Educating the Wheelers

Nothing like waking up at 3:30 in the morning to your 2 year old throwing up on you.  She hasn’t been sick like that since her baby spit-up days passed, and the poor girl was scared, didn’t know what was going on.  But she was so brave!  Endured a shower with Mama and new jammies and crawling into the guest bed downstairs … which she promptly also threw up in.  Another shower, more jammies.

We have a spare folding mattress-like thing that we put out on the floor of the playroom … but this time I heard her stomach start to gurgle, so I managed to get her onto the tile floor before she got sick again.  

Hey, it’s not every day that you get to wear 4 different pairs of jammies!  [And, well, the night’s not over yet.  Heh.]

So we’re up now, and she’s watching a "Special DVD" [as she calls it] and eating bread while Andrew and I veg out and do laundry until we think it’s passed for good.

I’m so tired I don’t think I can even find a way to make this relate to personal finance.  Make sure to have a lot of beds? 

[ … I hope I don’t go into labor this morning … ] 

We moved around a lot when I was a kid.  My dad wasn’t in the military, he just had the itch and had to scratch it.  I used to joke that we didn’t go on vacation, we moved.  [His father was a carpenter, so they went where the work was.  He probably went to 20 different schools before he was out of the 8th grade.]  I’ve moved a few times in the 13 years or so since I left my parents’ house.  Let’s see: Olympia, Tri-Cities, Seattle, San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Austin.  And sometimes more than one place within those towns.

As a result, I’m not terribly attached to "place" — I am definitely a "home is where you hang your hat" kind of person and there’s not a whole lot my externalities can do to make me happy or miserable.  I have few needs: I don’t want an intrusive environment, and I don’t want things to be inordinately expensive.  The rest is gravy.  [The only place I ever felt like I had to flee was San Francisco.  See my criteria.]  Texas is fairly low cost, and while it isn’t quite the free-wheeling live-and-let-live of the New Hampshire of my youth, it’s close enough.  Heck, with the rise of the Internet, I don’t even require a good bookstore in town anymore.  [Nonetheless, we have them in spades here in Austin.]

Now that I have kid[s] of my own, I wonder about all this in a different light.  Are we going to move around?  Since we’re homeschooling, that would make some transitions easier for them, though it wasn’t that big of a deal for me when we moved mid-school year.  But I guess I don’t think moving was really terribly "traumatic" at all.  My core family was stable and it gave me the opportunity to meet lots of different kinds of people in different types of cities and neighborhoods in different parts of the country.  It certainly taught me not to be provincial in my thinking, and it’s hard for me to get to worked up over insular group/regional pride once you’ve "been around," so to speak.

Then there’s the personal finance angle, though since I’ve only owned a home in two of these locations, it hasn’t always been that big of a deal.  When I was just renting, it was pretty easy to decide to pull up stakes and go if I was going somewhere that offered a job making more money.  [Though it was kind of a cosmic joke to make 30% more in SF than Seattle but have a lower standard of living.]

I love a big, roaring thunderstorm like the one we are having right now.  It brings home the true meaning of "shelter" in the cliche of food, shelter and clothing.

My dogs definitely understand it.  They were adult strays at the pound when we adopted them, and while I may be guilty of anthropomorphism here, Sammy and Pippin both seem to appreciate even more than I do the value of being in a warm, dry, stable home when they look out the window and see the wind and the rain and the lightning.

I love to go into the garage when the weather is this crappy.  The sound of the rain and the thunder is much more intense, and I feel even more blessed to not be standing out in the middle of it.