Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $285 in dividends. Our YTD monthly average is $105.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $775.14 in dividends this month from my stocks portfolio. Our YTD monthly average is $79.18. That’s nowhere near a good FI ratio so we have a long way to go.
Merch. I was hugely excited to have a shirt sale. My first in over a year!
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,886.35; Rural libraries, $346.69.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $435.94 in dividends in September.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,797.23; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Responsibilities
JB has daily chores to do now. The process of getting a habit formed has been painful. The whining, the complaining, the moaning and flopping about! They were easier to train as a 3 year old! But they are perfectly capable of performing the tasks assigned and so we stick to it.
One chore is setting the table. On a day I wasn’t feeling well, they took the initiative. Without any reminders, they set the table with all the usual, then filled a water bottle and brought it to the table to serve as a refill pitcher. I’m not sure where their idea came from but it made me laugh. A water pitcher for the dinner table has been on my wish list for a while but I had never mentioned it!
They were originally motivated by filling out a weekly chore chart for earning a prize but with my fatigue and the fires and smoke, and Seamus’s condition, we’ve had to skip a couple weeks. However the baseline of their having daily chores to do, on a rotating basis depending on the things needing to be done, has finally stuck.
They do want their chore chart back though, and I’ve promised to get that up again.
JB’s reads
They are absolutely loving the Catstronauts (Amazon, Indiebound), Baltazar’s Itty Bitty Hellboy (Amazon, Indiebound) and Superman Family Adventures (Amazon, Indiebound) comics. They’re also starting to get into the Judy Moody series. I saw Judy Moody at Comic Con last year but didn’t realize it was age appropriate already.
More parenting!
Some quick math: Seamus + JB who is definitely not a baby any longer + Sera + one baking baby makes four.
Just in case we had failed to add properly, JB likes to tell us we will have FOUR kids to take care of.
Yes. Yes we know.
They’re pretty excited about the new sibling. Seamus may care when the new arrival actually arrives but he’s too old to worry about helping me like he used to. I’m trying to train Sera to come help me when I get beached but she’s still too twitchy. She gets scared when I try to lean on her a bit to get up. She’s into babies, though, and is going to have trouble resisting bestowing dog kisses. We know where that mouth has been, no dog kisses thank you.
Pupdate
It’s been a while since I did a separate pupdate and I have decided *grand gesture* that we’ll combine them with kid updates. Why not. They’re all my dependents.
Seamus is aging more rapidly than we can bear. We adore him and it’s hard to see this. He’s got moderate to severe arthritis which we’re treating with All the Things to help keep him comfortable. He’s been developing neurological issues, like knuckling when he stands and walks, or misjudging distances and overcompensating or falling. He always gets back up but I dread the progression of this aging. We baby him as much as we can, he’s earned every bit of it and more, and I have pangs of regret wondering if there’s anything else I should and could have done for him. I know I’ve been doing everything that I actually can but it’s hard. He’s been prone to UTIs this year and he had a rough several months with them. We thought it was in our rear view but yet another nasty infection cropped up this month.
The funny thing about his getting older though, he’s finally less saintly with his patience. Where he once regularly let Sera share his water bowl, they would drink at the exact same time which is a hilarious sight, or even taken a step back and let her have the bowl first, he now just takes first turn at the bowl as his due. He always should have, he’s twice her age! But even as recently as last year he’d defer to her politely.
While she doesn’t understand most dogs, any kind of signal from him is respected. He only had to knock her head out of the water bowl once when she started to crowd him. She’s never again tried to shove her way in to share like she has done for the past two years. Since then, she just behind him to wait her turn. Some days, she won’t even drink if he’s outside until he’s back in and has had his drink first! She gets very little direction from him but whatever she gets, she takes very seriously.
We were working with a dog walker before COVID to give her some extra exercise once a week but that wasn’t very long before we all had to shelter in place. Since then we have had a lovely friend share some reactive dog training tips and information which has helped us recalibrate our expectations and our approach to her training. We’d hit a plateau in April and I was despairing. But we came to understand her fear a little better thanks to the dog training advice of @themariadawn and we’ve been seeing small but real improvements. I’ve noticed her looking at other dogs that would normally put her on high alert but then look up at us for a treat instead of lunging for the other dog. Previously, even dogs a block away would set her on alert. She’d stay alerted and tense until they were long out of sight. Now she might bounce with a bit of anxiety but she’ll stare at dogs across the street intensely, and then allow herself to be redirected. Lots of treats, lots of positive tones, and lots of forward motion all help us stay safely on our side of the walk. I hope she’s not reactive forever but it certainly felt that way for a while. We’re making some progress.
Precious Moments
Mindreading
JB: Mom, what’s that thing we eat?
Me: The what?
JB: That thing!
Me: … what color is it?
JB: Pink.
Me: What shape is it?
JB: Round.
Me: When did we eat it?
JB: That time with T!
Me: ….. cotton candy?
JB: YES!
When Avatar: The Last Airbender and reality collide
JB: Why are there SO MANY FIRES.
Me: Well for some of them, people are making bad choices and making sparks in dry areas where they can catch fire. That’s not all of them but the ones we know about are because people are being careless.
JB: What if it’s actually the FIRE NATION?
Me: Well, the Fire Nation isn’t real, that’s from a story.
JB: BUT WHAT IF.
:: Do you remember having wild flights of fancy as a kid? (Or do you now?) Also it occurs to me that the titles of these monthly updates should change to plural now.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,732.74; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
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Dividend income. We received $739.94 in dividends in August.
Claiming Funds. I spent quite a bit of time this month following up on cash back and money owed to us:
It took all month to get Achievement to pay up. I don’t know what’s going on with them but it’s really frustrating that their responsiveness has been so terrible. I’m on the verge of dropping them completely.
I had to submit claims to Mr. Rebates since the tracking on some of my purchases failed to register. Their customer service is great, though of course they are limited in what they can do during a pandemic with the stores.
I’m still trying to get our FSA to release our dependent care funds.
I finally joined ibotta and started inputting some receipts for their Any Brand credits. We don’t do much specific brand name shopping but I figured why not get money back for the shopping we already do? It’s tiny but I’m happy to take what I can get if we’re already spending – it just takes 20 seconds a piece. I could string those small 20-second bits of time into some side hustle if I were determined but frankly, I’m not prepared to take on any real commitment anyway so this isn’t a diversion that’s taking away from a grander purpose. It’s just spare change.
I finally had enough Swagbucks banked to redeem a $25 Visa gift card a couple months ago. They are 13% off which is 1 whole percent more than the standard monthly 12% discounted redemption discount, soI’d been saving them to coincide with a Birthday Swag-up. The $25 cost 2120 Swagbucks instead of 2175 (or the 2200 for a standard discounted redemption). I haven’t redeemed one for several months so this was nice.
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Life lessons
We’ve been having a lot of hard conversations with JB about the harsh realities of life. Namely racism: what it is, how it hurts people, how it’s wrong and how we fight against it. Their daycare hasn’t been nearly diverse enough for my taste but their elementary school will be much better and I want them to have a solid understanding of accepting people for who they are based on their actions, not their appearance.
This is nothing new. We’ve been reading “I am Rosa Parks” (Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org), The Youngest Marcher which has been extra hard for me to get through this year (Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org), and Sulwe (Amazon, Indiebound, Bookshop.org) for a while. With all the protests, they have been asking to read The Youngest Marcher every night.
Different bodies
We were picking up takeout when JB said: “There’s something wrong with his eye!” It wasn’t very loud but it was clearly out loud.
I was startled because I hadn’t noticed what they had, but I realized that the fellow bringing us our bags had a drooping eyelid. I told JB: “There may be something different about his body but should we talk about how people look?”
JB: “No.”
Me: “Ok, let’s not do that, please.”
They said said ok, though they still stared for a bit, and then we had a conversation in the car about how treating people with respect means that if they have something different about their bodies, it’s fine to notice but we don’t comment on them. We all have differences (or flaws if we consider them as such), and it’s unkind to point them out and stare. We wouldn’t like it if we had a scar or an injury or something different about us and people were staring, or pointing, or commenting on us.
I’m not sure if I handled it right in the moment. I feel terrible that he may have heard them and felt that we didn’t treat him and the moment respectfully.
Pupdate
Our buddy Seamus has chronic eye problems this year and we had to rush him to the veterinary opthalmologist for an exam when his latest bout with a corneal ulcer was going the wrong way. He’d been on medications for weeks and the darn thing wouldn’t budge. Typically they clear up in 7-10 days. By the 20th day both his regular vet and I were very concerned and it was off to the specialist for us.
That exam showed that it wasn’t quite as bad as we had feared so we still had a chance to head off a surgical treatment. Huge sigh of relief there. We went on an aggressively frequent eye ointment regimen, nine applications a day!
New Skills
JB is currently obsessed with wanting to “be a real dog owner” and wanting to walk the dogs alone. They can walk Seamus who is well mannered and cooperative 98% of the time but takes sudden turns once in a while that they have to watch out for. If Seamus was forceful as he once was about his course corrections I’d never allow it but he’s slow and gentle enough in his old age that he’s safe for JB to walk on a slow ramble. Sera, however, is strong, headstrong, and very reactive. So that’s a hard no to JB wanting to walk Sera. They will have to earn the “real dog owner” cred the hard way: slowly and steadily.
Precious Moments
I don’t know why either of us thought it’d be for a good reason.
JB: I’m always going to remember this day.
PiC: oh yeah? *hopeful*
JB: Yeah cuz you guys are gonna die before me.
PiC: Oh.
JB: I’m not gonna die before you! Oh, but kids can actually die.
PiC: Uh.
JB: Yeah cuz kids can get very sick when they’re young!
This makes me feel like a transport bus.
JB: I wish I could go to Italy! In person, not in Mommy’s belly. Because in Mommy’s belly, it’s very different.
:: If you had a visible injury or disability, how would you want a parent to address it with their kid while they were still in front of you or within earshot?
If you’d like to join me in helping Lakota families and/or rural libraries this year, please read this post. Over 6 weeks in 2019, we raised $2669.94 for the Lakota families, touching 27 lives. What can we do in 2020?
Current total: Lakota, $1,713.62; Rural libraries, $321.62.
Our long term goal is to replace our day job income with passive income before my health prevents me from working. I know from my Mom’s experience that qualifying for or relying on disability is incredibly tough or near impossible here in CA. Aside from that, I aim to do my best to make the most of what we can do while we can.
