5 Kids, 1 Wife
New posts every Monday, Wednesday and Friday from a husband and dad
Monday, May 20, 2024
It's jarring when the numbskulls you grew up with turn out to be responsible and productive adults
Friday, May 17, 2024
Losing your tribe of fellow parents once your kids grow up
If you have a child between the ages of, say, 5 and 17, and that child is active in some sort of group activity like a sport or music or theatre or whatever it might be, there is a good chance you have a parental tribe.
By that I mean a group of people whose kid/kids is/are involved in the same activity as your kid. You see them at ball games or concerts. You drive each other's offspring to practices, tournaments, rehearsals, etc. You may have an active group text chat or even a Facebook page where you communicate.
You sit bundled up in all kinds of weather (if your shared activity is outdoor-focused) and cheer on your team as one.
You are brought together by pleasant circumstances and quickly develop a close bond.
Then your child either walks away from that sport or activity, or else your kids age out of it together, and suddenly you don't see those people anymore unless you make a real effort to keep the relationship going.
There always seems to be something that gets in the way of that, of course. We're all busy. You still run across each other at community events or graduation parties, and you enjoy catching up, but it's never quite the same again.
Our kids were active in a range of sports and musical activities, so we ended up with multiple parental tribes. In some cases these tribes were separated by the distance of many years. We had one group of people we hung out with when our oldest, Elissa, was in school, and a distinctly different set of people we ended up seeing all the time with our youngest, Jack, more than a decade later.
While many of the Elissa-era parents were enjoying empty nests, we were still doing school field trips, plays, and track meets.
I miss the old group. And now, with Jack having graduated, I miss the new one, too.
What I'm saying, I guess, if that if you're currently in the chaos of having school-aged children, you should recognize and enjoy the connections forged with other parents – people with whom you may not otherwise get the opportunity to hang around.
These connections are fleeting, but they are valuable. They flame out as quickly as they spring up, but they are memorable.
Embrace your tribe. You only have them for a relatively small portion of your life before everyone moves on.
Wednesday, May 15, 2024
At some point (probably 1990), video games passed me by
Back in The Day™ (1982-85), I played a lot of video games.
Arcade games, Atari games, Commodore 64 games, etc. The term "gamer" didn't exist back then, but I was one.
We always knew that computer technology was going to advance and that the games we played would soon seem primitive compared with what was to come. But that didn't make them any less fun.
Once gaming systems and the games themselves started taking their expected quantum leaps forward in terms of graphics, sound and general sophistication, that's when I fell off the cutting edge.
Soon, I feel behind even the trailing edge.
After not too many years, I couldn't even see the edge.
It's not that I didn't like video games anymore. It's just that school, marriage, my career, kids and a host of other things got in the way. The spare time I once had available for gaming simply evaporated.
I never realized how behind the times I was until my kids started getting older and we bought them Xboxes.
The games were amazingly realistic. And often (to me, anyway) confusing.
The controllers went from the simple one joystick, one button approach of the Atari 2600 to the sort of thing you would use to pilot an F-16. One button? Try six. Or eight. And two joystick-like thumb controllers.
Then they all became multi-player games in which you wear a headset and talk to your friends (and total strangers) in the middle of the game.
That's when I knew I would never, ever catch up.
One of my favorite things to do on the laptop Terry got me for Christmas is play many of my old, classic games. You can download emulators that allow you to play the arcade and home video games of your youth, which is wonderful.
These aren't reproductions or close facsimiles of the games I loved in the 80s. These are the actual games. The ROMs (as they're called) for each one contain the exact computer code as the originals. There's no difference at all between the Ms. Pac-Man I play on my laptop and the Ms. Pac-Man I played at Galaxy Gardens game room in 1983.
It's mind blowing. And fun.
It also, like so many things these days, reminds me of a simpler time. I am an early GenXer, born in 1969. We are Baby Boomers in all but birth year. We straddled the analog and digital ages. We know what it's like to have one corded telephone in the house AND for everyone in the family to have their own phones, own numbers, etc.
We've seen both sides of the revolution. Some of us are equally adept living in either time period. I like to think of myself that way, but when it comes to video games, I am irrevocably stuck in the 80s.
And I like it that way.
Monday, May 13, 2024
Bringing another cat into the house is way more complicated than I remembered it
Friday, May 10, 2024
I'm sure my wife doesn't take unfair advantage of the fact I can't leave a dirty dish in the sink
I should go back and watch the video of our wedding, because I can't remember the exact vows Terry and I exchanged back in June 1992.
Wednesday, May 8, 2024
What, me retire?
Maybe the conversation wasn't "overdue," though. I'm not sure how often you're supposed to talk with your money person, but it felt like we hadn't taken a step back and discussed the big picture for quite a while.
While Dave stays in touch regularly, some time had passed since I had gathered all of our account information, sent it to him, and allowed him to run the numbers and gauge our financial health.
The results were encouraging.
Lord willing and the creek don't rise, we're right on track for me to retire in about 11 1/2 years. My goal is to work until the end of 2035 before calling it quits and enjoying whatever comes next.
I'll have just turned 66 at that point and will have been a member of the full-time workforce for two-thirds of my life (that's 44 years for those who didn't have Mrs. Schwarzenberg at Mapledale Elementary School and whose arithmetic skills may therefore be lacking).
That "feels" about right. I would rather not work full time into my 70s, if I can help it, but I also don't want to get out of the game too early, for reasons both personal and financial.
There are several factors that go into deciding how much money you need to sock away for retirement, including the lifestyle you want to lead once you get there. Terry and I want to be able to travel with some regularity, whether it's to visit kids/grandkids or just see the world.
I'm not talking about boarding a plane for some exotic location every two weeks. Maybe "several" trips a year, with most domestic and one overseas.
"Comfortable but nowhere near extravagant" is how I would describe our desired post-retirement lifestyle.
That's somewhat vague, I realize, but it was enough for Dave to decide we're ahead of the curve with our savings and investment plan, given the vagaries of the markets, my presumed ability to continue working for another decade-plus, and all of the other unpredictable realities that come with aging.
This was all somewhat of a revelation to me. I'm 54 years old. I don't think about retirement very often beyond how much I throw into my 401(k) and occasional dreams of touring World War I battlefields in France and Belgium once I have the time to do so (that's likely to be a solo trip sans Terry, if I had to guess).
For the first time, the conversation with Dave made retirement seem like a tangible thing and not just a far-off hope. I've still got a ways to go, and like I said, you never know what's going to come your way. But the fact is, it could happen, and that's fun to think about.
Again, though, as quickly as time passes these days, I still have several career-building years ahead of me, which is OK. We'll get there when we get there.
The closer it gets, the more real it will become, I'm sure.
Monday, May 6, 2024
I need to quit whining, go to bed earlier, and regularly lift heavy things
"The problem is we have a problem. It's not that we don't know what the problems are; we've known those for years. It's not that we don't know what the solutions are; we've known those for years. The problem is we haven't done anything about it." - Former Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson
I prompted the AI Blog Post Image Generator with "sleepy guy lifting weights." After several attempts even worse than this, I settled on the image at the top of your screen. I'm fascinated by (a) the bar running through the narrow end of the weight plate and on to...I don't know, another machine?; (b) the situation with the guy's right arm; (c) the condition of his right eye.
Why, you might logically ask, do I continually use such an inferior generative AI tool? The answer is a combination of it being free and my inability to look away from some of the images it creates. I can't stop going back to it.
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