{"id":48628,"date":"2022-03-10T23:37:38","date_gmt":"2022-03-11T04:37:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48628"},"modified":"2022-03-11T23:38:02","modified_gmt":"2022-03-12T04:38:02","slug":"dad-brog-081-now-we-enter-true-hard-mode","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/?p=48628","title":{"rendered":"Dad Brog (#081): Now we enter true hard mode"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/span>Seeing as how my eldest has now crossed over the two-year mark, I can\u2019t really call this series 2 Under 2<\/em> anymore.\u00a0 So for the sake of simplification and finality, because these are what these posts really are, I\u2019m just going to go ahead and just start titling these what they truly are.<\/span><\/p>\n

So for the past month and change, has been The Best Month Ever, part 2 \u2013 a substantial chunk of time in which my mom has been staying with me, to help take care of my children, as well as the opportunity to bond with #2, much as she did with #1 back two years ago.\u00a0 Her being here is a massive security blanket, as she is someone I trust unconditionally with my kids, and I always know my children are in good hands when I\u2019m not physically present.\u00a0 Which has been very critical seeing as how I have now returned to the office partially in my new hybrid work format.<\/span><\/p>\n

Honestly, I think this visit has gone better than the last one, since aside from being the point person on #2, my mom has gotten to witness the growth and development of my first child, and it will never not make me happy to see just how much #1 loves her halmoni<\/em>, and the rapid development of where it started with \u201chalmi\u201d at the start of the month, but has already corrected to a very well pronounced \u201chalmoni\u201d now.<\/span><\/p>\n

We didn\u2019t butt heads as often as we did the last time she was here, and probably by virtue of being in a job that isn\u2019t sucking the soul out of me, my mental state was in a far better place now than it was back then, and I didn\u2019t have my own head stuffed up my ass for the first few weeks of her visit this time.<\/span><\/p>\n

In spite of how glad I\u2019ve been to have my mom here over the last five weeks, it still has been somewhat of a roller coaster.\u00a0 As mentioned, I returned to the office, which has embarked a whole new world of awkwardness of getting back to commuting and being in a place of business again.\u00a0 I\u2019ve started working out and running again which is a positive thing.\u00a0 Unfortunately, as posted about not long ago, I had to put my dog down while she was here, which sucked massively in spite of knowing it was always looming.\u00a0 And in the middle of this month, I took #1 to Disney World for her birthday, while my mom took a break from kid duty to visit a local friend in Georgia for the weekend, which was pretty good for all of us.<\/span><\/p>\n

However, what wasn\u2019t good was the fact that my daughter picked up a bug while in Florida, and I can remember the little shitfuck who was coughing all over the shuttle, and being concerned that my daughter wasn\u2019t far enough away perhaps, and now I\u2019ve got two sick kids because it\u2019s impossible to separate #1 from #2 because they love each other.\u00a0 It makes me really reconsider doing anything that puts either of my kids at risk, because Americans still can\u2019t get their shit together, and frankly it\u2019s not worth my kids getting sick for an egregiously expensive excursion in the first place.<\/span><\/p>\n

Regardless, the point of the post is that the best month ever part 2 is coming to a close this week, and I have to take my mom back to Virginia very soon.\u00a0 I\u2019m eternally grateful for her help, and treasure the bonds she made with my daughters, but at the same time I\u2019m absolutely scared and petrified at what lies ahead in the immediate future, with daily life without any sort of safety net anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n

With me going back to the office a couple days each week, these are a couple of days in which it\u2019s going to be just my nanny, in charge of both girls by herself.\u00a0 This isn\u2019t say I don\u2019t trust my nanny, it\u2019s just that I feel like I\u2019m the only person in my world who really, really, really tries to avoid any and all scenarios in which my kids outnumber the present adults.\u00a0 I know how hard double duty is, I\u2019m on it way more than I wish I were, but shit happens.\u00a0 My kids are handfuls, where one of them is now a two-nager who has some very strong opinions and wants to get her hands on anything and everything, and the other one is an infant that sucks at sleeping and requires the DaVinci code in order to get to nap for seven minutes.<\/span><\/p>\n

Prior to this, I\u2019ve always had the luxury of being able to work from home, so that I was always available if things went tits up, but that\u2019s not going to be the case for several days each week.\u00a0 Mythical wife and I agreed that we really only need to hang in there until the end of the school year, but that\u2019s still nearly two and a half months to be going without any sort of safety netting.<\/span><\/p>\n

As if two kids under-ish two weren\u2019t already hard enough, going back to the office and sending my mom home, is truly going to be putting life into hard mode, and it\u2019ll be a daily touch and feel test to see how things are going, but I have concerns that I may need to put some stress on a job that I\u2019m really beginning to like, due to the realities of parenthood borne during pandemic.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Seeing as how my eldest has now crossed over the two-year mark, I can\u2019t really call this series 2 Under 2 anymore.\u00a0 So for the sake of simplification and finality, because these are what these posts really are, I\u2019m just going to go ahead and just start titling these what they truly are. So for … Continue reading Dad Brog (#081): Now we enter true hard mode<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[194,193,71,109,37,192,83,32],"class_list":["post-48628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-brog","tag-coronavirus","tag-dad","tag-famiry","tag-gym","tag-job","tag-kids","tag-observations","tag-running"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=48628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48630,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48628\/revisions\/48630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=48628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=48628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/totfc.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=48628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}