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
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June 15, 2015
I can take on any dog or cat and trim their nails but holy shekels, trimming LB’s nails is … a nail biter.
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I didn’t know it was normal for babies to hate tummy time. LB spent a lot of time faceplanting for most of the first few days, crying angrily.
We don’t seem to have growth spurts at regular intervals. We have five days on and two days off, if we’re lucky, from the things that seem to indicate growth spurt: increased appetite, intermittent wakefulness through the night. Makes for interesting sleeplessness on the part of hir hapless parents but also incredibly interesting development. We could see hir cognition becoming sharper and more focused one day to the next, adding deliberate interaction and movement to the mix.
One day, ze held my hand and selectively chewed on one finger at a time, clearly testing and rejecting on the search for the perfect finger. The next day ze picked up hir pacifier and tried to put it in hir mouth.
Out of the blue, ze decided that ze was going to turn over on hir belly from hir back. I couldn’t tell you what brought this on. Over 6 days, ze started the attempts. One every other day. On the last of the 6 days, on hir third actual attempt, ze made it. Angry and crying the whole time. Once accomplished, it seemed forgotten but really ze was just gearing up for five more days of seeing what else ze could do with this skill.
***
Some day, ze will sleep in hir crib for daytime naps, right? RIGHT? Please say yes.
***
The answer IS yes! We had to break all the rules but since ze is so strong, I’m not so worried anymore. Ze always rolls over onto hir face now that ze has mastered the art, so over the course of a few weeks, we added blankets and pillows and bumpers to the crib, experimenting with what seemed most comfortable.
Ze gets stuck on hir belly because apparently rolling from the back is easy but rolling from the belly is not. My child, ze is backwards. But in the process, ze often gets a limb stuck in the prison bars, so bumpers were much safer. It’s helped a lot, and once a week, ze might even sleep more than 6 hours at a stretch! And the cozier (blankes and pillows) the bed, the longer ze might sleep.
***
The moment LB actually looked at us, not through us, or past us, or around us, but actually directly at us was pretty cool. But far better was the moment that ze progressed from smiles to little gurgles to full blown belly chortles. It’s intoxicating! Hir eyes just about disappear into the creased chubby cheeks, hir mouth opens wide and curves into a huge toothless grin, the laugh wells up from hir toes. Hir whole body shakes with each outburst of glee. Needless to say, once I discovered that kissing hir cheeks or tickling hir cheek with my hair accidentally produced that chortle, I did that forever. Or at least until my face hurt from laughing.
***
Lots of “holy crap, this is OUR child” moments.
Ze rides in the stroller the way I ride in cars, feet kicked up, slumping down into the seat;
Crinkles hir face like I do;
Has some of PiC’s facial features;
and some of mine.
Weird.
June 10, 2015
Or is it the perfect number?
I have a half dozen friends who were onlies and happy about it. Half a dozen others who wish they were onlies, and dozens more who are glad they had siblings.
PiC always wanted a crowd. I wanted none. Or rather, I was open to the idea of raising kids generally but never felt the urge to procreate. Adoption always seemed like a better way to go but, either way, having a family of humans wasn’t imperative.
It’s decidedly disconcerting to be pondering this mere months after having LB but it started as a practical question. We do have to figure out what to do with the pregnancy clothes and new baby accoutrements and with very little storage space, the question becomes even more pressing.
Now that we’re on the other side of a somewhat difficult pregnancy and survived a few months of a baby that hated sleeping, neither of us are under any illusion that having a baby is fun. There are rewarding moments, absolutely, and it is true that the first time (and pretty much all subsequent times) your child sees you and is so pleased ze grins like a loon is something else. It’s pretty awesome figuring out how to extract baby giggles, too.
But the survival of all involved is no mean feat either.
The physical demands: We’re not young anymore. All nighters were terrible when youth was on my side, they’re far worse now.
The emotional demands: We solely existed as parents in these months, there’s no time or energy to be partners and adult individuals. And that’s exhausting in a whole other way. The first time ze went to sleep and stayed asleep even after being put in bed, we had no idea what to do with ourselves. (We ended up having dinner and a conversation.)
Financially, good grief. Diapers, and wipes, and hiring help. Breastfeeding was a must for LB’s health and saving money but despite having it really easy compared to some, it was chemically difficult. When I was tired (All The Times) feeding or pumping triggered a serious dopamine drop and a wave of depression overtook me. I had to talk myself off a ledge every time. I even started a Twitter hashtag to distract myself from the awful feelings. Still I provided the bulk of hir nutrition because formula is so expensive.
This may sound coldhearted but on the point of sheer exhaustion alone, before we consider how hard the pregnancy was the first time, neither of us are inclined to do this again.
And yet, strange twist. Despite my own life experience, despite always ranking sibling fighting alongside death and taxes (all are certain, all suck), there is a part of me that wants LB to have a companion who could, for as long as they’re inclined to be around each other, be there to reminisce about childhood things that they’d not share with anyone else.
I can’t do that now because my sibling is, bluntly, a shit. He almost always has been but in 30+ years, we did have 2-3 years when we got along and shared that bond. This isn’t a glass half full thing, that made his later choices a far worse betrayal, but I can’t deny that I did get to have that relationship for a short time. Later, his mental issues complicated things further. Much like having gotten a couple good years with my parents before life fully hit the skids, it reminds me that though I loved and lost, LB isn’t necessarily doomed to the same fate. Some people do get to enjoy good relationships with their parents. Some people do get to share life with their sibling in a positive way. Knowing that, there’s a small part of me that wonders if I’d be depriving hir of one of the most important relationships ze could have.
Looked at another way: having this sibling was hugely formative. Would I be who I am today if I had had the older brother I yearned for? If he’d been someone who excelled and applied his numerous talents, someone who looked out for me and guided me professionally? Would I be half as strong if I hadn’t had to learn how to act both as my own advocate as well as kick my own butt to forge a road of my own? Life could have been so much easier if he worked alongside me to support our parents but would I have had the same fire and determination to grow my career to this point so that I’d have the freedom to live a real life, the ability to choose to put my family first? Or would the easier road have left me softer, somewhat less ambitious, more willing to accept less because there was a safety net rather than a chasm gaping at my heels?
Maybe I would have. But I suspect that I would be a much different, much less successful, much less driven person.
I was a born follower. I always wanted to follow big brother and so follow him I did, right through a morass of trouble and back to safety and, never incidentally, punishment. Every time. My heart was not adventurous, my dreams were nightmares, and rarely did it occur to me that there was more to life than the books I devoured. I needed someone to follow and, as charisma and vision were his domains, I would have trundled along after him like an ant following a chemical trail. Without his failures, without a big push, I might still just be following.
He always wanted a brother so he did his best to remake me in that image, manipulating me into doing his dirty work like killing the spiders, climbing fences and other stereotypically boy escapades. Scion of a matriarchal family, I was a born scrapper but I learned to throw a real punch fighting with him. And fight we did, physically and emotionally, for nearly all of our lives. Bullies, wanting a bit of superiority marked me, all bookwormy and solitary, as an easy target only to rapidly retreat when I gave as good as I got. In the process of making me his “little brother”, he preyed on my every weakness, teaching me that the very existence of fear was a soft underbelly you never showed people. To this day, I won’t confess aloud that anything scares me because that’s an invitation to be pounced on.
High school was the first time I had to make my own way and my 12-year-old knees trembled at the unfamiliar ahead of me. Mom scraped up the cash to send him to private school, worried that he’d fall in with the wrong crowd at the public school, but as the academic and responsible kid, I was on my own. That was the first time that distinction between us had been made so clearly and that would follow us the rest of our lives. I often wondered how much of the family joke, subverting the usual expectations assigned to birth order that I would be the successful one and he’d depend on me, was a self fulfilling prophecy and how much was merely an accurate read of our characters.
The truth is, in many ways, my sibling’s inability to cast a shadow was as influential in forming the person I am as anything my parents instilled in me. I learned from them: facts, figures, morality. But I became more by pushing away from him, from our friction, in my need to redeem our family reputation.
Many people take comfort in their siblings. I am grateful when an encounter with him doesn’t give me weeks of nightmares. So it’s perhaps strange that I seemingly credit him with some large part of who I am. But it only seems fair to say that adversity tempered me and boy howdy did he throw challenges my way.
It’s not a theorem that can be solved for the best possible outcome. Much as I abhor math, I’d be working those numbers in a heartbeat if it could be done. So many “what ifs” crowd together: What if LB is like my sibling (terrible)? What if a future second kid is that awful person? What if LB would do so much better with a sibling?
All I can do is hope we do a good job with LB and have a LOT of help if we try again.
What say you? If you had them, were your siblings a joy or a bane? If you didn’t, did you wish for them? Or are you glad you dodged a bullet? How does that inform your choice to have or not have kid(s)?
June 8, 2015
I’m not asking for much, I swear.
We just want someone polite and competent to help me with LB during my work day. If we’re all lucky, ze will even sleep for half that time so the nanny can do whatever she wants, within reason. But we’ve been striking out left and right.
Our latest bomb candidate was a real doozy. I spent 18 hours working with her, willing to compromise on most things if her care was good, only to have her really drop the ball at the last hour. She was an older woman from my homeland, and that could have made it easier. Obviously, in this case: NOT ONE BIT.
The laundry list of objections felt endless. She would interrupt every time I gave her instructions, refuse to take no for an answer, take every conversation as an opportunity to persuade me that I should hire her, argue that we really didn’t need 2 or 3 trial days despite having agreed to work them, felt that “but I’m healthy” was an appropriate response to the requirement that she be vaccinated, insist on doing the opposite of what I asked her to do, and bother Seamus.
Seriously, if I say that the kid isn’t to watch tv so don’t point it out to hir, the first thing you do after that should NOT be turn the kid toward the tv and say Hey Look!
If I say that the dog is forbidden to have people food, it’s not funny to wave your lunch in his face and pull it away laughing. Baiting a dog you don’t know? That’s stupid, rude, and just highlights the inanity of your repetitious “will he bite me?” No, but I’m about to.
LB would dive for the diaper box and I’d set it aside saying, no, diapers are not for eating. The nanny would grab a diaper and toss it to hir during a change saying, here play with that. Um, “play” for LB means EAT. So you’re giving hir a diaper to eat. Thanks.
She probably could have been broken of all those habits, like a poorly trained horse, over time.
It wouldn’t have been easy for me because correcting an adult, in our culture, is Just Not Done. And if they’re ridiculously nosy, asking “how much did you pay for X? What’s your rent? Are your utilities included in the rent? What does Y cost?” you can’t directly tell them to buzz off. Thankfully, I’ve learned some acceptable defensive conversational judo in the past several years and stopped myself from getting sucked into the subordinate’s vortex of compelled and regretted answers.
The death knell was this: we have one of those cheapish electric chair swings, a lightly used hand me down. We use it once in a while but only with supervision because LB cannot be trusted. Ze is the squirreliest, wiggliest, contrariest kiddo I’ve ever cared. Strap hir into that chair and ze will have contorted in some unimaginable fashion trying to vault out of it two seconds later. So I tell the nanny that ze cannot be left alone, asleep or awake, in that thing. Ze may look conked out but ze wakes up at the drop of a pin and the very second ze realizes that ze is unwatched? FLIP!
Worried that it was actually me being unreasonably picky, I even invited a friend to come observe the nanny. We didn’t end up having her back for that observation but this very honest friend came prepared to tell me that I needed to compromise only to find that it’s not me! I’m reasonable, thank you very much.
I was working away, trying to decipher some weird work problem, when I heard the bathroom door click behind me. My brain turned over and I popped around the corner to find that Nanny-No-More had left LB alone in the chair, asleep, unsecured by the safety belt, with the rocker wheek-whacking away on High.
!!!!!
Now I GET that kids get injured on their own. I know that kids – hell, I was one of them – can be beyond accident prone. I don’t plan to wrap hir in a bubble suit. With me as a mom, ze is genetically coded for klutz. Kids don’t need our help or to be set up for more injury!
Just as egregiously, why is she incapable of doing as I ask? It’s almost as though I’m not paying for her services, so have no reason to expect compliance. Oh, WAIT.
Obviously, that was the end of that run. *sigh* We were so hopeful.
June 3, 2015
A fellow PF blogger, Jessica of Mo’ Money Mo’ Houses, is launching her new podcast today and I was happy to give a shout about it. I read Jessica’s blog back when she first started out a few years ago and have popped in from time to time, when I can since my reading time has been severely curtailed, and it’s great to see that she’s launching a fun new project.
Jessica’s guests will be sharing their experiences in debt reduction, getting spending under control, and entrepreneurial ventures including side jobs and quitting their 9 to 5 to become their own bosses.
You can find all the podcast episodes at momoneymohouses.com/podcast and tell her what you think by leaving a review at her iTunes page.
And as a little thank you for checking out the podcast and giving it some love: a Giveaway!
You could win:
One $100 Amazon gift card
One $50 Amazon gift card
One “Mo’ Money Mo’ Houses” bag from Bow & Drape (valued at $75 and totally unique!). Here’s a photo of what it looks like.
a Rafflecopter giveaway
June 1, 2015
Change from Jan 2015: 16.8% increase
On Money
I’m working away at Swagbucks to earn Amazon money for household, Little Bean, and dog things we need. Feel free to join using my referral link if you like!
***
PiC recently joked he’d settle for a luxury sports car and a very family car. Spending between $90-120K on cars? That’s a riot. So I proposed a swap. If he supports me writing a few bestsellers (ha), we’ll talk cars.
Note: 3 years ago, we paid $20K in cash for 2 used practical family-friendly cars with decent mileage and in great condition. We’ve had to spend on maintenance since, but very little, comparatively speaking.
Of course, his window shopping was stopped sort when I asked which would you want first, fancy car or a house?
Which would you want first? (or at all)
(and then I caught him browsing Trulia. I’d better get cracking and writing!)
*** (more…)
May 28, 2015
eemusings called me out for not having more pasta in my last posts, and she was right, I just forgot where I’d stashed the pasta pictures!
Am I the only one who is always disappointed when ordering ravioli? Not because it’s not tasty as all get out but because everyone thinks that six-seven ravioli is a meal! Don’t look surprised when I then consume 3 loaves of bread to fill up because six ravioli, no matter the size, is hardly a snack. Seriously, what adult is satiated with 6 bites of delectable filled pasta?
Italia: The less frugal adventure
Food and fun in Italy: Part 2
May 27, 2015
It used to be that life insurance was a standard part of any benefits package from my employer. I took that a little bit for granted once I stopped working retail. Now I have to scout out my own because I haven’t had a policy in force in ages. With Little Bean in the picture, that has to change pronto!
Life would be tough enough for PiC not having me around to take care of the stuff I manage (and I’m sure he’d miss me). Having to do without my income for a period of time with a kid, a dog, mortgages and all would be the pits, to say the least.
We have the bulk of our insurance with State Farm these days. Previously my car insurance for myself and Dad were with GEICO but the claim process was too bare bones. I don’t think it was worth the minimal savings anymore. We’re at that point where we really have to pay a little bit more for decent service rather than wasting massive gobs of time getting assessments, chasing down guilty parties, etc.
Flashback
I used to have Mercury Insurance which was another cheapish outfit, about ten years or so ago, but they weren’t so chintzy that they didn’t follow up on accident claims themselves. Some reckless jerk rammed my car on the freeway because he was in too much of a hurry to change four lanes one at a time and had to cut across all four in one go.
Mercury wanted to take the easy way out and have me split responsibility for the accident. A 50-50 split would cost half my $1000 deductible and I’d take 50% responsibility on my record without being assessed points, the rep explained.
My answer was a polite HELL. NO. The only fault I bore in that accident was existing on the same roads as the goon who failed the looking out his windshield exam so I held my ground and insisted that they pursue a no fault to me resolution.
Three months later that guy and his insurance caved and admitted that it was entirely his fault.
I refuse to eat the cost of other people’s poor judgment but I now don’t have time to personally pursue it when stuff happens.
I requested quotes from State Farm and Allstate for 30 year term policies ranging from 200-400k.
State Farm noodled around for weeks refusing to email quotes but also failing to get them in the mail for six weeks. After a few followups they sent me a stack of quotes along with some other poor sod’s paperwork but the quotes were useless. The policies were for both me and PiC when I’d requested policies just for me (in writing, by email so there was a record of the request), and listed me as a 30 year old male. The agent’s response when I pointed out the basic errors? “I forgot what you wanted.”
Oh, you forgot I was female and that you have my birthday on file? That’s cute. Nope, wait, that’s not competent. So that’s three strikes for State Farm: inconvenient, AND failed customer service twice.
Allstate actually approached me at the time I was doing price/plan comps so I gave them a shot. Unlike State Farm, Allstate provided quotes for ME within a day. Apart from the super cheesy “it pays to be young and healthy!” rah rah comment from the agent, that quote process was painless.
I used a Bankrate calculator to figure out how much insurance I’d need considering factors like:
My age;
The ages of spouse and child(ren);
My income;
My mortgage and other debts (none);
College expenses for child(ren) and/or spouse;
My funeral expenses.
Bankrate seems to think I need a policy for 1.7M. That’s a hell of a lot more than I was expecting and seems wildly out of proportion to my previous expectations. Maybe I need to play with the variables a bit more and do more research into how each one affects the recommendation. I doubt I’ll go for anything over $1M at this point, though.
