pandemic parenting

Everyday feels so long. Riley wakes me up around 6:30am and goes to sleep by 8ish (7:30 when I’m lucky, 9 on a bad day), and then I get 2 or 3 hours to cook and eat dinner, hang out with Jon, and watch a little tv. 

Sometimes he’ll nap for an hour or two and I get a little time in the middle of the day to either cram in some work or cook something. Everyday there are so many small joyful moments, where Riley does something adorable, says a ridiculous thing, gives me a hug or kiss out of nowhere, makes up a song, or finds games and things to explore in the yard. Sometimes we’ll be walking in the neighborhood and the sun is shining and flowers are blooming and we collect dandelions and things feel okay. There are also a collection of terrible moments everyday, where Riley has a tantrum or does things he knows he shouldn’t and I lose my cool, or I read a particularly devastating piece of news and just can’t function. Everyday is both lovely and terrible, and by the afternoon, that morning is a blur and I usually have to look at the dishes to remember what happened. 

Yesterday morning, I cleaned the kitchen, did two loads of laundry, made breakfast, did Riley's preschool zoom call, and took out the trash all before 10am. I was feeling great and started prepping lunch while Riley played in the living room. Lunch prep ended with Riley having a total meltdown because I wouldn’t let him run around the house rubbing a carrot on everything (and it had to be a specific carrot) while I was on hold with the bank for work and Jon had to hide in the attic for a work call because Riley was screaming so loud. Half an hour later, Riley was still bawling and I was crying to the woman from the bank about a totally harmless mixup. Then he finally calmed down with some potato chips and Winnie the Pooh, and we ate lunch and went for a nice walk around the neighborhood. By 1pm, he was passed out in his stroller in the backyard and I managed to get a little quiet time. That was only halfway through the day.

We’ve definitely been letting Riley watch a lot more TV than we would like, but have accepted that it’s the best we can do right now. He’s obsessed with sad emotional scenes in movies and books and spends a lot of time trying to understand them. We talked about the scene where Mufasa dies in Lion King probably a thousand times. Currently he’s really into Robin Hood (the old Disney cartoon where Robin Hood is a fox), and he constantly talks about the scene where the sheriff steals the little rabbit’s birthday present, then Robin Hood gives the rabbit his bow and arrow and his hat and makes it all better. I have to tell him that part of the story at least 5 times before he falls asleep at night. 

This is obviously how he’s trying to process the emotions he’s feeling and seeing around him, and it’s both sweet and tragic. 

He also likes to list all the things he’ll get to do when people aren’t sick anymore. “People not sick anymore, go to grocery store, go to farmers market buy empanadas, go to zoo, go to school, go to playground, go on airplane see nana and papa.” Sometimes when he’s playing by himself I just hear him saying this to himself, or he’ll say it when we walk past a swing in a neighbors backyard, or when he tells us a story about things he saw at the zoo when we went a few months ago. I’m just glad we found words to explain it in a way he understands.