So last year around this time I did not do a year-end post. I was pregnant and my husband got really sick while we were visiting my sister and we got in a car accident on the way back and we were happy to survive (no one was hurt in the accident). That was how 2019 started! We hosted an exchange student, Giulia, and she taught us a lot about Italy and Italian culture, and we talked to her in English a lot. She bravely kept going to school when we were very low energy at the beginning of the year! I struggled to find energy to work on the videogame I've been helping to write with my sister, Space to Grow, but I did work on it. We held Esperanto club almost every month, with some gaps when P-chan was born. I think we had movie afternoon every month too. A-chan waking us up early was a constant struggle, though luckily after the baby she learned how to turn on the TV by herself.
January was really hard. Adam was sick and having trouble driving and my morning sickness was at its worst. I forced myself to go to work because the thought of being stuck at home was depressing to me. I even worked from home for a week. It was difficult to go grocery shopping because of all the smells (thank you, mint gum!). I didn't throw up when I was watching TV and I watched a LOT of Netflix: Jane the Virgin, The Good Place, Stranger Things, and Call the Midwife were some of my favorites. We sold our Toyota and bought a hybrid minivan in anticipation of the baby (somehow we did this even though neither of us wanted to drive very much).
I found more of a good balance between medicine and coping strategies in February to get to the point where I wasn't throwing up as much. Every day I went to work I ate lunch at the MOA cafe: their grilled cheese and pesto sandwich plus the very berry salad. I could not stand the smells in the break room and just putting together a lunch in the morning made me gag. At work I hosted an edit-a-thon to create pages for children's books that have won the Coretta Scott King Award and it was moderately successful. My OB/GYN was not very sympathetic to my misery and I had cravings for waterfall salad/Nam Tok and Okonomiyaki.
In March I was still exhausted but it became my new normal and I think I scaled back on my activities and expectations a bit. I met some friends of my friends and maybe now we are friends? We found out that I was pregnant was a girl. The fetus was kind of stuck with its head by my hip and they wanted another ultrasound from the hospital. We visited my family in California for spring break and Giulia was very busy completing some unfair graduation requirements, but we got her to see the Pacific Ocean, the Golden Gate Bridge, and Muir woods. I felt very comforted by my mom's cooking!
In April I started a free Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program. It's this Palouse mindfulness site and it was something I could do on my own from home and I think it helped me cope with my pregnancy. I did the first five weeks of the course. I was a bit worried when I had to go in for the specialist ultrasound, but it turned out everything was perfectly normal, except my baby didn't want to move from my hip, haha. I went home early from work one day because I wasn't feeling well and I got pulled over for expired registration and I cried a LOT it was embarrassing. I made my daughter go to her music lessons even when she didn't feel like it. "I tried sitting meditation for 30 minutes... longest 30 minutes of my life!" I feel like I got better at meditation over time and it helped me to cope with some miserable days. We hid Easter eggs for Ada and she LOVED it. Giulia wanted to hike the Y, and somehow we did it!
A-chan started to play more videogames with me, particularly Yoshi's Crafted World. Giulia's parents visited us when she graduated in May. We communicated through Giulia and Google translate! Her graduation was bittersweet. Giulia came with us to do Cavan's escape room with some friends, which was cool and fun. We hosted a goodbye party for Giulia. In June we drove to Lake Tahoe for an extended family reunion, which was fun. One of my favorite parts was playing The Great Dalmuti with my cousins. We threw a party for A-chan's birthday, which she was excited about for a long time. She stayed with her Utah cousins while Adam and I went to Boston for Narrascope, where I met some other people working in narrative games and attended some amazing presentations. I also had a crab roll for the first time! I played The House in Fata Morgana and some of Baba is You. Adam's parents returned from their mission in Scotland. I continued to deal with the discomforts of pregnancy.
In July my nesting instinct kicked in or I simply wanted to be ready for the baby and we got shelves installed in the garage, moved things around and got rid of some furniture, and moved A-chan's room to make room for the nursery. My OB/GYN told me P-chan was breech and I tried lying on an ironing board at an angle and other ridiculous things (and bent up my ironing board in the process). My sister and her kids visited. One morning I started throwing up and went to the hospital, but my labor wasn't starting, I was just throwing up from a stomach bug or something.
P-chan was born in August and everything was fine. My mom stayed with us a week and helped A-chan adjust. Recovering and having my milk come in was painful and it took a long time to get my strength back. P-chan has been a very easy baby and this is a great blessing. I had some post-partum anxiety, like worrying that a spider would bite my baby, or not wanting to start doing anything because I felt like I needed to be ready to take care of her at any moment!! But I was pretty aware of it. We had some permaculture gardeners plan and re-landscape our front yard, which I have promised to be responsible for. It was expensive, but I hope that it will be nicer than a lawn in the long run. A-chan started afternoon kindergarten. We played Knights and Bikes together when it came out and she loved it. Somewhere in here I joined the ARCH-HIVE.
In September I was still on maternity hiatus but starting to get used to having a baby. I had very low expectations of my abilities and I had a few pity parties. A-chan showed some some symptoms of being stressed out and we set up some rewards for her accident-free days. P-chan started taking bottles in anticipation of me going back to work in October. I found a book on historical theology and wondered why no one told me about this before? I had a frantic stressful week searching for childcare and found an arrangement that would work.
In October I went back to work!! Working was the easy part, haha. The hardest part was that P-chan cried in the car on her way to and from daycare. I started listening to Harry Potter and the Sacred Text podcast, which I really enjoy. I made an Esperanto friend through Amikumu, and we started chatting on WhatsApp to practice my Esperanto. It's very good listening/speaking practice. Since WhatsApp is asynchronous, I can listen more than once and look up a word or two if I need to for my response. My high school friend Geoff came to visit us and it was fun to catch up with him.
P-chan got pretty sick in November, but recovered. I enjoyed playing Return of the Obra Dinn and started working on a top-secret volunteer project. I cleaned up after and Adam caught a mouse in our house and I can no longer look at black lint in the same way. I got pretty sick the latter half of the month, which lasted until after the first week of December, which was miserable. During that time we hosted lots of family for P-chan's baby blessing. Thanksgiving was fine, but since I was sick afterwards Christmas preparations felt a little rushed. A-chan watched me play Pokemon a lot. I dialed back my attendance to Christmas festivities but did go to two parties. My parents came to visit for Christmas and we had a fairly good time, even though we all got a little sick and didn't eat much.
Looking back on the year, it seems like I was sick a lot, or complained about my health in my journal a lot. I hope that in 2020 I can start driving my cargo bike more places and improve my health. I want to focus on finishing Space to Grow and my top-secret volunteer project at the beginning of the year, and continue to study Esperanto in anticipation of going to the Universala Kongreso in August. That's the biggest meeting in the Esperanto movement where people meet from all over the world! We are still trying to teach A-chan some Esperanto... we'll see how that goes. I want to revitalize our local club but I'm not sure the best way how. I'll keep thinking about my New Year's resolutions and write them down in my jounal.
