I started blogging before the Great Recession and as I prepare for the next one, whenever it may finally touch down, I’m thinking about all the ways we’ve evolved since then.
1. I am a reformed workaholic.
This is huge. I didn’t think I’d ever stop being a work junkie, or stop chasing the highs of earning money and overtime and achieving. I never dreamed of wanting to let go of all that because it’s what paid off debts, paid bills, built up our savings and saved my bacon.
After the Great Recession, I clung to that even harder because I got a sense of how much worse it could have been if I hadn’t been addicted to earning.
Cliched as it may sound, getting pregnant changed all that. It didn’t come in a dramatic blinding revelation or the glow of motherhood (I never got the glow, I feel cheated). It came, as most things do, in a flash of logic.
I thought about all the choices we were getting ready to make, all the sacrifices, and how it just didn’t make any sense to do any and all of those things if we were not actively choosing to be present for zir life as well. At the rate that I used to work, I would miss every second of it. It felt right to actively make the choice to shift my mindset from a woman for whom a career was everything to a woman who had chosen to embrace a career and a family with a whole heart. (more…)
Angela’s Friday Five made me want to do better. As it often does. But in a good way!
Aitza’s cheap eats strategies for Europe. Ever since car seats became a thing in our lives, I’ve not felt any urge to travel internationally to non-Asian countries with JB (a number of Asian countries don’t require carseats and apparently it’s safe…) but the Done by Fortys are doing it!
This is why Alexa and Siri are banned from my home. It’s basically the equivalent of consenting to bug my own home for the benefit of tech companies. NOPE.
“In the company of their aunts, nephews and nieces know that they are privileged persons. The bonds of duty are somehow relaxed: they have no obligations but to be happy.” I relate to so many of those quotes. I have always maintained that loving aunties and uncles are a key to successful parenting. On the hard days, they can help out a bit or help us remember what is good about the kid. On the good days, it’s wonderful to share the love of the small human. Of course, JB adores the ones we have kept in zir life. And it’s so important to me as a person and as a parent to know that JB is surrounded by family we’ve chosen to fill in that hole left by the family we cannot have.
All I read was the headline: “Would You Sell Everything to Travel the World?” I laughed. No. Never. Not if I had a choice about it, anyway. Zero knocks on people for whom that isn’t a laughable notion of course, I used to think a nomadic life sounded great too. I loved the idea of being a city girl, I loved the notion of being location independent. But at this point in my life, I know who I am and what makes me happiest. Even just traveling for up to 2 weeks reminds me who I am. After ten days away, I am awash with fatigue and a burning desire to be left alone. I am a homebody. I am the happiest in my hobbit hole and only venturing out when I feel like it and running back home to nest and read books and eat and read some more. I have no desire to constantly be on the move or even just without a home base. Who are you?
We talk a lot about what constitutes the middle class in the PF world. I consider us upper middle class but reading this WSJ article, it strikes me again (without judgement) that we have such different ideas of what the buying power of an UMC/MC income is. For example:
The two-child couple earned just over $100,000 until 2017. They had a roughly $106,000 mortgage, about $97,000 in student-loan debt and $24,000 in car loans.
Then Ms. Young, 33, moved from a full-time to a part-time faculty position at a university because of its budget cuts. With income reduced to around $70,000, they still felt confident enough in their earning power to borrow $48,000 to finance two cars in 2017.
We have a mortgage that’s twice our combined annual incomes and don’t have any other debt so we have a similar debt ratio to the couple in the article. But for us, at this ratio, I don’t consider ourselves in a position to be taking on additional debt. We will need to replace my car and I have to think quite carefully about what we can “afford” and how we’ll pay for it. We both blanch at the $30k price tags of any newer cars despite our very solid savings program because those savings are specifically for future retirement. I need to start setting aside savings that are meant for spending on a car but we simply can’t get behind the idea of taking on an auto loan again if it doesn’t make very clear financial sense.
That gap between what we think an UMC income, or even an MC income, should buy remains fairly large. Even I wonder why we “can’t afford” (cannot easily pay for, without financial consequences) to just buy a new car when we make and save as much as we do. The reality is still that becausewe have to save as much as we do, we can’t spend freely. It’s one or the other.
For health reasons, I generally don’t get more than 5000 steps on average, not if I also want to get all my work done, be a present parent and partner, feed my family and tend to our dogs. The energy expenditure required to hit 10,000 steps a day simply isn’t worth it. Good to know that 10,000 steps baseline was totally not based on science.
The news just keeps making me sicker. This country is doing horrific, inhuman things.
I keep going back and forth on whether to take a cruise but knowing this makes me, at the very least, cross Princess and Carnival off our list: “Miami-based Carnival pleaded guilty Monday to six probation violations, including the dumping of plastic mixed with food waste in Bahamian waters. The company also admitted sending teams to visit ships before the inspections to fix any environmental compliance violations, falsifying training records and contacting the U.S. Coast Guard to try to redefine what would be a “major non-conformity” of their environmental compliance plan.…Carnival has had a long history of dumping plastic trash and oily discharge from its ships, with violations dating back to 1993.”
Matt on the cases people make against charity. I definitely have a scarcity mindset and things like the unpredictability of the health insurance landscape (an example: the squeeze of high deductible high plans) or the high cost health care in general feed mine. But I still give, one way or another, to people who need help, to small creators, to causes we care about.
Nicole Cliffe’s told the funny version of her grandmother (CW: suicide, substance abuse, and sexual abuse) online but this is the serious version.
Men who behave like this at first look like any other men, thus I look at all of them askance until I KNOW I’m safe around them. I also think he should have been moved to the worst seat and arrested coming off the plane.
Don’t be a Natasha Tynes. I don’t get why people feel the need to police (particularly black women) people for doing necessary things like eating.
The politest (puppy) eviction
I saw this on reddit and I’ve watched it a minimum of 27 times and every single time it has only gotten better and exceeded my expectations pic.twitter.com/Y6xPMCtJ99
An acquaintance told me that she had a rule for her kids and their birthdays: up til age 3, they had a party. After that, the kids had the choice of a party or taking a trip together. The end result is they’ve been on a LOT of trips, and dodged the hosting a party bullet many times. I envy them a little, as my bones ache in the aftermath of this party.
We have celebrated with JB very quietly the past three years. We had a casual lunch with all our friends the first year, a home cooked dinner with family the second, and the third last was a park date with zir best friend followed up with a happy hour lunch. Each one was low key and most importantly, easy.
Since then, ze has been invited to over a dozen birthday parties which firmly planted the seed that zir birthday could mean, no, MUST mean, A PARTY. As a result, everything for the past 12 months has been about what ze wants for zir party. We don’t typically cater to our child’s whims but several stars aligned in zir favor: PiC wanted to do one, ze has been with these classmates for a really long time, and my favorite relative wanted to lend a hand. We decided it could be a one time thing and we worked on economizing! There was nothing saying we couldn’t do this on the cheap. Was there? (Foreshadowing voice: FOOLS.)
We did off the cuff research as we discussed whether or not this was really happening – at birthday parties for other kids, we evaluated the service, the cleanliness and fun level of each place, the prices. JB was evaluating too. Every party we left, ze piped up: I want to have my party here, please! Discernment, ze has none.
Venues range from $165-$600. ($600!?!?)
We prefer doing park birthdays which seem way more relaxed BUT they’re actually a ton of work. You have to bring everything: food, drinks, place settings, chafing dishes if you have warm food, coolers and ice if you need cold stuff, tableclothes, decorations. This time of the year, you run a real risk of getting rained out. One forward thinking set of parents brought tents and canopies for their kid’s party in case the rainstorm of the week stuck around for their day. Luckily the skies were clear for their event but helping them pack their two cars was a 5.5 person job. Also, why do people not listen when you say gifts are not necessary? They clearly stated “no gifts” and had to pack 20 gifts into their brimming over cars. We gave them the gift of no physical gift and helped them set up and clean up. (I vote that our gift was the most valuable!)
We wanted to have less work and less crap to haul so we picked the cheapest possible indoor venue. The cost should have been as low as we could get it except we expected 20% of the invitees to decline and only 8% did. Even the kid who never goes to any of the birthdays ever said yes. What the heck?? Um, “luckily” a few kids cancelled at the last minute so we had exactly our limit of attendees. Honestly if they hadn’t cancelled, I don’t think we would have had room for them. The party room was MUCH smaller than I expected.
The hour-long activity was really well organized. The two instructors kept things moving right along and the kids were all engaged and relaxed. PiC got to watch and photograph more of it than I did, I was somehow dubbed the “get people to sign their waivers” person so I had to watch the door for stragglers and get them set up.
Total: $235+ $40 tip
Food is typically pizza plus cake.
I was sick and tired of pizza at kid parties. I was going to be different – we were going to have good food! Then I saw how much it would cost to feed 21 kids and 25 adults. Quotes were coming in around $300. Holy crap, nope, immediate backpedaling!
Since I can’t cook in large enough quantities to feed that many people cheaply and well, we ended up with pizza and a platter of catered sandwiches after all. Oops.
We did make our own dessert using a delicious easy recipe. Totally unhealthy but delicious – tiny lemon cupcakes. They’re glazed and in tiny portions so two or three of our cupcakes is still less sugar than your standard store bought cupcake with four inches of frosting. (That’s disappointing to the frosting eaters among the children, namely, JB.) PiC insisted on having a small cake for zir candles and decorated it beautifully.
Naturally the kids all rejected the delectable dainties because it wasn’t the “real” cake. I overheard one parent valiantly trying to convince her kid that these “really are cakes, and they’re DELICIOUS.” We should have seen that coming!
We had sandwiches left over to feed all of us for 4 days, too so that was a nice bonus. They were really good.
Cupcakes for 42 people, plus cake: $24
Pizza: $30
Sandwiches for adults: $50
Juice boxes for the kids: $7
Water bottles, left over from friend’s party: free
Sodas for adults: $10
Dessert platters, which we’ll use again when we host dinners: $25
Cake server because we’re adults now: $4
Foil pans with lids just in case we needed them: $5 (returned these, we didn’t need them)
Paper plates, plastic forks, napkins, leftover from previous events: free Total: $150
Decorations can ran the gamut, depending on how fancy you get.
Most people have themed balloons, banners, and goodie bags. I used to think that was extravagant. Then we went to a party that was so over the top, we cringed all the way home over the waste. There was SO MUCH paper and plastic, and extravangantly expensive fondant cake that didn’t even taste good, that was thrown away. They had themed everything: goodie cups filled with toys, snack boxes to take home, stickers, custom made frosted cookies scattered all over the tables for the grabbing, and a costume for the birthday kid just for the party. Enough latex balloons for everyone but everyone scattered to the winds with their armloads of swag, leaving only the birthday family to take them home. So much was just left behind, and trashed, it made my heart hurt. Of course the kids were over the moon about it at the time, but they also promptly forgot about it.
We ran in the other direction. We planned to have, at most, a small bundle of balloons, a gold banner that we can use for many birthdays to come, and the venue’s standard tablecloths. We pulled out a set of disposable tablecloths we thriftily saved from PiC’s birthday a few years back just in case. (Disposable, hah!) We couldn’t get the balloons and didn’t need the banner since the venue had one left up already, so that was $21 saved. No one noticed our lack of decorations – the food and drinks and the birthday kid were all they needed.
Total: $0
Goodie bags, oh boy
I was thinking we’d do a stack of books but one of JB’s aunties wanted to contribute this to the party. I THOUGHT she was going to be restrained but… no. I think the kids loved it, it wasn’t a bunch of cheap plastic to throw out, but it was a lot more than we would have done on our own! JB wanted to hand them out personally, ze was so happy to have that thing to do.
Cost to us: $0.
Final out of pocket total: $425.
We’ve very clearly told JB that we’re not doing this again and of course it bounces off like ze is Teflon. Every other week, ze is doing research for zir next birthday and writing up new guest lists! Kids.
:: What is your favorite birthday tradition, for kids or adults?
An interview with Kassandra Dassant, talking finances after 40: Building her Business and Finding Her Purpose. This is a timely read / series for me as I examine how I want to end my 30s and how I want to enter into my 40s.
