Yesterday I had my first full night of sleep in a while. I went to bed and slept right through and woke up at my regular time of 6am. I felt rested and for the most part much better. For the last week I have had to sleep flat on my back without moving much, but i tried to sleep on my side last night and it was ok. I felt a bit of pressure on my core, but it was nothing too bad and was quite manageable. For the longest time, even prior to the surgery I was waking up at 4am or so. I think that right now out of the 4 in the household I am the one that is probably going to bed the earliest at approximately 11:30. Xavier gets home from hockey around 10:45 and needs to shower and unwind a bit before he goes to bed so I think that he is probably in bed by midnight and up at 6:45. Olivier gets forgotten and does not go to bed until someone remembers and tells him he should be sleeping. Mel and I have always been night people. In Chinese culture instead of saying night owl, they are deemed night cat. Both of our kids have inherited this, and it is interesting that Xavier does not like to sleep in and will get up at the exact same time every day. Xavier is grumpy when he wakes up though, just like his mother. Olivier wakes up and is ready to go, more aligned with me.
Olivier has been planning for Christmas and hand wrote what he wants on the tiniest of post-it notes and gave it to Mel. He then expanded on it and assigned gifts to each person. Xavier is the complete opposite though and normally has no clue what he wants to get. This year however he has decided that he wants to purchase a Smith machine and has been harassing Mel to get one for quite some time. He said at the very minimum he wants adjustable barbells and a bench so he can work out. Mel warned him explicitly that she has enough on her plate and she does not want to hear anything about work out equipment until the end of November when the house is in a better state. Last night he was able to chat with Mel and convinced her of his strategy on how he will get the Smith machine by asking for money for Christmas, money he will get from Chinese New Year and negotiating how much he is willing to pay for it. His arguments are around how this is a gift for the family and everyone will be able to use it. Mel tried to counter saying if we got this as his Christmas gift that he would not get a ski trip and he said he would rather the Smith machine as he could use that everyday while skiing was a one day trip. I am sure he also knows that we will end up going skiing regardless at some point. Mel did eventually agree that we could get one, we just need to eventually plan where we will put it. I think that their approaches to gifts are vastly different because most of the big things that Xavier wants is related to hockey and he has always received it, so it is no longer “special”. It was amusing for him to counter arguments by saying next year if I do not need new pads we can save money, fully aware of the ridiculousness of him getting new gear every year. He did counter though and say he might need new ones next year if he keeps on growing but we are approaching the end of him needing new pads yearly because of growth.
I had some friends purchase me gift cards and it is insane the amount of financial support that we have received in terms of helping things around the house. I appreciate the gestures from everyone and what I realized this morning was that I had forgotten to send a message to some people telling them thanks. If I have time and remember I will hand write out some thank you cards and mail them out to my friends. We have some completely hideous cards that we got. They look like they come from the 60’s. I love them and told Mel that I want to use them and she said that she does not want to be part of any of those shenanigans. When we were writing out our thank you cards after our wedding, I wrote lengthy replies to my side and highlighted things that I appreciated and things that they did for me. Mel thought mine were better than hers and she was glad that people would not see the difference between the two of them. I spend more time writing and have more experience writing than Mel though. Xavier writes at a level far exceeding his age and his grandmother thinks that he ChatGPT’s his responses or gets me to help him. He does not. His ridiculousness is all his own. Olivier is the same, especially with his story-telling. His word choice is exceptional and he crafts vivid stories of what has happened. He lost his watch yesterday because of the way he wore it and when relaying the story you could picture him running around trying to find it all worried how we would react.
Mel years ago had my Garmin bike computer and she had gone biking with the women’s group and she crashed and lost it. The women tried to comfort her saying that now I would be able to upgrade and get a newer better one. She informed them that it was already the top of the line one available at the moment. When coming to tell me I think she was quite nervous that I would be mad and prefaced the conversation by saying do not be mad and explained what happened. I asked her if she had fun and she said yeah and that crashes do happen and it is not a big deal. Her approach I think softened it for me, because she knew that i would be upset about it and she was sorry that it was lost, but I was more concerned about her getting hurt as it is not really easy for it to come off the mount. You need a pretty significant crash. Things like that do not necessarily bother me when it is lost because things do happen. Lack of accountability I think is what bothers me the most. I eventually purchased another model as they are rather expensive and it was a want and not something that i really needed.
We are very fortunate and lucky that we are able to provide for our kids. My parents were immigrants and could not come close to providing as much materialistic things as I give to my kids. That is not to say that they did not, they would get it for us if it was important. I have always had access to computers within my house, even when it was cost prohibited for a lot of families. We just did not always have toys and things like that which my parents thought were not important. Looking at our current situation, most people know that I am the main cook within the family. Since I have struggled to do that in the last couple of weeks we have had so much support from people either with financial assistance to purchase meals or people dropping off food. I appreciate the kindness of everyone and will reciprocate as soon as I can.
As I am sure you can tell, I am not as fatigued this morning and words flow much more easily. Last night when writing I was struggling to think, but now when I am not tired my thoughts come more easily. Now you may think that I prefer to write in the morning, but I am generally far more creative at night and actually wrote most of my dissertations after midnight till 3 or 4am in the morning. I would be writing and Mel would be “deep cleaning” the apartment in the middle of the night and then we would both go to bed. I would be up at 6 and Mel would sleep till 11 like a normal person who was up all night. I am well on the road to recovery and I think by next week things should be much further along towards normalcy and I think I can start cooking dinners again in our fancy kitchen.
Q