britton thinks out loud

Only those of you who play World of Warcraft will find this at all funny, but it begs to be shared regardless:

Achievement Unlocked.

We had our six-month meeting with Peter's teacher today, and she had some unsettling news for us: Peter is becoming more aggressive, often getting "into it" with his best friend, and the two frequently have to be told to play in separate areas. However, it seems that his main reason for being antsy is this: he's bored. He's not being challenged.

Unfortunately, he's still half a year away from his third birthday. Regardless, she's recommending that we push to move him up as soon as a spot opens in the preschool classes, which will hopefully occur as soon as January. And if he's ready to move to kindergarten before he turns 5, well, so be it -- he goes to kindergarten at Bright Horizons for a while.

This continues a trend that we've been seeing for a while now with Peter: he is rarely satisfied with where he is. He always wants to be doing the next thing -- crawling, walking, talking -- and he'll be frustrated until he gets there. On the one hand, this kind of passion is certainly a boon for development; on the other, we need to teach him how to best deal with his frustration. Unfortunately, the one area that we have the least input in is his interaction with peers; for that, we have to rely on his teachers. Still, I'm sure there's something we can do...

Liz and I have put it off for too long -- we really need to set up a will and a trust for our kids. Nothing fancy at all, but it needs to get done. Anyone know of a good estate lawyer in town, one that we can trust and who knows what they're doing?

It's odd, how touchy a subject money is. You might tell someone your age, party affiliation, or faith (or lack thereof) if suitably uninhibited, but your salary? That's intimate stuff. So avert your eyes, ye squeamish! Money's been on my mind recently, so I'm gonna talk about it.

To whit: Liz recently left her regular-paying job as a high school teacher, and has since acquired two-and-some-fraction irregular-paying jobs in its wake. Since those jobs have so far brought in zilcho dollars and null cents, I've been keeping a close eye on our collective wallet.

Oddly, it's not necessarily for reasons you might think. I'm not worried that we might one day default on our mortgage. We're actually in a really good position. I mean, really good -- we have precisely one debt, in the form of the aforementioned mortgage, and we have a decent amount of equity in that. (And yes, it's fixed-rate.) We have enough money in our cash reserves to float us for several months even if we both lost our jobs completely.

But while we're in this "cash flow situation", as my dad likes to call such times, we're having to cut back on nonessentials. This unfortunately includes investing for retirement, and that's what has my knickers in a twist. I can almost see those sweet days to come vanishing into a haze like a mirage. (I'm trying hard not to think about what the recent financial blowup -- stupid, stupid Wall Street -- did to our retirement savings. It would make me cry.) So I'm playing with Quicken and OpenOffice Calc (huzzah free Excel substitutes!), tallying and re-tallying, adding up all the columns and making sure there isn't any low-hanging fruit that we can cut back on.

Oddly, I actually find it fun. Heck, maybe I could figure out a way to make some cash as a part-time accountant -- I actually like spreadsheets and numbers and dicing up our income/expenses in different ways to try and figure out what's going where. I even wrote up a little program I call BudgetMinder: I run a report in Quicken that tells me how much money we've spent this month on Stuff (our name for a combination of groceries, dining, gifts given, entertainment, and other variable and somewhat-discretionary items), and then I take that number and plug it into the BudgetMinder. It then calculates how much money we've got left to spend this month and sends an e-mail to me and Liz, along with any notes I might want to add. It helps keep us on the straight and narrow, though we're still getting used to it.

It's dry and boring to most, but someone's gotta do it. I may as well have fun with it.

Oh, and something we found while checking out credit cards -- if you don't carry a balance, take a serious look at American Express Blue Cash. If you spend enough money per month (they've got a calculator on their web site you can use), it beats Discover all to heck, and for a family of four it can add up to a significant amount of money -- literally hundreds of dollars a year. Just don't carry a balance!

I recently took the time to explain to Peter exactly what makes up an airplane: here's the tail, here's the nose, here are the wings, the wheels are called "landing gear", etc. It's made a surprising impact: now when he plays with his duplos, instead of just throwing blocks together and calling it an airplane (which was okay by me, at this stage), he makes an effort to ensure that it has all the requisite parts. The result is below, and to be honest, it looks cooler than any duplo-plane I would probably come up with.

In general, the duplo structures he often comes up with just look cool...they have an interesting aesthetic. No, really! We'll often play legos or blocks together when I come home after work, and when I start building something, he'll watch me closely and then start building something similar, with surprising results. (The plane above was not the result of such a session -- that was entirely on his own.) More often than not, I like his better than mine; clearly I didn't play with legos enough as a kid...