#It was clearly because he wanted XL to be alone and with nobody to turn to except for himself like biggest red flag in history

[bellatrixdulac]

This might be controversial but…like the vindication I've felt when Mu Qing and Feng Xin spelled it out for Xie Lian that Hua Cheng is creepy as hell in book 6? I was thinking the same since the start and I felt like I was the only one. Unreliable narrator and toxic shipping are fun but genuinely everyone seems to think that HuaLian is like a "goalsss" kind of relationship in the fandom, super cute and romantic but uh? If it wasn't the main ship, everyone would likely hate Hua Cheng for being a creep, let's be real. I felt like I was living in a bizarro world until those two finally spoke about it. Not that I had any doubt he would not turn creepy. I have believed since the start that Hua Cheng picked the colour red so he could use all his red flags as clothes lol He was always so... icky.

[canaryatlaw]

okay. it’s late, obviously. and I need to go to bed. I just took my pills like 10 minutes ago though so it might be a minute before I actually get tired. but yeah, today. I think I woke up around 11, and then for like two hours waited for my sister to wake up and trying to not get annoyed because I know I’ve slept that late plenty of times, like even on this trip, but I was just kinda tense. it didn’t help that on twitter I was repeatedly seeing people doing tribute tweets to their friends or making lists of all their friends who did whatever in 2019 and I wasn’t on a single fucking one, even when people that I know they saw less than me made it and I just like.....I got really upset about it because I felt like shit and like I didn’t even have any friends, which of course I know is not true, but it felt really shitty to see people I’ve expended energy trying to befriend just straight up ignore my existence and I just felt really awful about myself. this year has unfortunately gone from meeting a lot of new friends to constantly fearing that none of them actually like me or want me to be their friend, thanks to a couple of things that have happened. and I just feel like this massively messed up person who must’ve fucked up so badly to have all these people turning against me but like, I didn’t even fucking do anything, and if people had actually been honest about stuff this could’ve all been avoided but they weren’t and now I’m the one who’s hurting because of that and it really fucking sucks when you really feel like nobody cares about you. sigh. I feel fraudulent sometimes posting about how happy I am with my life (which I am! really!) while knowing my emotional stability is not where it should be definitely could be causing an issue. and like, looking back to the beginning of this decade all I can think is 10 fucking years and so much happened and yet emotionally I’m back in the same fucking place? how did that happen? I still obviously care way too much about what people think of me when I know I shouldn’t, and placing way too much of my happiness and value into friends who clearly don’t reciprocate any of those feelings and clearly don’t care about my emotions or how any of this actually affects me. and I fucking hate that because I truly have grown so much as a person but I feel like that same fucked up kid who cared way too much about what her friends thought of her and definitely put a lot more energy and care into her friendships than she got back. and I feel so emotionally unstable and I don’t know how to deal with this because like! I’m not depressed! my overall mental health has been fine and there aren’t really any issues there, this just feels like an entirely separate area and I don’t know what to do with it. It really sucks that just when my professional life was finally getting its shit together my personal life had to fall to pieces. and I know on some level that like all this shit really means that I should be in therapy actually working through all of this, and this is so fucking hypocritical, I know, but like....I just don’t have the emotional energy to deal with going through all of that right now. It’s going to be so much work and I really just don’t want to deal with it. and that’s messed up because I’ve told so many fucking people that they should be in therapy and that it will really help them, and now I’m clearly not abiding by that, so that makes me feel shitty too. sigh. I got on way too much of a tangent here and now I’m ranting. I really need to get back on focus and actually talk about my day before I go to sleep because it’s fucking 3:30 am. anyway. eventually my sister woke up and then she had to go get her flu shot for something with her job but like all of the places they were going to didn’t have it so she didn’t even get it done, then her and her boyfriend returned and we went to the mall. it was alright, not great, and eventually she wanted to split up which I kinda knew was going to happen because we wouldn’t want to go to the same stores, but it still was annoying. I mainly wanted to get jeans and I went to Express and tried some on, but all of their jeans were still so fucking expensive (the ones on clearance were like $50, reduced from $80) and there was a super fucking long line and I just didn’t have the patience to stand through that long ass line to pay too much for a pair of jeans, so I left and concluded I’d get jeans at some other point in the future. I went to Dynamite after that because they always have stuff I like and it’s been a while since I’ve gotten anything from them, and I ended up getting a pair of work pants from them that were on sale and very nice, so I’m happy about that. after that I met back up with my sister and we headed out. back to the house, I had dinner with my parents and then watched some GBBO with them until my brother’s friends arrived. He had asked me if I wanted to go out with him and his friends tonight and I knew if I didn’t go I was just going to end up alone with my parents and feeling sorry for myself so I said what the hell and said I would. my brother is at this new assignment at work though where he’s working a 3 pm to 11 pm shift, so he still wasn’t getting off for some time yet, so my parents ended up driving me and his two friends to the bar where we chilled for a bit and talked until he arrived some time after 11. he was bringing with him this girl who he has apparently started dating (yeah, I found out on Sunday that both of my brothers are apparently dating girls, which is just fucking great for my self-esteem knowing that I’m officially the only sibling without a significant other) which I suspect is the real reason he asked if I wanted to come so she wouldn’t be the only girl there. and she was nice, honestly at this point any girlfriend is probably going to be a positive influence on his life, so unless she was really terrible I’m not going to object. I mean, honestly, his ex-girlfriend was like, the best thing that ever happened to him, but he fucked that one up and hopefully this time he’ll be a lot smarter and more mentally stable about it. I really hope he is honestly. I also really miss his ex-girlfriend since we’d gotten quite close in the time they were dating, and of course she ultimately ended up coming to me for help when things went south, so there was a lot of emotional investment there. sigh. anyway. I was having a pretty good time chatting with his friends before he got there, they were both guys he went to highschool with so I had at least in theory known them for like 12-15 years now, but never had more than like, a passing conversation with them really. one of them I’d talked to a bit over the years, I always thought he was cute but never had like a full blown crush on him or anything, but it was kinda nice getting to talk more to both of them tonight. and of course there was alcohol, and I considered maybe trying some since it’s been like 4 years since I’ve tried consuming any but then I got a whiff of the tequila shots they were doing and I swear the smell alone started giving me like minor chest pains, so that was a no. I was kinda dumb though at midnight because they were passing out little cups of champagne as the ball was dropping and I had a single sip of champagne, which again was dumb being that I just concluded I shouldn’t be drinking any alcohol, but I mean it was midnight and everyone in the bar was doing it....sigh. It kinda burned in the back of my throat for a while which was unpleasant but never moved on to the full on chest pain that’s fucking unbearable, so I’ll count that as a semi-success, definitely not a full success because it really did not leave me wanting to consume any more alcohol, but at least I wasn’t in pain over it. we ended up playing darts for a few rounds, which I’m not particularly good at but it doesn’t really matter. a little after 2 we started trying to return to my house where everyone was spending the night, but that turned into a whole debacle because this is the fucking suburbs and it’s 2 am on new years, so getting an uber was a bit difficult. my one brother’s friend had apparently worked as a lyft driver in the past so he was a bit biased towards that app and then the first driver somehow got messed up and picked up another person but it still charged his phone and he was like, so affronted by this and just not letting it go at all and it was honestly pretty funny, it was obvious the alcohol in his system was contributing to it on some level but it was still amusing. since there were 5 of us they were originally trying to get an XL which proved even more difficult, and we ended up taking two separate normal sized ubers to get home, which still took fucking forever and we didn’t end up getting home till like, almost 3 am, which was annoying. but oh well. once we got home I showered and then had to do all my pills for the week because of course I had to run out tonight, then opened my laptop and started typing this, and now I’m here like 40 minutes later because it’s just a few minutes before 4 am now because I clearly was in the mood to write a fucking novel for some reason. sigh. last 2019 post, even though it’s now 2020 the day was in 2019 so it gets the last December 2019 hashtag. alright, I really need to go to sleep now, so that’s what I’m going to do. Goodnight dears. Hope you had a very happy new year.

[parentingtheoryandpractice]

Assorted Parenting Updates from a while back

I found this post in my drafts folder and I figured it was worth posting, even though it’s now more than six months out of date.

It's been a while since I wrote any updates about my kids, so I figured I'd try to record some stuff for posterity. The one caveat is that everything is great and I wouldn’t tell you if it wasn’t.

A while back, when I felt like I was staring down a lot of years of parenting, I started asking my friends when things got easier. I mostly got two answers: when your youngest turns 3, and when your youngest turns 5. So now, when I have a 5.5yo and an almost 3yo seems like a particularly appropriate time to reflect. 

It really is sort of shocking to me how mature Lydia is. I don’t mean that I think she’s especially mature for her age–more that 5 seems like a shockingly mature age compared to what came before. From the time she was a baby, we did a ton of talking about stuff and explaining stuff, and all that. But at this age she really gets it. Explaining things works. If she doesn’t want to do something, she’s often happy to tell me why, and she’s decent at introspecting, especially if we talk her through it. She seems to accept that there are some things that I will make her do (though I try to keep that to a minimum), and she’ll ask whether I’m forcing her to do something or not. And often she’ll be up for doing it even if I’m not forcing her, even if she doesn’t want to do it, just because I really want her to do it. She recently informed me that she can open all of our child locks, and I was basically just happy about that development. 

By my standards, she’s pretty polite :-).

She’s pretty motivated to observe family rules, and she’s also very much tracking that other families have different rules, particularly around toys and sharing. (In our house, lots of the toys belong to one kid or the other, and a minority of the toys are communal.)

She also sometimes tells me when she thinks I haven’t been being fair to her or paying enough attention to her, which always feels comforting. Though I suppose I never know for sure what she isn’t telling me. 

It’s definitely a bad bet to assume she isn’t paying attention to stuff that people around her are saying.

Her favorite food is pasta with parmesan cheese.

She loves LOL dolls.

She’s been super into singing, and wants me to help her get all the notes perfect. Her favorite songs are Rose Red, Hey Ho Nobody’s Home, and Ah Poor Bird. Other favorites include Once Upon a December, A Million Dreams, and Let it Go.

She builds a lot with Legos and Duplos, and lately she seems to have more of a plan. Like she’ll specifically round up a bunch of a type of piece she knows she’s going to need.

Socializing is clearly important to her, but she seems to get burned out by it too sometimes. And lately she can actually meaningfully spend a lot of time doing pretend play with Zeke, so there’s that too. She has a lot of strategies for getting him to do what she wants when they play. Playing with our nanny is also one of her top things to do.

She started getting carsick lately :-(, whereas she really didn’t before, which is too bad. A lot of the time it doesn’t happen though, and she is fairly self-aware about her triggers.

She has stuff she likes playing on the iPad, and some Wii and PS4 games she likes, but hasn’t ever really gotten into video games or computer games. She loves playing The Sims on my computer with me, perhaps partly because it’s a bit of scarce activity.

For years now she’s had a pretty steady interest in arithmetic. It’s pretty common for her to spontaneously ask about addition, subtraction, and sometimes a little multiplication. We talk about infinity sometimes.

She’ll ask to practice reading with me and Will, but my sense is that her motivation there is largely about connecting with us. I don’t think it feels real to her that she could actually learn to read.

She loves our dogs, and wants more animals. She periodically mentions wanting a smaller dog and a cat.

She’s definitely still a night owl. Our nanny starts at 9 a few mornings a week, and she’s asked me to wake her up for that, since she doesn’t want to miss out. Otherwise, she’ll wake up anywhere from around 8:30-10:30, and she often goes to sleep around 11:30, though sometimes it’s much earlier if she had a jam-packed day, or if she slept less than usual the night before. 

I can definitely imagine what would feel easier about having my youngest child be 5. 

Zeke isn’t quite as into trucks and construction as he used to be, but he likes it a lot. He largely likes watching videos about construction, making slime, playing with kinetic sand, making food, factories, and that sort of thing. Overall, I find his taste in videos pretty soothing. 

He like digging outside.

He has some interest in just about everything Lydia is interested in, and he really likes it when he gets to play with her and her friends.

He likes to play with words a lot, and repeat rhyming and similar sounding words for fun. 

For a long time now, he’s been very good at getting his point across to people, though he’s still definitely at the age where strangers sometimes can’t fully follow his toddler accent. 

He’s gotten pretty good at doing pretend play on his own, in addition to liking it with other people, and sometimes Lydia and I get kick out of listening to him babble to himself when he’s playing in the upstairs area by himself. 

When playing with Lydia, he’s fairly inclined to grab her things, and still sometimes knocks over her creations or gets in her space. It seems normal to me for an almost 3yo, though of course we do our best to stop him. it also seems more deliberate than it used to, in an almost-3-yo-way instead of in a 2-yo way. 

He likes playing with the dogs sometimes, but sometimes doesn’t want them around, and sometimes pokes them sits on them. Again, I do my best to stop him, but the dogs are also fairly skilled at taking care of themselves without hurting the kids, which makes my life easier. He throws balls for Krypto a lot.

Similarly, he’s quite cuddly with me, but there’s often kicking, climbing, and stuff like that mixed in. 

He still gets carsick, though I think less than he used to. This month he’s pretty willing to get in cars to go places he wants, but there have been long stretches of time where he wanted nothing to do with cars.

I basically don’t have to remind him to go to the bathroom anymore, and I believe him if he says he doesn’t have to go. The very high degree of reliability without any reminders is fairly recent though. And I do make a point of getting him to pee before bed, since otherwise he’ll sometimes have an accident at night. Mostly he’s been dry at night for years. 

He’s still nursing, but he’s pretty accepting when I turn him down, and we don’t do it all that many times a day at this point.

I don’t wear him that much anymore, though sometimes I think it would be better if I did, since I think puts him in a good state. As with Lydia, our wearing wound down a lot around 2, with wearing him while out and about being the last one thing to fade away. He’s around 31 pounds, and I’m out of the habit, so it doesn’t feel easy to have him up for long, even though I am an experienced enough wrapper that it’s pretty ergonomic.

Everyone is still sleeping in the family bed, which is a queen plus twin xl. We have no plans to change that system, since it’s working well for us.

Zeke is also basically a night owl, just a little less so than everyone else in the family. He usually gets up between 8 and 9. I try not to let him nap, but even if he has a maximally late-night-inducing nap (like sleeping from 7-8pm) he’s typically not up later than 1am. Which may seem late, but with Lydia thing could get considerably later when she took a late nap at this age. He’s always had a comparatively robust circadian rhythm, for which we are grateful.

I get what’s easier about having a youngest kid that’s almost 3. He’s not in a particularly cooperative stage, but it’s not intensely physical and hands-on all the time the way it used to be. And when I reflect on how much I do trust him, it’s actually a lot. We were camping for a wedding the other week and I asked him to leave an axe alone. Someone there made a point of showing him the axe and how it wasn’t actually that sharp, which I appreciated, and also expressed skepticism that he would really leave it alone because I told him to. But I didn’t have any real doubt that he would leave it alone. Almost always, when he goes into the kitchen, he closes the baby gate after him both on the way in and on the way out. (The baby gates are so the dogs don’t eat food I sometimes leave on the counter. He’s been able to open and close them for a long time.) I basically trust him to run in front of me on the sidewalk, because he’s been reliable for a long time about not going into the street. 

The dogs are doing well. I still spend kind of a lot of time training them, more some days than others. They spend more time outside in the yard than I’d ideally want, mostly to reduce total chaos, but they don’t seem to mind. And I feel better about that situation now that they have each other. Krypto is obviously temperamentally less anxious, but Argos is also obviously better trained. I still don’t have as high a degree of reliability with them around distractions as I would like, but I think we’ll get there eventually.

On my end, maybe the biggest change is that the more years I’ve been doing this, the less I question my overall approach. And when I read articles or books about parenting, I tend to be much more skeptical of what people are trying to sell me. That part feels good! I still think there’s plenty of room for me to get better at things, and I try to, but I also think I’ve come up against a lot of actual constraints, and there isn’t all that much low-hanging fruit anymore.