Late in Bubelah’s first pregnancy, we stopped in at a bar after a visit to the doctor for a routine checkup. I had a beer and she had a seltzer.  It was a mild winter day, mid-afternoon and we were savoring some quiet time together before the main event, due a few weeks later.  As we chatted, I was slightly surprised to see a couple walk in with a stroller and a baby who appeared to be about two years old.

As they sat at the bar, with their baby parked behind them, I stewed. I had a lifetime of bachelorhood behind me; the main interaction I had with children before I had my own was glaring at them when they cried on airplanes.  My just-recently born niece and nephew were – as far as I can remember – the first and second babies I had held in my life.  I hadn’t been around people with children much at all; my life in New York and Moscow before that was centered around singles life.  Babies and toddlers were a vague, distant afterthought.

So when the toddler at the bar started fussing, my passive-aggressive fury mounted, and I threw the parents a nice rough glare. They seemed to shrug it off.  Being midafternoon, the bar didn’t have any smoke in it, wasn’t crowded and except for a few patrons around the bar and towards the front watching a soccer game on TV, it was quiet.  My glare cut like a knife hurled in the parents’ direction – or at least I imagined it did.  They probably thought I was squinting at the TV.

I am more sympathetic now, of course, since I have two toddlers of my own. It’s tough to avoid “grown-up” places when you have kids.  Just because I have kids doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to visit an adult-oriented establishment from time to time.  The obvious answer is to have a babysitter, but it’s tough to leave two small toddlers alone in the evening with a babysitter unless you have a great deal of trust in her (and yes, I’ll be sexist and say “her”).  And now that I’m a parent, I’d like to expose my almost-four-year-old son to a nice restaurant once in a while.  I’m not sure my daughter appreciates the difference between McDonald’s and the Olive Garden and Morton’s yet, but why not let her enjoy french fries from Morton’s, too?

But. There’s a but.

Kids don’t belong in bars. There are two reasons:  first, they aren’t 21.  What’s the cutoff?  If I bring my 12 year old to a bar, is that OK?  Is it fine as long as they don’t drink?  If so, can a 16 year old stroll in?  19?  Second, I think other patrons have a right to a “no-children-allowed” bar experience, just as they do to a “no-kids-at-R-rated-movies” experience or a “no-kids-playing-in-the-office” experience.  I have seen both; I remember going to see the movie Alien Versus Predator at a matinée * and sitting there with my jaw on the ground as stroller after stroller rolled in filled with (understandably) shrieking babies.  I’ve seen quite a few single mothers who work in accounting over the years bring their kids in to the office in an emergency (babysitter sick, everyone else at work, etc.).  It’s not fair to everyone else to bring kids there.

This may be an Americanism.  Europeans don’t worry much about children at bars. Maybe most cultures don’t care.  I’ve sat on enough beer garden benches with rugrats playing tag in the aisles while in Germany to know that.  Americans may just be more prudish, or more considerate, or less (or more) family oriented.  I’m sure the argument can be made that exposing children to the drinking of alcohol isn’t healthy, but you could make the same argument (in my opinion) for exposing them to TV, junk food, pop culture, toxic big cities and even various political philosophies.

I’m not sure when I’d start feeling comfortable bringing my kids to a bar at happy hour.  The article I read that prompted this thinking (here) seemed to be centered on the parents’ need for socializing.  I view that as selfish.  If you want to socialize, get a babysitter.  Have lunch while your child is at day care.  Take turns as parents staying home while the other goes out.  It’s not ideal, of course, but many of the comments were dead on:  you are a parent now.  If you miss hanging out all afternoon drinking sangria at the local watering hole with friends: tough.  If you’d like to pop into the local bar for a beer with the kid in tow on the way home from work when your child is sleepy:  too bad.

So if you go to TGI Friday’s with the family in tow, fine. They’ll put you near the kitchen, give you some crayons and a kids’ menu and tolerate the tossing of forks.  Should you go to O’Hallorans at 7 pm with your two-year old?  Nope.  Head home, read Runaway Bunny and suck it up.  There’s a happy medium, and I’d rather not be the guy pictured on CNN with an obviously crying baby on my lap and a half-drunk glass of wine in front of me (look at the article).

* I love science fiction.  I loved Alien.  I really loved Aliens, one of my favorite movies ever.  I loved Predator, too – how can you go wrong with two future governors (Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jesse Ventura) fighting an eight-foot-tall invisible rastafarian bug-man?  I was really excited about Aliens versus Predator before it came out.  I did NOT love AvP.  Way to stick a fork in both franchises, people who made AvP.

photo by Penningtron

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
babies in bars is an original article from the website brip blap.

About four years into the business of managing new humans – i.e. raising kids – I’ve realized I have some regrets, unsurprisingly. You might not think four years with two kids (Little Buddy, almost 4, Pumpkin, almost 2) is long enough to develop a list of regrets, but it is. My feeling is that the time-frame for regret is compressed more and more as your children get older. The end result of teaching your children to eat right might not be apparent when you are forcing them to eat vegetables when they are two, compared to denying your 16-year old the right to drive by himself. The types of regret become more significant, as well: not teaching them to stay away from drugs is on a different level than not using cloth diapers, for example.

Focusing on the negative is never a good way to produce positive change, so before I catalog on the regrets I can toss out a few things that have made me proud of Bubelah and myself: our children have a fluent understanding of a second language, able to understand both English and Russian. We have instilled a love of reading in Little Buddy (uh oh, foreshadowing a regret here). They are healthy, verbal and happy, other than the usual little toddler outbursts. They are adorable kids (don’t worry, I’m being neutral, they are definitely the cutest, sweetest, smartest kids on the planet).

I won’t focus, either, on meta-regrets or things that are still in process. A good example? The kids have not yet been exposed to even 10 seconds of volunteerism or community work. That’s bad. On the other hand, I think there will be opportunities to do so. I also don’t focus on regrets that I call “meta-regrets” like circumcision – who knows whether I should regret that or not.

As a general bit of advice to new parents, in other words, here are a few fairly simple little regrets that I’ll just pass on, even though I know new parents – like we were – hear so much advice in the middle of sleep-deprived conversations that much of it becomes a big, fuzzy blur.

Toys with batteries

Since we send our son (and soon our daughter) to a Waldorf school, we’ve been exposed to the Waldorf philosophy regarding toys: all toys have to be natural materials and non-branded (i.e. no Dora or Batman). Battery-powered toys are forbidden (so no cute wooden trains), as are violent toys: no wooden guns. All of that is fine, but at home our kids have a vast area of beeping and booping Dora, Handy Manny, Sesame Street and LeapFrog devices. Cars honk. Alvin, Simon and Theodore chirp away. Dora blares out Spanglish. I don’t mind plastic toys so much; my brother and I spent countless hours playing with plastic cars and planes and bears and dinosaurs. I do, on the other hand, regret SOME of the branded toys and ALL of the battery powered toys.

Battery powered toys are horrible. I regret not placing a ban on them as gifts, buying them myself or allowing even “educational” ones like LeapFrog into the house. They have an unintended side effect: I have more than once snatched away a toy from my kids after one too many electronic shrieks of “GO! DIEGO! GO!” The noises make me grumpy. Plus, after a few years, the real problem is obvious: battery-powered toys crush imagination. My son or daughter can take a handful of toys like Smurfs, dinosaurs, even little action figures, a couple of little houses or castles and play fascinating, original little games. They can build cities, make up “families” from a bear, a duck and a smurf, and so on. But once a battery-powered toy is introduced, a bit of a rat-getting-cheese-by-pressing-a-lever takes over. Battery-powered toys are TV on a small scale.

Television

Now this one is funny. I hate children’s TV. It serves no purpose for children. I am as convinced today as I was four years ago that a child would be infinitely better off if he or she didn’t see a television program until their fifth birthday. All of the so-called “educational” programs are, largely, garbage intended primarily as branding tools for a line of merchandise. TV is garbage.

BUT – there’s a big but – TV serves a purpose that has nothing to do with the kids. It does serve as a babysitter. I am going to out myself as a bad parent, but you know what? When it’s 6:30 am on a Saturday, both kids are up and bouncing around ready to go, and Papa hasn’t had his coffee, Dora can turn them into the quiet little couch monkeys that give Papa 30 minutes to make breakfast and drink coffee. So it helps.

So the regret is not TV so much, but failure to take much more aggressive action to control the medium in this way: absolute avoidance of just turning the TV on at random. I wish I had recorded 100s of hours of Sesame Street videos. I wish I had recorded things like “Go Go Riki” – but edited out all of the commercials. And I wish we had purchased a Roku sooner, which has a nice little collection of things like Caillou. The TV experience then could have been limited to complete shows, commercial-free and consistent. Instead, far too often we’ve just flipped on the TV and said “hey kids, what do you want? Handy Manny or Curious George?” The kids then watch the last 10 minutes of a Curious George episode and 15 minutes of Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, mixed in with commercials (and believe me, PBS and Disney Playhouse can blather on all they want to about being advertising-free, but I still see Chuck E. Cheese popping up a lot between shows).

Reading

As I mentioned above, this is one of my few “split” regrets. I read to Little Buddy in the womb. I propped his wobbly little noggin up and read “Oh, the Places You Will Go” and “Brown Bear, Brown Bear” to him endless times. We read Mercer Mayer books, Richard Scarry, Russian classics, English classics nonstop. And then we had a second child and reading to Little Buddy became much more infrequent. That was fine – he had already developed enough of a love of books to keep him going. A few books a day hold him, and he can pick up a book and leaf through it, identifying letters he knows and even reciting stories from memory. That’s fine.

Pumpkin’s another matter. In the chaos of dealing with two small kids, too often she was left to play and entertain herself while we chased Little Buddy around. Reading to her was the exception, rather than the rule. That sounds terrible, and it’s not as bad as that: Little Buddy was probably read to far more than was necessary, and Pumpkin’s still had her fair share of Chicka Chicka Boom Boom. But already the difference in the two of them is obvious; Pumpkin’s far more likely to squirm away from a book than Little Buddy was at her age. She enjoys a few favorite books but gets bored by new ones. I know we still have years to correct that, but I wish we had approached it differently.  I regret our approach more with one of our children than with the other.

Food

I am sure many parents could write “War and Peas” about their children’s eating habits. Again, I won’t go into meta-regrets about, say, vegetarianism or 100% avoidance of fast food or anything like that. I might wish that foods like chicken nuggets had never been introduced, but that genie is out of the bottle.

But what I do regret, and still hope to change, is the eating schedule and atmosphere. I insisted – and still do – that the TV be off while we eat. But what I should have paid more attention to is the idea that meals are meant to be shared. It’s very easy when you have four people in a family who are not only on different schedules but have different metabolisms to slip into an “eat-when-convenient” mindset. I rise earlier than everyone else. Little Buddy goes to school. I go to work. Pumpkin takes three hour naps covering lunchtime. I get home at 6 most days but the kids are hungry at 5. The result has been that we almost never eat together. We still have time to fix it, but it’s a regret because I wonder if the mental building blocks (“grab food and run”) have already been laid.

Regrets – I’ve had a few

That’s a long enough list of regrets for me to bear for today. The unifying factor of all of these regrets is that we worried about one thing but ended up regretting the unintended side effects, or something unanticipated For example, we worried about diet, but the problem hasn’t been diet (they eat fairly normal and non-junky diets) but the structure of mealtime. This is true of so many things in life; young people worry about where to go to college more than they do about what to study once they are there, even though that makes a far, far greater difference in the direction of one’s life.

Regrets are not productive. My dad sent me a birthday card years ago when I was in a bit of a down period that had a little guy standing at a fork in the road. In the forward direction a sign pointed with the inscription “the future.” The sign pointing in the direction headed back said “not an option.” The past is over and immutable. The future is the only thing that can be changed, and the only purpose of a regret is to help you improve in the future. Even if your regrets impact others, you can’t make the past any worse; you can only make the future better.

photo by broma

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
small human regrets is an original article from the website brip blap.

My wife is an intelligent woman who decided to quit her professional career as a management-tracked analyst with a huge investment bank in order to be a stay-at-home parent when our son arrived, and to remain home even longer when our daughter arrived.

First of all, before I’m jumped upon…I know there are single mothers and poorer families who have no choice. I would maintain this is a small proportion of the population, though. Single mothers definitely have no choice as the primary breadwinner, of course. Some families may have special circumstances that require both parents to work – health care costs spring to mind. I wonder, though, how many times the choice to work is the choice to support owning a second television, or keeping the premium movie channels, owning the house with the extra two rooms, or leasing a nice car – versus staying home with a child.

My family took a big hit to our finances when my wife quit work. We went from two people living in a two-bedroom apartment on two salaries to three people living in a three-bedroom house on one salary. We did it by making huge changes in our spending, and after a couple of years those changes have – surprise – become fairly routine. We understood that we could not afford as many luxury vacations or idle purchases of gadgets and jewelry and so on. The reward was that our children have been able to stay at home with their mother and be in a safe, healthy, fun environment.

This setup has not come without cost. My wife misses adult companionship and the sense of validation that you get from a professional position. We miss having the second salary, which for a while was all being plowed into savings and made for a relatively large down payment on our home. And of course my wife worries about her future job prospects once both of the kids are in school and don’t need a stay-at-home mom. But the worst thing in the past were the assaults on her decision by other women.

Bubelah relayed conversations to me from her friends and ex-colleagues and so on where the subject was inevitably “when are you going to get back to work?” Aside from the obvious insult that caring for a child is not “work”, this had a very negative effect on her state of mind. She usually laughed it off, but the simple fact is that she doesn’t really interact on a daily basis with anyone but me who supports her decision to make child care a full-time job – although since we’ve moved to Florida the support has been a bit warmer. We never felt that the trade-off of getting another salary was worth having our kids in day-care 10 hours a day before they were two years old, but that’s what we felt was expected, sometimes.

Do we need the money? We may not be able to spend freely like our friends do (particularly since we also don’t take on any debt) but we really don’t NEED any more money to meet our current expenses. I understand that sometimes both parents want to work. That is fine, but just be honest about that choice. Many people claim to be “forced” to work two jobs to make ends meet, but is it really “making ends meet” when you drive a new car and have premium movie channels and take a vacation to Aruba every year?

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
the two-income myth is an original article from the website brip blap.

Most of my relatives have divergent ideas about money and its place in our lives.  By relatives I’m including the wide range from my wife to my parents to my in-laws, etc. I realized a long time ago that it is a trivial undertaking to pick out the flaws in other people’s philosophies or actions – while at the same time failing to recognize them in your own thoughts and actions. However, I still find it a fairly useful exercise to try and determine the how-and-why of people’s good decisions and bad decisions. Even more important is trying to understand the ‘why’ behind those decisions.

My mother’s parents (my grandparents), for instance, were always quite frugal. They were both raised on farms in the 20s and 30s and suffered through the Depression. My grandfather left home to join the Army pre-World War II, serving in the horse cavalry – and yes, it’s hard to believe the US still had a horse cavalry less than 80 years ago, isn’t it? Here are some of their views towards money that I think are interesting, both good and bad, and my take on them.

• Investing, a good habit. My grandfather was an early fervent believer in investing. Coming from a rural background and suffering through the Great Depression you might expect him to be very wary of investing, but he was quite the opposite. He invested heavily in the market, and on a schoolteacher’s salary did quite well over the years. He invested in the market although he had a state pension, and could have chosen to spend that money on other things. From him I learned a very conservative study-buy-and-hold approach. Although I didn’t know it at the time I learned it from him, his approach was basically the same as Warren Buffet’s. While it didn’t make my grandfather a billionaire, it did make him a huge ‘extra’ retirement fund on top of his pension and my grandmother’s.
• Never selling, ultimately a bad habit. My grandparents maintained an almost emotional attachment to some of their stocks and held them year after year, even in times of declining prices, shrinking dividends and their own advancing age and deteriorating health. They saved these stocks thinking that they would be passed on to future generations (for example, me).  But as they moved into more and more expensive housing (nursing homes are much more expensive than regular apartments, obviously) until he passed away, it became obvious that all of that money would not outlive both of them.  Had they moved it into a savings account paying 5% ten years ago they could have been earning steady income and perhaps avoided some of the market fluctuations that ate away at their net worth.
• Never really spending, good and bad. Although they amassed a modest “fortune “, during retirement my grandparents never spent much. They constantly talked of wanting to pass it on to my mother (an only child) and my brother and myself. They never traveled, although my grandfather dreamed of returning to see a peaceful France and Germany, where he had spent years during the war. They did ‘live large’ in some senses – they ate out frequently (albeit modest restaurants), they bought new cars for cash every few years while they could still drive, and they were extremely generous to everyone in their family. They gave us stocks, cash and other gifts for years. However, it is hard for me to look back on their 20+ years of retirement together before my Grandfather passed away and think that they never really did much after retiring. I know that part of that is my perception, since I love overseas travel, but I am not sure retirement was meant for watching TV and eating out. That’s a judgment each person has to make individually, I guess. But to view it in a more positive light, when my mom was younger and living at home they were very frugal, and even late in life my grandfather’s frugality could be amazing. A heavy, heavy smoker for his entire adult life, he quit cold turkey one day because he thought cigarette prices had finally gotten too high – and didn’t ever smoke again (17+ years). He never worried about the health aspect as far as I know, but paying $3 for a pack of cigarettes instead of $2 was apparently one dollar too much.
• Avoiding debt, extremely good. My parents and grandparents gave me one gift that I realize is invaluable after I read many personal finance blogs: the fear of debt. I have been convinced since an early age that going into debt is practically a mortal sin, a stain on your character, a flaw. While I think it may have been overstated a bit, this philosophy has made me somewhat unique in a sense: I have never carried a balance on a credit card, EVER. I have had only two debts in my life: a car loan one time and a mortgage on my current house. Other than that, I have never bought anything I couldn’t pay for with my existing funds. So debt has never been a headache for me, which is a great gift.  Possibly the greatest one you can get, because with debt so little else is possible.
• Charity begins at home, mixed. I know this may run counter to many people’s beliefs, but another closely held belief of my grandparents was to take care of themselves and their own before others. This philosophy meant that there was no ‘automatic giving’ to charity until everyone in the family was taken care of. They gave generously to their church every week, but I am sure (without ever having seen it put to the test) that had I been in need for some reason they would have given that money to me, instead, for as long as I needed it, and forgotten the church.  Give when you are able. Get your own financial house in at least minimal order before trying to help others.  I do not subscribe to the Christian teaching that I should give ALL I own to the poor, and apparently from the number of late model SUVs and families in nice clothes I see in church parking lots I’m not alone in rejecting that teaching. It doesn’t mean you can’t give to charity – I certainly give to several children’s charities – but take care of your family first.

Those points are really just highlights. The important lesson to remember is that anything your family or your friends teach you about finance is valuable. Sometimes you may learn by avoiding their mistakes, sometimes you may learn by taking their advice to heart – but it’s all learning. From my maternal grandparents, I learned to save and to avoid debt but also that sometimes you need to spend money, too, because there ARE things and experiences in life worth the money. The truly important thing was never the money, it was the security the money bought, and being able to give back to their family, that mattered to them.

(another reworking of an article originally appearing on brip blap in 2007)

photo by Ghostboy

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
what my grandparents taught me about money is an original article from the website brip blap.

Who doesn’t love a cute and educational children’s television program? If you have small children, I’m sure you’re amazed by the wide array of supportive, nurturing programs that strive to be as educational as possible, given that most of them are commercial ventures. But what are they really teaching, and what does that message mean for the society this generation will construct?

I had the best intentions, before my kids were born, to limit TV time. I still do to a greater extent, I think, than many other parents (I like to think so, at least). I don’t allow them to see anything involving gun violence, up to and including cowboy-cartoon type shows. I try to restrict viewing of commercial programs (Nickolodeon) in favor of PBS and Playhouse Disney and movies. And yes, I know, Playhouse Disney is a 24/7 advertisement for the products of the Disney Corporation, but at least it doesn’t have blatant blaring Bratzz and Transformers ads every ten minutes.

So now that I’m digging a deeper hole for myself, admitting to familiarity with these programs, I’ll start off by naming MY favorite kids’ shows, and why, before going on to the horror at the bottom of the barrel.

The Wiggles: You could argue that the Wiggles don’t teach a thing. These four guys from the land of AC/DC dress in bright primary colors and do little but, well, wiggle around while singing songs about wiggly spaghetti. What I like about it, though, is that they do encourage a lot of movement in kids – my children love to dance to Wiggles songs. They also like Talking Heads, though, so maybe it’s just the music. But it’s the ONLY show I’ve ever seen inspire actual movement, as opposed to zombie-like lounging.

Little Einsteins: The Little Einsteins take a few bars of a classical composition, artwork of some sort and then use these “tools” to rocket around the world to save a moose, help the baby monkey find his lost rattle, and so on. I’m not sure what’s being taught, but I know that constant exposure to classical music in Bugs Bunny cartoons at least made me recognize the music later in life. Unfortunately I refer to “The Ride of the Valkyries” as “the one where Bugs is in Viking drag on a giant horse chasing Elmer Fudd.” Freud, start your engines. Little Einsteins don’t have much Viking drag.

Mickey Mouse Clubhouse: Yes, because of this show my kids have Disney deeply implanted in their skulls. The title song – by “We Might Be Giants” – doesn’t make up for that. But this show surprisingly seldom gets as condescending as many shows (I’m looking at you, Dora) and puts a great deal of emphasis on counting, collaboration and goal-setting without resorting to mind-numbing repetition.

The Penguins of Madagascar: OK, I don’t like my kids watching this show. It’s utterly non-educational. Four penguins who act like a Delta Force team are engaged in constant shenanigans with the preening, annoying king of the lemurs, King Julian. Everyone acts crazy. But the dialogue is snappy – unlike the lethargic, repetitive pace of most shows – and that alone makes it more enjoyable. Not for them, for me.  This show is more fun for me.  I deserve a break, for God’s sake.

So those were some of the good ones. Now for the ones that make me shudder:

Curious George: OK, I like Curious George. I like the books. The monkey’s fun, the artwork’s cute. But think about the very odd living situation of the man in the yellow suit. He lives in a penthouse on Central Park with his monkey. Is it too soon for Michael Jackson references? The monkey creates endless havoc, does exactly what he’s told not to do and is often saved by others who put themselves in peril to do so. This show basically says “go ahead, do stupid and dangerous things and people will chuckle.” Don’t get me wrong – I like a “take chances with life” philosophy, but someone stifling your dreams of becoming a poet is a far different scenario than “George, don’t play on the conveyor belt”.

SpongeBob SquarePants: I told my kids that Sponge Bob was canceled and not on the TV anymore. I couldn’t take it and I saw no other way out. Much like Curious George, the premise of the show seems to be that being an idiot is something to emulate. The running side gag – that a flea is trying to steal the recipe to the Crabby Patties Sponge Bob makes – as a burger-flipper – annoys me. SpongeBob works at McDonald’s-Under-The-Sea. He aspires to nothing, contributes nothing, annoys everyone and harasses his neighbor, Squidworth. No point, no attempt at education, and the products based on SpongeBob are EVERYWHERE.

Dora the Explorer: Quick poll. If you plop kids in front of an episode of Dora, what do they do when Dora asks a question? She asks, pauses about 5 seconds, then says “That’s right!” My kids say nothing. My kids have not learned Spanish, either, as a result of Dora, nor do they need to do so. I’d rather have them watch Telemundo and learn spoken Spanish, not Dora’s Spanglish. Dora is tedious, repetitive and the attempt at interactivity is painful. I’d rather see kids play a Dora game on the computer where they could actually click the mouse around, rather than the stupid effect of having a pointer fly around the TV screen, clicking.  Vaminos to a different channel.

(catchall) Any show that teaches kids that they are unique and special just as they are. It’s a common rant – I’ve heard both Adam Carolla and Anthony Bourdain rant on this recently – but it’s true. I wrote a post about “8 steps to a six figure career.” Not one of them said “you are special and unique, just as you are, and nobody’s like you, and because of that everyone will recognize your specialness and give you a six figure salary. Just for being you. Sweetie.” Even Paris Hilton has to get out there and hustle for attention. She has to distinguish herself from Lindsay Lohan, Tara Reid, a host of minor B-list drunken actresses and singers. Not everyone is special.  People make themselves special through effort, not through entitlement.

Everyone can MAKE themselves special, but even Tiger Woods practices. Kids need to learn that being special and valued and unique is the work of a lifetime, not an entitlement. I made myself somewhat special by learning Russian, living and working for years in Russia. That took effort. Without that, I am just another guy with an MBA from a state university, working the traditional corporate path. I made myself stand out. Children need to be taught that inherent intelligence is NOTHING if not put to use. Special abilities (drawing, music, athletics, language, whatever) are also worthless unless used and developed. The idea that you can sit on your butt doing nothing and call yourself special is laughable, and the attempt at building self-esteem is going to implode when these kids realize, as adults staring at the clock in the cubicle at 4:52 pm, that all of the bubbly anthems declaring that “everyone is special” were a lie.

photo by IntangibleArts

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
everyone is special and unique just the way they are is an original article from the website brip blap.

I spend an inordinate amount of time worried about the trivial aspects of child-rearing. As a confirmed bachelor a decade ago, I would have though my concern laughable.  Only soft-headed parents sat around worrying about their children hearing Mozart in the womb and being exposed to ecologically sound psychologically pleasing alphabet posters.  The idea of grooming children for greatness seemed stupid.  Care to debate breast-feeding, anyone?

Now, after spending more than three years with two small children, I’ve been through the fire and back over to the other side. I spent years thinking that if my kids whimpered in their sleep, they needed to be held.  If they couldn’t figure out the difference between two fingers and three fingers, they needed to be TAUGHT … NOW.  For a while, every moment had to be a learning moment or it was a lost moment.  The simple fact is that children are rough beasts, and little we do can really influence the humans they will be.

Extremes exist, of course. Extreme abuse can hurt, and extremes of nurturing can help.  Wealth and influence help.  I have no doubt that the children of the Bushes, Kennedys, Clintons and Obamas of the world have more access to better experiences and tutors and influences than I can hope to provide.  But I have seen children of caring, loving, involved parents turn into low, desperate adults.  I have seen children who had no positive parental influence at all turn into amazing, positive and caring adults.  I have seen the opposite – caring, loving, involved parents who raised caring, loving, involved kids.  What I have never seen in my life – to date – is a pattern.  Kids are gonna vex ya.

We are all shaped by a multitude of influences. I count things as grand as my years in Moscow as an influence, but I would argue that I was just as deeply and permanently influenced by reading The Lord of The Rings when I was young.  Digging back further, the time spent listening to my father read chapters from “The Hobbit” opened up an intellectual curiosity in my mind.  I can count the momentary influences in my life that left deep impressions on me just as easily as the long-term influences.  An evening spent playing Titanic with my parents might have had as deep an influence on me as my college education.

If you don’t have children, I think this lesson still holds true. Don’t worry too much about the influence you think you have – or don’t have – over others.  We overestimate our own influence, because we are human.  No matter how in touch we are with ourselves, WE are the universe.  It soaks into everything – I write about personal finance because MY personal finances OUGHT to be the subject of praise/disdain/etc.  Some basic principles hold true:  in personal finance, don’t go into debt; in life, don’t hit women (for example – an inarguable principle).  Core values are unalterable.  We all want to be important, and the hero of our own lives.

But don’t worry about your children’s future as much as you do. Do what you can to be open, happy, and present.  Everything else will be a bonus.  The best college?  Extra.  The best cars or stuff?  Extra.  Even that extra book at bedtime?  Extra, to be honest.  Don’t worry about your friends or your family – do your best to be present above all else with them, and let them do what they can with that.  If you put the best YOU out there that you can, you’ve done a good job.  Your children can feed off of that better than they can a million trips to the mall.

photo by alessandro pucci

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
why you shouldn’t worry about your children’s future is an original article from the website brip blap.

I grew up in the Deep South. Winter meant jackets, not heavy coats, and snow meant a dusting and a nuclear-war level alert by the local school districts.  A half inch of snow meant weeping mothers, runs on canned foods at the supermarket and preparations for the breakdown of society.  As kids, snow wasn’t really much of a factor one way or another for us.  Life was the hot season and everything else.

Yet I’ve spent three winters with a child in the northeast and learned that the seasons of a childhood here are the outdoor season and the indoor season. This year, we had a long indoor season.  When I lost my last consulting contract, we were faced with an odd prospect – Papa was going to be home all winter but we had to watch money because we had no income coming in.

I count myself lucky. My wife and I, despite having many differences of opinion on money, have aggressively saved against a day such as…well, these days.  The long cold winter wasn’t filled with trips to Disneyland but it wasn’t filled with Ramen noodles and sweaters-versus-50-degree-thermometers, either.  We had the means to prepare.

But at the same time, I had a long winter not working – unless you count blogging as work – to think about what made a happy childhood and one of the recurring thoughts I had was that outdoor time was precious. I’m not sure about my daughter yet, but my son appears to rocket into full form when he’s outdoors.  He seems happiest outside.  He seemed restricted and bored indoors throughout the winter, and once a mild spring/summer (whatever this miserable pseud0-season is here in New Jersey) arrived, he launched outdoors with a vengeance. His childhood – at this early stage – could appear to be defined by the ratio of indoor to outdoor time.

I know some people will wax nostalgic about snowmen, or snowballs, or mulled tea. Not me.  For me, a happy childhood – and to some extent, a happy adulthood – are directly proportional to warm days.  Wish me luck as I seek to prove this theory. 

photo credit: chantrybee

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
how to have a happy childhood is an original article from the website brip blap.

A life lesson, using a child as an example:  when my son was born, we were good parents. When he cried, we ran to him.  We rocked him, sang him comforting songs in English and Russian.  We gave him milk to get him to sleep.  We slept in the room with him. We still do.  He sleeps in fits and spurts.  He’s a great kid, but his sleep patterns are erratic.

When my daughter was born, we were good parents. When she cried, we waited.  We rocked her sometimes, but put her down at the first sign of drowsiness.  We sang to her when she was awake, but never to put her to sleep.  We gave her milk sometimes, but often put her to sleep long after milk.  We never stay in the room with her.  She sleeps through the night occasionally – something we never could have imagined with my son at her age, or even now.

The life lesson?  Constant attention is not always the answer.

1.  Your spouse does not need your constant attention. People are individuals.  When you get married, you are not a cyborg unit, a fusion of male and female (or otherwise, depending on your state’s legal system).  You are two individuals who love each other.  Back off a bit sometimes.

2.  Children need to grow and explore – and here’s the shocker, they don’t need you ALL THE TIME. I thought I had to entertain my son 24/7.  He’s a brilliant boy (I’m an objective observer) but he’s highly dependent on interaction.  Maybe that means he’s going to be president in 2044.  Who knows?  But my daughter already shows independence and the ability to entertain herself.  One of the keys to life is to be happy with yourself, and although that can come from interacting with others or from spending time alone, kids do need to develop the alone-time skill first.

3.  Work does not require constant attention. Back off a bit.  Have a life away from work.  Don’t think that your company will fail without you.  It will not.  I promise you.  Try it – stay home for a day and turn off the phone and email.  It will still be there tomorrow.

4.  Money will wait. If your finances are great – or shoddy – they will not change drastically if you look at every penny or if you let slide a few dollars.  Make an overall guiding philosophy, then let the small things slide.  Constant attention to every expenditure in your life is not necessary.

The term “accidental parenting” applies to a lot of decisions made by parents – overindulgence in one area creates problems later in life. “Accidental life planning” or “accidental money planning” would be equally apt terms.  I’ve always found it amusing that I’m considered one of the most draconian and strict parents in my neighborhood.  I don’t view myself that way, and according to most of the parenting books I read we are on the lax end of the scale.

The most important thing to learn is that nobody benefits from being treated like a baby, not even babies. Not friends, not family, not kids, not parents.  Our financial, social, intellectual and spiritual lives don’t need to be treated like babies, either.  Push your kids and your own limits and you’ll all benefit.  Push yourself and limits won’t matter.

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
how to soothe a crying baby is an original article from the website brip blap.

I’ve seen the question of children play out a dozen different ways with friends and in my own life. My parents had kids (my brother and me) when they were barely out of their teenage years.  I have friends who waited until they were almost 40 to have kids.  One couple fervently and frequently insisted they would never have kids – and show no signs of changing their minds.  In each case, the decision to have a child (or children) was deeply personal, and made for a number of reasons – but seldom considering the cost.  The simple fact is that you’ll be better off financially without kids.  Kids are expensive.

It’s a potentially sensitive topic … and most people don’t want to have that conversation. “Kids bring so much joy into your life!”  “Kids are their own reward!”  I’m biased – the cliches are all true.  My son’s a supernova of energy, creative and amazingly verbal.  My daughter’s charming and almost impossibly cheerful.  They are joys.  But to be realistic, I have to admit that because of them I will not be as wealthy as I could have been.  I regret nothing, but I also understand that I’m going to have to work harder accumulating wealth than I would have without children.

So how do we plan to compensate? If you have kids, how can you avoid spending more than you need to?  It’s not the nature of my blog to talk about ways to save money on Cheerios by buying the store brand.  But I do have a few “big ideas”:

1. I’m not paying for my kid’s PRIVATE college education. If Little Buddy wants to attend a private school, he’d better develop his tennis skills or become a world-class scholar.  I’m not paying for Pumpkin to attend an Ivy.  I’ll help, but if they can’t pay for a private college, they can go to a public university, just like Mama and Papa did.  We did just fine.
2. We will readjust our lives around their education early on, though. In the city we live in (the New Jersey “suburbs” of New York) the public schools are awful.  I am, however, firmly opposed to private schooling.  We will either move to find a good public school district, or homeschool.  I’m increasingly set on that idea.
3. I will strive to teach independence. This sounds stupid, but I have seen so many of my colleagues in corporate America talking about their mid-20 (or even mid-30) year old children living at home.  I know I can talk big now, but I left home at 18 and my children will too.  If we’re still living in the NYC area and they can’t afford a home, I’ll tell them to move to a cheaper locale.  An unmarried 35-year-old living with their parents needs to experience life.
4. We will resist consumerism. My neighbors bought one of those big car-battery powered cars – with a working FM radio – for their daughters.  Little Buddy loves it.  I was tempted to get him one.  He doesn’t need it.  I have fallen victim again and again to the urge to buy toys.  Sometimes it makes sense:  I bought him a farm set that he plays with daily.  Sometimes I fail:  I have bought a half dozen balls (football, baseball, soccer) and he is utterly indifferent to all of them that don’t have Spiderman on them.  But I see a sickness in most parents around me:  the need to buy distractions.  I struggle to remind myself that learning to pretend my wooden blocks were race cars taught me to IMAGINE things.  My parents would have done me a disservice by buying me Hot Wheels.  Learning how to live with less – at least as far as toys – is a gift, not a burden.

But none of these cost-saving ideas can compensate for the fact that a childless couple (or a single person) will simply be much better off than a couple with kids. I won’t recommend one choice or the other, because it’s such a personal choice.  But don’t let anyone tell you otherwise:  in the short term, having kids is no big deal.  You can afford formula, diapers, baby clothes.  But in the long run, having kids will change your career choices, affect your ability to save and limit your choices about almost everything.  Make sure you’re comfortable with the long-term cost before you take the leap.

photo credit: Kevin N. Murphy

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
why you’ll be richer without kids is an original article from the website brip blap.

photo credit: Rhys Jones Photography

When I started working at my current client, I was lucky enough to get an office that was being vacated by a retiring officer. This arrangement made things very simple for everyone – no need to set up a new desk, get a new PC or even get office supplies. I just sat down and started to work.

Imagine my surprise when I found out last week that I was ‘unofficial’ and technically just squatting in the office. I probably should have suspected something since I never received an extension or voicemail (irrelevant to me, though, as a Grand Central user). So a small political disagreement arose between the head of my sub-department and the head of another sub-department over the usage of the office.

I was not terribly concerned about the office. As a consultant I’ve grown accustomed to cubicles and random desks here and there. I found that losing my corner office with floor-to-ceiling windows and a view of lower Manhattan only affected me for a month or two. After adjusting to the lack of an office, I have become uninterested in my physical location as long as I have the basic amenities – a moderately comfortable chair, some tabletop space and adequate air and light. Sounds like I’m a hamster, practically.

The next step in this process, though, was ridiculous. The company has tight budget on the purchase or lease of new PCs, and I was told that temporarily I would have to share a laptop computer with one other consultant (from a different company) and an employee. More than just the logistical insanity of a setup like this, the sheer short-sightedness of it was amazing. I protested that I would just bring my own laptop from home and at least piggyback onto the nearby public library WiFi. I wouldn’t be able to get on the company network but at least I could work offline on reports or documents.

After inquiring why I couldn’t keep the desktop I was currently working on, I was told it was because as an ‘unofficial’ they didn’t want to alert the department executives that a move was taking place, because it might alert them to the empty office and spare equipment. Sadly, it took me two days to realize what this meant – the employees weren’t going to physically move the computer without a work order and the desktop was going to become a paperweight. The office was going to be converted into a room for several new consultants, and they were bringing their own computers.

Frustrated by all of this, I decided to do something myself. So I solved most of my problems this morning by simply unhooking the desktop and physically carrying it over to my new cube and plugging it back in. This bold and decisive step took some of the regular employees back and I was told to assume complete responsibility if asked how it was moved, since apparently I could trigger all sorts of ‘asset removal’ problems. And of course my new cube is also ‘unofficial’, so I continue a vague status as a gypsy consultant. My pay continues to arrive, though, so the other details remain fairly inconsequential to me.

With a decision-making and action-taking process like this I wonder about the future of American business. It’s hard to believe we put a man on the moon sometimes.

If you read brip blap via RSS, you might want to visit the site and see the new theme; if you like it, it's the frugal theme and if you buy it through that link, you help support brip blap.
if you believe they put a man on the moon is an original article from the website brip blap.