Self-care for the drowning

The same month that the Megatherium started two mornings a week of preschool, she pretty much stopped taking an afternoon nap, which meant a net loss of time for me. Now she's (more or less) happily ensconced in full-day kindergarten and every time I almost start to relax, grauwulf's brain goes out again. I already lost my father to his brain eating itself alive from cancer; I'm not ok with my husband disappearing into his depression. And [and, and, all the other crap redacted for now]

I have been buying too many things, and worry uneasily that if things go (any more) horribly wrong I need an income. I read bits of books, love them, & take them back to the library unfinished. Food is hard. My brain doesn't want to focus long enough to do much of anything. The Megatherium wants to spend all her time at home watching videos, I suspect partly because I have trouble summoning the energy to engage with playing things that interest her. (Also grauwulf got her paw patrol to watch b/c he was tired of listening to Doc McStuffins songs and didn't know any better. Now he does, but we are stuck with useless allegorical mayors & ridiculous boy dogs.) She is *so close* to reading independently, but saving all her concentration on that point for school hours. (Holidays are particularly bad, so my outlook is pessimistic at present.)

Things I find myself doing by way of coping mechanisms include:

*Silly video games on my phone (I'm still playing Merge Dragons, which is a silly little thing I can drop in and out of, and is both post-apocalyptic ecological restoration and biologically utterly ridiculous.)

*eating high-fat baked goods (with whole wheat flour if I'm making them, but we have a pantry moth infestation(of course we do), so I need to get more flour & better flour storage, ugh). This actually helps at certain points of my headache cycle, weirdly enough.

*I've taken to wrapping up my head in infinity scarves, kind of turban-style. (My hair still sticks out the back; I did not punch the random lady who came up behind me and petted it when I had it otherwise loose.) It keeps my ears warm & my hair out of my face, and feels kind of like hiding in a make-up as war paint sort of way. Also I can wear some of the pins I keep collecting but never use in the scarf, which is nice.

*reading at bedtime (and then staying up too late, as one does)

*I'm organizing a craftster swap for "little good things," which I hope will be small moments of focus/distraction rather than dealing-with-stupid-stress, running over the year end holidays when I find I am not the only one who spends the last week of the year stalking the swap boards for outgoing things to work on. It's my first time doing the organizing, so that's different.

Things I need to do more of/better with:

*getting my sewing machine started up (the house is now cold enough that it is back to minutes of unsettling flashing before it warms up enough to turn on) and making more long sleeve dresses for the Megatherium, and then more of whatever-it-is that I want to wear. Something feral & tattery, or maybe just patch up all the jeans that are in for repairs. Clothing that suits my mood is genuinely useful to my emotional state. (Is that weird? I think people want to believe it's weird or shallow, but it's also relatively true. Probably parallels could be drawn to gender disphoria or something massively more harmful.)

*making more prayer flags (art flags? I'm not sure what I call them yet.) I took a break after the election, but that was the right form-factor for playing with random embroidery designs, and then I can send fun things to people.

*I need to go visit my woods. None of us have been in... over a year? I think? And, well, woods. I can go visit other people's woods, too, some of which are closer, but in mine I can take my garden gloves and clippers and chop up invasives and maybe build some weird land art, or just brush piles.

*music. Playing or singing would be lovely, but involves transit time & regular schedules w/o child in tow, but I don't even listen to anything of my choice consistently, and I have gotten more music recently, and I don't know any of it yet. I need to revive or replace my ipod (which we discovered was dead on the way back from Pennsic after the Megatherium's cheap mp3 player ran out of battery) and soundscape my spaces.

*exercise of some sort would probably be nice. I miss the yoga-ish class that was 5 minutes away and hasn't been offered in about seven years. I also miss climbing.