After two months (Spain) we now have the right to go for a walk every day with the kids. This has improved things.
During the hard lockdown (no right to go outside with kids) I had very bad days (stress, anxiety, etc.), which affected my kids (they became angry aggressive, something that I had never seen in them) and with help from a psychologist I learned to calm myself down and now things are fine again.
I guess that my side project has been to learn about my own psychology and how it affects my family, and to learn to deal with all that.
I have grown a lot as a person!
I feel I should be pushing the schooling and learning harder, but my wife is leaning hard into their emotional well being first. And watching my middle daughter teach our youngest how to say "i feel" during an argument and not "you did" means I need to back off. I might even be growing as a parent too.
What makes this very challenging is that a) Kid wants attention continually so there is no point in trying to do any work while it is my turn.
b) We live in an apartment complex and folks who live downstairs have called cops on our kid multiple times for running around. This despite the fact that he never does during "queit hours (sleeps from 8 pm to 7 am)" and these noises are protected by SF tenant laws. Couple of weeks back a SF police officer knocked on our door and tried to arbitrate. Internally, I wanted to slam the door in the cop's face though I was respectful.
c) Because of (b) kid knows that we are very sensitive about him running around. So anytime he feels he is not getting attention, he will run or stomp on the floor.
Fun times
Have you tried introducing yourself, or maybe leaving an apology/explanation note with contact information. Downstairs it probably feels like they are screaming into the void whenever there is noise, they might have a kid trying to take a nap or something that you can compromise about. There also might be certain noises that seem small to you but are more irritating to them.
Honestly, the only good downstairs (or upstairs) neighbor I ever had was a mostly deaf older woman.
The youngest is 5 and he's a handful, so we got our babysitter to help us three days of the week. She lost all her jobs and has no income otherwise, and for us it means we can work normally 3 days a week, so everybody wins.
But he's also finally getting better at playing alone. (He used to be great at that when he was 3, less so more recently.) It's also a matter of managing the expectations of your kids, I guess.
obviously 'talking' wouldn't have worked here.
If they are just ignoring the cops, why would they listen to neighbor.
They were assholes, and talking to them didn't help. I can't say we were too broken up when he died of a coronary and she moved out of the building.
But in the time I had I’ve been able to make my child a simple drawing app for the iPad as many of them are too complicated or too formed. Hope to finish it and releasing though.
It's really hard, but it mostly involves insane levels of cooperation - and giving each other equal times to work and take care of the kids.
The one thing that would have made our lives much easier would have been a way to share office calendars (different companies) so that if either one of us had a meeting at any given time it was booked off for the other one.