It seems that a funny thing has happened on the old PA blog this week. After taking four days off for Thanksgiving I came back with a fairly detailed account of what was going on in my life and around my house and family for that holiday weekend, and then I proceeded to dive into a few pop-culture-heavy essay posts that had either been floating around in my head for a while or were inspired over Thanksgiving. And I’ve got another one of those for today, too, but jumping straight to that would mean once again that I would have essentially gone four days without talking about the household current events, such as they are. So allow me to take a moment now to address that.
The thing is, not much is going on that I haven’t already talked about previously, or that doesn’t boil down to a bullet point for the Saturday Grab Bag. The machinery of buying our new house continues to grind, although I think we have just about finished with the Endless Rounds of Faxes, so yay. The sellers made the repairs we requested based on the home inspection; the appraisal of the house came in above what we’re paying for the house. All good news, but let’s be totally honest here, it’s pretty boring even to me, and I’m the one who ends up with a new house out of the deal. Trying to rent the townhouse is a bit of a trial, involving realtors stopping by at random to show the property to prospective renters even though they're supposed to coordinate that through our rental management company … but all we have to do is find one interested person who passes the application process and everything will be fine, so I remain optimistic that we can do just that by January 1st.
Trying to pack for the move has more or less ground to a halt, partly because days spent at work do not translate to a great deal of energy for sorting objects into boxes at night. Probably a bigger factor, though, is that my mom has been staying with us all week, and our basement functions as our guest suite, but our basement was also where I had started the packing process and what I was planning on using as the main staging area. I feel (irrationally, sure) like spending excessive time in the basement this week is kind of like invading my mom’s space, not to mention that if I start digging through the storage closet at 8 p.m. and make a huge mess, I have to have that all put away again by 10:30 or so in order to make the basement habitable again. Hardly seems worth the effort.
It’s also been an exhausting week because my son has not been sleeping well, and as I alluded to above, this is something I’ve talked about at length before and there’s not much new to add. We know he has an ear infection, but when he starts screaming at 2 a.m. it’s hard to know if he needs pain medicine or is just cranky or if we’ve created a vicious cycle letting him sleep with us when he’s really sick and now he wants it all the time, or if possibly when he’s home all day with my mom instead of his usual providers at day care maybe my mom isn’t feeding him enough so he wakes up hungry or she’s putting him down for naps at unusual times and screwing up his internal sleep clock. It’s hard enough to parse through all of that at any time, but half-asleep in the middle of the night it’s nigh impossible, so we’ve just kind of been gritting our way through it.
I love my mom but I wouldn’t exactly say I’m close to her, and in all candor I can’t even say it’s been nice having her in town this week. It’s been work, adjusting our lives around her presence, which is not to say that she’s disruptive or hyper-critical or monomaniacal or any of those nightmare scenarios, she just doesn’t integrate well because she’s kind of quiet and sedentary and … just there. The baby has loved having his Nana around and she, in turn, has been thrilled to spend time with her one and only grandchild, and I think it’s important to provide the opportunity for those relationships to take root, but my only real takeaway is just a little more stress than usual. Which makes me feel horrible even to admit to, but there it is.
This probably also explains why I’ve retreated blogwise to talking about nostalgia and comics and decade-end reading lists and whatnot. I hadn’t really realized that myself until I typed it just now. Huh.
In any case, my mom leaves tomorrow and things should return to normal (or a passing resemblance thereof) by next week, so stay tuned.
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