March 2, 2016

On parenting, after year 1

Over lunch, a friend asked me if we do “Good cop, bad cop” with LB and for the life of me, I couldn’t wrap my brain around the idea. Ze is one year old. Is there a point to doing a good cop / bad cop routine? For 3 minutes, I stared at her, silently pondering what that would look like for an infant.

Besides, I’m no one-note mama. I am all the cops. Sometimes the good cop, mostly the bad cop, always the tickling cop.

Her real question was: Do you enforce boundaries and rules? How?

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I’ve made some first year remarks already but as I said then, there’s a lot about parenting that you just don’t viscerally get from a babysitting or professional aunt/uncle role until you’re there in the thick of it and there are no returns.

Experience has changed my viewpoint on some, not at all on others. It’s been a lot of “ohhhh that’s what that looks like,” or “what, exactly, is happening right now?”

Discipline

Pre-kids: My sibling’s the Exhibit A of The Bad Seed or a cautionary tale for the ages. It’s hard to know which.

It’s a Pyrrhic victory to hear your parent admit that everything you’d warned them would happen if they wouldn’t listen to you did happen, after they wouldn’t listen to you. I don’t know, can’t know, if we’d still have the same end result had they listened to me, but we know it all went to hell when they didn’t.

Post-kid: LB first heard “NO” at four months and hasn’t stopped hearing it since. Ze still doesn’t care what no means but soon enough ze will understand how to use language and I want hir to know there are times that are “yes”, and times that are “no”, and NO MEANS NO. From us, from anyone else, from hir.

Ze may act clueless or disregard the first admonitions but repetition is our friend here. When we’re consistent, we see the results of that efforts months later.

We don’t enforce *discipline* (punishment) specifically at this age, ze is too young, but we enforce the boundary of No especially when it comes to hurting others (*caveat: Unless they hurt or intend to hurt you, in those cases, gut ’em), or hurting hirself.

Responsibility

As in, having it. And then teaching it.

Pre-kids: This felt like an anchor around my everything. I don’t know how to motivate a kid to care about something that’s not a fun thing. From early on, I’ve always been the intrinsically motivated kid, competing against myself, but I’m necessarily an extrinsic element to LB so how do we foster that intrinsic drive? We cheer ze on for trying things, even if ze falls down or fails a lot, because we want hir to keep trying. And ze does. But how do we avoid turning hir personal motivation into a praise-seeking situation?

Post-kid: The responsibility is still daunting. I still don’t know how we’ll teach hir everything we hope to. But I have to hope that talking to hir, honestly and carefully, and demonstrating the desirable behaviors will have an impact. Maybe I was lucky to have been the passive kid I was; Mom and Dad always seemed pretty reasonable, I never wanted to rebel even if their rules chafed a little, and by the teen years, I assumed that acting like an adult would mean they’d treat me like one, so I did, and they did. For the most part.

We have to shape LB so that ze is prepared to succeed in a world we probably won’t understand in 20 years, being the outdated geezers that we are. We have to guide hir to build character, to have compassion, to be money savvy, to work harder and smarter than those around hir. I’m not sure how we do that. And in this world today that’s full of bile and anger and horrible people, how do we protect hir? Every single day I read another horrifying story about how someone abused, killed, and hurt their spouse, child, boy/girlfriend, complete stranger that looked at them wrong or was in the wrong place at the wrong time. We can’t wrap hir up in bubble wrap forever but it’s a scary damn world out there.

I don’t have any of the answers. To some degree, you can do it all “right” and still lose your child to whatever’s out there. But today, right here and now, I’m ignoring those what-ifs and soaking up the baby goodness and trying to get it right one day at a time.

Love

Pre-kids: Everyone says “it’s totally worth it” but it always sounds like they’re trying to rationalize the choice to have kids when it was prefaced by a story of how frustrated or annoyed they are by the kid. Which I’m sure all our parents felt at one point or another.

Post-kid: I absolutely adore this kid. Even when ze is difficult or confusing or frustrating. It didn’t happen the second ze was born like it does for some people. We needed time. I needed time to heal. I will never forget my fear and despair in Months 2-3. We needed time to get to know each other. Ze needed time to be more than a baguette.

Right now, it’s easy for me to feel both love and frustration at the same time and roll my eyes at weird infantile things like licking the dog or having a meltdown over having hir ankle grabbed as ze tips over the edge: “You won’t let me sustain a concussion waaahhhh!”

It’s interesting that one of my oldest friends knew bonding could take some time but didn’t tell me until I was past the 4th trimester. A mark of how well she knows me, and respects boundaries, that she wasn’t going to dictate to me what my life experience was going to be like some people do with their “wait until you … !”

So far, it’s hard work and it’ll only get harder. I think we can make the call in 30 years whether we did a good job and if it was all worth it because it’s way too soon to tell but right here and now, I’m just glad we took the chance and aren’t regretting it.

Posted in: child snapshot, parenting

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March 1, 2016

Net Worth & Life Report: February 2016

DollarSign

Change from Jan 2016: 0.10% decrease
0.10% decrease from last month

ON MONEY

I use Swagbucks. Here’s a handy tutorial if you’d like to join and earn.

By way of ebates and Swagbucks, our Side Money tally this month went up $118.
I knocked serious money off a bill with a phone call which was good because…
We had that lovely episode with Seamus.
I pick the best Valentine’s gifts. I’m loving this delightfully petite broom and dust pan! When you spend half your snack time sitting on the floor picking up crumbs, tiny cleaning implements are suddenly fabulous. Well, no, that’s not true, tiny gear of any kind is always fabulous. I gave LB a demonstration of how to use it to sweep up counters and got a little chuckle. Laughing at me, laughing with me, whatever. As long as we’re laughing.
I bought a humidifier in an attempt to not die of the latest Viral Scourge and it came with a free subscription to Better Homes & Gardens. Imagine my tiny triumph when I read the fine print and found we could refuse the subscription and get a check for $6 instead. Yes, that’s small beans. It’s half a bean. But it’ll pay for my postcard mailing habit so it’s mine mine mine.
File under credit card churning. I picked up the Bank of America Alaska Air credit card and used it to pay for our car insurance and a couple incidentals to meet the minimum spend of $1000 in 3 months. We netted 25,000 bonus miles (one round trip ticket), a $100 statement credit, and some thousand and change purchase miles. The downside was the $100 wasn’t pure profit – they didn’t waive the first year’s annual fee like most of the cards I prefer to nab so we came out ahead $25 and 25,000 miles.
Two really sick friends received the gift of food delivery. It was a surprise and the best I could do once I found out how sick they were because I couldn’t run over to help myself. It ran to the tune of $400. That’s coming out of our discretionary spending and I regret nothing. (There were tears, the good kind. I double regret nothing.) Then PiC sold car parts to cover half of it, so I triple regret nothing because it’s always been my instinct to make up for unexpected expenditures instead of just cashflowing it. I’m a good influence, dammit!
I’ve been wearing holes into the only pair of jeans that fit after I sized out of the maternity jeans. After weeks of deliberation, and cajoling by PiC, $55 bought me a pair of new jeans (50% off) so of course when I wasn’t looking, I dropped the last 7 pounds to hit my pre-baby weight. DAMMIT. I’d plateaued! There was no reason to believe those lingering pounds were going anywhere. Has unanticipated weight loss ever been so annoying??
We are so close to completing our estate plan I can taste it!
I’m also very close to completing our tax document compilation! We’re just missing a couple of forms. But I’m maybe not so much in a hurry to file because thanks to something outside my control on PiC’s side, we’re expecting a huge tax hit. Ugh.