I think May has to be my favorite month of the year to live in the Pacific Northwest. Everything is green and blooming from previous rain showers, and the weather finally gets warm and dry enough to spend an entire day outside with the family.
Most of the year here is cold, cloudy and wet. We spend a lot of time indoors playing board games, reading books, watching movies, hanging out with friends, and trying to stay dry….
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One of the more frequent criticisms I hear about early retirement is that, “I’d be bored if I retired and quit my job.” (As if an interesting life doesn’t really exist outside the confines of a job.)
Personally, I hate the term ‘retired’. It comes with too much emotional baggage to be a useful word. It’s one of the reasons why I don’t self-describe myself as ‘retired’ on this blog…
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Yep, I survived my week of solo-parenting! Nobody died, and very little blood was drawn. I’d call that a success! More importantly, I survived a week almost completely disconnected from the internet (other than checking the weather forecast at night)! No blogging, no email, no web browsing, and absolutely no social media…
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If there’s one thing I’ve learned from being a parent, it’s this — Parenting is a tough job. Everyone tells you this when you prepare to have a child, but you don’t truly understand just how tough it is until you’ve actually walked in the parenting shoes.
This goes doubly-so for single parents. When there’s two parents you can tag-team away some of the difficulty…
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Now that spring is here, the rain is finally starting to dry-up in the Pacific Northwest (PNW). For all the readers that don’t live in the area, we have a very bipolar weather pattern — 4 months of constant rain and clouds in the winter, and then 4 months of absolutely no rain in the summer.
It’s a weather pattern as regular as clockwork…
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Raising kids isn’t easy under the best of conditions. Most of the parents I know work a 50+ hour work week. To deal with after school care, they enroll their kids in after-school programs, at considerable cost to themselves. It’s a kind of “two steps forward and one step back” situation that makes raising kids and saving money difficult.
The average family I see, only gets to spend nights and weekends together…
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When it comes to cooking meals at home, absolutely no-one wants to cook a separate meal for the kids and a separate meal for adults. Yet adults often prefer bolder, spicier flavors with more exotic ingredients. Kids tend to enjoy simpler fare — carb heavy dishes with much milder flavors. At least my kids do — pizza, spaghetti, macaroni & cheese, sandwiches and so on.
It definitely puts smiles on their little faces, but I can only eat so much of it before I’m craving something more exciting…
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Ah, spring is in the air! It means the kids are out-of-school on spring break… and that means I need to take my stay-at-home-dad duties a lot more seriously.
While many families choose to travel somewhere warm or exotic during spring break, we’re just hanging-out at home. Both of our boys can have a great time even if we don’t travel somewhere, and as I mentioned in a recent post, they don’t fly particularly well yet…
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To understand how our February went down, you first have to understand that we were “snowed-in” for a significant portion of the month. The local news called it “Snowmageddon”, but my kids called it “fun”…
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