Today Liza is One
Happy birthday, Liza!
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The View From the Top
Before Eli was born, I looked at how much we were spending and how much Eli was likely to cost us. I then took a moment to breathe slowly and deeply into a paper bag while red numbers danced in my vision. It’s a natural reaction, and I always figured most parents-to-be experienced it regardless of how much they made.
It looks like I was right, if this post is any indication. The would-be parents are making $200,000 in Silicon Valley, and aren’t sure how to make ends meet. I’ll leave it as an exercise for the readers to determine how reasonable the poster’s proposed budget is. Note that he’s in the top 5 percent of US earners, views his monthly budget as “austere,” and has come up with similar budgets for living somewhere other than Silicon Valley.
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Summer Scheduling
Summer shouldn’t need a schedule. It should be days of waking up and deciding if we’re going to get motivated enough to go to the pool or just play in the water sprinkler in the yard.
It should not require a shared Google calendar to pull off. And yet for the second time in about three weeks, Stephen and I have had our wires so crossed that we didn’t know what we were doing.
So now our family has a giant Google calendar. Everyone has their own color and every event is now being meticulously added for the greater good. Greater good in this case is marital harmony.
May is full of family visits to celebrate Liza’s birthday. June is full of Eli’s camps. He’s taking swimming lessons for two weeks and then going to soccer camp for a week. July is shaping up to be our trip to Japan. August will bring the school schedule with it.
I’m already exhausted and school isn’t even out for summer yet. But better this schedule than the one from last year! This time last year I was beginning my two weeks of off and on labor before Liza’s birth. Let’s just say I’m looking forward to the 20 hours of flying to Japan way more than the 20+ hours of labor.
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Misty Loses at Vomit Roulette Once Again
This morning as I was showering I was thinking of this website and feeling the pressure of not having made a post in a couple of days. I wondered what to write about and decided to see where the day would take me.
Eli had a dental checkup this morning and all went well except the dentist insists that Eli now give up his pacifier. He started to whinge about it before we even got to the car. I struck a deal with him. If he could do without the binky and the bulk of the moaning about the binky for a whole week, then next Wednesday we’d go to the Pizza Rat, a.k.a. Chuck E. Cheese’s, for lunch. He agreed to it and was unusually silent during the ride towards home. I asked him a couple of times what he was thinking and he said he was thinking about going to Chuck’s.
About 3 blocks from home he started coughing. I asked if he was ok and I passed him a napkin just in time for him to throw up all over the napkin, himself, the car seat and the backseat.
I don’t know if you missed the post from this weekend but I’ve already had my quota of vomit for a while. Also, Stephen and I struck a deal back four years ago when I was pregnant that he would deal with the vomit and I would deal with the blood. Yeah, so far that deal has not worked out in any shape or form.
I’d just like to let the universe, and you guys, in on a little secret: I hate vomit. I hate to do it myself, I hate to smell other people’s and I most especially hate to clean it up. Even more so when it’s to clean it out of the car seat, the crack of the backseat, and the seatbelt.
I suppose I should be thankful that I’ve had to deal with more vomit than blood but is it too much to ask to not have to deal with either one?
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A Four Year Old Reviews Grand Theft Auto IV
Long ago I reviewed a lot of video games for a dot com, which meant that I got a lot of free games. Even now, years later, I sometimes get free games.
So how could I not try out Grand Theft Auto 4? And how could I not see what Eli thought of it?
Technorati Tags: grand theft auto 4, video game, review, not the kind of sandbox he usually plays in
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Selling Parents Fear
In March, Lenore Skenazy let her nine-year old son ride home from Bloomingdale’s on the New York subway — by himself. Then she made the mistake of writing about it in the NY Sun.
As you can imagine, a lot of parents thought she was nuts. Her son could have been abducted! It wasn’t safe!
Being a parent means having sudden, unexpected moments of panic when your child drops a heavy weight on his head or stuffs undoubtedly poisonous plant leaves in her mouth. Really, it’s a wonder we don’t lock ourselves and our kids inside and never venture out, except then radon would kill us.
There are, of course, a bunch of products that play on those fears. You want to baby-proof your home, and looking at everything you could buy you might think it’s possible, but you can’t, short of removing all plants, books, sharp corners, and electricity. You can make your home reasonably safe, but true baby-proofing short of putting your kid in a giant hamster ball is unachievable.
Even once you’ve given up on making your child perfectly safe, how do you decide what’s reasonable? For instance, what about SafetyTats, temporary tattoos with your cell phone on them? The company’s very tag line is, “just in case.” At first I didn’t see the need for them — Eli is quite capable of telling sales clerks that he’s lost. But what if we were in an amusement park, where Eli or Liza could get very, very lost and it could be hard to track us down? What if I had a non-verbal or autistic child?
Overall I decide what’s reasonable to worry about by how likely it is to happen. That’s one reason why I don’t even worry about anyone abducting Eli or Liza. In 2004, The Today Show claimed that 58,000 children go missing each year. According to US Census data, there were 72 million children under the age of 18 in 2000. That works out to an abduction rate of 80 per 100,000 children. However, the 58,000 number covers all “non-family abductions”. There’s more to it than meets the eye, as the STATS.org report explained.
But in such cases, as the media rarely notes, 90 percent of “abductees” return home within 24 hours. The vast majority are teenagers running away with friends or romantic partners and over 99 percent are returned alive and uninjured. (Although many teen girls are involved with sexual activity during the time when they are “missing,” the statistics do not distinguish between voluntary and coerced sex because if the girl is under-age and the male is not, she is not considered capable of consent. The majority of the “missing children” covered by this statistic (65%) are female and 59% are aged 15-17.)
This time [in 2006], Today was more conservative in its estimate, claiming that only 5,000 children go missing each year. While this is an improvement over 58,000, the implication is still that there are 5,000 stereotypical kidnappings, in which a stranger or acquaintance abducts a child to hold for ransom or abuse and kill him or her. According to the Justice Department, there are only about 115 such incidents each year.
115 a year works out to be less than 1/5 of a child per 100,000 kids. For comparison, in 2003 the leading cause of death for children was unintentional injury, at a rate of 1,000 or more per 100,000 children, spiking to 15,000 per 100,000 for kids over the age of 15. More than half of those unintentional injury deaths come from moving vehicle accidents. Even if you accept the inflated rate of 80 abductions per 100,000 children, that rate is still beaten out by homicide, suicide, heart disease, and even the flu.
If I’m going to live my life, I only have so much time to worry and plan for contingencies. Given that, I think I’ll make sure Eli and Liza’s car seats are buckled in correctly and that they get their flu shots.
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A Four Year Old Reviews You Have to Burn the Rope
Some time ago I showed Eli the Flash game You Have to Burn the Rope. He immediately wanted to play it again.
At this point I estimate we’ve played it twenty times.
It got to where he would tell everyone who came to our house about the game. And that’s when I wondered, what would happen if I asked him to review it?
Technorati Tags: You Have to Burn the Rope, video game, review, so simple even a four year old can play it
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A Hike and A Picnic
Wednesday, Wendy lured us on a small hike with a picnic in the middle and then a hike back.
Pause for a moment and think about:
- 1) me on a hike
2) with Eli the Whiny (when things aren’t going his way),
3) Liza the Deaf Maker (when things aren’t going her way), and
4) all of our stuff!
Wendy has no idea that I nearly called her 14 times before we left to say we weren’t coming. Well, I guess she knows now if she’s reading this post. But I got my act together and only forgot Liza’s hat and a spoon with which to feed her. Now you know why she is wearing her sweet potato stained hoodie in most of the photos.
We had a great time and Eli produced almost zero whine until we got in the car to go home when I made the mistake of telling him about ticks. Bad mom!
Click the photo for more pictures from the hike.
Special thanks to Mike Self for helping make up captions for the photos.
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Eli Idol
It’s been a while since we’ve let you hear Eli singing. He sings all the time, making up songs about whatever is going on in his life, like eating breakfast and playing Zack and Wiki. In this case, he’s singing about friends.
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Vidal Sassoon Should Sue
Let me not indulge in false modesty. I have amazing hair.
I easily have the hair of a woman twice my age. People cannot keep their hands off of it. They tousle it. They pet it. They say, “Liza, you have such beautiful hair. How do you get it to be so full, so shiny, so full of bounce and life?”
Usually I smile and coo, never divulging my secrets. But you, internet, all of you are my true friends. For you, I will tell you.
Banana.
Chunks of banana rubbed into your hair twice daily will provide necessary nutrients, and impart a shine to it that can be had no other way. Let it sit, so that your split ends and over-processed strands can soak up what it needs to be beautiful. Before you leave the house, wash it out of your hair to avoid the amorous attention of fruit bats.
