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This is what I imagined in my head when the vet suggested that I feed Beorn baby food until he could eat on his own:

I’d come downstairs and scoop him into his feeding box. Then I’d pop open a jar of baby food and take out a tiny baby spoon. He would walk up and lick the baby food off the spoon, and I would coo at him, “Does baby love his green beans?” Then a bluebird would fly through my window, land on my shoulder, and sing a happy song.

This is what actually happened when I went to feed Beorn baby food:

Josh brought home five options and a pack of baby spoons. I placed Beorn in his feeding box. I scooped up the first bite of pureed carrots and held it out to him. He sniffed it once and then backed away into the corner. I brought the spoon close to his face, and he turned his head. Finally, I emptied the baby food into a syringe and squirted a few mL at a time into his mouth. Both of us were coated in pureed carrots within seconds.

Lather, rinse, repeat. Four times per day.

For those playing along at home, Beorn is still not back to normal, but we identified the problem. He stopped eating this past weekend. He didn’t seem like he was in pain, but he couldn’t take anything into his mouth. And he wasn’t walking around a lot. I gave him 60 ml of critical care each day, and he dribbled a lot of it out of his mouth.

I was in a complete panic and called our normal vet Monday morning. Would he see him again because now he wasn’t eating at all? They told me to bring him in immediately. I had been up since 4:45 am, so I emailed them my notes before I left so he could read them and watch a video I made of Beorn trying to eat.

He came out 15 minutes after he took him back and apologized. He didn’t know how he (and the other guinea pig specialist) missed it, but Beorn’s teeth had grown over his tongue, trapping it. This was actually good news because it’s a common problem with a fix, and the vet only needed to sedate him (vs. put him under). I could leave him and come back for him in the afternoon, and while he would need critical care until he was back to normal, he would be able to eat again soon.

What solved the problem? The detailed notes. By seeing that day-to-day account of what happened, he knew where to look for the problem. The note about the critical care dribbling out was a red flag for his back teeth. It pays to be a little bit bonkers and journal obsessively about your pig.

It’s a testament to how much Beorn loves food because he continued to ask for it, even when he couldn’t eat it. And he sat next to it, sniffing it, even when he couldn’t move his tongue. My sweet boy is getting whatever he wants as we build up his weight, including a smörgåsbord of hay varieties and baby food.

He is my best pig boy, and I love him so much.

Do you really need anything more than the headline? This is just a warning post, in case you forgot. The news is so messed up right now that I figured it couldn’t hurt to remind you to put on your skeptical glasses while reading anything on the Internet today.

It’s the most annoying day in the world, floating in the current sea of unrealness.

You know that I’m all about distracting myself with games, and this IS a game, but it’s also not really a distraction. You get to change one moment in history, and you can choose between two options. You then learn the cascading effect of that single change.

The first time I played it, I quickly jumped into the thousands with karma. I was helping the world! But just as quickly, my great changes — things I knew would be good — had unforeseen negative consequences. In time, I pretty much botched the whole thing.

The point, of course, is that it’s easy to play armchair historian and point out all the things you would do differently, but we often make those choices without thinking through the full impact of the decision. Even actions or inventions that are clearly “good” can end up having a negative impact on future generations.

Play it and see how you do.

I love those lists that people create of things you can do to stop yourself from spiraling into anxiety. None of them work for me, but I like to do them along with spiraling into anxiety because I think it makes the anxiety a little easier to manage.

The first is doing a brain dump of everything making me anxious, from the large amorphous things (country/world falling apart) to the more personalized real problems to the more personalized less real problems. For example, there are things I allow onto the list that aren’t really problems. I know they’re not problems, and the list knows they’re not problems. But I figure I’m the only person seeing the list, so I can write them down and take them out of my brain.

This task is helpful for two reasons. The first is that by taking these worries out of my brain, I can tell myself that I can forget about them for a few minutes because I will not forget the list. It’s written down. The second is that I can look back on past lists and see which fears came true and which ones did not.

There were 9 things on the list I wrote on January 3. 7 have been completely resolved. 1 is undecided but is leaning in a good direction. 1 is still happening, but I currently feel okay about it. That’s pretty good, right? A little over two months later, 78% of the things making my heart pound are behind me, and 100% are no longer a worry or making it onto a list in mid-March.

The other thing I’m going to do is try to clear my to-do list. It has become unmanageable, and we were only triaging the time-sensitive tasks. So now I throw a few items that I know we can tackle that week in an email for Josh and one for myself, and we leave it in our inbox and take care of one or two tasks per day. It feels good to get it back down to one page this month.

Maybe next month, we’ll be at a half page. Fingers crossed.