Why we moved...

It has been too long since I've written anything down here.  And, as I type this, I wonder: exactly to whom am I writing?  Myself?  My kids?  The random citizen of the interwebs in Norway?  Well, at any rate, I've been considering something for a while now and I have a little time on my hands so I thought I'd wax about it a bit:

We moved, roughly 25 miles up the interstate, at the end of last summer.  Life was made a little harder on my wife (longer commute) but has been much better for the family as a whole, I believe.  Our reasons for moving were roughly three-fold: 

1. We were living on top of one another.  In a cramped townhome where an entire floor was essentially a no-fly zone due to a cat with a temperment issue.  We spent most of our waking hours cooking, eating and "playing" in approximately 400 square feet of space.  No deck.  A lousy, minuscule, damp, rocky and obnoxiously loud back yard.  A parking lot for a front yard.  No escape.  No elbow room.

2. The neighborhood was deteriorating (not that it was ever a picturesque place) and semi-violent crime was on the increase.  A local hispanic gang had started targeting homes for break-ins and there was some non-fatal violence...but these things typically escalate as the group gets bolder.  We just didn't feel safe.

3. Kindergarten/School district.  

I guess, when you boil it all down, #2 begat the situation for #3.  The local elementary school, while reasonably "good" on a scholastic scale, was a disaster in terms of socio-economics.  Please understand, I am all for diversity, and want my kids to be exposed to all shapes, sizes, colors and sounds.  The ethnicity of the schools' attendees were not at issue.  The safety of my girls, and the involvement of the community that supported the school were.  It was a den of problems.  Old and run-down.  A very high percentage of kids who did not speak English as a first language, and not at all at their homes.  We wanted to be able to provide more for our daughters.

We had talked about the possibility of getting them into the elementary school across the parking lot from their daycare center (one of the best schools in the county...and that is saying something), but we knew that there were to be no guarantees in this regard.  To be sure of a better situation, we had to bite the bullet, take an enormous loss on our house (did I mention the crappy housing market?) and find a new place to call home.

So, we did.  A big single-family house with a large back yard and a quiet neighborhood.  Solidly middle-class families that fed into a fairly new elementary school with a very good reputation.  A school, I might add, which has a very diverse ethnic population (way more diverse than where I grew up...there you were either a hick or a yokel...now,  I'm "Dr" Yokel).  We had done it!

This brings us to last week: we filled out the paperwork.  Our little girl has been registered for Kindergarten.  A momentous occasion in any parent's life I suppose.  But that, in and of itself, is not what has had me thinking lately.  It isn't that I'm not ready for her to go to school yet either.  No, it's that I'm not sure SHE is ready to go to school.

Oh, sure, in many ways she's just fine.  She handles social situations very well, and is certainly smart enough (this is always a weird area to talk about for me...I know she's smart, but all parents think their kids are smart...and I hate getting into mental pissing contests or having to tone down my pride in my daughter).  She befriends EVERY teacher she has EVER had under ANY circumstance (this could get her in trouble later on, when her classmates give her the old "teacher's pet" business...but that'll be her problem).

The thing is, I think she still needs her mother and I in a way that her younger sister has already kind of moved past.  Today, for instance, I had to stay home with her (because she had a stomach thing and couldn't be away from a bathroom for too long) and the entire day she was glued to my hip.  Sure, it's made worse by her feeling ill, but in general she won't do anything around the house without either my wife or I in the same room.  

We built the kids a playroom in the basement and stuffed it with toys and books and crafts and decorated it all in Disney.  The youngest will happily traipse down the stairs and play.  Paige, however, requires one of us to be down there with her.  She'd rather go down and bring up a toy to play with than actually play in her own play-place.  

And, back to the illness issue: I changed her PJs three times today and her underwear four times.  She just couldn't make it to the facility the first couple of times she had to purge (both ends, I know...nice visual).  School is only 5.5 months away...should she be able to do this by now?  Do teachers/nurses at an elementary school do what I did for sick kids while their parents are en route?  

I don't know.  I can't seem to get my point out tonight.  I know the "sick" thing is only an occasional issue.  I'm not interested in her zooming through her childhood, but I DO want her to be ready for the next step in her blossoming young life.  She's probably going to be fine.  Maybe it really is me at the root of the issue.  Maybe she's just a needy kid sometimes.  What's wrong with that?  I'm all in for hugs from her for LIFE (got that Mr "boyfriend" guy who's reading this 19 years from today while thinking about giving her that diamond burning a hole in your jacket pocket?) - so why am I wishing she'd detach?  

Life was certainly easier without kids...though, to be sure, much less interesting and invisibly incomplete.

Good luck in 5 months Paigey...Daddy loves you.

And it begins...

It was a tough day at work today. It's often that way with research. Best laid plans and still no "positive" result to build on. Oh well, it'll either get better or I'll get to retire early...like REALLY early.

To help de-stress this evening, I carted Paige to her tap/ballet/gym class. It gives me 55 minutes to screw around on the interweb and/or just sort of be still. So I jumped at the chance, while the wife usually does the honor.

In the car on the way over Paige and I were talking about her transition to her new school. She lamented that she misses her old friends and that she really wanted to play with Calliana and Ella today but they weren't at her new school. It made me a little sad, but she very quickly started talking about her new friends that she was making, with quite a bit of vigor, so I stopped feeling as bad.

That's when it happened. She started naming all of the kids in her class, because I told her I don't really know anyone very well yet. Camden, Isabella, Kaitlyn...MAXWELL.

Maxwell, and I quote "him always tries to hug me and kiss me, for real, everyday. Him really likes me and told me he wants to marry me (said through a series of squeaky giggles)."

Me: "did you kiss him Paige?"

Paige: "well, I didn't have on pretty clothes, and him didn't have on handsome pants, so we didn't get married...Daddy? Do I have a white dress in my closet?"

WTF??? She's 4!!!

Thank god I've got the iPad so that I can blog and shop for a Desert Eagle at the same time.

I'd like to go back to work now...

Daycare

It's a word that strikes a certain level of fear and apprehension in parents who require it.  It's a foreign concept to parents who don't.  To kids old enough to speak fairly well, it's school.  Our kids have been put through a bit of a ringer in this arena.  I have only our family experience to draw upon, so I preface this with the notion that this might not be out of the ordinary...but it feels like it might be.

When Paige was on the way, I was a graduate student at Georgetown and making very little money (based on the nation average I was doing OK...but in the DC area I may as well have been paid in rubber bouncing balls).  We had a house to pay for, and other incidentals, when we started researching and interviewing day care providers as my wife would need to continue to work to make the household affordable (not to mention that she WANTED to continue to work...though she had and still has pangs about not being a stay at home Mom).  We hit the usual suspects, the big national centers (KinderCare, La Petite) and a few local centers figuring that they were accredited and would provide a solid "care" base and a progressive scholastic environment for our kid when the time came.

We were BLOWN AWAY at the astronomical cost of these facilities, but figured that we could afford it and so we booked Paige a slot at La Petite to start when she was ~8 weeks old.  We settled on it and let it be for a couple of days/weeks.  Then, just to be sure we were doing the "right" thing for our kid, we decided to look into some home daycare providers in the area (no way in hell we had the space or $$ to do the in-house Nanny thing).  We interviewed 2 or 3 providers and found one we liked more than we thought we would.  Young-ish couple with two young boys (elementary school age).  Father was a K-9 police officer for the county and the space was pretty good sized and our kid would be the only infant in her care.

The cost was dramatically different.  Like lifestyle-altering different.  Still a whopping sum of $ for the year, but about 60% of what the center cost was.  We thought long and hard about it, deciding that when Paige reached a certain age (in our minds ~3 years) we'd move her to a pre-school type environment then and allow her to progress academically and socially at that point.  So we cancelled our slot at the center, and placed Paige in the home.  It was a tough transition for my wife, as I'm sure it is with all mothers.

(Side note: why is it that we fathers are sort of "programmed" to just be able to go immediately back to our full-time jobs after the arrival of a child?  I don't think I love my kids any less than my wife does.  Why is it expected, and almost biologically hardwired for us to leave our kids and forage?)

Things went pretty well with the situation.  We even coaxed friends into placing their newborn at the same home.  There were problems, sure (I am not going to point them out here, that is another post, down the road, when I'm sure that K9 Dad no longer has a service weapon - or dog) but we chalked them up to "every place has its issues...this is the best situation for our child".

When Taryn was on her way we were faced with a seemingly exponential increase in daycare cost (really, it only slightly more than doubled, but that's a whole lot of coin) and really didn't even consider a move from the home.  She took her place there with her sister (and a growing list of clients and issues) at ~8 weeks and we were off and running (I was making a tiny bit more $ at this point as a post-doctoral fellow, but really only enough to cover the rise in care costs).

Then, when Taryn was 6 months old (Paige was just before her 3rd birthday), in the dead of winter (in the midst of the worst stream of snow storms the DC area has had in my 11+ years here now) we were summarily dismissed from the home care.  The reasons given were spurious at best, and the method was utter cowardice.  We were led to believe that our oldest daughter was Satan's own spawn.  We were heartbroken and angry and cast our doubts on our collective abilities as parents.  It was a very difficult set of emotions and logistical issues to deal with.  Maybe the single most trying time of my personal life (and I've been through gradschool/postdoc hell AND had an engagement fall apart) to date.  I will never personally forgive the woman and her deadbeat (we found this out along the way...) husband.  I hope she rots in hell.

My sister came down from NY to help us out.  Like I said, we were in the middle of awful snow which basically shut down the DC area for a week.  We were able to be home with the kids the first week out of care (we elected to pull them immediately, though they were given a "two week" notice of sorts) and then my sister stayed with us for 3 weeks while we tried to sort things out.  It was a mutually beneficial situation I think.  We paid her a little, and provided all her meals...she watched her two favorite nieces during the day and got to change her scenery up a bit from the confines of upstate NY.

Since Paige was approaching the age of 3, we decided that we were going to eschew the search for home providers and put the girls into a center.  We did some more interviews.  Holy shizzoly.  The expense was going to murder us.  We figured out how to do it, realizing that in very short order we were either going to be moving to North Carolina to chase my career, or stay put with the prospect of my salary increasing a very healthy amount as a fellow for the National Cancer Institute.  We decided to enroll the kids at a center in our town.

Free advertising plug: Little People Dayschool is a magnificent facility for care and nurturing of kids.  Our kids both flourished, almost immediately.  Paige potty trained just before starting, and this reduced our cost too!  (If I told you what we spend on daycare, you'd jab a fork into your ear...let's just say that we haven't replaced our 11 year old Pathfinder...but we could have, every year, with a brand new one and had no payments...)

Paige learned her letters, numbers and all sorts of stuff.  Taryn was the jewel of the the infant/toddler scene (OK, I'm biased...Tiffini and Ed, if you're reading this, Ty is pretty cool too...).  Speaking of Tiffini and Ed...we made a new set of friends after being at the school for a bit.  Super couple with two kids that our girls really like.  We've done a few play dates, cook outs, birthday parties with them.  Spent July 4th at their place.  Would like to do more when we can find the weekend to do it too!  Our kind of folks...(even though she's a Steelers fan).

So, this brings us to today.  Paige and Taryn are spending their last day at Little People.  We moved recently, remember?  My wife has been trucking the kids down the interstate every day and dropping them at school, going to work, and picking them up in the afternoons.  It's too much.  It adds 20 minutes to her commute, each way, and it just isn't fair to her.  Or the kids, really, to have them in the car so early and for so long each day.

We knew this was going to happen, but we wanted to let them adjust to a new house and surroundings before placing them in a new school (an opportunity they'd not have had if we moved to Carolina).  But it's time.  We toured a few facilities in our new spot, and found one we think (we hope) is going to be comparable to Little People.  It's a crap shoot.  We're sad that we have to pull the kids out of such a great place, where we've made friends and have a good relationship with other parents and the teachers.  The kids were loved there, beside being cared for and taught.

Paige is excited to start at her new school.  It'll be a short transition for her I think.  I'd be surprised if she's not fully entrenched within 2 weeks.

Taryn, on the other hand, is a different story.  She's a bit younger than Paige was when she moved situations, but is a completely different child.  She's stubborn and does not deal with frustration well (it manifests as hitting and grumpy non-compliance...she's 2).  I'm guessing it'll take a bit longer for her, but her big sister will be there so...

Here's hoping that we improve our batting average with this choice.  We're at .500, looking to go to .667 and not drop down to .333

We'll miss you, Little People.  Truly, you were the perfect place for our daughters.

Rocky Mountain High

I'm sitting here in Denver Inertnational Airport, at a gigantic bay window looking out at the Rockies. I know the Andes and Himalayas are taller, but these mountains are simply majestic. I'm looking at, I don't know, maybe 15-20 miles of flat open plain lands and then BOOM, 14,000 foot snow covered peaks. Incredible.

This trip to Denver is the latest weekend jaunt my Dad and I started (unbeknownst to the two of us at the time) back in 1986 in Minneapolis, Minnesota when we saw our first professional baseball game together (Red Sox vs. Twins, Wade Boggs hit a game winning home run and we saw it from the nosebleeds with a bunch of family).

Over the next few years, we made it to Shea Stadium to see my Mets, Yankee Stadium to see Dad's Yanks, and to Fenway to catch a Yanks/Sox matinee. After I went off to college in 1995, I decided I wanted to see at least one game in every major league teams' home ballpark. No double visits for new stadiums were required to fulfill this goal. I broached the subject with my Dad a bit after that and we decided to do it as a father/son tandem. Along the way, we've included a few family members (Baltimore with my Mom and sisters, DC with Mom the wife and my oldest daughter, San Diego/Anaheim with Tommy, and St.Louis/Kansas City with Uncle Steve and Jeff and Chris).

We just saw the Rockies lose to the Giants by a run in a really good game at Coors Field. We're at 13 parks now, including those mentioned and Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. It's a really nice way to get away from everyday life, talk a little shop, shoot a little shit, experience a new city and watch some baseball (my favorite sport, even in this NFL-dominated world). It's great to be with my Dad in a capacity other than preacher and congregation. I think we've become honest friends, with mutual respect and admiration for each other and a genuine desire to do these trips together for more than the fantastic food a beer we take in over the nutty 48 hour jaunts. Though, to be sure, we had our fill this weekend too...

Next year, we're going to try to do Toronto and Cleveland, two birds with one stone, as it has been two years since we've been able to make this work (grad school, job hunt and new kids will do that to a guy).

I don't know if it will ever happen...but I'd love to have something like this with my daughters in the future...even if it involved theater or whatever they're into. Maybe a new winery every summer? Or a really great restaurant in a new city when they've come out of their Mac and cheese / chicken nugget phase.

I love my Dad, and these only partly debaucherous weekends of ours...

Giants 6, Rockies 5 in 9 innings at 5280 feet...

Life is a Sea of Pink and Purple

That's what it appears when you've got two young daughters at least.  Pink socks, purple flip-flops, hot-pink t-shirts, bold purple corduroy pants.  With the recent move into a bigger house, and the presentation of bedrooms for  each, we're painting again...

Parents: "P, what color do you want us to paint your new bedroom?"
P: "Pink and Purple"

We're doing P's room (well, the lower 1/3rd of it) a pink that matches the pink in her new bed linens.  Of course.  T's room you ask?  Well, that whole thing will be a purple that matches her new bed linens.  Pink and purple curtains, pillows, bean bag chairs and sheets.

Jesus, even their soccer ball is pink.

When I had P at a home improvement store (what a joke, these places should be called "Oh shit, that broke?  Again?  I'll go get it's replacement/quick fix" stores) before the move, looking for packing supplies, she BEGGED me to buy a roll of duct-tape...you guessed it...bright effing pink duct-tape.

I swear I'm going to paint my bathroom jet-black just to have a little masculinity in the house (of course, our tub is a nice rose color...FML).

I'd say I'd like to have a son, to get a little blue or dirt in the house - but that would never happen.  We'd wind up with twin girls...I am 101% positive of this.  Then we'd need a 6 bedroom house (probably somewhere in Omaha - you know, middle America?), which would be even pink and purple-er.  I'll just bide my time until they have families...hopefully two boys each...

Finally

Finally: I'm on here writing again.

Finally: We've rid ourselves of the small town house in a poor school district and a bad (not terrible, but bad) neighborhood.

Finally: We've taken possession and moved into a beautiful, spacious, clean, neat, well-appointed single family home in a quiet neighborhood with an excellent elementary school.

Finally: I can begin to re-focus on my science and start making true headway as I'm not being pulled in 16 different directions outside of work (only the usual 6).

Finally: I have a commute less than 35 minutes each direction (actually, it's like 7 minutes, but who's counting?)

Finally: It feels like we are where we are supposed to be.  It's a bit more rural (still nothing like where I grew up...we won't be butchering our own pigs in our front yard here...) and picturesque but has a solid suburban atmosphere at the same time.  An hour from DC.  5 minutes from my local homebrew supply store!  HELLO BEERSVILLE!

Finally: I believe I'm (we're...) providing my daughters with what they've deserved all along...

Finally: I'll be a bit more active in the blogosphere...promise.

Well, things seem to be tracking right for our little clan these days. The kids are a mix of absolute joy and a healthy dose of derrière discomfort. They're kids, I guess.

We put our house on the market 11 days ago, at a very uncomfortable (low) price. It worked. Received two offers after just six days and actually got higher than the asking price ($100 is $100...). We close on Aug 30th...as long as the inspection/appraisal and financing go well. So, we're nervous but hopeful.

Then, 2 days ago, the wife and I found our kingdom a real castle. Made a strong offer and got the contract (it should be being signed as I type). We're going from a two bedroom poorly laid out 1400 square feet with curbside parking and no yard to speak of to an open floor plan with four bedrooms, 3000 square feet, a deck, 2-car garage and .27 acres of yard. And the kitchen? Holy moly what I'm going to be able to get done in that space...

Great elementary school and a really nice, put together neighborhood. We close on the 31st of Aug, and move that same day. Crazy. Then, two days later, we head to the Outer Banks of N. Carolina for a week with our great friends C & J and their two rug rats. Going to be a GREAT time. Beers, pools, beaches, and awesome company. And, we'll get to come "home" to our new castle. For the first time in quite a while, things feel really really positive in our little world.

The idiot (me) manifested this morning. As part of the sale of our townhome, we agreed to recarpet the staircase on the main level. $500 job, not a big deal. The guys showed up to bang it out this morning (Empire Carpet is worth EVERY penny...highly recommend them) and did a fantastic and FAST job. In and out in 35 minutes. I, however, did not have a single shekel in the house to give them as a tip. It was really awkward. I felt awful. Still do. I DID overpay for the job (a $375 job but a $500 minimum installation floor) but still...I wish I'd have had $20 to give each of them.

Well, next time I'll make sure I've got cash on me when having work done. Maybe I'll feel less douche-baggy.