Month: February 2021

February Musings

Do you ever get that feeling of existential dread that runs down your belly and into your legs, leaving everything numb? I’m having that now. I think it’s anxiety-related, due to me not being at work during the middle of the day (because I wasn’t scheduled for any classes) and feeling guilty about it.

Aren’t humans weird? I have no reason to feel guilty, no reason to feel bad. It’s all in my head but I can’t shake it. I know this, but the feelings remain.

Seems like every winter about this time I write a post about how much I hate winter. It isn’t just lip service. My body chemistry changes in the winter and I wrestle, in a real way, with depression. Luckily mine is seasonal and usually dissipates right around the time that Spring begins, something that occurs much earlier in NC than it did in NH. So I know this is a temporary feeling.

It still makes me question everything, every year. It makes me cranky and short-tempered. It makes me want to drop all responsibilities and move to a tropical island.

Every single year, I tell myself I need to book a vacation in February.

And every single year, I do not do it. My current excuse is that I don’t have any time off in February. While this is true, there is a long weekend or two during the month, and I could probably get away with taking enough days off to fashion a week-get-away.

Why don’t I?

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The Cost of Eating Plant-Based

Our family has been eating a plant-based diet since November. A plant-based diet is one where we incorporate as many fruits, vegetables, beans, and selected whole grains as we can, and minimize the animal and dairy products we eat.

The big difference between a plant-based diet and a vegetarian or vegan diet, I think, is the intent. We switched to eating this way for the health benefits of it, not for any ethical reasons (which are great, but they aren’t our reasons).

As with any big change in your life, it takes a while to get the hang of it, and we’re still figuring out how to eat.

At first, when cooking with just plants, I added a lot of fat into our cooking, thinking we needed it for flavor. But then, as my weight started to increase, I realized I was doing something wrong.

So I kept reading, and took the oil out of our diets, primarily palm and coconut oils, especially pernicious as they’re full of saturated fats. As my dad says, “If it’s in solid form at room temperature, it’s at solid form in your body.”

Each week, we cook a big batch of beans and a big batch of whole grains–whole wheat pasta, quinoa, brown rice. Then, we base our meals around some kind of whole grain and/or bean, lots of green stuff, and spices.

Now that I’ve got the hang of it, we’ve been losing weight, as we need to, since I was bordering on an “overweight” designation, and Mr. ThreeYear was bordering on an “obese” designation. I have lost about 5 pounds and Mr. ThreeYear has lost about 7 pounds. It’s slow, but steady.

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Why We Put Our Kids In Private School and What We Plan to Do in the Future

If you had told me last February that we would have spent the majority of 2020 in the midst of a global pandemic and that now, a year later, both of my boys would be enrolled in private school, well, I would have had trouble wrapping my mind around that.

Even though I work in a private school and get a 50% tuition break, I still was hesitant about putting my kids in private school, mainly because even a 50% discount on tuition is waaaay more than “free” which is what public school tuition was.

But, I had vaguely considered putting Little ThreeYear in because he’d had a bit of trouble fitting in in his elementary school. It was a lot bigger than his New Hampshire elementary school and he hadn’t found a group to click with. We’d also had a weird situation at the school and wanted to get him away from that.

Once the quarantine hit and I saw how his public school was tackling virtual school (compared to how our school was tackling it), the decision was a lot easier. Little ThreeYear did not do well with self-directed, asynchronous virtual learning with zero live classes.

Both of my boys have ADHD and anxiety. Both are very smart but struggle in school because of the lack of executive functioning they have due to the ADHD. Both have improved tremendously over the years in their ability to manage their work and homework, but it’s never been easy.

As a mom, that has been hard for me, because I was an excellent student. I never had any trouble in school and my parents never had to help me with anything school-related.

With my boys, I have had to sit next to both of them to do homework until grade 6 (so, for Little ThreeYear, I still sit next to him to do homework, or I at least have to be in the room).

The Decision Process

One of the hardest parts of Covid has been making decisions. We were given massive amounts of new information and scenarios to sort through as a nation, as a world. Making decisions about what to do in unknown or untested scenarios is hard. There were also many unknowns. When would be able to go back to work, school, restaurants, in person? If we could go back in person, would we have to be virtual in the winter? How could we keep our families safe?

We had a great number of unknowns, a lot of information (some of it misinformation), and some pretty dangerous consequences.

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A New Furnace and a No Spend Month

Ahh, the joys of home maintenance. A few months ago, our furnace started working intermittently. We’d wake up to a very chilly downstairs one day, and then the next the heater would work again.

We thought it was just a part that needed to be fixed, but… you know what comes next.

“A new furnace,” the repairman told us. “Your furnace is already fifteen years old, and you’ll just spend a couple of grand repairing it only to have to completely replace it in a few years.”

“And here’s a quote for adding in a new AC unit, too. They’re all one system and it’s way more efficient to replace them at the same time. Your AC is twenty years old and it looks like it could give out any day now.”

Our AC has already given out once. We got it patched up by the Home Warranty company, courtesy of the one year of home warranty our realtor had given us.

By the way, home warranties are a terrible idea, in my opinion. They nickel and dime you for everything–we ended up paying several hundred dollars for the AC repair–and they refuse to replace anything, opting instead to patch up your appliances, hoping they give out after you’ve cancelled your membership. Many years ago, in our first home in Atlanta, we had a home warranty and it worked much better. Our oven and hot water heater died, and the company replaced both without charging us more than our $75 service fee. This company, however, was terrible and I much prefer to pay for home repairs out-of-pocket, which I suspect in the long run will be more cost effective (although not enjoyable the moment I am coming up with the money out-of-pocket).

We got three quotes from local repairpeople, including the repair company that partnered with Costco, who all told us the same thing, and decided that we would replace the furnace and AC all at once, since it was cheaper in the long run and we knew the AC would give out soon.

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