Parenting is such a balancing act. I can’t say who was more in the right here, I think it’s probably a percentage of both, but PiC and I had a joking mock-fight this morning over JB.
They have a state project right now. They have to write a paper, give an oral presentation, and make a diorama. JB is artistic enough that they are well-equipped to self manage the diorama so long as we get them the supplies. PiC scavenged a really good box from Costco, I got them a big box of clay for some parts, checked in with some friends for an assist on mini animal figures (no luck there but I asked). I’ve given them home-deadlines that supercede school deadlines to make sure they actually stay on track and won’t end up working on this last minute and then stepped back.
PiC is a perfectionist. PiC has SOOOO many ideas on how this could be good. Really good! And, he’s right, his way would result in a fantastic diorama. (But his way would also take ten times the amount of time and inevitably at some point cause frustration.)
JB asked me if I could remind him that this is their project and their responsibility. They appreciate that he wants to offer ideas buuuuuut please (stuff it) back off. I reminded them that they are perfectly within their rights to tell him themselves, but I did later tell him to get his own state if he’s so enthusiastic about doing a project.
Him: Sooooooo I looked at the diarama. I had ideas.
Me: You need to back off and give them space.
Him: I did! I’m just offering some suggestions!
Me: Well, stop. Let them be their own person. They’ll come to you if they need or want help.
Him: They can be their own person later! They won’t have the ideas if they don’t know what they’re missing!
Me: They won’t BE their own person later if we don’t let them develop personhood now! And they will come to you when they want help!
We’re not actually fighting and I understand his pull just as much as mine. Maybe his even more. I worry that mine means they won’t do the best that they CAN do, b/c he’s right, their perspective is limited. But they need to be independent, too! What’s the happy medium between forcing them to hold the highest standards (and interfering constantly) and being so hands off they don’t develop a sense of quality?
Point for me: They did come to ask me for help a couple of times. I offered an idea (Go collect pinecones to use as “trees”) and I offered a “suggestion” (I can’t find a small enough pinecone! // I think that’s a problem that’s solved by going and looking some more, isn’t it?). They did their thing from there.
He’s a reasonable human so he’s taken my push in the way it was meant and told them that if they would like suggestions, let him know.
Life with Smol Acrobat (5.3)
SmolAc has been really cheesed off about being the youngest lately. No idea why. They’re the most coddled but, oh. Right they want all the same things that JB gets. Hilariously this is the exact same fight I’ve been having with JB for two years ages8-10 where they want all the same things that SMOLAC got (fewer responsibilities, age appropriate responsibilities for SmolAc that they had long outgrown) – but didn’t want to give up any of the privileges of being the older kid.
But some of this difference isn’t a function of age, it’s a function of size and ability. Sometimes JB gets a double patty burger when they’re especially hungry or they order off the adult menu. We allow it because they are a good eater and usually have a decent idea of what they can handle. They’ve had this privilege a pretty long time because they’ve always been an enthusiastic experimental eater. Yes, they miss the mark sometimes and hate what they chose or can’t finish it but we use that as a learning experience for next time. Sometimes concession stand food sucks. We can’t do anything about that except choose “safer” options.
SmolAc is a giant pain to feed because they’re picky and fussy and whiny and easily distracted and takes forever to eat a marginally calorically appropriate meal. We’re not letting them order anything we already know they will let go to waste.
I overheard them telling JB: When I am 100 I can have three burger patties!
Related: They don’t need eyeglasses yet but needed to try on frames because JB was doing it, so couldn’t they? Fine, that’s not hurting anyone. Or when they thought that JB was getting to drink from a syringe for fun but it was because JB’s mouth was so swollen they couldn’t drink from a cup. SmolAc believed that a syringe would cure them of everything, too.
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 $544 in dividends from the stocks portfolio.
A couple of our local restaurants are giving 60 points per dollar on purchases now in Fetch so we got $2 cashback through TMobile dining and 2300 Fetch points on the $40 of dumplings. (I don’t know what the conversion rate on the Fetch points is off the top of my head, I’m too tired to figure it out.)
Small business Jack working as hard as he can to pay his rent, laboring under a heart condition.
Lily Meade and her mother are unhoused and she just lost her second book contract and her agent in succession. I know what it’s like to feel hopeless and I haven’t had to do it under as dire circumstances as she’s in.
Sonia Hale has been trying to get back on her feet after divorcing a domestic abuser.
Also feeding folks.
My friend in Alaska works with a refugee center and the facts are life is super bleak right now. Refugees without green cards are no longer receiving SNAP, refugees are no longer safe from DHS detaining them indefinitely regardless of their status, they will likely lose Medicaid sometime this year. This is despicable. We’re supposed to help people get on their feet and this is disgusting and inhumane. In response to this and many other problems created by this administration, the refugee center is working in with local groups to support local farms and provide food to those who need it: What is Grow Local, Give Local?
I’m adding this to my donation list for next week.
1. My two crow friends haven’t been by in weeks but two ravens visited this week so I signaled treats to them, same as I do my crow friends, and they came over!
They are always braver than the local crows and showed it this time by hanging out by the food spot even after they’d cleaned up the offering, and let me come close enough to roll a few additional rounds of treats over to them.
The crows always require me to be a minimum distance away, and retreat as soon as they fill their beaks. They’ll come back for seconds and thirds but hanging out in the vicinity while I approach is still a solid no.
“Now, Ayures keeps an eagle figurine on his desk. When he’s re-stationed, it’s a piece of Unalaska he’ll hold on to — knowing that somewhere out there, an eagle with his cell phone is holding onto a piece of him, too.”
Helping folks: Carrie Mesrobian: “ICE is still here in Columbia Heights. People are still unable to work, feed their families, pay their rent. If you have a couple bucks to spare, please do. If not, just go please meet at least one neighbor. You will want to be ready if this ever comes to your community and that is the first step.” Link to GFM for this community in MN.
Year 6, Day 294: I keep wanting to make a box cake. Then I remember: it’s so mediocre I won’t enjoy it. Which, I’ve always known what it is BUT I liked it just fine. I took advice to use butter instead of oil, milk instead of water, and added an egg to make it better and still, meh. I keep wondering if it’s me or if something changed with the mixes. Everyone else likes them just fine. I used to live week to week for my Friday night box-cake-and-laundry ritual in middle and high school. I want to reinstate the ritual! But not if I can’t enjoy the cake part of it. I’ve gone searching for other ways to make it better. It feels like by the time I’ve added the butter, the extra egg, the ricotta, the pudding pack, maybe I might as well make the whole damn thing from scratch? I can’t remember the last time I did a cake from scratch, if I ever have. But it feels a whole lot more energy intensive than I can afford. Which takes me back to being grumpy about box cake not tasting quite right anymore.
Year 6, Day 295: Last summer I impulse purchased beautiful Maya Kern skirts with enormous pockets. Advertised as “fits a Nintendo DS”! I don’t have a Nintendo DS but I do have a phone and a wallet and keys and kids who always need snacks and water – I foresaw a fabulous future of magical pockets full to bursting. It was going to be my Mary Poppins moment.
However. While the pockets were absolutely not oversold, the waists are a simple elastic and they defeated me. All of my other skirts have defined waists so I never had to think about it before. I could just pair them with pretty much any shirt and they’d be fine.
Maya’s feed is full of lovely women of all shapes and sizes, mostly plus size with more shape than less, looking wonderful in their skirts with a simple top tucked in. When I put it on, and tucked in a tee (because when packing my bags for that weekend I wasn’t thinking beyond “clothes for the top part”, “clothes for the bottom part”) I looked drab and frumpy. Drab, I’m used to. I’m ruler of sweatpants at work world. But frumpy, ugh. During bedrest, I scrutinized the pictures of Maya’s customers: trying to take notes on how they styled their outfits to get some ideas and even asked some of them for their thoughts. The simplest one seemed to be adding a belt so, using the existing customers’ pictures as a guide, off I went shopping for belts in various colors.
Next problem: I’ve never accessorized with belts successfully. I’ve bought belts but they’ve never made an outfit look better. Fashion bloggers made it seem so easy! This week I finally tried on the belts and promptly made the outfit look much worse. I texted bestie pictures to confirm and she both confirmed it did NOT work and gently guided me to use different color combinations whereupon voila! The belts work for me, not against me! Honestly. Only I add accessories and end up looking significantly worse. There’s a whole world of rules around colors and shapes and lines that I’m overdue to learn in order to dress my adult self.
Year 6, Day 296: The to do list is about a mile long and growing. I’m adding things that need to be done faster than I’m able to do them.
So much grumble.
Year 6, Day 297: Bedrest again. I managed to clear my call schedule for the week though, so at least while I’m confined to working from bed, I don’t have to fake my way through video calls. Yay for that.
Year 6, Day 298: Depression has hijacked my brain.
Year 6, Day 266: Two little bits of excitement for the day: JB seems to have had an organic sale of one of their art things!
I Mcgyvered a toothbrush duct-taped to a pen to dig out a ton of the lint stuck down in the trap. Feeling Quite Accomplished. It’s not the full cleaning it needs but it’s progress, just like the toaster oven door with 1/5 of the glass clean.
This scene got me right in the gut. As a person whose parents didn’t always like her, as a person who watched grandparents treat her beloved mother with disdain and outright hatred, and as a parent who deeply loves her kids but sometimes finds them insufferable.
Year 6, Day 267: It feels like I’m being responsible and forward thinking when I scan every possible job listing (at least for the title, location, and pay range) to eyeball likely postings daily. But they all depress me. Every high level well-paying job that would roughly one to one replace this job seems to have all the same characteristics of the job I already hate (mostly corporate incompetence, also “number go up” culture). I’ve never been one to turn down a professional challenge, but having been learning how not to create more problems for myself on the personal front has changed my perspective on this career hustling moment.
Applying that awareness to this situation, job hunting feels like it’s now hypervigilance rather than proactively looking for opportunities.
Is this me being tired of the looking? Maybe. I don’t really spend all that much time looking, but it is an entirely deflating however many minutes I spend on it. There’s nothing exciting about having to look and interview and present myself a certain way and all that. It’s absolutely exhausting.
Year 6, Day 268: PF buddy Abby was asking about our retirement plans and I wanted to be hopeful but that healthcare piece remains a wild card. It seems impossible to budget for now that the US government is being run by a pack of wild murderous dingos.
Looking at those example numbers I cited before from someone who is self employed – $17k premiums and $6500 deductible which works out to $24,000 before their insurance covers anything and their situation isn’t even the worst healthcare plan out there – how does one budget for the possibility of somewhere in the neighborhood of $50k – $100k a year (for 4 people) in healthcare premiums and deductibles?? It starts to suggest you’re better off self insuring.
Except you’re not. My family took that route when I was growing up (pre ACA) and it was AWFUL. So that’s a tough needle to thread at the best of times, while we’re currently in what certainly feels like the worst of times. The unsettling part is knowing that it could get a lot worse, because that’s definitely the Republican game plan.
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SmolAc has been slightly under the weather with a cough and sore throat so I made them ginger garlic chicken and ginger garlic rice. They appreciated none of it. But it was really good! So it’s been my lunch for the week. Turns out you can have an easy almost Hainan chicken experience if you lower your standards some.
Year 6, Day 269: My friend challenged my thinking about what kind of savings through investing we can manage in the next two years. I have plans to squeeze out every dollar that I possibly can and put it into our investments but it still seems like it’s so far from enough. So they asked what our gains were in each of the past two years. I went back five years and was really surprised to see that with the exception of 2022, every year since 2021 has seen six digits of growth. We’re still far from my ideal number (which admittedly has been creeping up again in this, the worst timeline) but these numbers are so far from small it’s laughable. And yet, I still think “I won’t be able to save enough in the next year and a half” in case I get laid off.
Whenever the thought about a potential layoff comes up, my action-planning brain hides in a corner. I really really don’t want to have to find another job, all the job hunting notwithstanding. I really want to have enough invested that I can be let off the hook of having to work if I lose this job. But I still want to be able to work on the Lakota families project, to help out folks who need help, to afford some small luxuries like a dozen books a year or to adopt a dog when I’m ready. *wistful sigh* Wishful thinking!
Year 6, Day 270: I had my annual review today. When it was scheduled, I was awash in anxiety for a few hours. Then I got over it. I did my little notes and write up, had a friend take a look for perspective, and gave it a last cursory 2 minute brush up the next day and moved on. Therapy’s done me a world of good, I know my anxiety would have been through the roof about this six years ago.
I know that I put in an extraordinary amount of work last year. An unbelievable number of hours. And despite months of stress and friction and worry and under-resourcing battles, and shitty entitled staff battles, we eked out a win by the end of the year.
Even though the review was quite positive, it was hard for my brain. I struggled to accept the positive feedback. My brain wanted to undermine it all within 3 hours of the relief. “What if he was just saying that? what if he’s just gassing you up but doesn’t mean a damn word of it and will undermine you later??” it demands. I wanted to be mad, why can’t you let me enjoy this???? But there are reasons. I want to see that in writing for it to be real. It feels like all our massive efforts would only have been recognized under these circumstances – pulling a win out by the end of the year. It feels less than genuine because my boss was largely absent last year, like they’re only basing the judgement on the end result rather than the whole picture. Not that I’m saying that they WERE being disingenuous, it just feels like when people make that “you’re smart” comment – what exactly are you basing that on? What are your objective metrics? While I am perfectly happy writing up my people’s reviews based on their genuine efforts, for myself, my brain simultaneously demands to be recognized for being awesome (because professionally, I am) AND demands extra proof of that awesomeness. My brain is my worst enemy some days. But speaking of metrics, as we’re into the new year, I guess our bonuses (or lack thereof) will be a tangible metric.
Year 6, Day 217: Every time I log into Fidelity, this message flashes at me: Attention: You appear to be invested too aggressively. Fidelity has investment strategies to help you stay on track for retirement.
So judgy! What business is it of yours that I am invested very aggressively? Could I not have a PLAN? In fact, I do. Invest as aggressively as possible to ensure our savings will see us through a long layoff or a medical emergency. Remember 2008-2009? I do. I job hunted for 18-20 months during a miserable economy. Nowadays we could probably, if it was just one layoff, make it a year without extreme panicking. Financially. Emotionally I might not be able to hang. But a medical emergency or crisis? THAT would be serious stuff and I don’t think we can withstand one of those. Not a severe one.
Every time I read an article about how folks have to go into full time medical care for something serious the calculator starts going. The costs of the care, the costs of childcare (if we could even get reliable childcare), the cost of feeding everyone when no parent has time or ability to cook, all adds up to a staggering number in my head. That would have to be entirely out of pocket for us. Like my pregnancy during 2020, we’d have to cope entirely on our own. We have no local family or friends who are financially set with the ability to put their lives on hold to help us out, so it’d be like the past ten years of parenting: one or two weeks a year when a trusted relative comes and cooks and hangs out with the kids. Everything else is on us.
Year 6, Day 218: There isn’t any day I don’t hate my job right now. We’ve been given impossible KPIs with next to no time to make them work and contradictory KPIs at that. Think: Double our productivity at the drop of a hat sort of impossible. “Dire” consequences are hinted at if we don’t meet them. Well, we won’t! It’s impossible. It’s been a long time since I thought any job was worth killing myself over, and this one definitely isn’t, but my priority is about my people, not the work and that’s what’s going to get me.
I’m damned if we do, damned if we don’t.
If I don’t put in the legwork now to prep support for next year, we definitely won’t have the support. So if we all still have jobs, my people suffer. Or if I’m the only one who gets the axe, they suffer because I didn’t take care of them. If I do put in the legwork now but we miss the target this year (as expected), maybe we lose that support anyway. It’s really stupid! Unless I can talk them around and say look – we’re all as well placed as we possibly CAN be to aim for the stars because I did all that work, surely you don’t want to waste it.
But my ability to talk sense into corporate “line goes up” types is naught because I argue logic and reality. They just want line to go up, completely divorced from logic and reality. So maybe I have a job for 12 more months before they decide it’s my fault that their impossible demands aren’t met.
That realization rubs up against my survival instinct. Day to day, I want to help people and that means giving money. Lots of it, these days. But if I’m likely to run out of job runway in 6? 12? Maybe 18 months at the outside? If nothing else, I don’t really want to be miserable for that much longer. It’s been awful since 2023.
And PiC is feeling similar heat at his work – massive amounts of work while having layoffs twice a year every year for four years. In his twelve years prior to that, maybe there were a couple layoffs? It was not the norm.
It’s hard not to give in to the feeling that we have to save every penny for our family. We do save aggressively but in the moments I remember the Great Recession, my whole being clenches up with stress.
Year 6, Day 219: Every day feels like a week these days but my cousin being in town for the holiday makes life seem bearable again (temporarily). This is the one long weekend in the year I can truly relax. There’s an adult in the house who can manage my kids that isn’t PiC and isn’t completely exhausted all the time and loves us. It’s a rare feeling and my body obviously feels it deeply because I can actually sleep deeply when she’s here.
We did cake deliveries in the neighborhood together, since we had a giant Costco cake and no party, and it was fun surprising friends with a large slab of cake.
It’s suddenly cold enough to see your breath now. I’m also finally feeling 80% human again. That’s about my baseline for health. Every time I hit this phase, I realize that I haven’t just been lazy for a month. I’ve been down and out. Now I can do my workouts. I can get out of bed and do a full day of work at my desk. It don’t have to work in bed all day to conserve every ounce of energy. It’s a huge difference.
Year 6, Day 220: JB asked what Thanksgiving is about for us since we don’t celebrate the Pilgrims being colonizing jerks. Well, I said. It’s a federal holiday whether we buy into the reason or not so it’s our time and our chance to have our own family traditions with food and chosen family.
I used to spend this holiday with in-laws and other family but I haven’t been able to face Other People since my mom died a month before Thanksgiving. From my still-raw grief and need to avoid people grew a new tradition where I don’t travel, we just host whoever might be around and we set an overly ambitious table for five. It’s become a far better day than it used to be and I’m grateful for this time.
It’s funny. Stuffing (dressing) and being with a wide array of people this weekend used to be the most important thing to me, back when I was young. This year I forgot the stuffing and was happy that it was just the five of us. We wouldn’t have minded friends joining but I didn’t feel like anyone was missing, other than our beloved dogs.
Year 6, Day 221: We spent this day freezing our toes off in the city. It was planned so far as: we met up with SmolAc’s schoolmate and their sibling and parent at a park. They had a hell of a time biking and cackling their little heads off. JB didn’t like the biking conditions so I ran an impromptu calisthenics routine for them.
The play time dragged into snack time, we’d all packed some things, and then into forest exploration. That turned into a hike and then the end of that turned into an hour on the playground.
The kids clearly had fun and I was too busy trying to find patches of sunlight to care about much else other than hoping that no one tore the seat of their pants or their knees, sliding down the hills haphazardly as they were.
