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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If you spend any time reading this blog (or other financial independence blogs), you might begin to develop something of a false impressions about this whole financial independence thing — specifically that we’re really hardcore people. Extremists.
Occasionally I get emails from people saying, “It’s great what you’ve achieved, but you’re so hardcore I could never do that…”
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When you read blogs or news articles about geoarbitrage, it’s almost always the childless couples that travel the world. They leveraging the lower cost living of regions like Southeast Asia, Central or South American, and even Eastern Europe.
These “nomads” will stay in a location for a couple of months, enjoying that locale to its fullest…
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If you happen to live in a climate that experiences the season called winter, “Snow Days” are a thing that happens. Kids get the day-off from school (because the schools close), and parents have a reason to play hooky from work
“Sorry Boss, schools are closed! I’ve got to stay home with the kids!”
That excuse might work with your Boss a couple days a year, but after a few Snow Days his (or her) patience begins to wear thin…
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