version) with Gemma in London. It was a walk-and-talk over the phone, 10/10 would recommend. I got *hopelessly* lost once or twice, but it’s pretty straightforward to get back as long as you know where the middle of town is and keep the moor at your back. The walk included some stretches of the Dales Highway and the Millenium Way, I probably just needed to pay better attention to the signs.
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We’ve been slowly packing up for the past month, preparing to move thousands of miles away. It was exciting up until about two weeks ago. We knew it would be sad to leave the people we love, pack away our books, sell so many of our things. But we were looking forward to a big change.
Now it feels untethering. Reality feels very thin at the moment, and the process of moving amplifies that feeling. Home should be a grounding place, but it’s shifting under our feet. We’ve disassembled our workspaces, we’ve given away the chairs and sold the monitors. The umbrella plant that I got at the flower market when I first moved here, the dracaena I brought back from the dead, the lovely coffee table we’ve had since we first started living together. They’ll all be gone by tomorrow.
I really don’t mind the downscaling. They’re just objects, and all of them are going to great homes. And we’re still going to move even if it gets delayed by current events, so it doesn’t make sense to hoard things for the sake of a few more weeks. But the *timing*. Things are dissolving and will be fluid for quite some time. I could really do with some solidity.
The worst part is that we may not get to say goodbye. We were planning to celebrate with the people we love. There’s an outside chance we’ll still be able to, but we don’t want to put friends in an uncomfortable or dangerous position.
What will happen will happen. And we’re pretty fortunate. It’s just sad, that’s all.
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I want to get STRONG
Yoga is relaxing but expensive, and I’m not sure about learning it at home. Gyms suck. Swimming is *lovely* but doesn’t do my angry skin any favours. Can’t run much b/c of lifelong knee issue. Excuses, excuses.
At-home bodyweight exercises FTW. This is what I’ve been trying recently, every other day for about 30 minutes. I can do all of them within the confines of a yoga mat in my postage-stamp flat.
They’re based on a few decent exercise vids on YouTube, but I prefer not to refer to the full videos all the time. Too high-energy / shiny. Instead, I’ve got the movements programmed in to a circuit training app and I listen to that alongside a mix.
About 11 minutes. Need a yoga / exercise mat. Related video
0:30 – Pulse lunge, left side
0:30 – Pulse lunge, right side
0:30 – Lunge with leg raise
0:30 – Jump squats
0:30 – Side squat steps
0:30 – Sumo squats
0:30 – Abductor squats
Move to mat, tabletop position
0:30 – Donkey kicks, left side
0:30 – Donkey kicks, right side
0:30 – Fire hydrants to straight kick back, left side
0:30 – Fire hydrants to straight kick back, right side
Lie on stomach, head resting on forearms
0:30 – Frog kicks, alternating legs
0:30 – Frog kicks, both legs
Lie on back
0:30 – Glute bridge
0:30 – One-leg glute bridge, left side
0:30 – One-leg glute bridge, right side
0:30 – Glute bridge, narrow stance
0:30 – Glute bridge, alternating leg raise
0:30 – Glute bridge, hold it
About 4 minutes. Completed standing in one spot, arms extended the whole time. These are hard to describe, see related video.
0:30 – Arms extended, palms up and then down
0:30 – Butterfly stroke then curling under as if holding beach ball
0:20 – Pulsing with palms facing forward
0:20 – Pulsing with palms facing backward
0:20 – Small circles clockwise
0:20 – Small circles counter-clockwise
0:20 – Forward, bend elbows, up, down
0:20 – Up, bend elbows, forward, back (reverse of above)
0:20 – Straight arm clap
0:30 – Trace ball in front
I’ll add more as I come across things that I like.
I found Piskel while writing this post, what a cool little site / tool. Neat CSS tip via SB: use image-rendering: crisp-edges for extra crispy pixel art.
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Read Joe Hammond’s final article in the Guardian
Author Joe Hammond passed away recently at age 50 from motor neurone disease. He covers so much loss in his final article, particularly the loss of the future with his two young boys and wife.
Other losses are simpler and more incremental. Sometimes they are nothing more than adaptation and sometimes, like the loss of my voice, they are devastating. I lost my swallow very quickly. There was a three-week period when Gill made sure I had lots of really nice soups, and that was it. Food was a thing of the past. I’ve never got over that loss.
My grandpa on my dad’s side lost the ability to swallow years before he passed. When it started getting bad he could still have ice cream every once in a while, his favorite thing, and then no more. I find it almost impossible to imagine how hard that must have been, particularly for someone as social as him. He probably managed to stick around as long as he did because of my grandma. She was his college sweetheart, his always.