About sixteen years ago, I met him for the first time. My trainwreck sibling brought home this adorable puppy he had no business adopting because he had not one thing in his life that wasn’t a mess. I was furious at my sibling – he didn’t even take care of himself, how could he drag
Things have shifted around here quite a bit in the past four years. Not just because of COVID, also because of developments like having a second kid.
He does all the grocery shopping. We used to split this 70/30 (more him).
He does all the daycare dropoff and pickup, I do all the elementary school dropoff and pickup. We used to split the daycare dropoff and pickup a little 80/20 (more him).
He does all the car maintenance and records tracking. I do all the paying for the car maintenance. This is the same as before. It does worry me some that I haven’t dealt with car stuff in over a decade and don’t know much about the cars.
He does most of the weeknight and all the weekend dinners. I used to do most of the dinners. I don’t cook from scratch very much these days, and he buys lots of ready made entrees at Costco so we can cobble together with frozen or fresh veggies depending on how far out we are from our last grocery run. Sometimes we use veggies from the garden, but it’s slim pickins at best. Here’s hoping the pea sprouts suddenly burst into bloom and yield delicious snap peas.
I still do all the financial everything: savings, spending tracking, submitting for and tracking reimbursements, donations and mutual aid, investing, strategy and goal-setting. Once in a while he’ll ask what our financial health is like. My usual short answer is we don’t have retirement money yet, but we will. That’s kind of the biggest picture answer.
I used to do most of the dog walks and all the dog healthcare appointments and maintenance. Ear cleaning, wound tending, medications, all me. He used to do most of the morning walks and maybe the late night ones.
I do all the dental appointments (6 a year), he goes to his own (2). He has a mild phobia? strong dislike of the dentist and doesn’t want to pass his anxiety to the kids. Fine by me, I love the dentist! It’s a nice relaxing hour in the comfy reclining chair and we recently even found some improvement in my gum health. Flossing DOES work. Smol Acrobat doesn’t share my love for the whole thing but their bribery is good enough.
I get all the orthodontia appointments too (4-6 a year). The appointments are fine but the 2 days after they’re tightened are terrible.
I handle half the eye appointments: myself and JB usually. He does his and Smol’s. The optometrist gives me the heebies.
He’s done all of Smol’s medical appointments, I generally do all of JB’s now. We used to both go.
I do all the other paperwork in the household: registrations for vehicles, for school, forms for school and daycare.
He does all of Smol Acrobat’s showers and bed routine, I used to do all of JB’s. It just shifted as JB outgrew the need for us to bathe them and my work was more demanding.
Year 5, Day 180: Our Yeti was acting funny a few months back so I contacted Goal Zero to troubleshoot. They couldn’t figure out why it randomly shut itself off either, so they arranged for an exchange. It took us months to actually get to packing it up for shipment but within a week of the arranged pickup with FedEx, the replacement one arrived at our doorstep. FedEx’s tracking system is generally garbage and this was no exception. Most times my deliveries are delayed six times before they get here, annoying but ultimately fine. This time I was notified that a label was made, and that was the status right up until the delivery guy banged on our door like Aragorn announcing Gondor’s call for aid. He was kind enough to deposit it just inside our door rather than just on the front step. I could not have safely hefted that thing by myself. This felt timely since we’re having yet another heat wave this week and PGE has planned blackouts. If things get dire, we may need the Yeti to keep my devices up and running for work.
I felt a need to eat my feelings all day. It was confusing, though, usually I think: I’m so mad I need something sweet/salty/crunchy to soothe my ruffled feathers. Today I just kept trying to think of a snack but nothing suited and I couldn’t figure out what was driving it. Ultimately it was probably overwhelm. I’ve got too many plates and balls and spiky pineapples being juggled all at once, it’s feeling impossible to manage. I’ve just got my fingertips around all of it but it’s precarious. I felt a bit better by the end of the day when I’d burned through several huge piles of backlog.
Year 5, Day 181: It’s heat wave time again. We were just coming down from 90 degrees at 7:30 pm. It’s funny dealing with the heat when all my patterns have finally shifted to living in cold weather. Everyone else in the family copes much worse than I. No one sleeps well and there’s a lot of complaining.
I was utterly unmotivated to cook dinner so when JB asked for takeout, I suggested the burger place. Then on the spur of the moment, we decided to eat on their outside patio since it wasn’t crowded. We rarely ever do that. This might be the fourth time we’ve ever eaten there. (My antipathy for the company of other humans is stronger than ever since 2020.) The best part was getting home at 645 with everyone fed and ready to hop into the shower. We’re usually trying to get dinner on the table or just sitting down by that time. It’s amazing how much less stressful the night feels when dinner is done by or before 7. I still had to work late but it was an early enough start that when Smol Acrobat asked me to lay down with them for a while, I didn’t particularly mind the lost half hour. I managed to dispatch the worst of the pile and log off at 10, off to do the second half of my exercises so really it felt a lot like having it all today.
Now that it’s October, we need to make time for our flu and COVID shots. Every time I think about it, I remind myself: but don’t do it the same time as PiC! Maybe we should get our flu shots separately, too … I will say that the kids really like seeing us get ours, so we often tried to do them all as a family but last year kicking our asses taught us not to pander to their enjoyment.
Year 5, Day 182: It’s been one week of taking the lowest possible dose of this new medicine (an alpha blocker blood pressure med for off label use) to see if this will break my lifelong cycle of intense draining nightmares.
I had terrible side effects the first night (nasal passages felt severely swollen for a few hours), less the second (annoying congestion), weird the third night (congestion didn’t start until I woke up), and none since the fourth dose. As for effectiveness: I still have vivid dreams but none in the past week have been the terrible gripping nightmares that make me wake up screaming or even more tired than when I went to sleep (similar to massive pain nights). So far so good? I’m going to stay at this dose for another two weeks and see if there is any recurrence.
I’ve found three new freckles on my arm. That’s weird. I’m not in the habit of adding freckles to my collection. As teens we used to theorize they were the result of sun damage, based entirely on the frequent appearance of freckles on one friend every time they were sunburned. I wonder what really caused them.
It’s early release all week for JB and PiC has taken the brunt of the past two afternoons. His schedule is more flexible than mine on a good day, and I haven’t had one of those in a while, so I really appreciate his taking the hits.
Dinner: carnitas fried stovetop (premade from Costco), pico de gallo, Mexican rice and chips from the local taqueria, shredded cheese, guacamole (Costco), and a handful of fresh picked green beans (5) and snap peas (3) from the garden. I gave the other 5 green beans to JB to pack for their lunch tomorrow.
Year 5, Day 183: Everyone’s sleep patterns this school year are still very off kilter. Even our earliest riser, Smol Acrobat, is sleeping late, past 7 some days. I enforce an 8-830 bedtime but it’s not doing the trick.
Another scorcher today. I grumble a bit when it’s colder but on days like this, I’m grateful that our house holds in the cold so much that even when it’s 90 degrees outside, as long as the blinds are down and doors and windows stay shut, the cool air stays inside.
I’m glad it’s online so we can attend without leaving the house but I’m still whining that it’s already the next PTA meeting. Really? Already?
Related: The 4th grade is the big fundraising year for the kids’ 5th grade costs like graduation and the like. I’ll fundraise for charitable reasons to help out folks in need, never for personal gain/needs/wants, so I feel VERY weird about this. How do people even do this? I can’t / won’t post it at work like people used to do, I’m a higher-up. Almost everyone is below me in rank, that wouldn’t be right. I don’t feel like I could circulate among friends, either, because it’s not a “good” cause. Once in a while I get fundraising emails from niblings whose parents are wealthy or well off for a school thing or a Scout thing and I don’t mind that. I toss in some money but this I feel completely awkward about. It feels like we should just cough it up and cover the costs ourselves. Does anyone else feel this way (on either side as a parent or as someone being asked for donations) or have another way of looking at it?
Year 5, Day 184: Even with people I like, long work calls leave me into a devolved state where I feel about as human as a Dushegub. Three calls this week was 2 calls too many.
But! I did finally get that appointment with the bank to get some paperwork notarized (more people) and then we took the kids to get their flu and COVID vaccines. They were NOT happy about that at all, not one whit. I let JB know a few hours beforehand, let them get their feelings out (so many feelings), and let them pick their top three treat choices for afterward. They were in a tizzy about it right up until the needle hit their arm and then they remembered it wasn’t that big a deal. “that’s it?” 🤦🏻♀️ Smol Acrobat didn’t handle the needle moment well, they were crying before they even sat down but recovered well enough to get home. Then they hobbled like they’d lost three inches off their leg for the rest of the night. It’s very dramatic. JB was side effect free as far as we could see, Smol was a little off their game and seemed a touch feverish but it wasn’t very bad.
1. We met a local family with kids around Smol Acrobat’s age at the new park opening and exchanged info to maybe have the kids bike together again.
2. We explored a new park and the adult and teen riders were all very cool about sharing that space with the youngest and wee-est of riders that were wobbly-bobbly but wanted to be part of this cool thing too.
3. They’re not ready for picking yet but we have a whole DOZEN snap peas growing all at the same time now!
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $519.25 in dividends from the stocks portfolio. That all goes to buying more index funds.
Year 5, Day 166: Trainer time! I’m gaining confidence that I can do exercises without immediately sending myself into CFS / fibro traction and there’s something immensely uplifting about that knowledge.
Arms day is easier for me than legs day, and I attempted to max out my reps again. (spoiler: I was able to lift my arms again the next day. Yay!
TIL the acronym HENRY: High Earning Not Rich Yet. That’s us, since I define “rich” for us as being able to survive long term without our jobs. I’m always acutely aware that it can go away. My Great Recession scars are practically tattoos, they’re always out and always at least a little bit dictating my attitude towards money. We are currently high earning (though at the very bottom of the high earning wage scale in this area and compared to the other professions/industries around here, most daycare parent make multiples of what we both make combined), and we couldn’t maintain this lifestyle on one or no incomes. We splurge now and again, and we give more than we splurge on ourselves most months. There’s plenty of non survival (our survival that is) fat in our spending but I don’t consider it all non-essential. I would really hate to be unable to help folks out. But that’d be part of the reality of losing our incomes due to corporate cuts, along with other belt tightening we’d have to do. Actually, I can’t entirely blame the GR for my continually being on edge: PiC’s employer is going through yet another round this year, did I mention that? This is what, the fifth round this year. No wonder I’m always expecting it. What steams my cauliflower is that the parent corporation is doing Just Fine. They made many-digits of profit last year. Alright, I’d better leave it at that. We’re HENRY. Can’t wait to drop the NRY and the heartburn of waiting out round after round of layoffs, hoping we make it through another one. Between PiC’s income, benefits and the childcare being linked to his employer, we have so many reasons to hold on tight at least until kindergarten starts. Then it’ll be down to the income and benefits. Healthcare is such a huge question, and has the potential for such catastrophic consequences if you have a serious illness, I don’t know if I’ll ever not be nervous about that piece of the financial puzzle.
Year 5, Day 167: Everyone got up late again today. We weren’t late out the door but this waking up early is such a tough nut to crack. Even Smol Acrobat, usually an undesired reliable alarm clock, slept in. There’s something about this school year that’s making it all much more challenging.
Garden harvest: three snap peas, three mini cucumbers, and seven green beans! Our biggest green veg harvest yet!
Work: 👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼👎🏼
I’m preparing a brief to get into yet another tiff (of sorts) with corporate on behalf of my team to get them what they deserve. Ahhh there’s nothing like a combination of intense pressing deadlines AND political bullshit to navigate to ring in the fall season! This is just the beginning of this particular advocacy, and it remains to be seen if I have a particularly powerful person on our side or not. That’s what I find out next week – wish me luck?
Year 5, Day 168: Chores day for everyone. JB needed to wash their lunchbox, plan tomorrow’s lunch, grind coffee beans, and put away the new load of laundry. Smol Acrobat is responsible for their own laundry so they had to hang up their own clothes and fold their underwear and put away the utensils. PiC prepared dinner. I assigned the chores, babysat Smol during their chores to help them over the little bumps, then spent two hours submitting FSA claims, and trying to figure out how to earn a few miles for our Alaska mileage accounts.
I ogled these cakes from a local(ish) bakery. I want to try some of their flavors but not at $35 for 1-2 servings. I’m not feeling that level of economically secure.
Year 5, Day 169: This weather cannot make up its mind: one day hot, one day cold, two days hot, two days cold. One day hot, one day cold. Today is Full Winter. Tomorrow’s forecast? Full Summer!?
Unfortunately I can’t or I absolutely would, but still practicing naming the thing I feel like even if I can’t: just want to sit here and stare into the middle distance for a few hours doing absolutely nothing. Sadly, nothing in my schedule says: sure, relax. Today I’ve got to run an errand after school, tomorrow I’ve got to attend a school event so that means rescheduling my appointment with the notary to next week. This weekend is all costume making and kid-minding and food-cooking and then next week is chock full of meetings that were postponed from this week. I hate meetings. Loathe them. But these are actually necessary so I suck it up and forge on.
By dinnertime, I slumped over thinking “I am so tired, I can’t take it anymore” which of course leads to “oh no it’s going to be harder next year when JB’s self defense classes are later in the day and then the year after that when Smol Acrobat starts kindergarten and we won’t have childcare after the kindergartener’s early release midday aughhhh….” There’s really no resolution to that particular mental slide. I have no answers. It’s just auughhhh all the way down.
Year 5, Day 170: Well, I’ll be darned. I was dreading the arrival of an envelope from the Passport Services Agency today – we only just submitted our applications last week and the only reason I could think of that they would be sending anything to me so soon after processing payments is that they were rejecting Smol Acrobat’s passport photo. I accidentally sized their head a little too large in the prints relative to the 2″ x 2 ” size and the agent said maaaaaybe they would take it but they might not, and they would mail it back if not. You could knock me down with a feather when I opened it up and found that it was my very own renewed passport! That was less than 2 weeks from submission in the new online system to delivery! Fantastically fast.
Trainer time: It’s arms day again and I’m maxing out my reps while I still can. 24 lateral raises, 18 almost-semi-kinda pushups. I can feel the ache but it’s not terrible.
Money things: PiC mentioned the cascade of upcoming big home maintenance things: getting the roof replaced, and then the gutters, and then (this is really ambitious) finishing the exterior paint which was started seven years ago but never finished. That made me a little nervous so I made a savings bucket in our Ally savings account to start to trickle in cash for big house stuff. I didn’t love how it felt to take the cash from our emergency savings even if we did make up that lost ground over less time than I had feared. At least this way we’ll have some cash set aside specifically for these things. I also made a travel bucket while I was at it. Historically that’s always just come out of cash flow but we also haven’t really done much big travel in the past 5 or so years, it’s easy to cash flow a road trip or three. Bigger travel is going to cost accordingly.
Also looking ahead to 2025 moneywise – I think the 401K contribution limit is expected to go up another $1000. I’ve been plugging in some of this year’s numbers into next year’s spreadsheet and it looks like our cash flow falls over into the negatives by May. Part of this is because spending is high. Well, I guess that’s just really the whole thing: our spending projections are on the high side. Since my takehome pay is hard to calculate for next year, I’m being very conservative about how much that might be for now. I’m also conservative with PiC’s presumed takehome pay for the early part of the year as well. We usually “run out of money” early in the year in the first few drafts of the annual spending projections and we don’t ever actually run out of money in real life but even knowing that, I still hate the early draft feelings of augh the numbers are going negative! And I still have more spending to add! Especially since, in keeping with everything else that keeps going up, our annual property tax bill is now over $12k total so I have to bump up that specific savings bucket. I can’t reduce our property tax or the daycare bill or the mortgage or the half dozen other necessities. I can only reduce the not-survival stuff like giving and travel. Boo. Do not like.
1. People who haven’t spoken to me in years texted me a happy birthday this year and that’s topsy turvy because the one friend who has never forgotten and always called for my birthday didn’t (but she didn’t forget my birthday, she just didn’t know what day it was where she was 😆 so I’m amused).
1. Food and lodgings, $300
2. Gas, $150
3. Trolley for four of us: $42
4. Gifts and stuff (both for us and others): $500
5. Badges for 2 adults, four days plus Preview Night: $730. 2 children were free (vs $623 in 2023)
6. Dogsitting, $0 😔
7. Stupid tax, $0? I don’t remember anything that falls into this category. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, just that I forgot to record it if it did.
8. We added an extra entertainment this year and split ticket costs: $150 for our share of entry fees and locker rental.
Total: $1872
As always, this endeavor starts many months in advance. Badges are sold through a lottery system so it’s never certain that we’ll get in. I’m always grateful when we do.
A bit of history: A Saturday pass for 2024 cost $79. They also now charge a handling fee of $15 so it’s $94 to attend that one specific day. In 2005, that Saturday pass was $10. TEN DOLLARS.
Spending: We were freer with our spending than usual and there were fewer deals than usual. Normally those two things wouldn’t appear in the same sentence together! But I’m very happy with the things I bought for myself. I finally indulged in a piece of jewelry from Adorable Mayhem – her stuff is all handmade and really cute. I couldn’t justify spending much on myself in the past, and especially not with two grabby hands kids in a row, but they’re finally old enough to know better and she happened to be selling a line of tiny animals bearing weapons. I couldn’t resist. My little hamster wielding a flail makes me very happy. As does my (very cute) wallet that is finally the right size ($30). I’d been using a $20 wallet from Target that was simply too big for my hands for the past 2 years. It’s too big and too heavy, but I made do. Now I have one that’s comfortable for me to hold, not so heavy, and doesn’t hurt my hands after a bit.
Favorite moments: JB boldly made a beeline for the adults sitting at the table at the bookstore booth to ask if they had specific books. Unfortunately the adult in question was a special guest author, Adam Nimoy, who was thoroughly confused by the customer service question. I was laughing as I steered them to the actual bookseller on his right and then we got out of there. (On reflection, he could have been just a little bit gracious about it. He pulled a face and asked the bookseller person “Do i have a WHAT??” You’re sitting at a bookstore booth at Comic Con and a kid is looking for a book, is it really that outrageous they’d just ask the first adult human looking like they’re available for help? I still think it’s funny but I also don’t think much of the guy.)
Walking into the restroom, a little girl behind me yelled “I like your skirt!” When I turned to say thank you, she yelled “I like your mask too!” (We weren’t the only maskers but we were in the minority so it was a nice callout.)
Smol Acrobat yelled Wolverine! (the kids mostly know the Avengers, but Wolvie is my old time favorite) and the cosplayer waved to them with a grin and popped claws for them.
JB had taken a picture with a giant Pudgy Penguin cosplayer. I showed it to Smol Acrobat who was fascinated and wanted one of their own. We wheeled (in their stroller)
Clever cosplays we loved: Kobe-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi master costume in Laker colors.
The Indiana Jones cosplayer in a wheelchair with a rolling ball behind their head above.
The Avatar cosplayers who brought awesome props to mimic bending.
The Remy (Ratatouille) rat riding on the human’s head.
That moment when we were driving home when I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with my body. It felt funny. I keep prodding mentally, what’s this? What’s going on with me? And then it finally sank in: I’m actually feeling relaxed. It’s been a year or more since I actually felt that way.
I’ve put in a calendar alert for the next returning registration battle. Fingers crossed.
