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 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:Â 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?
January 7, 2015
Reading Parenting with chronic pain on Slate was a huge wrenching reality check for me.
There’s nothing new in there. No surprises about how chronic pain plus the rigors of parenting go down. Nothing that I haven’t worried over and discussed to death with PiC. There were many many days where I just couldn’t see committing to parenthood because of it. But reading another chronic pain mother’s experience, after the child has arrived and is older, is a bit of a kick in the gut nonetheless.
Chronic pain has now dominated 2/3 of my life. There is no cure and very few effective ameliorating treatments for what I have other than trying not to “overdo it” (which is to say, do ANYthing that resembles having a real life) on bad days.
I have no reason to think that it’ll get any better. Parenting was always going to be a challenge but parenting with only 65% of normal function, at best, well, that’s going to be a hell of a thing.
I wonder if this is a huge mistake for LB’s sake.  My parents, in some very real ways, shattered my late teens and most of my 20s with their financial and health instability and poor decisions. Am I setting LB up for an equally difficult path?
Obviously you could argue that no one knows what tomorrow brings and that terrible things could happen to any healthy parent as well but
A) most people don’t really actually get hit by a bus so that “anything could happen” argument holds very little water here practically speaking (and anything could STILL happen but magically getting better is not likely) and
B) I already have an existing chronic and limiting condition that has only gotten progressively worse over the years. This isn’t a game of What If, it’s a When and How Badly will this deteriorate?
We’ve committed.
We are committed. There’s no turning back and I don’t think we would choose to if we could turn back time. (I don’t know. I just don’t think we would. And maybe that’s just because I’m stupid. But it’s highly likely that LB will be an only child if we don’t adopt.)
But this just reminds me that I’m not paranoid, that the sort of lurking fear that I’ll be crippled “someday” is not being dramatic given the number of days I can only just exist.
This is why I’ve always insisted that our emergency savings are UNTOUCHABLE. And our savings rate must NEVER fall below 25%. When I get too sick or broken to work, I need to know we won’t be falling back on the charity of … who exactly? No one in my family is fit as support even were they inclined to provide it, the few who might be in a financial position to help are terrible people and I’d never ever ask them for help. His family’s got their hands full already.
Simply put, we must maintain solid financial health because my physical health is at best, average, on a good day.
January 5, 2015
I was reviewing the Investment House paperwork, vaguely remembering that I’ve got an old home warranty on the place and that it’d be good to make sure I renew that in time.
Good darn thing I did!
Old Warranty was expiring in a month’s time. Meanwhile, looking at a quote for the New Warranty company (the one my property manager works with and recommends as being reliable payers), I discovered that a new policy with them would only come into force 2 weeks after they received payment.
The timing on that would have been really annoying if something broke down that would have been covered and I’d missed that crucial detail.
Aside from that, though – there were things from the home inspection that were noted as being broken. Nothing was critical but the tenants were so balky about the inspection and walk-throughs that it completely slipped my mind that I’d wanted to fix those items.
I’m going to have some of the repairs arranged before the warranty is up. I’m sure it’s going to be a bit of an inconvenience to the tenants, but it makes more sense to me to have everything in good working order when it’ll still be covered for a base service fee. Otherwise, the new warranty won’t cover it and then the whole cost may be coming out of their security deposit because it was broken during their tenancy, they never reported or fixed it themselves, and tried to keep us from seeing it during the inspection.
Some of the items may have to anyway, but I don’t feel the need to wait and keep their whole deposit if I can deal with the problem now.
Would you find that unreasonable? As a previous tenant myself, I can certainly understand being annoyed by some scheduling inconveniences, but I’d prefer that over having to pay for the cost myself.
January 1, 2015
2014 highlights
SPENDING
The good: We can do a fair bit of luxury spending: travel, paying a little more for good quality things rather than settling for the cheapest (and lower quality), eating out more than usual to conserve energy.
We’ve considered a new (to us) car but we’re holding off for now. We’ll wait til the new fancy edition that PiC wants is at least a couple years old and available on the used market. That also means paying cash so I’d like to have that on hand.
The bad: I still feel we spend too much of our incomes (about 75% of it) but we live in both a relatively HCOLA and we pay at least $17,000 annually for my dad’s upkeep, more or less depending on shenanigans.
SAVING
The good: We maxed out PiC’s 401(k) contributions.
I made a last minute 2013 IRA contribution and did the same for 2014. (Last minute because I plain forgot.)
We continued to save 25% the whole year, and started a new savings account for LB.
Our side money venture went really well in Q4.
The bad: I don’t have a retirement plan through the new company so I intended to set up my own. Researched, yes. Decisioned, no. So that’s a fail.
The I don’t know yet: We expanded our portfolio into real estate this year.
Since it took me all of Q1 to properly collect our net worth data, I don’t feel like I can really extol our progress accurately on that front. (more…)
December 29, 2014
Do you cook with your partner?
I read “How Cooking With My Boyfriend Showed Me Our Relationship Was Toxic” and in between shaking my head over the clearly slothful boyfriend who expected to be served and catered to, I realized, oh wait, PiC and I can’t cook together anymore.
You know I adore him, obviously, and this doesn’t affect our actual relationship, but we cannot be co-chefs.
He can be my sous chef, he’s all over the grocery shopping as necessary and the dishwashing as well, but otherwise, he gets the boot when I’m cooking. And likewise if he’s cooking, I just set out the ingredients for him, get out of the kitchen and do the clearing up after.
We just don’t work well together! He’s a backseat chef, questioning whether I should be doing or not doing something a certain way, which drives me nuts. I tell to “just shush and dice the onions. I don’t care what they look like as long as it’s cut up!” which drives him nuts.
See, for all that I’m a Type A in other things, the kitchen is where I get to be haphazard, laissez-faire and not really follow directions fully. Just like he defies the GPS’s recommendations, I routinely take only what I want from recipes and with a little guidance from Twitter, barrel along my happy way. That also means I don’t want to answer many questions that aren’t important to the taste. (To be fair, sometimes how a veggie is sliced actually does make a difference but never does the size of the minced garlic matter.)
He, on the other hand, and he needs structure and specifications, dammit! If he could get measurement requests down to the millimeter, he’d be in sous chef heaven.
Basically it came down to this: unlike other things about the house, neither of us could fundamentally compromise on our styles. So, out ye get, non-primary chef.
My firm rule about separation in the kitchen was an ongoing joke, mostly him ribbing me over my refusal to deal with his running commentary, until one day ….
We were having brunch with a dear friend who is, in many ways, just like him. So, as he tried to slice the bread, she was hanging over his shoulder scolding him for how much it was getting squished. As he started to fry up, she was at his elbow, surveying, heck, I don’t know, his spatula technique? She actually rattled him enough that he spilled some egg! He’s had his occasional kitchen snafus but never when there are witnesses. That’s also my area.
True to form, I sat in the other room working, chuckling over the hollering (mostly hers) and the fuming (mostly him).
Honestly, I thought the best part was that she didn’t know how irritating she was being. I was very wrong. The best part was actually later in the day when he turned to me and said: oh my God!
Didn’t even need context, I knew immediately what he meant. I started to laugh, and said, “Yeah. But it’s about time you got a dose of your own medicine.”
The look on his face was priceless. “NO WAY. That’s what it’s like?!?”
“YEEEEEP. This is why you stay out of my kitchen.”
“Oh. My God.”
“Yeah. Seriously. Stay out of my kitchen.”
Love, y’all. It’s also about boundaries.