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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January 23, 2015
We have progress!
PiC really stepped up under (self imposed) pressure.
I’d set my expectations to “sensible and moderation” when we first started the purging and organizing because we’d started so late and my energy levels never came back.
My internal ideal was that we could eliminate 75% of the crap that was piled up to the ceiling in one closet, but I kept my yap shut because PRIORITIES.
But, perhaps feeling the heat of LB’s impending arrival even more strongly than I, he pushed himself to knock off so much on these seemingly never ending internal lists in his head that this place has been transformed. We had some ruffled feathers for a bit, with those self imposed stress levels, but we’re back on an even keel now so I can feel free to be rather impressive how much has been done around here.
- We’ve offloaded so much stuff on Craigslist and made back a good bit of money!
- We donated a ton of good items that we wouldn’t be able to sell in the increasingly short period of time left to us. We found a local homeless shelter that helps families get back on their feet so much of these goods are going there.
- We received duplicates of used baby gear so we’re just going to keep one of each and donate the rest to the homeless shelter since they’re all in really good shape after 1 child’s worth of use.
- He actually fixed our wacko fan! We thought it was needing replacement but nope.
- I’ve picked over a couple boxes of used clothing and we’ve done some baby laundry in advance.
- My mini-office is all set up with storage and stuff.
We’ve spent a shiny nickel at the Container Store on organization. This involved about a dozen trips, all told, between buying things to try and returning things that didn’t work. After PiC’s first trip, I bought a big gift card at an 8% discount, and combined that with ordering the stuff through ebates for cashback and their 10% off sale.
Total we’ve spent about $300 between outfitting: the kitchen with shelves, hanging organizers in one closet, and hooks and doodads for both the bathroom and two closets. Everything was on sale at least so that makes me feel better about not maximizing every single possible discount – time was obviously a factor in these projects.
January 21, 2015
Mrs. Micah briefly returns, like Godzilla from the sea with a rant. She was chatting with Revanche when Revanche ran across an article that pissed Mrs. Micah off so much she needed to respond. The piece was written by Robert Brokamp on Get Rich Slowly, “How to save for a down payment on a house fast.” Now, I’ve been out of the PF blogging “business” for a solid 4 years, but *harumphing sound* back in my day, GRS wouldn’t have published this kind of tripe (just tried tripe in pho, tripe turns out to be delicious, must come up with new metaphor).
This piece is crap from start to finish. First, let’s start with the premise. The couple got married and got pregnant pretty quickly. Either it wasn’t on purpose (accidents happen, even with birth control) or it was a “let’s see what happens.” In the latter case, this shouldn’t have been a “save fast” thing. You decide that after getting married you’ll be opening up the possibility of creating a new human? If you’re being financially responsible, you take into account all the possibilities, like needing to move.
But whether planned or not, the premise here is entirely flawed. A one-bedroom apartment is legally (in many places) too small for parents and a child, though with an infant in the crib and with everything else going smoothly, one may not have to leave instantly. Even if you can’t stay in your current place, that doesn’t mean you should instantly start house shopping.
If you’re going to start this kind of dramatic, unplanned lifestyle inflation once your kid arrives, you’re starting down a really bad financial path. Will you need a bigger car next? A preschool you can’t really afford?
Particularly awful suggestions from the list include:
1. Get help from family. This only works if you have wealthy and financially secure family. You know what I’ll inherit? I have no idea. If my dad lives another couple years max (at 70), maybe a tidy sum. If he lives another couple decades, I may have to support him. And my dad is comfortably upper-middle class…but not wealthy. Only the truly wealthy have that kind of money to safely throw around. I could ask my dad for money for a down payment, but that might well bite us all in the butt in a decade’s time.
4. Use IRAs. What. …you even admit, Brokamp, that this “almost hurts” to type. Yes, you’re absolutely allowed to take money out of various IRAs w/o penalties if you’re a first-time homebuyer. You can withdraw the money you put into a Roth because it’s post-tax. But are you going to let your lifestyle inflation choice take away from your future financial security?
5. Sell your body. Really out of left field. Unless you plan to sell your eggs (not an option if pregnant), this isn’t the kind of thing to get you big money fast. Medical testing carries inherent risks, it’s almost impossible to participate in the more lucrative tests if you’re also holding down a job (I looked into some at NIH), and…really? This is advice for someone who’s holding down two part-time jobs and finding other sources of income, not for someone getting a mortgage. Yay you got your wisdoms pulled for free, but that’s not really helping the goal here.
6. Get help from your boss. ahahahhahahahahahahahah you must be male. Heck, maybe it’s a good time to milk that male privilege for all it’s worth and take advantage of the biases men receive when starting a family. But be aware that your female colleagues are taking negative hits when they have children–in perception, in pay, in everything. This isn’t just the dozens I’ve stories I’ve heard from friends, this is study upon study backing up the stories. Start with “The Motherhood Penalty,” thanks Nicole and Maggie for that link.
Relevant reading: Have I lost my fire?
Negotiating a raise because of life decisions you made, however, strikes me as being the opposite of being a good asset to the company (although some companies will play along with it, at least for “family men”). You don’t deserve more money from your work because you chose to get married/have a baby/buy a house/etc. You deserve it because of the quality of your work.
Relevant reading: Terrible workplaces: A blast from the past
How someone could type any of these without stopping and saying “wait, do we really need to buy a house right now?” is beyond me.
What you can do:
A. Get a bigger apartment. Even if you want to buy a house, you don’t have to do it the instant the baby comes. A 2-bedroom apartment is plenty big enough for most kids. Maybe when you have a second kid or when your kid is getting older, you’ll want a bigger space, but for the first 5 years, minimum, your kid doesn’t need a big space.
(Yards are really nice as options, but a public park will do.)
B. Rent a house. If you really, really have to have a house, look into your rental market. Voila, now you have more space and a yard.
Now that you’re in a place where you’re no longer rushed? Start saving for that down-payment. Put time into planning where you want to buy.
The one decent piece of advice in the list, IMO, was:
2. Buy a fixer-upper that doesn’t need immediate fixing. When my dad downsized after my mom’s death, he sold our family house as a “fixer-upper” because he didn’t want to put in the time and money to make it good-as-new. The house had a good 25 years of family living put into it. Everything worked, but the paint was old, the linoleum scratched, and it needed maybe $30k of work to make it pristine according to realtor standards.
Once you do have the money to buy a house, that kind may be a great starter house for you and your family. If you let some of the more dramatic stuff go until the kid is older, then it’s not as much of a crisis when they draw on the walls behind your back or take safety-scissors to the carpet. But unless you get a great deal on that house, you can still hold off on buying it until you are ready.
You have at least a couple years of your child not having a clue that they’re not living in a house. Where you are, where they live, will be home. Be smart. Don’t mortgage their future buying into the habits of a society that’s drowning in debt.
January 19, 2015
You might have heard of MOLESKINE+MILK. I didn’t until I ran across a deal on MyPoints, and maybe that should have been a red flag, but I let the MOLESKINE name and the initial look of the site lure me into buying a voucher.
Likes
The book binding was awesome.
The paper quality was lovely: thick, high quality glossy paper.
The book was delivered a little bit faster than I expected since they didn’t communicate a real expected delivery date (so I guess this is also a dislike because if I were ordering a gift, I’d need to know when it was going to arrive).
Dislikes
You can work in the expanded page view which takes up your whole screen or your regular browser. Both choices turn out to be frustrating. I always prefer working in my regular browser, but it turns out that you can’t scroll to the relevant stuff at the bottom of the screen to make selections of the style or color sets at the beginning of the book. There’s also no easy way to change your viewing selection when you figure this out so then you’ve got to get back to the homepage and start over. Frustratingly you may also find, as I did, that the full expanded page view STILL doesn’t show you all the options at the bottom of the page but you’re SOL as you STILL can’t scroll. Good luck figuring out how to select your color palette.
Image upload. It takes forever to upload high-resolution files, and you can’t reorganize or filter them in any really sensible or useful way. How they get uploaded is the order in which they appear.
Creating pages and layouts. You can’t shift a created Page 2 to Page 12 if you decide it fits better there. If you add a page, you have to add a full 4 page spread after the spread you’re working on. If you decide to delete a page, the whole spread has to go. It would be MUCH better if you could add 2 pages at a time or delete one at a time and sort out the total number of pages at the end when you’re Previewing to order the book.
Using the images. The used photos are marked with a check in the Edit pop-up box but you’re limited to the 9 images per screen view – they don’t have a handy way to scroll through the images along the bottom of the page so that you can grab all photos of a particular theme while you’re working on a particular spread. You can also only add photos one picture at a time to a spread, so if your layout requires 4 pictures, you have to click on Edit Image for every picture. Shutterfly, again, and other companies do this MUCH better.
You can’t delete a photo from the page without deleting it from the entire uploaded content menu. Instead you have to go into Edit and select a replacement photo right then and there, so you can’t just decide to remove the misplaced photo and come back to the spread later.
The spread options are extremely limited with only a few layout options per grouping of 1, 2, 3, 4, etc photos per page.
You can’t customize the image sizes in those layouts. You can only pick the image and increase the size from 100% to 200%.
You can’t decrease the size to better fit a layout, you can’t crop, brighten or edit the photos at all in the interface. If you didn’t know this and had uploaded all your photos in bulk, then your pictures aren’t going to be of uniform brightness or hue, you have to have edited them all beforehand. And you don’t have any real guide as to how to edit the sizes other than knowing they can only be square, landscape or portrait but if you load a larger landscape image into a square box, you can just shift it up, down, left, or right but you can’t make it smaller so the whole of the image fits.
There’s no option to fade images and create backgrounds, of course, so the really cool thing that PiC did with fading a full landscape photo with images on top for our other photo book? No can do.
Inviting contributors. They should really let you set the type of permissions a contributor can have or at least have more than one level of permissions where someone can basically be a co-owner and make independent decisions vs someone who can make decisions that have to be approved. It was immensely frustrating to PiC to be given contributor access but have to have all his edits require approval.
Overall
It’s a neat idea but on the whole, my experience with it was incredibly frustrating. I’m glad that we have our memory book but getting to that point was so time consuming, I couldn’t do it again.
It’s a shame, the books are beautiful and the interface looks like it’s going to be modern and easy to use but honestly working in Shutterfly or one of those more common book creation sites will be both much cheaper and much less aggravating.
My book specs: (1) Large 60-page Landscape book
Paid: $50 for the book, $9.99 for shipping to the US.
Full Price Value: $125
There are usually sales and coupons but that may just be during the earlier growth period. I can’t say that I could stand the level of frustration that it takes to complete a full book even for 30-40% off.
January 16, 2015
Thanks to the Cuba announcement causing the market to dip, I had just enough cash set aside to buy *nearly* 100 shares of something before the end of 2014.
That was a bit of a milestone since my very humble 10 share purchase beginnings. I could have transferred more money in to make it an even 100 shares but we had agreed on a certain amount for purchasing 2014 stock and I didn’t want to go back on that or take the few days to wait for a transfer and have the prices go right back up. I only keep cash sitting idle in the account when I’m waiting to make a purchase.
Note: I’m not into timing the market, it’s just that I didn’t have a timeline on buying, this stock dropped below my optimal buy price, so I went with it.
I picked our buy last year, so in the name of fairness I went with PiC’s preference. My turn this year! And I won’t necessarily wait for Christmas proper. Christmas can come early, after all! 🙂
January 14, 2015
As a veteran guest of baby showers, when our turn came around, I wasn’t excited about having one and happily, PiC agreed.
No Shower
My frequent attendance in the past was always out of love and support for the guest of honor, but I quickly came to loathe the traditional baby shower. There was always awkward mingling among (not with!) guests who don’t know each other and so only focus on the guest of honor. Then the whole affair involves fancy color coordinated food, decorations, and gifts for the games. Oh the GAMES. I haven’t met a baby shower game that I didn’t hate. There are probably a few out there that are fun but they have yet to be discovered. It’s not just too much face time for an introvert, but it’s also sort of appalling from the social ineptness point of view.
Aside from that, it felt too much like a gift grab, especially not long after we finally formally had our “wedding”, and even more so when someone made remarks to that effect (“this is how you get all the stuff you want!” Ew.). It’s kind of gross to ask people to travel again, unless we did which, frankly, the idea of flying or driving back to Southern CA again as I’ve become hugely unwieldy was completely unappealing – just to give us gifts? No, that’s ok, I’d rather save the time and spend my own adult-earned money on the things we really needed.
My feeling is that if we can’t afford the basic start up costs on LB, then we have no business having a kid. And it’s easier to keep the accumulation of stuff down to a manageable level when you’re actively being frugal about what you buy.
So we planned to skip the shower entirely and used the baby registries as shopping lists with a bonus completion discount at the end.
Oh, yes shower?
Then a good friend insisted on doing *something*, vehemently enough that I got the message: this was more for her than for me 🙂 So I graciously agreed on three conditions, while maintaining full veto power: no games, no fuss, no pants.
The no games rule was easy.
The no fuss rule meant I didn’t want anyone feeling obligated to give us gifts or do anything too out of the ordinary so no formal invitations, nothing like that.
The no pants rule is my favorite: whatever she planned, it couldn’t require people to do anything that required putting pants on to leave the house. It really had to be simple and no fuss.
She actually came through brilliantly with ideas to virtually organize a few projects that focused on friends and family and sending well wishes, allowing people to send some limited gifts if they wanted but entirely avoiding asking people to pay to outfit our newest little life adventure.
After some discussion of baby showers over at One Frugal Girl’s, she suggested that we share a registry to those who really wanted to send us something. I did end up sharing our registry with the few people who specifically actually asked for it and I don’t regret not sharing it far and wide. We’ve still been showered with plenty of unlooked for generosity.
Unexpected gifts from friends
One dear friend of mine had the registry and went hog wild. LB will be owing her quite a few thanks, as the one thank you card from me just doesn’t feel like it’s enough.
PiC’s friends kinda creep me out sometimes. He and I were just discussing a child seat thing he was interested in getting, I had made some semi-curious noises, but we had not agreed to buy it. Two days after that conversation, a box arrived at our front step. It was that seat, in the color I would have picked! I texted him, did you already buy that seat???
What seat?
The one you showed me 2 days ago.
No….
I popped open the box to discover that one of his friends with whom he had NOT discussed this with had sent us a gift. MINDREADER.
A couple of my old friends delivered boxes of used clothes. Perfect. I don’t think LB needs all that much clothing and a couple boxes jam packed with hand me downs was just the ticket. It gives me a chance to weed out too much of any one color. To the dismay of some old school relatives who cannot fathom not putting boys in blue and girls in pink, I was adamant that LB will NOT be sporting gender role colors, the wardrobe will be evenly distributed across all colors. I loathed pink as a child and it drove me bananas when I was forced into them as a kid. LB can wear whatever colors are happy-making and hide the blood (that’s why I liked black and grey), but I refuse to let stereotypes start this early.
Another group of friends pitched in to get some accessories for LB + PiC so they could go running together.
….
So PiC can take LB running, rather.
We’d agonized so long over the car seat and stroller selection that would fit our budget and work for my needs that we still hadn’t picked or bought anything after more than 5 months of discussion. Fortuitously, as it turns out. We ran into some old friends who had just the day before transitioned to new car seats and they offered us their practically new infant car seat – amazing timing as we hadn’t seen them in a year and it didn’t even occur to us their kid was ready for an upgrade! We were grateful to take that home and PiC picked up an extra seat base for cheap on Craigslist.
Gifts we gave ourselves
Permission to relax (mentally, anyway)
Formal photo sessions. I had hesitated over this but PiC and I agreed that it could be nice to have some photos of this huge change in our lives, before LB arrives, and after. I’ve always loved Maryam’s photos (of Hi+Hello Blog) and was thrilled when we unexpectedly happened into each other again and set up a photo shoot.
Gender Bender
One of PiC’s coworkers suggested that they throw him a shower, but a friend-coworker who knew we were trying to keep things low maintenance headed it off at the pass. I don’t mind that at all, I think it was lovely of him to remember what we wanted, but I do wish he hadn’t suggested that the reason he’d veto it was because they’re “mainly for women”. I think this is an area where we would do well with being co-ed, if only to get me off the hook for attending all the time! 😉
January 12, 2015
Life with DOG!
I can’t seem to get a dog that doesn’t turn into PiC’s dog. Within days it was clear that Seamus didn’t want PiC to be the alpha, he just wanted to be Daddy’s favorite. When PiC went away for a weekend, he pulled a classic Doggle, moping his way into bed at 7 pm: life isn’t worth living, I’m just going to bed early and maybe he’ll be here when I wake up.
So I get to be alpha in that I’m the discipline parent and PiC is the beloved parent. Which means I can always get him to take his meds, cooperate with a bath, ear cleaning, or wound care, and go to bed when I say, but any time PiC might be around, he’s a much much happier dog.
Out of the blue, Seamus decided to violate the no dogs on furniture rule, nearly destroying the slipcover in the process. When he screws up, he goes big!
Medical woes
To date, we’ve spent several hundred on his surgery, and a few more hundred on additional rounds of medications to soothe his skin as we slowly start to figure out what works to keep it happy.
After a rough start involving steroids and a stressed bladder, we went months without incident.
Clever boy tried to outsmart me. Having been scolded every time we hear him licking his paws, he tried to throw me off by licking the air for a while. I was stealth- watching and the second he thought it was safe to lick his actual paw, he was clearly shocked to hear his usual scolding. I don’t want him to aggravate his skin further so we have to regulate that pretty strictly.
His back is looking pretty wonderful, though, so there IS improvement. There are no inflammation, rashes, sores or weeping wounds – hurray!
A Dog and Our Money
I had a brainstorm when the County insisted that we license him, despite his being a foster for now. I’d just paid up for Doggle’s 3-year license this year and they don’t do refunds. But glory-be, they were willing to let Seamus take over the rest of the license! And they were amazingly easy to work with, we did it all by email and it was taken care of in just a few days. I’d be impressed by the efficiency of the local government but it was probably only because the licensing has been farmed out to a company.
January 9, 2015
“You don’t tell me ‘No’, you say ‘No’ to your parents!”
When I was nine, a landlady was prescribing the weirdest diet to fix whatever she thought was wrong with me. The details I remember involved raw eggs, sounded terrible, and possibly was meant to plump me up but I distinctly remember politely hearing her out and then answering truthfully when she wound up the unsolicited diatribe with the demand: so are you going to do it?
“No.”
She nearly burst with indignation! How DARE a scrawny child say she wasn’t going to follow her sage (and totally bogus homeopathic) advice?
She followed up with a lecture on how totally inappropriate it was for me to decline to follow the instructions and how out of line it was (I stopped listening around here to ponder on why someone who was basically a stranger would tell a little kid to defy her parents or feel the right to dispense “medical knowledge” and tell her off for trusting her parents better than a stranger in matters of…. Anything.)
I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong when I looked at Mom’s bemused face. After all, there was nothing wrong in saying No. I hadn’t called the lady a quack or been rude to her. But that was also the first time I’d ever said no to an adult. I had no idea it was going to become such a habit 🙂
In my teens, a dear friend’s dad told me something about parenting that really stuck: one of the hardest moments for kids growing up is to realize that their parents are actually human too, they make mistakes. They’re not gifted with omniscience just because they’re parents. And the moment you, as a child, realize that, your relationship evolves… And that can be painful.
It’s so true.
R-E-S-P-E-C-T
In our culture, “Respect your elders” is one of the highest tenets.
To this day I still can’t call teachers who have become good friends by their first names. It’ll always be “Mr./Mrs./Ms. [X].”
Learning to manage my relationships with adults, including parents and parental fugues, required a great deal of learning to reason, to accept that we will disagree about things –fundamental life changing things– and still love and respect those who are important and disagree with me while walking my own path without their help or approval.
Heck, to this day, my dad still doesn’t know what I do for a living. It’s just completely outside the realm of normalcy in our family. They understand going into medicine (as a doctor or a nurse), engineering, and accounting. And some entrepreneurial things. But I’m the weirdo who went the Humanities route and then even further off the tracks into the professional world. I might as well be a lawyer, it’d make more sense to them 😉
By and large, I always respected my parents and what they taught me based on their life experiences.
As a first generation kid, though, there were more than a few situations in which it would have been a big mistake to follow their guidance. Oftentimes, it seemed to just be down to personality or cultural differences, and it wasn’t always clear who was right, but it was valuable learning when to trust my own instincts and seek other sources of wisdom.
When it came to functioning in the American workplace, the generational gap was the overriding factor and it became most obvious that there were ropes I’d have to learn on my own.
This isn’t a revelation, every new generation has to learn to manage adulthood without training wheels on, but even after years of standing on my own, some lessons still take time to learn. These were my two biggest though:
Don’t stand up for yourself
Then: Dad was always the pacifist in the family, the salve after Mom’s fire, and I had trouble relating to him. I was always frustrated by his lack of action or motivation to act when someone wronged him. When an employee embezzled and basically put them out of business, he felt that it was better to turn the other cheek or “take the high road”. So instead of possibly recouping some of that lost money and staying afloat, my parents had to declare bankruptcy and shut down what had been their livelihood for years. That embezzler screwed us and our long time employees over and I was outraged that Dad refused to fight.
Now: I realize I didn’t know enough about their recordkeeping to know if they could have made a case but it still bothers me that he didn’t fight.
Then: When my sibling was bullied at school, I’m pretty sure the advice was the same: take the high road. By the time it was my turn to get bullied .. Well let’s just say I never waited to get advice on the matter. Even as an 8 year old, I knew I wasn’t going to stand for being literally shoved around and hurt, especially since there were never any official consequences and he never got caught. When our class bully tried to throw me off a platform, he got the biggest punch in the gut I could muster. Years of fighting with my sibling had given me a pretty good right hook and I’m sure the kid, who had at least 30 lbs on me, didn’t have an inkling that was coming. He never laid a hand on me again. My reaction to unwelcome touching, with guys twice my size who would try and force themselves on me when it was clear I didn’t want someone hovering over and hugging me, remained the same throughout the years. No one ever had the temerity to repeat their aggressions after getting a sharp elbow in return but I could NOT understand why they thought it was OK to put their arms around me, uninvited and without permission. (Actually it was clear why they did it, it was a stunt to show off to their friends what they could get away with. Joke was on them, really.) Obviously, I’m not a natural hugger.
Now: Dad recently related an anecdote where he sharply told off his sister for advising my cousins to take the high road on some bullying situation, pointing out that if her grandchild was being pushed around and hurt, would she honestly advise turning the other cheek and keeping quiet?
Either he’s changed his stance or he only wouldn’t go to bat for his own. I don’t know what it was but he’s certainly never advocated standing up for yourself to me, he’s always tried to talk me out of it.
Trust your bosses: they mean well
Right.
Then: When my manipulative boss tried to give me cash for personal use, my parents guessed he was just trying to be nice. But my gut said there was something not kosher in being handed cash out of pocket by a married male boss with tendencies to hold unvoiced expectations over your head. He made it very clear he considered this money a personal gift, but it wasn’t so clear what he expected in return. He certainly wasn’t saying he wasn’t expecting anything nor that it was OK to decline, so from his position of authority over me, it was an incredibly awkward place to be in.
Now: I don’t know if trusting someone in a position of authority is a cultural thing or if it’s the habit of deferring to authority because they can make trouble for you (mine certainly did) but I don’t think I ever asked for their advice when it came to workplace dynamics ever again.
Are you a product of both a culture or generation gap? One or the other?