Random life updates

Do any of you follow the story threads of our lives and then wonder what happened since we forgot to update?  Here’s some updates:

Little Kitty’s IBS and health:

• She had idiopathic elevated calcium levels (meaning they don’t know why).  This was the best possible outcome since the other outcomes where they know were all bad.  First she got steroids for two weeks.  Then she got taken off the hydrolized diet and put on a low calcium diet and now her tummy seems to be all better.  No more IBS even when she steals her favorite people food (chicken).  It is mysterious.
• Once her calcium levels got balanced, she got to have her teeth cleaned.  Unfortunately 7 teeth also had to be pulled.  Also it is insane how even though these costs are expensive, they are waaay less expensive than costs of the same thing in paradise.

DH’s relatives:

• The one with the abusive baby daddy has moved back home.  She’s not getting along with her dad because he says she frequently does dangerous things when taking care of her son and he tells her not to.  Her step-mom is doing well with chemo and is really enjoying taking care of the baby while her step-daughter works at the Walmart a few towns over.  I have no idea how the menu planning stuff went down or if now that the oldest girl is back she’s taken over some of the responsibilities.
• The other one who was a teen mom is still living with her two kids with her husband near her biological mom across the country.  She seems to be doing fine.

Kitty saga:

• I don’t think I ever mentioned this, but my sister ended up taking a second kitten from our back-yard cat saga since we were only allowed to take two cats with us to Paradise.  Her two still love each other and my sister seems to have bonded with them.  Problem:  her new roommate brought a bully cat and boy kitty started peeing on things in protest.  So now her two cats stay in her bedroom suite during the day, mostly sleeping while the bully cat roams the rest of the house.  :(

DC1 at public school:

• In the end, DC1 transitioned well to public school for 5th grade in Paradise.  I think it was good that it was still an elementary school.
• Zie seems to be doing fine at middle school for 6th grade so far this year.  Zie has to do some testing to get admitted to the GT pull-out program.   One of hir friends from private school is in orchestra with hir, which helps.  They should both transition from 5th grade orchestra to 6th grade orchestra at the semester.  (DC1 decided against another year of trumpet, which means zie has to have weekly violin lessons to ease the transition since zie is a year behind.  Zie is surprisingly not that awful– much better than my memories of that first year of my sister practicing.)
• Zie tested into 7th grade advanced math, which is really nice.  This and orchestra are two big advantages over private school.  I do miss having a foreign language though.  DC1 had Spanish as an after school program last year (they also had French, but only for native speakers(!), so we dropped that), but it doesn’t appear that anything like that is available here.
• The after school program is cheap ($115/mo and goes until 6:30pm) and the bus stop is literally at the corner of our house.  For now we’re doing after school instead of having hir take the bus home so we don’t have to worry about hir being latch-key when DH is out of town for work.  The law in our state is vague… it basically says, you’re ok so long as something bad doesn’t happen, but if something bad happens you made the wrong decision.  If we still had a home phone I’d feel a bit better about a latch-key situation.  If we do go latch-key DC1 will need a cell-phone.

DC2:

• Returning to the Montessori here has been great.  So great we decided not to start K this year and to leave hir in Montessori another year.  Then we may skip K next year if zie doesn’t get into the dual-language program.  We’re playing it by ear a year at a time.
• Zie really does miss hir friends, but many of them were heading off to public school anyway (either K or Pre-K), so…  And we’re happy zie is back to more academics and less of the creepy religious stuff.  (Nothing against non-creepy religious stuff, but even though DC1 and DC2 both attended a year of preschool from the same Lutheran branch, DC1’s was not at all creepy and DC2’s was full of not preschool appropriate stories.  Just comparing the children’s bibles they each got was pretty crazy.  Like, it wasn’t our imagination.)  Hir reading and math abilities have skyrocketed since we got back.

I think those are the big things in my online blog persona life.  If anybody cares.

ask the grumpies: Favorite sing-a-long?

Leah:

What is the best sing-along song ever?

I can tell you my current least favorite is this one song on Starfall about the days of the week.  Today is Friiiday.

Let’s go with the Wheels on the Bus.  They go round and round.

Would you pay for your kid’s graduate school?

I always thought it was ridiculous that some parents would pay for their kids’ law school or med school tuition.  Those tuitions are high but the salaries after are also quite high (at least they were for lawyers before the recession) and having to live on less than a fortune in order to pay off loans helps people keep their fixed expenses low.  So you don’t end up having to make a 300K/year salary to pay your required monthly expenses.  If the cost-benefit ratio isn’t high enough (ex. There’s a glut of lawyers or the business school isn’t very good) then nobody should be paying for the degree.

College seems less of a problem because a high salary straight out isn’t guaranteed (and certainly not an MD or JD-level salary) and there’s so much besides student loans that a person has to save for when just starting out.

My thinking was probably also shaped by the fact that my parents took care of my (subsidized) student loans and neither DH nor I got parental help during graduate school.

I still believe that people shouldn’t get a PhD without being fully funded.

However, as our income has gone up, I’ve been feeling more ambivalent about the need for kids to pay for their own professional school.  If DH and I have saved a lot, why not pass it on in the form of tuition assistance rather than as an inheritance that our children will hopefully never need?  If that’s something they want to do.  (Both DCs, however, seem very much like they’ll become engineers, so this may be a moot thought.  We’ll see what the future brings.)

This type of thinking leads to a slippery slope.  When I read The Millionaire Next Door I thought that the the plight of the next generation of millionaires who spent down their parents’ wealth was pretty awful.  But is it really awful?  Wouldn’t we all like to be parts of aristocratic dynasties living beyond our incomes from the benefit of family wealth?  If the money runs out, doesn’t that just put the third generation back where it started, in which case, why worry about dynastic wealth at all?  Why does wealth need to grow with each successive generation?

I’m still against helping kids out with a downpayment– people shouldn’t be able to take on a mortgage they can’t afford.  And I’m firmly against taking money from my own parents (I try to encourage them to spend it themselves!)  But will I give my adult children monetary assistance?  I don’t know.  They probably won’t need it.  They may not want it.  But who knows, we may end up being ok with funding graduate school.  We’ll see what happens when the time comes.

Do you believe in funding children’s graduate education?  How about their house downpayments?  What kind of monetary assistance would you provide to your adult children?  What kind would you not?

It takes a village

We were not meant to be one adult + children 24/7. Our babies ourselves has a good literature review on this topic.

People were not meant to be sole care-takers for their kids, that’s why we have families and play-groups and all those other support structures. It really does take a village. Some parents have family members as part of their village, some friends, and some paid help. As long as the folks looking after are loving and caring and responsible, it’s all good.

If you’re a SAHP, do not isolate yourself.  Get out and see adults.  Join regular playgroups, parent-and-me classes. (Or whatever floats your boat.) Make sure you get adult-only time each week as well.

If you’re a WOHP, stop feeling guilty!!!!  And stop telling people you should feel guilty.  WOHP are legion and our kids are doing great.  Kids are resilient and they get a lot out of spending time with different high quality care-takers.

That is all.  (Another post that was started 4-5 years ago…)

ETA (h/t Bogart):  Standard disclaimer:  Differing constraints and preferences may apply.  IOW, YMMV.

A village parenting story

The other weekend I was standing in a long long line for a bouncy slide with DC2.

There was a woman behind me.  After letting someone cut in line behind her, her daughters kept running in front and trying to get to the slide.  And she kept ineffectually calling her daughters’ names and making grabs for one of them.

When I got right at the front of the line, I stuck my arm out as one of the daughters made a break for it to run up the slide in front of DC2 who was waiting patiently until it the teenager in charge said it was safe to go up. The daughter ran into my arm instead of up the slide.

This is the kind of thing that parents around here do all the time, catch other people’s kids when they’re making a break for it, because the parents tend to be upper class and the streets are close by and dangerous so parents (right or wrong) tend to have more fear of their kid getting away than of other parents. (I don’t know if I mentioned that DH literally saved a kid’s life earlier this year.  A toddler had wandered from the playground into the parking lot to get something from his parent’s van and was about to get backed over by an SUV.  DH ran his bike in front of the SUV to stop it from backing up, which made the SUV driver upset until she realized what had almost happened.  DH returned the kid to a frantic parent who had been looking all over the playground for the kid.)

In any case, this horrible woman then chewed me out for touching her daughter and she had everything under control etc., but of course she didn’t.

Later that day I recounted this story to our friends out here, and they individually said, “were the daughters names Olivia and Isabella?”  And was the older one Isabella and the younger one Olivia and Olivia a year or two older than DC2?  Did the woman have brown hair?  And the answer is yes.  Apparently this woman has a reputation and it wasn’t me at all.  I imagine she thought my arm was some kind of comment on her parenting (which it wasn’t until she chewed me out about it!)

(After DC2 went down the slide I said no more fair activities because the horrible woman was going to the last thing DC2 hadn’t done, so I was like, let’s go to the library instead.  And so we did.  And I witnessed lots of village parenting and parents thanking other parents for helping out instead of chewing them out and it was nice.  And then we went to another event at DC2’s daycare and I was even more hands on with keeping other people’s preschoolers out of trouble since parents were busy volunteering and I ended up on kid duty somehow.  People seemed grateful.)

I think where we normally live there’s much less of an atmosphere of village parenting, but there’s usually hardly anyone at the park or playground because everyone has a play structure in their back-yard.  And disgruntled women like the one at the park are more likely to be carrying a concealed weapon.  I’m not sure I would have automatically prevented a kid from going up a slide back where we usually live, no matter how dangerous.  But the teenagers in charge of the event would also probably have been better at keeping things safe.

What’s it like where you live in terms of village parenting vs. minding your own business?  How do you feel about other people stopping your child when he or she is making a break for it?

 

What’s wrong with me that I don’t feel guilt about parenting?

Nothing!

 

That is all.

Ask the grumpies: Managing bedtime for an obsessive reader

zenmoo asks:

any ideas on how to manage an obsessive reader? My just 6 year old’s reading ability has exploded over our long holidays. This is great but she gets very caught up new stories to the extent of finding it hard to sleep… I was an obsessive reader at her age too (still am) but it never stopped me sleeping!!

Make sure that your 6 year old has a flashlight that doesn’t get too hot and that hir covers are the kind that won’t melt if say, they have a bare lightbulb touching them. Not that I ever accidentally melted a sleeping bag (much).

You can forbid reading after a certain hour and turn off the light, but one of the great joys of childhood is sneaking to finish a novel late into the night under the covers.  If it interferes with functioning the next day, eventually zie will learn how to regulate it, most of the time anyway.  So long as the next new book isn’t too enthralling.  Fortunately at 6, falling asleep in class is unlikely to result in damage to one’s permanent record.

You also may want to put bedtime a bit earlier so that when you head to bed you can check and remove any lit flashlights or open books from drooling children who have fallen asleep mid-chapter.