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+ Some time in the middle of June, I finally got the basement clean enough that I am willing to go down there on a daily basis and hit the elliptical. Since then I've been down there every evening except June 30 (protest day, plenty of walking, and everything hurt, so a judicious break was called for); I started out on 1000 steps/day at resistance level 5, and I guess for a couple of weeks I've been doing 1100 steps, and that's getting easy enough that I'm going to have to scale up again soon - only I don't want to keep adding time forever, so we'll see at what point I bump up the resistance instead. I can feel the difference in my strength, stamina, and general energy levels just from this frankly little bit of gymming every day. I am pleased to be more in control of my body.
+ I have also gone back to the eating habits that enabled me, 10 years ago, to reach (and stay for a bit at) a size and shape I liked better than the one I have now. I am already feeling slightly smaller and slightly leaner, so that's not nothing. Of course 10 years ago I hadn't had a baby, so there's some soft Baby Waz Here stuff around my middle that's probably going to be lumpy forever because ligaments can only tighten themselves so far. Still. I am pleased to be more in control of my diet.
/ I continue to try to be as supportive as I know how to Himself as he works (and he is working!) to manage his depression. I think we're comfortable calling it that. He's trying the meds in the order they are recommended to him and reporting on their effects or lack thereof, and he took a week off work in the middle of June, which was freaking huge - we went on vacation in October 2015 and that's the last break he had until the couple of weeks surrounding the prince's birth and homecoming, which as you all know is not a restful time - and he said it helped a bit in getting some looming neglected things off his back. I pointed out that we both know we can solo-parent for at least a few days at a time, because we've both done it, so what if he took a long weekend really away, where nobody was going to cry out for him in the middle of the night or insist on being picked up while he was trying to make breakfast or need his nose wiped or his diaper changed or etc. In fact what if he did that, say, quarterly? If that kind of brain maintenance schedule would help him sleep better more of the time, I'd sign up for it whether or not it also, downstream, made him feel like having another kid could be a good idea. Bottom line, we're both trying so hard to get each other what we need and want. Both our therapists comment on how well we communicate and treat each other, so there's that.
/ We got kiddo a pair of stepstools for the bathroom sinks, mainly because he's getting pretty heavy for me to hold while brushing his teeth. (He's about 25 pounds, which is not heavy at all, but leaning over the sink so a lot of that weight is on one of my wrists was getting precarious.) He is in love with climbing stairs, so getting him up onto the things was no problem at all, and at n=2 (washing hands when we got home yesterday, brushing teeth at bedtime last night) he is 100% not in favor of getting back down again. Poor kid. Of course he wants to explore, and when we introduce a new thing it's even odds whether he'll take to it or not - but once he does, it's his favorite thing in the world for at least a while, and I can totally see where he doesn't understand why we'd give him a new thing and then take it away again almost immediately.
- We're going to have to redo our hall bath. :-( The hope was that repairing the faucets and relining the tub would buy us several years before we had to really redo that room, but the plumber thinks the faucets are almost certainly not repairable (they're likely so damaged that they'll need to be destroyed to take them apart, and even if he can get them apart without ruining them, there's a decent chance they won't hold when he puts them back together again) and not replaceable (it's an old three-stem fixture that nobody makes now for baths and showers because you need a thermal limiter), and that means a Sawzall and some retiling of at a minimum the wall with the taps in it. And in any case you can hear and in many places feel the hollowness behind the tile on that wall and the adjacent wall, so the odds are overwhelming that all the tile has to go. It'll all be in concrete and need jackhammering to get it out. We are not looking forward to another period of living in a war zone, nor to spending this kind of money at this time. :-(
+ I have also gone back to the eating habits that enabled me, 10 years ago, to reach (and stay for a bit at) a size and shape I liked better than the one I have now. I am already feeling slightly smaller and slightly leaner, so that's not nothing. Of course 10 years ago I hadn't had a baby, so there's some soft Baby Waz Here stuff around my middle that's probably going to be lumpy forever because ligaments can only tighten themselves so far. Still. I am pleased to be more in control of my diet.
/ I continue to try to be as supportive as I know how to Himself as he works (and he is working!) to manage his depression. I think we're comfortable calling it that. He's trying the meds in the order they are recommended to him and reporting on their effects or lack thereof, and he took a week off work in the middle of June, which was freaking huge - we went on vacation in October 2015 and that's the last break he had until the couple of weeks surrounding the prince's birth and homecoming, which as you all know is not a restful time - and he said it helped a bit in getting some looming neglected things off his back. I pointed out that we both know we can solo-parent for at least a few days at a time, because we've both done it, so what if he took a long weekend really away, where nobody was going to cry out for him in the middle of the night or insist on being picked up while he was trying to make breakfast or need his nose wiped or his diaper changed or etc. In fact what if he did that, say, quarterly? If that kind of brain maintenance schedule would help him sleep better more of the time, I'd sign up for it whether or not it also, downstream, made him feel like having another kid could be a good idea. Bottom line, we're both trying so hard to get each other what we need and want. Both our therapists comment on how well we communicate and treat each other, so there's that.
/ We got kiddo a pair of stepstools for the bathroom sinks, mainly because he's getting pretty heavy for me to hold while brushing his teeth. (He's about 25 pounds, which is not heavy at all, but leaning over the sink so a lot of that weight is on one of my wrists was getting precarious.) He is in love with climbing stairs, so getting him up onto the things was no problem at all, and at n=2 (washing hands when we got home yesterday, brushing teeth at bedtime last night) he is 100% not in favor of getting back down again. Poor kid. Of course he wants to explore, and when we introduce a new thing it's even odds whether he'll take to it or not - but once he does, it's his favorite thing in the world for at least a while, and I can totally see where he doesn't understand why we'd give him a new thing and then take it away again almost immediately.
- We're going to have to redo our hall bath. :-( The hope was that repairing the faucets and relining the tub would buy us several years before we had to really redo that room, but the plumber thinks the faucets are almost certainly not repairable (they're likely so damaged that they'll need to be destroyed to take them apart, and even if he can get them apart without ruining them, there's a decent chance they won't hold when he puts them back together again) and not replaceable (it's an old three-stem fixture that nobody makes now for baths and showers because you need a thermal limiter), and that means a Sawzall and some retiling of at a minimum the wall with the taps in it. And in any case you can hear and in many places feel the hollowness behind the tile on that wall and the adjacent wall, so the odds are overwhelming that all the tile has to go. It'll all be in concrete and need jackhammering to get it out. We are not looking forward to another period of living in a war zone, nor to spending this kind of money at this time. :-(
