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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April 27, 2015
How about I just don’t spend $150+ and save $150+?
Walking to the counter, arms loaded down with pump bottles, I turned and stopped in front of PiC. “We’re buying nearly $80 worth of hand soap. HAND SOAP.”
It was 50-70% off, but still. Hand soap.
A Bath and Body Works holiday sale nearly sucker-punched our wallets. After 30 minutes of sniffing and picking bottles we were walking over to the counter when reality sunk in. The soap smelled great, of course, that’s how they got us in the first place but thankfully my brain turned on. I can pay $5 for a gallon of soap that smells just fine! It’s a testament to the pull of the new scents that I was actually sad putting the bottles back on the shelf.
I’m a sucker for products that smell good, and I’m not the only one. There’s a whole science behind manipulating your senses between scent and organization to get you to stay longer and spend more.
Some scents transport me to very specific moments in time:
Softsoap: high school, childhood best friends, horseback riding, the red-brown dirt of the riding stables where I learned to “be a rider, not a passenger”, hand scrubbing my one pair of riding pants and line drying them every week.
Garnier Fructis: high school and college, couponing, youth
Incense: temple, death, grieving, parent loss, tradition, childhood Lunar New Year celebrations, grouchy old grandma, ancestors I only know through faded black and whites and stories passed down from generation to generation
Bath and Body Works brown vanilla sugar: college best friend during college, picking apples at the grocery store, Southern California sun, driving my new car to work/school/work
BBW plumeria (long discontinued but there are a few scents reminiscent of this): junior high school phys.ed., black shorts and white tees, an old friend I haven’t seen since New York, braces, REALLY terrible looking long hair, weighing less than 70 lbs and being mocked about it.
Pears/apples (artificially): being carefree, young, and silly. Life before kid, jobs, degrees, or college majors.
Coffee: five years old, learning responsibility, trusting my parents implicitly and completely, discovery
Gingerbread and fresh baked cookies: Christmas, family, holidays
“New car” smell: Age 19, negotiating my first major purchase, driving a new car in torrential rain, paying off a loan early
Scents are such a powerful trigger for memory, no wonder it’s a tool to manipulate our emotions and buying habits! I’m safer shopping online from home.
What’s your shopping weakness?
April 23, 2015
Once in a while, I send out postcards. I might have heard you were having a hard time, or you mentioned something that made me think YOU WOULD LIKE MAIL.
I love getting real mail. I also love sending it. I hear some of you feel the same.
I’d like your opinion on how you’d like to participate. And if you’re ok with it, I’d like to feature at least the front of some of your postcards here. If this goes well, maybe we’ll make this a recurring thing!
So let’s kick this off and say, submit your answers by May 8th.
Quick edits (April 24th): I am willing to send to at least one international address, and I’d like to kick off this round sooner, so I moved the response deadline to May 8th.
April 22, 2015
We recently experienced a little improvement in quality of life, and so decided to take on another challenge.
Since none of my family had met the newbie yet, and his family was ready to take another crack at it, we loaded up a rental and drove down the coast. Here’s how it went….
Night 1: we left an hour and a half behind schedule. I blame Enterprise. They botched pickup, they didn’t have the car at the location even after I confirmed with them two days in advance AND they didn’t have a clean car ready to go when PiC finally arrived at the 2nd location where the cars were allegedly ready. They threw us exactly 1.5 hours behind.
We rented a minivan because STUFF and we wanted to be safer w/Seamus and LB. I hate not being able to crate him for the drive but there is no way to fit a Seamus-sized crate in the car. A truck, sure, but I’m not a fan of popping the dog in the truck bed, exposed to the elements. And LB, of course, requires a car seat and numerous other accoutrements. We tried to minimize as much as possible and consider this a learning experience for future packing.
I haaate running out of diapers and paying full price so I packed nearly 100. For 5.5 days away. It’s called pooperation, alright? I also packed twice as many doggy poo bags as Seamus could use. Very little worse than being stuck in a shitty situation with no clean up available.
Surprise: LB still hates being strapped into the car seat and hates sitting still in the car but loves freeway driving. We prepared our souls for multiple stops and screaming, instead ze slept the whole first 4 hour leg.
Day 2: we made an extra stop on Leg 2, making it 2 of 3 stretches before we made it the Home Base and that 45 minute delay put us in the middle of hellish traffic. 2:30 and like a bloody spider, GPS showed traffic stretched out every direction from the body of LA. Of course. It was a quick tutorial in why we can never move back. Every trip would take at least 45 minutes, if not 2 hours, because our friends and family are scattered everywhere.
LB ran out of “sitting in a car seat, putting up with freeway” steam at the tail end of Leg 3 so we rode the rest of the way serenaded by hir increasingly ragged roars. We slept pretty well that night, when we slept. It was a parody of our routine at home: sleep til ze wakes, one stumbles to get the bottle and the other weaves over to the sofa with hir, both collapse while ze is fed and patted back down. Stay on the sofa the rest of the night.
Day 3: Most of the morning and afternoon was spent recovering from the long drive and then ze finally met part of my family that night. Ze was full of chatter and what we call “crab bubbles” and then crashed hard.
We got to visit with some friends briefly that evening, and wind down almost like regular people, except we had to keep checking on LB since we didn’t bring a monitor.
Day 4 was the most intense day. We had a morning to early afternoon engagement, a small reunion, and ze decided that since we had to be up at 715 anyway, why not get up at 620 and stay up?
Thanks to, again, SoCal traffic, we didn’t get home til after 3, and then it was back out again for a dinner. This dragged on far longer than was civilized for a tiny infant and ze passed out in the car. Blessedly, this was the night of the long sleep. Ze actually stayed asleep for 8 hours. Hadn’t happened before, hasn’t happened since. But boy did we need it.
Day 5 was one last hurrah gathering of family and arguably the best one. LB was whisked away by Grandma, only to be seen again when hungry, then whooshed off to a cuddle and feeding with Grandpa. Aunts and Great Grandma finished up the rounds of baby passing and ze fell asleep in PiC’s arms. I don’t see this branch of the family often enough and boy do I miss them. Ze was also surprised with a handful of amazingly timed baby gifts: all things ze needed and I hadn’t even thought to mention them to anyone. Psychic family, I tell ya.
Logistics!
Packing. We were pretty sure that we overpacked but didn’t want to take the risk that going too minimalist would be to my detriment. I can only handle so much manual stuff, before you factor in the stress of travel, disrupted routines, and the energy drain of socializing.
Turns out we didn’t need: the spare cozy blanket (we brought two heavy/cozy and one light blankets, 2 were used regularly); the baby carriers (we were too tired to wear hir); a picnic blanket. I could also have packed about 10 fewer diapers but let’s never skimp on packing diapers because I don’t want to pay full price or live with regrets.
Feeding the Bean. I planned to do combination pumping and formula for hir feeding so we could be flexible. Turned out we didn’t need most of our handy formula packets. When I didn’t have enough prepumped milk packed, I nursed hir, and most days I was able to get nearly 20 oz in just two pumping sessions. Really quite convenient.
Costs. The car rental was nearly $400, and of course we had to fill up about three times. We stayed at places with breakfast provided and packed enough food and drinks along in our cooler so that we only paid for takeout twice. The convenience of not having to cram everything into our smaller cars and risking things falling over on Seamus or fighting with squeezing stuff into every inch was so worth that outlay.
April 20, 2015
PiC took a generous holiday last year to be home with us and, despite working through most of it, I was immensely spoiled.
He was an absolute superman! He only left me the chores I wanted: laundry, cooking, correspondence and gifts, all financials, tending to work and hobbies. Everything else was taken care of.
He was all over it: furniture related acquisition/building/maintenance, Craigslisting, car maintenance and upkeep, reorganizing, dog stuff (usually my specialty but on temporary suspension), keeping the house clean (always his specialty).
Oh, and feeding me fruit. He’s excellent at feeding me fruit regularly. It was great. Very nearly the ideal split of home life, with me continuing to work and him doing stuff he wanted to get done and in a timely manner.
It got me thinking that, despite loving having my quiet time and space, this suggests that my once upon a time dream of being the breadwinner and having PiC be the SAHD and house manager isn’t so farfetched after all. I just assumed that I couldn’t bear that much time in close quarters even with my beloved spouse but it turns out we enjoy each other’s company more than I realized!
The other piece of the puzzle is that after all this time with Little Bean, I do not like giving over hir care to someone else. I want to be the one hugging, cuddling, feeding and even changing hir. Failing that, PiC should be doing it. This is an odd sense of possessiveness (MY BABY) that I never expected to feel, or at least not this strongly, and the desire to be home with my child is utterly foreign.
Mind, I do not want to be a stay at home mom, I’d be terrible at that. Physically, I’m simply not up to it. And eventually, I’d get antsy to do other things, my brain would go right to mush and my temper would fray. I’m not the full time SAHM anyone would want. (Though, when I’m hung up on an idea that won’t develop properly, the idea of just cuddling LB while I think is awfully appealing. I am pretending that ze isn’t heavier than a sack of potatoes and demanding full time attention.)
I want to be home and available to LB, to continue to work and have my family be together.
What would it would take?
1. We need enough money to cover both our salaries and the full cost of good health insurance. Health insurance has forever been a main reason I’ve worked so hard. You can’t afford to be without it when you have a chronic illness. Sure, we could live on less but a) I don’t want to, b) we support more than just ourselves and I can’t force Dad to cut costs more (YET), c) savings is not optional.
2. Potential to grow as a professional and therefore potential to grow my salary further.
3. Be location independent, saving my energy for the important stuff.
I’m not an ideas and vision sort of person, I’m a Make it Happen sort so getting started isn’t the challenge, it’s coming up with a project in the first place. I’m an excellent troubleshooter but creativity isn’t my strongest suit.
Sidebar: I both admire and envy friends who knew exactly what they wanted, whether it was to stay home and rock the Best Mama At Home thing, or to get back into the fray at six weeks and rock the Career Lady thing, and were able to execute the plan.
Since my body is a jerk, a lot, things are a bit more complicated but this has my brain ticking again.
It could be time for a major career change once I lay out the details of what we’d be willing to take on and risk, or another change altogether for the same result. Let’s see!
Are you considering any major life changes?
April 15, 2015
A. I don’t like giving feedback, it feels confrontational.
B. I shouldn’t have to give you feedback or tell you what I’m thinking. You’re my right hand, you should already know.
C. Why are you doing [what you thought was your job], you’re not responsible for that! You need to be doing [some other thing you were never informed of]!
These are just a few of the gems delivered by Past Terrible Managers in my Past Work Life.
Bad managers drive me more than a little bit ’round the bend. Not all managers became managers because they were actually good at managing people, they were usually promoted for doing their own job well. When that happens, either they learn how to do it well, or you get a dingleberry of a supervisor and that’s just bad times.
As a manager, past and present, giving feedback to staff, or really anybody, without either feeling or being confrontational is such a necessary skill. If you need someone to change, they need to KNOW that you need them to change! Relying on strategy C above is such nonsense.
I understand that delivering criticism feels fraught, it’s not always comfortable, and empathetic people who have had bad experiences on the receiving end of feedback don’t want to perpetuate that cycle. That does not relieve you of a key aspect of your duty as a manager.
When a manager tells me they just don’t want to give feedback, I often ask if they enjoy being irritated, resented and subpar. Because that’s the situation they’re setting up: their employee will continue to do things wrong, this will reflect badly on the employee and reflect badly on you. Also, it’s likely that the tolerance of poor performance by that employee will have a sinking effect on morale for the rest of the team.
And conversely, what would it be like to be the hapless employee who doesn’t know they’re doing things wrong or inefficiently, and catching flak for something they don’t even realize is a problem? Don’t be that jerk boss who sows confusion, induces anxiety, and breeds resentment!
As I said, this is a learned skill. I didn’t come by it naturally, especially since I’m both introverted and at least a little anti-social.
So, how do I give constructive feedback?
1. I treat feedback sessions as conversations.
This isn’t intended as a confrontation but girding yourself for a battle almost certainly turns it into one. Be prepared, just don’t assume it has to be that difficult.
First time offenses? I ask them to explain to me how and why they’re doing X so that I understand where they’re coming from. It’s possible that they’ll identify a weakness in the existing protocol, or the training documentation. In other words, this could be a learning opportunity for me too.
After I solicit some perspective from them, if it doesn’t change my mind, then I explain what we need them to do and why.
Repeat offenses, if the thing is non-negotiable? I remind them of previous conversations, and ask what, if anything, is preventing them from performing their duties as asked. This is not permission to stand their ground, this is checking whether I need to be doing another aspect of my job: removing barriers to their performance. Reiterate that I need them to do it this way, and follow up as needed.
2. Understand that your goal is improvement, not chastisement.
Even if they’re on a PIP, the end goal is improvement of the work situation, whether that’s ultimately a firing or a mediocre employee understanding what’s really needed from them and turning a corner.
When frustrated by an undesirable outcome, I’ve seen managers rage and rant at their staff. What’s the point? That intimidates some, irritates others, but rarely ever produces results. Besides, it’s rude and disrespectful. Respect goes both ways and is more easily lost than earned.
3. Take the emotion out of it.
This is about the job, remain professional. It’s not your feelings or their feelings or likes or dislikes or any of that other stuff. It’s not personal. That doesn’t mean be a robot! It just means don’t derail the conversation. Focus on the thing you want improved and find a way to fix it. If someone is causing a problem, then figure out a way to fix that but don’t make it personal.
No one benefits from going several rounds in the blame game.
There’s no magic bullet, and I’m not the perfect manager, but I try to address my weaknesses. The least we can do is help people do the same. After all, it’s your job.
:: What ridiculous things have you heard from management?
:: What did you love in a good manager?
April 13, 2015
Is it ironic to anyone else that one of the first things you have to look for when you’re expecting, assuming you haven’t decided that one of you will stay home with the kid(s), is childcare? I mean, you’re going through all that trouble to bake and birth the child and then we have to farm out their care to some degree.
I say this with absolutely no judgment at all, I have never wanted to give up my professional career to stay at home with the kids a day in my life so I know it’s part of the cost of my choice but it sure does feel counterintuitive. I enthusiastically support the idea of Doting Dad PiC staying home if we could swing it but since we’re not quite there yet, sitters and daycare are part of our reality.
Sidebar: I have had friends who chose to stay home after looking over the finances, not because they wanted to do that more, and also SAHP friends who did want to. We have all sorts in our cohort and I respect all those choices equally. /sidebar
The minimum for your bog standard daycare here is a shade under $2000/month for full time, five days a week, maybe including a snack but usually not. They don’t come standard with: diapers and wipes, hot or full meals or snacks, or video monitoring.
You might think I’m nuts expecting that last but it is becoming more common in the LA area and that’s one thing they may be doing right. For my money and sanity, I’m not leaving my kid with strangers without some kind of oversight – I’ve read too many (horror) news stories about abuse. Just the other day there was a 2 month old killed by her sitter’s 11 year old kid. ELEVEN. I nearly threw up reading that and don’t tell me that hormones have anything to do with that reaction other than the hormone of their world will BURN if someone tries to abuse my Little Bean.
Right. Back to the point.
In the Bay Area, full time daycare is bogglingly expensive.
Our mornings are hard enough that I hate the idea and the logistics of dropping LB off at some location with strangers and no video surveillance for the day. This is further reinforced by an unexpectedly strong sense of not wanting to let hir out of my sight. We need other options at least for the first few months that I’m back to work.
We do have some flexibility here in that I can work remotely for a period of time. I initially wanted to hire a couple mother’s helpers but they’re charging nearly or just as much as experienced nannies in this area for very little experience. I’m talking about $18-25/hour for 0-2 years of experience, and $20-45/hour for 10-30 years of experience.
Indeed.com shows that full time nannies in the SF area are typically charging 35% more than the rest of the country’s average and run about $30-40K per year. Obviously, we do not have that kind of Silicon Valley/SF dot com money.
We had a frustrating trial with a mother’s helper who came highly recommended. She’s great with toddlers but had to be told four times in the same day to check LB’s diaper when ze cries on waking from a nap – my patience doesn’t extend to repeating basic instructions several times a day. In the end, we decided that it’d be worth it to try and find someone with more extensive experience. We scoured care.com, urbansitter.com, and sittercity.com for both, and they were all three kind of a crapshoot.
After we interviewed a handful of providers it appears that the people posting profiles use the listed rate ranges like a weird kind of target practice.
You’d see:
* Will take up to 3 kids
* Comfortable with pets/dogs
* Will take care of sick children
* XX years of experience
* Will drive kids to and from school and activities
* Will cook and clean, do laundry
* $15-20/hour
I’d expect that $20/hr would be for more than one kid, with lots of other work thrown in, and $15/hr would be for much less work, which is what we’re looking for. 1 kid, very minimal clean-up, feeding, diapering, and putting down to sleep.
Instead, all were charging $20/hr minimum, with paid sick leave, holidays and 2 weeks of vacation, and are horrified by Seamus. Oh and are utter Awkward Aardvarks with the baby.
If you’ve never seen someone hold a floppy necked infant for the first or second time, it goes something like this:
Here’s the baby!
*ginger or wary acceptance* They sort of stick the baby into one side with one arm, bracing as if for impact, while most of the baby remains free. Baby wiggles. Switch to the other side. Then back again. They grimace and adjust their hold. Baby, slipping, flails an arm or a leg. They adjust again. Baby squeaks and writhes indignantly. They start. Baby looks up at them, and their head suddenly flops forward. *thunk* Eyes wide, they return the baby.
It wasn’t quite that bad with the people we met but it was close.
The one touting 30+ years of experience with newborns kept asking us to show her how we hold the baby, adjusting her from one floppy position to another, insisting that my (already incredibly opportunistic) child was unhappy because ze “wants to be held the way hir parents hold hir.” The picture of grace, I managed not to laugh in her face. Yes, of course, ze knows how hir parents hold hir. That’s why ze just rejected me in favor of Grammy who cuddled, rocked AND cooed at hir for a weekend. Don’t tell me what my baby prefers. Ze’ll take the best offer going. And the best offer was NOT that nanny.
One didn’t come near the baby and told me that vitamins are a lie that doctors tell us to make them hyper. The origins or the why of this theory, we’ll never know.
I was starting to think we’d never find anyone but we took a shot with someone who looked less qualified on paper and it was well worth it. She actually holds the baby like she’s met one before and had that parentese down pat. LB was cooing at her in 90 seconds or less. It remains to be seen how well it works out on an ongoing basis but we’re doing a trial with her.
At full time employment, this carer’s rate will run just a touch below our previously very-(un)precisely budgeted allocation for childcare.
April 10, 2015
Every single year, no matter how organized I think I was the previous year, I wasn’t. Then I’m having to dig for hours to find and sort all the necessary documentation for my tax filing. This year’s even more complicated than last because we have rental property in the mix, so I was determined not to repeat a decade of errors.
This year, finally, FINALLY, it seems like I might have developed a good system.
Throughout the year:
I keep a running spreadsheet of rental property income and expenses which will be matched against the property management company’s 1099.
I keep another running spreadsheet of all deductible expenses as they’re incurred: mileage, non-reimbursed business expenses, donations.
At tax time:
I save all files with category information. For example, a 1099 from Ally Bank would be named: Income 1099-M Ally Bank.pdf. A donation receipt is saved as: Deduction Donation Goodwill 01-09-15.pdf.
Sorted by name, all my income and deduction forms will naturally group together, and I can easily combine them into a single PDF if necessary.
One spreadsheet to organize them all!
I match all the forms and receipts against my running spreadsheet and then pull that information into a Summary Spreadsheet for the tax year. I also compare this to the previous year’s Summary to confirm everything’s there, or if I forgot to download Bank of HadAGoodBonus’s 1099-INT form. Our banking changes year to year but not a ton so this is a good way to double check.
Any relevant notes about life changes and people-related information are included in that spreadsheet: names of people filing and our dependents, any changes from the previous year, etc.
Since I recently started using an accountant for all the legwork, my concession to the value of my time, it’s been even more imperative to make sure all the information is there and easy to understand. I generally catch a minor mistake or two when I review any prepared taxes, mine or otherwise, so my very detail-obsessed brain knows that I shouldn’t be handing over a virtual shoebox of receipts if I don’t want a horked up return filed.
Alas, it’s to be another extension for us this year, but I have hopes that next year we’ll be filing by Jan 30th, just like the good old days!
:: Do you have an amazing organizing system? Tell me all about it!
