i love my family but now i need to hibernate
Dec. 27th, 2025 10:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
wychwoodChristmas was good but also SO MUCH. By the end of Boxing Day lunch I was trying to work out how much longer I had to stay in company, but I ended up in my mother's living room where she was silently playing a game on her new tablet and my sister's fiance was silently playing a game on his phone, and I just sat there silently reading on my phone for an hour and felt much better.
Family updates:
Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:
Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.
But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.
Family updates:
- my sister is engaged! this came as a surprise to me and the brother who doesn't live near her, although mostly because we thought they were already engaged (there have been casual discussions about weddings going back some years)
- my sister's endometriosis op in the autumn revealed that she does not in fact have endometriosis, but she did have a nasty tumour-y thing which was not cancer but apparently also not not cancer and now she is down one ovary and fallopian tube, which is particularly upsetting for her because all of this was part of the fertility investigations they've been working on
- my middle nephew is dating a boy! He is definitely the least surprising candidate for this out of my niblings. Apparently he is not presently interested in labels, only in dating the person he likes, which seems perfectly reasonable to me, particularly since he's fourteen
Both my parents stayed home from the Boxing Day walk this year, which meant that for the first time in years I was not solely responsible for the cooking, and was surprisingly stressful (Dad: "Oh yes we can cook all six of those things in the last half hour before lunch!" Me, silently: YOU CAN FIT A MAXIMUM OF TWO THINGS INTO THE OVEN, AND I DON'T BELIEVE YOU HAVE ACCESS TO TIME TRAVEL). However my mildly panicked promptings did cause enough things to happen early that it wasn't a disaster (three or four things were cooked while we were eating and brought up as additional items, but that's fine). They didn't want to cook things early and let them get cold waiting around, which is very reasonable, but also if you are trying to cook:
- three trays of sausage rolls (vegetarian spanakopita; sage and onion; cheese; chorizo; black pudding; "Chinese takeaway" (with five-spice, hoisin and soy sauces); homemade by my sister's fiance and apparently all very delicious - obviously I only had the spanakopita ones)
- two trays of cheese potatoes
- two sticks of garlic bread
- a tray of pigs in blankets
- three small trays of brie and cranberry parcels
- a pack of chicken goujons
- a small tray of beef and stuffing Yorkshire puddings(?!?)
- a Greek omelette / fritatta thing
Mum was pretty down about food things because - well, ok, she has pretty much spent six months during her chemo eating the exact same meals every day at the exact same times, which has been working for her, but means she does not yet have any real idea how to calculate the appropriate medication for meals with different food in them, or how to arrange them around eating at different times, or how to schedule everything so that she can still eat her before-bed weetabix to prevent any overnight hypos. I'm fairly sure this is a one-time problem, because by next year she'll have varied her diet and activity sufficiently to be able to work it out better. But right now she's feeling very confronted by how not-"normal" her life is, and it's been no fun for her.
But everyone had enough to eat and there were left-overs, so it was a success. Then I came home and did nothing and talked to no one and hopefully tomorrow I will have energy to start on my to-do list backlog.
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