Expensive Day

1) Duchess is commencing Project Braces this fall. Should take two years, plus a follow-up retainer. No headgear or other extra misery.

2) Looks like we need a new roof, a full tearoff. While we're at it, we should remove the extra chimney, right? And if we're doing that, we should renovate the kitchen, right?

Small news items

1) The strike was called off! Hurray!
2) I have a (part-time, short-term) job! Hurray! The gig is relevant to my education, pays okay (I will earn enough, though just barely, to pay off Skipper's preschool tuition for the school year, which is a great relief to me), is located nearby, and offers fairly convenient hours. Double Hurray!

Farm Munny

Skipper and Duchess both get an allowance. Duchess has gotten more careful over time about how she spends her money, but Skipper has been miserly from the start. When I ask her if she wants to bring her money to, say, the candy store or the toy store, she always says, without hesitation, some variation on this:  "No, because if I spend my money I won't have it any more."

Yesterday I asked her what she's saving her money for, and she said, again without hesitation, "Animals." It turns out that she's saving up to buy a farm.

Miscellany

Skipper is into space this week.* She has been asking lots of questions and poring over an old Click magazine issue about space. She dug up an astronaut bear stuffed animal given to her by a NASA fan a few years ago, renamed it "Davy Baby Space Bear," and given it Most Favored Animal status.** However, when Cook delivered a bedtime story (an installment in the six-year-long Pippa and the Penguin series), in which the child heroine and her avian companion were SEPARATED from the parents and accidentally caught a ride on a spaceship, Skipper freaked out and had to hide under her pillow until the family was reunited. Apparently, we will all have to come along when Skipper makes her first space mission.

Today we took the girls to an open house at a local dance/theater/music education nonprofit, where they were offering free half-hour classes. Skipper was excited in advance, but when we got there, she didn't want to participate. ("I don't like this class because you have to talk," she told me.) Duchess, however, got to participate in an improvisational theater class, which (of course) she adored. Cook and I watched the whole thing, and we were both really struck by how much any 8-year-old (or human being of any age) can benefit from some improv training. The primary rule, more or less, are that you say "yes" to any idea that is tossed your way, that you listen and respond and not "block" your teammates' ideas by changing the storyline too drastically or by refusing to go along with their ideas. Funny but irrelevant non sequiturs are discouraged. There are no mistakes. It's all about paying attention, being generous to yourself and your partners, enthusiastically diving into ideas but still keeping an eye on the big picture to make sure things aren't veering too far off course... doesn't this sound like a recipe for success in conversations, relationships, projects - just about everything? I've decided that every second-grader in Portland should have a weekly improv class.

While I'm fixing up public education, I've decided that math needs an overhaul, too. This week my curiosity overpowered my budgeting willpower, and I purchased a ridiculously expensive ($6!) math game app for my awesome tablet. Duchess has been playing it as much as she is allowed, and it appears to be more or less teaching her algebra.*** It's pretty cool, and I think the school district should have all the kids learn algebra by playing a video game for a few hours. I'll include that in my overhaul.

And, for your last item of miscellany, I took Skipper to the dentist last week, and she LET THEM DO AN X-RAY. She cried quite a bit throughout the whole experience, but the incentive of getting screen time ("Wonderpets" again) was enough to make her power through. She may be actually growing up. For a bonus, the staff lavishly praised her excellent oral hygiene, she got a sticker, and she has no cavities. Huzzah!


* Hey, NASA. I assume you're aware that Sunita Williams is a fabulous ambassador for the space program, but having her/allowing her to host a 25-minute video tour of the space station was a really great idea, particularly if you were wanting to add "astronaut" to the career wishlists of girls around the country.
** Eat your heart out, Punghy.
***Though it's not perfect, and occasionally the presence of a coach with some grasp of math is very helpful.

What we play on the tablet

Cook: Minecraft
Duchess: Angry Birds in Space
Me: Where's My Water
Skipper: random-ass preschool games*

I haven't played computer games in a long, long time - they seem like a waste of the time I don't seem to have -  but the tablet has changed that. Not only is it a great way to play games (right size, right speed), but I can take it on the bus, so I can play during time that can't really be spent usefully anyway. And there are some really great games out there, as it turns out.


*A few weeks ago, she was sitting on the floor with the tablet while I was doing housework, and she said "Mom, I need help!" and I stalled her. Eventually she said "Never mind, I solved my problem," and I didn't think about it again until I opened my email and found that she had made a $2 purchase of an app. I put a PIN on the system so she can't do that again; I'm fortunate it wasn't worse!

Cognitive exhaustion

One of the things that really bothers me about Mitt Romney (and George Bush, way back when) is that he clearly has absolutely no idea what it's like to be poor. He has never, ever, ever felt the kind of anxiety you feel when you have no safety net for your life. I liked this Wonkblog post about Romney's perspective on personal responsibility, which reminded me of my bus commute. I ride the bus with a lot of people who are much, much worse off than I am and one of the things I have learned from that experience is that yes, "the poor use up an enormous amount of their mental energy just getting by." It's insanely hard, being poor. The people on whom I eavesdrop on the bus have to do a tremendous amount of organizing, negotiation, and maneuvering, just to get through their days. 

I can see how easy it is to dismiss poor people as lazy, stupid, or irresponsible. I hear people on the bus talking all the time about bad situations they are in, or trying to solve, or trying to help somebody else solve, and they sound awful. Sometimes the situations they are navigating involve making terrible choices, like leaving your kids in the care of a person you don't trust at all, or taking up with a boyfriend who treats you like absolute shit. Those choices, though, often are the best one that they can make at the time, given their circumstances. The scary babysitter is free, which is all you can afford. The boyfriend comes with a place to live. I'm sure that many of these people, like many people everywhere, are stupid or lazy or irresponsible in some ways. But I recognize that they are under the crushing, unrelenting stress of trying to tiptoe (or sprint) across the wobbly, jury-rigged structure of their life every day without shaking something loose. Something shakes loose all the time - a babysitter gets arrested, a boyfriend leaves when rent is due, a job is lost, a car breaks down, a bus doesn't show up - and there's never anything left to try to shore up or improve that structure, because you're just trying not to be buried in the rubble. I think it's astonishing that anybody escapes poverty. I'm absolutely sure that if I was living like that, I would perform pretty badly. I doubt Mitt Romney would perform terribly well, either. I'm confident he wouldn't be rich now if he had been born poor.

Mitt and I have lived our lives in a cozy, safe place, where any entrepreneurial, "maker"-type risks we might take are cushioned by a net of family and social resources. It's easy to improve your life when it's already easy, and it's easy to believe that you are an impressive, success-worthy person when you can bring all your mental resources to bear on improving your life, instead of just surviving. I went to an East Coast boarding school, so I spent a lot of my adolescence in the company of people* like Mitt and George W., people for whom success came easily because of all the resources behind them. I don't think any of them realized that their success wasn't entirely, or sometimes at ALL, merit-based. (Lots of them went into finance, as it happens.) 

I don't think the country should have a president who can't even begin to imagine what it's like being poor, and who believes that if you're poor, it's because of your personal failure. 

* I'd like to note that my friends from high school are great people. I'm not talking about them, or the many other people at my high school who didn't take success or good fortune for granted. 

I photodocumented the first really summery day of the year.

 

Breakfast

Going out

Library

Post-library walk home

Antarctic Uncle is renovating our basement, so every time we come home, there's something new to see. Today, the door getting sanded in the garage, and the toilet in the yard.

 

Daydreaming

Lunch

They made up a song and dance routine about seeds and spiders.

On the way to swim lessons

Dinner at the cart pod!

Antartic Uncle bought Duchess an oyster shooter, and offered to pay her $5 if she ate it. She did.

Ice cream at the cart pod.

Going home

Shameless

Why indeed you CAN contribute money to Dutch's school to pay a music teacher!* If you wish to,you can do it through the Portland Public Schools foundation website at https://www.thinkschools.org/index.php?page=ways-to-give . Make sure you designate Atkinson Elementary as the specific PPS school to receive your gift, either in the web form or on your check.

However, you can also save your money for the nine million fundraising campaigns my kids will probably put you through over the years. (And all you other parents of school-aged kids? I'll totally sponsor your kids in their run/jump/whatever pledge fundraisers. Hit me up.) Or you can save your money so you can watch Dutch perform in many important theatrical equine productions when she grows up, because her latest career plan is to be "an actor and also a person who helps take care of horses."

*Well, probably a small fraction of a music teacher. One who's freshly minted and at the bottom of the payscale. 

Small triumphs.

Today I spent an hour calling people and asking them for money. I have gotten involved in the efforts of the brand-new school foundation* to raise enough money to pay for staffing for some small scrap of a music program. We're shooting for a half-time position, though it's extremely unlikely we'll get there. However, we have raised about $13,000 so far, which I think is actually pretty awesome considering half the kids at the school get reduced-price/free lunch, the foundation only started fundraising a few weeks ago, and all the families have been asked all year to pony up for stuff like school supplies, playground balls, field trips, PTA fundraisers and direct donation drives, etc. So I called people. Talking on the phone is not my favorite thing, and asking people for stuff makes me feel sick to my stomach, so I felt pretty much like throwing up the whole time. But I did it. Nobody gave me their credit card numbers on the spot, but several people said they plan to donate,** and nobody yelled at me, so I consider the experience a huge success.

I also helped organize a letter-writing event last week after school, in which participants used our talking points and materials to write their own letters to legislators about the need to reform school funding at the state level. It was a good event,*** though also kind of sad. People kept looking up and asking things like "Hey, how do you spell 'appalling'? How about 'hopeless'?" The legislator who attended (it's her district) was very pessimistic about the prospects of any kind of improvement, given the refusal of Republicans to entertain any discussion of revenue reform. Actually, what I was told by somebody who knows more about this stuff than I do was that the pension expenses should be under control in about 15 years, at which point the spending on schools will immediately improve, barring social collapse.**** So after Dutch and Skipper are done with their public schooling, things might look up a bit.

Anyway. That's why I've been doing all this asking. It's very tiring, but I'm trying not to feel hopeless.


*I hate the idea of school communities fundraising from their own pockets to pay for stuff. There are deep-pocketed schools that support multiple FTEs through fundraising, and others who have no foundation at all. But I don't want our school to keep losing enrollment, and I don't want any kids at the school to go without music. So I decided to start participating in the foundation effort AND the legislative reform stuff, in an effort to feel less awful about the foundation fundraising. 


**At that point a good fundraiser would ask them to pledge to donate a specific (high) amount, but I'm a terrible fundraiser, so I just said "Great!"


*** There were bubbles!


**** My disclaimer for most statements about the future.

 Lately Skipper has been putting herself to sleep pretty often. Today she kicked me out of the room after her pre-nap book, and I heard her yakking away to herself for a few minutes, pretty loudly. She sings to herself, loudly, extensively deploying what a friend of mine calls (in describing her own peculiar child's singing) a "strange toddler vibrato." Anyway, when she stops making noise, she almost immediately falls asleep. I went in to check on her about 90 seconds after the last note faded away, and this is what I found.

And these are two pictures from this evening. This is Dutch, reacting to my explanation that the amount of  money we are going to start regularly putting away for her college education is enough to pay for 1% of her expected costs to attend community college while living at home

This is Skipper, playing with the all-time favorite toy in this household.

Money, consumption, tulips, etc.

Today Dutch's school had a 2-hour snow delay, throwing a wrench into my plans for the morning. I took her and Skipper along on a multi-modal errand adventure, using as incentive for good behavior the promise that I'd take them to the big grocery store so Dutch could buy a toy she'd been wanting. She wouldn't tell me what it was, but she said she knew exactly what she wanted and she was confident that the $2.87 in her coin purse would be sufficient to purchase it. When we got there, the two toys she wanted cost $8.99 and $9.99. She frantically cast around for a few minutes to find something she could afford and actually enjoy, and came up with nothing.

Then we talked about fads. The toys she wanted are both currently extremely popular with boys in her class, who trade them and play with them after school. She wants the toys only for the social engagement to which they are a ticket. We talked about how the Pokemon fad in which she had been so eager to participate had ebbed recently (just after she finally got her own pack of Pokemon cards). I told her about the tulip bubble.* We talked about how if she's going to spend ten bucks on something, it'd probably be a good idea to make sure it's something she will enjoy playing with even by herself. She agrees, in theory.


*I also thought about how much fun it is to get to tell somebody about the tulip bubble. Parenting sometimes makes me feel, in a thoroughly enjoyable way, like I know an ENORMOUS amount of stuff. Of course, the flip side is that the kids expect me to be able to answer all of their questions. Like this morning's question, which was "How do clouds make rain?"

The "Principal's Coffee" should be called "Your Monthly Reminder That Education Is Not A Priority in This Society, Now Go Home And Cry"

Dutch will enter 2nd grade with a school budget reduced* from the previous year by 3 FTE. She entered 1st grade with a school budget reduced from the previous year by 1.5 FTE. I'm guessing that Skipper's 2nd grade experience will entail a classroom of 50 kids, one teacher, and a school year that's 100 days long. Music? Art? Library? PE? Attractive inside and outside spaces? Recess? Individual attention?  That's for rich kids.


*Technically, it's only a cut of 2 FTE - the third FTE is the result of having to spread the school's resources across more kids without getting any money to pay for the extra teacher required to prevent the 4th grade from having classrooms of 40 kids. You know. Do More With Less.

Today Dutch started two savings jars - one is labeled "collage" and the other is labeled "horse camp" (by which she means a week at a sleep-away horseback-riding camp in summer 2013).*

Dutch is planning to be a wildlife biologist. Four years at a public university (in-state tuition) is likely to cost something like $40K/year by the time she gets there. I think it's probably a good idea for her to start saving.**


*I'll leave you to guess which one gets the larger portion of her allowance.
** And learning how to spell "college."

Whoa.

This is pretty cool.

How To Be Car-less With Kids: Sanctimonious Tedium Ahead!

Here's the question I always want to be asked, and never am: "How do you get around with kids with no car?" I want to be asked this question because I could answer it for HOURS, and I do love to talk about me. And what's a blog FOR but boring unsolicited monologues, after all? (With that said, you should all feel free to not read this post... you've all heard it all before, anyway!)

So here you go. This is how to be carless with kids, according to me. 

1) Locate yourself appropriately. Choose a home with access to bike and transit infrastructure, and a nice array of convenient destinations within walking distance. Choose all your activities, work, school, childcare, etc., based on accessibility. Don't overschedule.

2) Get yourself the right array of equipment, whatever works for you. Being car-free requires that you have options, and it's one of the great joys of escaping the car - when you walk out the door every morning, you have real choices in how to get where you're going. I love that. Here's my array.*

The Ergo. Now on its last legs, it's served us well. I now use it only when I want to take Skipper on trips involving the bus (no transit system is convenient with a stroller) and also more walking than I think she's up for. 

Trusty rusty stroller, also on its second kid. Skipper and I use this for longer home-based walking trips. Dutch, by this age, was both an excellent walker and so enormous she couldn't actually fit in the thing comfortably anymore, but Skipper is neither of those things.

Skipper's wagon, which we use for short trips or carrying large flat things home, like a bunch of tomato seedlings or a pile of wood chips we found in the street with a "free" sign on top. Notice Dutch's bike in the background. She would like me to mention that it is a very good bike. 

Our go-to Skipper-transportation mode. It fits two kids very snugly, or one very comfortably, with room for a giant package of toilet paper rolls, plus several bags of other groceries in the back. (Sometimes Cook or I take the trailer with no kid in it, if we need to fetch something really big.) Cook's bike and my bike both have trailer hitches, so we can easily switch the trailer between our bikes.

My bike. I love it. It's almost as old as me, it's this awesome shade of blue, and check out those brand-new full fenders, baby! Now I have no excuse not to bike in the rain...

This is a bonus piece of equipment. I got it super-cheap at a yard sale, and it's kind of falling apart, but excellent for kid-free walks to the grocery store to buy a gallon of milk, a gallon of vinegar, ten boxes of pasta, a giant package of toilet paper, and, you know, whatever else tickles your fancy.

3) There's no 3. That's it.

We bike for most trips.We walk for trips under a mile unless speed or cargo necessitate biking. I take transit for trips downtown, trips longer than 5 to 8 miles (depending on weather and the pleasantness of the route), trips when I really can't be at all sweaty or disheveled when I arrive,**and trips when I feel like it's too cold and wet for biking. Cook doesn't take transit at all unless his bike is totally out of commission or he's going somewhere with me and I feel like it's too cold and wet for biking. We get a zipcar occasionally, mostly to pick somebody up at the airport. We rent cars for longer trips. We get rides from friends and coworkers sometimes.

So, car-free with kids. Is it sometimes a hassle? Yes. Does it take more time? Yes. Does it put limitations on your life? Yes. Does it require more planning? Yes. Is it worth it? Yes, totally. I used to say that I expected we'd have to buy a car eventually. But I don't say that anymore; I really hope we can get away without being forced to get another car. It feels good to be car-free as a family. It is fun, it is easy, it is convenient, it is healthy, and it enriches us both literally*** and figuratively. We live in a wonderful place, and the activities and destinations to which we're "limited" seem pretty darn varied and terrific to me.**** The extra time that it takes to get around by transit and my own physical effort is not in any way wasted. We spend it getting exercise, seeing the world around us, talking to each other, reading a book, and doing all sorts of other valuable things. All the cheesy aphorisms about travel being part of the experience (The Journey Is The Destination!) feel a lot more true when you're out of the car, and I really value sharing that with my kids.

That is the end of my sermon. Thank you.


*When we get rich, I'm going to get one of these to add to our stable. We have friends who have one, and Dutch loves getting rides on it. I think it'll solve a number of our remaining  transportation dilemmas - giving a ride to a friend, getting Dutch somewhere when she really doesn't feel like riding her own bike, giving Skipper a good option during the awkward period when she'll be too big to comfortably ride in the trailer, but still too small to ride her own bike, etc. 


** I go to a lot of job interviews, after all. 


***Living without a car for over a decade has saved us  probably somewhere between $5 and $10K per year. That's a lot of money. The entire fleet in the photos above, plus Cook's and Dutch's bikes, cost us a little under $1000 total to buy originally. I get a free monthly transit pass through my job (the only benefit I get), and Cook gets a parking-cash-out benefit for not driving to work (his employer takes an enlightened capitalist approach to employee parking), so between those things, we spend very little additional cash on our transportation.  Cook does some basic maintenance stuff himself, and keeping his bike running well costs about $400/year (and that includes investment in decent raingear, lights, panniers, etc.). He rides about 50 miles a week. I ride only about 20, and Dutch about 15, so we have cheaper gear and maintenance needs. If we had none of the employer benefits that now cover almost all of our expenses, I think we could keep our whole fleet running very well, including replacement as needed, for $1000 a year, and meet all our transit needs for $800. Can a car-dependent household get by spending less than $2000/year on transportation? I'm thinking not. 


**** The one thing that I wish we could do more easily is get out of town for day hikes and camping. When we get rich, though, we'll be happy to rent cars more often to do that!

Dabbling

This month is about free trials. My thinking in setting them up was something like "Hey, free stuff! Cool! Also, it's fun to try new things and see what you like." It's been a reminder for me of what a dabbler Dutch is by nature. She loves all activities - if it involves social interaction and getting to experience the intoxicating first slope of a learning curve, it lights her up, and she gets really excited. I can't think of an activity she DIDN'T like trying since she got past infancy. The problem is that she can't do everything, due to constraints on parental time, money, and energy.*  I think we probably have just stop introducing her to new activities, because You Just Can't Have It All. Stupid free trials.

I also see that we will soon begin really experiencing what it's like when she finds herself on a flattening learning curve. We've had that a bit with school, and also with swimming. She really doesn't want to do swimming anymore, because she ran up against trouble (with side breathing) that she couldn't easily get past. That dilemma is on hold, because the wintertime (indoor) pool is much harder for us to get to than the summertime (outdoor) pool, so I don't really want to deal with swim lessons until spring anyway.**

Free Trial #1: Tomorrow she will finish up her 4-class trial at a kung fu center in our neighborhood. She absolutely loves this class, and came home from class yesterday ecstatic to have been granted a white belt.***

Free Trial #2: Today Dutch had a trial piano lesson. I bought a cheap digital keyboard off craigslist last week, and it's been getting a lot of action, mostly in deploying all the silly "voices" to their maximum annoyance capacity. Cook also taught Dutch how to do a couple of scales, and she really likes that. The piano teacher she met today was about 15 (okay, maybe 25),**** and very cheerful and nice, and she loved spending half an hour with him, messing around with a piano.

So... I'm thinking this kid is not going to be an expert at anything, but she will have tried a LOT of stuff.


*We expect to be somewhat richer soon, once various tangles of red tape are untangled and Cook and I get to start our new jobs. Not rich enough for Dutch to take lots of expensive extracurriculars, however.
**I am, however, going to force her to keep doing swimming, for many reasons, including my belief in the value of working through plateaus (a belief I rarely put into practice in my own life, but I still BELIEVE in it). I'm going to work pretty hard to bribe/force/cajole/trick her into doing swim team this summer.
***This class is perfect for Dutch - it's great exercise, the teacher makes it really fun, and it involves rigid hierarchies and rules, which is pretty much Dutch's favorite kind of learning environment. However, it's crazy expensive, and there are all these martial arts weirdnesses, like everybody bowing to the photo of the founder of the discipline. So Dutch will not be signing up until we win the lottery, and even then I'd have to work through my feelings about the cult-y elements. 
****The place is a co-operative music studio. It's adorable. I think we'll probably sign her up - both Cook and I, in spite of our personal lack of musical training or talent, believe that learning music theory and gaining some competence on an instrument are really valuable, even if you are, like Dutch, pretty much devoid of musical aptitude.

This weekend

 Dutch started telling us this evening that she might decide to get rich when she grows up. "I know how to get rich," she informed us casually. Cook and I gave her our full attention, but when she said "Well, to start with, you have to have at least $300," I decided I had to film the explanation.

*

And then when I plugged the camera into the computer to download the video, I discovered that there were about twenty short videos on the camera (which was surprisingly low on battery power when I picked it up) that Skipper had taken. Apparently she's been furtively filming for the last month or so. Here is what Cook and I judged to be her finest work, shot yesterday. She hasn't done any editing, so it's a little rough.

*(Dutch got a haircut this weekend. It looks pretty great, actually, though this very unflatteringly-lit video suggests otherwise.)

http://xkcd.com/946/

I can't figure out if this is funny or depressing.

You decide: sad white guys in silly outfits.

Small steps, big checks

Owning a house is expensive and very tiring. But our plumber is really adorable, and Skipper loves him. She tried to hug him (he fended her off, as he was lightly coated in sludge). I think we'll keep him for ALL our plumbing needs!