First Day of School

Goodbye Summer

We really did enjoy you this year, when you could find time to vist us. If you would like to come back for a few days this month, that would be OK too. I'm sure our resident Rain would be willing to take a few days off.

And another thought about Labor

It looks like women have caught up to men in the workforce - if we only look at women who have never had children and never taken a leave from work. Of course, between women and men , women are still far more likely to take that time off work for a child. And there is no catching back up for most women. A recent article in the NYTimes spelled this out.

What to do about it isn't clear cut. Yes - more quality and affordable childcare options are a must. Of course, to do that we also need to place a reasonable value on the work of childcare. The numbers I can find say that in 2002 childcare workers in daycares earned a median income of $7.18 an hour, with "minimal benefits". I can attest from experience that running a home daycare meant that I had to work 50 hours a week and I only reached minimum wage ($8 an hour here) once I was watching 4 children in addition to my own two. Yes - it did have the benefit that I didn't have to pay out daycare for my own kids to someone else, so all of that minimum wage was actually mine to keep. Woopdie do.

You don't get a lot of quality from folks under those circumstances. So maybe the solution is to just stay home with your kids.

Well, it's pretty hard to live on one income, and you'll end up in that mommy (or daddy) trap when you want to re-enter the workforce.

A few parents manage to make it work. Wow - that is an achievement. I won't debate how good a job they did as parents - that is the road of the so-called Mommy Wars and the needless internecine fighting that just tears us apart.

The whole thing is just making me mad today.

Some thoughts about our Labors

Happy Labor Day to you all. How are you spending the day?

This holiday, which has never made much sense to me, was always a weekend for a big home improvement project when I was a kid. My father would say "it's a time for Labor after all." He was also fond of saying that the main reason to have kids was so you had little workers. So.

Actually, all weekends featured more work than play for my family-of-origin. Our "play" was also a lot of work - my parents ran a community Gilbert and Sullivan theater group, staging 3-4 of the operettas a year. Saturday? Costume or set construction. Sunday? Rehearsals. Once the show was going? A month of Friday, Saturday, and Sunday performances. We were in the shows. We were the stage manager. We were the house manager. We baked all the cookies and brownies that were sold at the concession.

It wasn't until I could drive myself that I found another way to spend a weekend, and tellingly, my escape into a weekend of my own choosing was to volunteer for hiking trail work parties - yes, I went hiking, but I was hauling along tools and a hardhat. My fun was still a lot of work.

I still don't really know how to treat a weekend, and it's made harder by the fact that my husband would love to just sit and chill all weekend long. That's after he sleeps in both days, of course.

Just chillin - or anything that is mostly sitting around - makes me very uncomfortable. I start to get twitchy. I start to feel bad about myself, like I can physically feel myself spreading and turning into a blob of pudding. Inside, my inner child is glancing around nervously, afraid that one of my parents will catch me "doing nothing" and yell at me before they give me an even worse job to do.

It's obviously a balance that I need. All work and no play does make Sara a dull girl, and a worn out, tired, and sick one too. All play and no work would most likely result in chaos, as there are many dimensions of my life that require my focus and my work. Not only that, but I just couldn't do it - I really really couldn't.

I'm trying to frame some of my downtime as "puttering". I am encouraging myself to take the time without a To Do list, without a plan, and then to just do stuff as I am moved to in the moment. So far, "puttering time" has been filled with painting house trim, cleaning out closets, washing windows, weeding gardens, and pulling kids outside toys out of the margins of the yard and cleaning them up before storage/donation. My husband's comment was that puttering for me apparently means working just as hard as usual, but not asking for any help. It needs a bit more tweaking.

So, once again, happy Labor Day to you all. May your labors be light, and your play be sweet. And may we all find a balance point between the two.

Saturday mornings

They love to come pile into bed with us on Saturday mornings, the only morning of the week that no one has to get up and get off to work early. But here, even if Daddy slept in an old army cot out at his folks' cabin, they seem to think it's a tradition they need to keep up.

Let's talk about money

We have an allowance system in place for our family - my husband even takes out a personal allowance that goes into a different bank account for him. I'm the only one that doesn't really take out the allowance and use it on myself (something I need to work on).

Personal allowances, and the fact that the kids get their allowance on "Allowance Day" is a big help when they are shopping with me. If they see something they want, I can just suggest they save up their allowance. It has cut back on begging and whining in stores like a charm.

But I've been sliding and getting lax on our original intent, which was to require the kids to also save part of their allowance and donate part to a charity of their choice. I've been taking them to the store without giving them cash first, and letting them each pick out something roughly in the ballpark of their allowance amount. If the sales tax pushed it over, or it was a couple bucks more than they had, I just covered it for them and they really never handled the money themselves - it was all on my debit card.

Not the point of an allowance, I think. It's exactly the mindset that doesn't pay too much attention to how much something costs that has led me to carry credit card debt that slowly creeps up month by month.

On the flipside of spending money is earning money. I really hate it when kids aren't willing to do anything around the house unless they are paid for it, and I think chores are mandatory parts of life. But - there are limited ways that kids can earn money, and my kids are very interested in earning more money. I'm trying to think of "extras" that make sense to pay them for. And I'll pay them in cash, but they have to keep the cash out in the open (it has been lost in their bedrooms before, so this is just safer - money is not a toy).

So far, I've paid them for "being their own babysitter" at work one night when I couldn't find a sitter. I'll also pay for them to fold my laundry (not theirs - they really should fold their own), and I'll pay a bounty on all dandelions pulled up out of the yard. Carbon really wants to set up a lemonade stand, but the season for that is already past. We'll keep thinking about entrepreneurial opportunities for him.

And they are back to donating part of their money - they both chose the World Wildlife Fund as their charity.

How do you handle money? What do you think leads to better money habits?

The food plan for school

School starts next week, and I'll need to pack a lunch for every member of the family, plus snacks for preschool, plus snacks to tide us over on the nights the kids are going to dance classes, plus I want to avoid the dreaded dinner hour melt down.

So I'm working out a plan. A list of standard lunches sounds good to me - no floundering about as to what I want to put in the lunch box in the morning. This picture was my rough draft on the frige white-board, but I've swapped a couple of things and put the meat sandwich on Tuesday so we can observe Meatless Mondays and be vegetarians on Mondays.

I've also assigned snacks for Hypatia that will go well with her leftovers from lunch. Her preschool requires a snack, and if the child shows up without one they will feed them one - at $3 a pop. Since she arrives at preschool at 1pm, it will be her leftover lunch and the little side pocket snack I'll pack. And then we have a dance class after school two afternoons a week, so on those days I'll need to have juice and a snack for the kids, because Carbon is always hungry and cranky after school.

My next planning step has been to draw up a chart of all 7 days of the week, am and pm, and write in the tasks that need to be done ahead of time, such as hardboil eggs, make hummus, chop veggies the night before, etc. And I've added a few standard dinners, such as always having a beanpot in the slowcooker on Wednesdays, which requires remembering to soak beans overnight on Tuesday nights.

I get my bakery CSA on Wednesdays, and I pick up my farm CSA on Fridays at the Farmer's Market, which is a good time to buy meat for the week from the local pasture guy who sells there. Then I can look over what veggies I got and make menu plans for the week to utilize those vegetables, and I can go to the regular grocery store to fill in the holes on Friday afternoon or Saturday morning. The CSA ends in October, so I'll adjust the plan then.

And I think we'll stick to either having Sunday dinner at my mother-in-law's or going out on Sunday evening - no Sunday cooking for this girl. :)

It's a plan. Fingers crossed that this keeps us on a more even keel.