These attitudes about women and childbearing have got to go. Assigned childbearing shifts???
What would you spend on if you saved too much in your Dependent Daycare Account? I’m absolutely no help there, I’m just staring wide eyed at the idea of not spending a full $5000 in the DDA for a quarter of the cost of daycare. And frankly somewhat terrified at having to add “summer logistics” to my brainspace.
TSA, get it together. Now they’re thinking about telling us we can’t carry food on planes?? I’m not ok with this. We never travel without food lest one of the three of us become hangry.
We’ve talked failure resumes before, I haven’t done mine but look at Jim’s!
An interview with a nanny for a psychic. This bit caught my attention: “I initially reached out to her because my (deceased) father’s spirit was following me around trying to get my attention. I asked him to stop but she told me that he was there trying to make it up to me for being a negligent father. He was trying to protect me now and wanted me to know that he’s there.”
Haunting runs in our family and is considered run of the mill. But if my dad tried to pull this, I’d be looking into banishment. We don’t typically go in for that in our family but no way no how no sir.
Nicole Cliffe on bigamous marriages in her family. We also have one of those stories. It’s weird.
Slate does a series based on the idea that “Every couple has one core fight that replays over and over again, in different disguises, over the course of their relationship.” Realistic or no? The very idea seems totally exhausting to me. We have had long standing differences of opinion, and backgrounds, but we acknowledge them, discuss why they’re important, and work out compromises based on knowing those things about ourselves. It’s a lot of work sometimes but it sure feels better than engaging in a lifelong tug of war like this couple. Also I think this is a remarkably immature read on risk-aversion, but is this actually common?: “I see risk-aversion as banality, boredom, giving into convention or family pressure or something like that. I hate this idea in our culture that you’re not an adult unless you feel frustrated and stifled and you hate your life. We equate maturity with the wrong things.”
Since when is adult life equated with feeling frustrated? For me, it’s meant freedom and stability and more freedom even with all the responsibilities I choose to take on.
This made me laugh: how comparison is the theft of joy, experimental monkey style. This is how I am with salaries in my own field so in some ways I have to force myself to stop looking at what other people are getting paid other than to set a benchmark for myself to reach. Otherwise, I still maintain that social media is what you make of it. I don’t spend time on social media that makes me compare myself unfavorably to a limited snapshot of another person’s life. This is why long form blogging will always be the best for me. And let’s be honest, Twitter is right up there. Twitter and my tweeps have kept us fed, literally, when I couldn’t dredge up the brainpower to figure out what to make for dinner.
We’re finally getting winter weather hereabouts, and the Sierras are getting snowpack! As a drought state, as much as I don’t enjoy slogging through the wet, I eagerly watch weather reports every winter hoping we’ll get enough snow and rain to refill our reservoirs.
“It’s a strange phenomenon, but millionaires swear that the more they give, the more will come back to them.“: 2018 is all about 6 and 8. For the first time in my life, I’m going to trust more in the belief that giving back, as the right thing to do with our good fortune, will work out for us in the end, and focus less on keeping the numbers under our strict control. This is a fuzzy sort of thought I’ve never had before and I hope it pans out.
Tanja’s after my ultra risk averse heart with the side hustle year now that that they’ve retired.
Didn’t science say that sharing your goals makes you accountable more likely to complete them? Trello’s got several reasons why sharing goals might be counterproductive. I haven’t pinpointed exactly why that’s how it works for me but I usually don’t share too many goals ahead of doing a good amount of work on them first to ensure that I will follow through. When I prematurely share, I never start. Is that you?
The premise of this article, that parenting largely has no real effect on the development of a child into adulthood, as presented is a bit disturbing. He claims that reading to kids doesn’t matter. Hm. Really.
But then the concluding paragraph summed up much of our approach to parenting:
Natural selection has wired into us a sense of attachment for our offspring. There is no need to graft on beliefs about “the power of parenting” in order to justify our instinct that being a good parent is important. Consider this: what if parenting really doesn’t matter? Then what? The evidence for pervasive parenting effects, after all, looks like a foundation of sand likely to slide out from under us at any second. If your moral constitution requires that you exert god-like control over your kid’s psychological development in order to treat them with the dignity afforded any other human being, then perhaps it is time to recalibrate your moral compass; does it actually point north or just spin like a washing machine (see Pinker’s work for this same point made more eloquently)? If you want happy children, and you desire a relationship with them that lasts beyond when they’re old enough to fly the nest, then be good to your kids. Just know that it probably will have little effect on the person they will grow into.
I have no idea how much parenting does or doesn’t matter. We want JB to be a good human; we will model decent behavior and explain why we do what we do, and most importantly strive not to break zir in the popular authoritarian style that the previous generation seems fond of. But in the end, I’m not sure that who ze becomes is really in our hands. How well we cultivate our relationship is but that’s the best we can do. It’s still disquieting but in a different random lightning strike kind of way.
With a system like this, it’s a shock that any guns ever get traced: This is the maddening, inefficient way gun tracing works, and there is no effort afoot to make it work any better. For all the talking we do about imposing new limits on assault weapons, or stronger background checks, nobody talks about fixing the way we keep track—or don’t keep track—of where all the guns are. I had NO idea things were this bad!
This story made my eyeballs leak a little. Apologies that it’s not in a very readable format, but it’s worth it if you can.
We’re getting better and better at packing lightly but I always felt awful at it during JB’s infant years. GenYMoney inspires me to do better at it with her 12 days traveling with just carry-ons!
Boom! Lawyered: Pregnant and Going to the Doctor? You Might End Up in Jail
I remember giving what seemed like endless urine samples during my pregnancy and I am pretty sure that they didn’t tell me it was for drug screening. Simultaneously, they were really persistent in scheduling me with a maternal health drug and alcohol therapist of some sort. I was equally persistent in dodging her because it seemed unnecessary. When we finally had our interview she seemed tense at first but then started to laugh at all my bland incredibly boring answers. They were concerned I was a drug addict and that’s why I was dodging the appointment.
Call me morbid but I’m always reading articles about how people dealt with their parents’ passing looking for ways to make our estate plan and paperwork more airtight and clear cut so that in the event of one of us passing, there isn’t much work for the other person.
A stunning chart shows the true cause of the gender wage gap: “Historical drivers of the gender wage gap — a lack of education among women, for example — are disappearing. But the professional penalty women face for having children is stubborn, and it isn’t going anywhere.”
JB has been asking for a lot of Elmo lately. Normally I don’t mind but for the last couple of weeks, his squeaky voice has been getting on my last nerve so I was pleased to find this version of Elmo that satisfies zir request and doesn’t annoy me!
