Month: June 2014

Leave a comment Posted on Nostalgia, parenting

The Doom and Gloom of “You Just Wait”

July 19, 2011 at 9:51 pm , by 

Eight months.

A year ago, when my wife was pregnant with our son, co-workers would ask me about what was going through my head about becoming a dad.  I would always respond by telling them I was aware of how my life was going to change, but that ultimately, I was excited about it all.

And what typically was their response?

“Well, you just wait until he’s crying in the middle of the night and you’re not getting any sleep… You just wait until he turns two years old and he’s pitching a fit… You just wait until he’s a teenager and he acts like he hates you…”

Needless to say, I’ve heard this unsolicited “well,you just wait until he gets older” gloom and doom more than I care to.  Well, here I am, a year later, and I’m still the same positive guy living with my realistic expectations; which certain people view as a fantasy.

The phrase “well, you just wait” is just another version of “I told you,” translating into “I can’t say ‘I told you so’ yet because enough time hasn’t gone by, so you’ll just have to wait so that you can see that I am right and you are naïve.”

I would bet that in the history of the world there has never been a time when a person has truly appreciated hearing “I told you so” or any form of it.  So “well, you just wait” doesn’t translate any differently to me.

Admittedly, it can be tricky trying to figure out what to do when it comes to parenting because it’s so easy to become overwhelmed by not only so many techniques out there, but also so many people confidently telling you that what worked for them and their child is the best (and only) way to do it.

Often, a lot of the parenting advice I hear just gets lost in the noise.  Granted, this blog is technically designed to give fellow parents advice, as I often do.  So am I just adding to the noise pollution, as I regularly share my noticeably conservative and undeniably positive outlook on fatherhood?

Maybe.  But whether or not you ever adopt my views on any particular aspect of parenting, and whether or not you find any of them to be effective, my intention is to speak with authority while not coming across as a know-it-all.  Will I be able to successfully pull off that delicate balance?

Well, you just wait…

Leave a comment Posted on Nostalgia, parenting, Spirituality

The First Day of the Rest of Our Lives

July 18, 2011 at 11:00 pm , by 

Eight months.

The reset button has been pressed and the screen has faded to white.

Today my family began life back on the magical island (a reference to Lost) of Nashville where we have been destined to live. It was a big day for all three of us:

I returned back to the same office where I used to work; my wife started a new job back at Vanderbilt University where she worked previous to our move; and Jack went to daycare for the first time, or  ”baby boarding school” as I like to think of it.

(I will inevitably be writing an entire post about my feelings about him going to daycare, in the near future.)

For me, starting back over in Nashville today felt like waking up from a long stretch of amnesia, where I remember dreaming of a strange parallel universe I had been living in for eight months; only it wasn’t a dream.  It was real life.  It’s like suddenly having  a flash drive in the USB port of my brain which contains the acquired data to help me best function in this “redo” of my life.

As I rode my mountain bike from my office to Jack’s daycare to briefly visit him during my lunch break, I noticed several businesses and restaurants that have been replaced by new ones; while others are surprisingly still around. And in my office most of the same people were still there to welcome me back, though I saw several unfamiliar, and therefore strange, new people who were walking around the place as if they knew what they were doing.

But it was me who wasn’t there all along, for I was receiving my necessary life education lessons back in Alabama.  As of last night, we have officially unpacked our bags. Though we still have a lot of our stuff still in storage, there already is the undeniable sense of “home” for us here.  Because despite what we thought was right for us a year ago, we belong here, in Nashville.

I loved being back at my old office today. And my wife is really excited about her new job.  As for Jack, I will just have to assume he’s having a good time in daycare; hanging out with other babies who are the same age, yet a lot smaller than he is.  I know he’s in good hands, but it’s just tough that they are not our hands.

The time has come for all three of us to grow up and move forward; together as a family of three.

Photos courtesy of Moments in Time Photography in Fort Payne, Alabama:

www.mitbyamie.com

 

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I Was Supposed to Be in Nashville Tonight, But…

July 16, 2011 at 10:57 pm , by 

Eight months.

Ask me if I’ve had a stressful day.

“Nick Shell, have you had a stressful day today?”

YES.

Today was the big move back to Nashville. However, I type this post from a shady motel in a nameless town halfway between my hometown and Nashville. Though at least my wife and son should nearly be to Nashville by now.  Actually, they were both here with me for a few hours but then we came up with this plan to have my wife drive my car to Nashville and for me to stay here with her broken down car until the morning, when my dad and brother-in-law will drive up from my hometown with a spare car for me to get to Nashville and something to tow my wife’s car back to my hometown so they can hopefully get it fixed.

I just didn’t feel good about my wife and son staying in a motel with me where there very possibly could be a drug dealer staying in the room next to me.

That’s right, of all days, my wife’s car decided to die today.  At least we made it to a motel in time.  Thank God we didn’t get stranded on the side of the road! Because both of our cars were loaded to the ceiling with our belongings, so that would have been a nightmare trying to get our son and his car seat into my car when there were literally no free square feet.

Other things we are thankful for, regarding this event are that A) we weren’t in a car accident, B) this didn’t happen on Sunday afternoon when it would have been much more of a struggle to make it to work on Monday when we start our jobs back, C) my dad and brother-in-law are driving here to help so that we didn’t have to pay a tow truck, D) I’m remembering to save my receipts from this “business trip,” and E) even if this motel is so musty that I refuse to let my bare feet touch the carpet, at least they have free WiFi so I can document this story while I’m stillvery much in the story.

So as we move back to Nashville with the spare change we have left in our savings, now we had to put $68.54 on our credit card for this motel room. And we’re followers of Dave Ramsey, who teaches that it is a cardinal sin to use a credit card.  Therefore, this is painful.

I’m totally rethinking my current life motto, which was the name of the previous post: “Nothing to Lose; Everything to Gain Back.”  Maybe I should take out the “nothing to lose” part.  Granted, I’m aware that at any moment anything I have can be taken away, but when I said “nothing to lose” I meant it in the sense that we had been humbled.  But okay, maybe my new life motto needs to be something like this:

“Please, God, let me keep what I still have, please let us get back on our feet financially now that we know what we are doing, please let my wife’s car get healed without costing us too much more, and let us gain back everything and more that we gave up in the move to be close to family plus the cost of starting back over because financially we couldn’t make it work back in my hometown. We will work very hard, I promise.  Sorry we spent all that money on Starbucks over the past four years. But seriously, we are so much better now at financially planning our lives. So, God, please?”

That motto seems kind of wordy to me.  But I can’t think of anything more true and relevant.

I will close with two requests.

The first is that you, the reader, will leave me a comment letting me know about inevitable typos in this post.  My wife always does my editing for me, but in this case, that’s not an option. (I’m okay with sentence fragments, though; they’re part of my style.) Typically, there are at least five typos.  Can you find them? I will be so grateful for your help.

The second request is to any clever car companies out there.  Let’s make a deal. You see, it has pretty much become an annual event that my wife’s car breaks down and costs us at least $1,000. In fact, this is actually the second time we’ve been stranded at a motel in the middle of nowhere because her car broke down. So just think about this:

Clever car companies, any of you, if you were to want some major free publicity on this widely read daddy blog on Parents.com, you would definitely get it if you gave my wife a new car. You know, like one of those baby-friendly cars that gets really good gas milage and is good for the environment… the whole “go green” thing that everybody’s always talking about. We’re those kind of people.

Imagine all the pictures of the car that would show up on this daily blog of mine, all the hyperlinks to your company, the way your brand would be represented by an All-American everyday dad, his beautiful wife, and their awesome little son… they way your brand would become the heroic answer in a viral sensation. I mean, that’s just product placement at its finest, if you ask me.

So… any takers?

This is where tonight’s Dadabase post written.

 

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Nothing to Lose; Everything to Gain Back

July 15, 2011 at 7:10 am , by 

Seven months.

Last Tuesday on July 5th, my wife and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary… at Panera Bread in the neighboring town of Rome, Georgia.  While we typically take a weekend trip to a bed-and-breakfast for our anniversary, this year had to be different.  And not just because we have an infant now, but because we’re in the midset of restarting our lives again as we prepare to move back to Nashville.

Needless to say, if we’re moving because we just couldn’t come close to making it financially here in Alabama, which is precisely why we are moving back,then we didn’t have the money or mental capacity to enjoy a relaxing weekend getaway trip this time.

The flowers I gave my wife this year were picked from our backyard.  While they may seem like the cheapest flowers I’ve ever given her, they were actually the most expensive.  I could have only obtained these flowers by us moving away from our financially secure life in Nashville and exhausting almost all of the savings we moved down here with. So yeah, they weren’t cheap flowers.

But at this point it’s about proactively moving forward; not getting stuck in the damning mind game of “if only we would have known…”. My motivational life slogan right now is, “I’ve got nothing to lose; everything to gain back… and more.”  We’ve never had a better advantage in life than we do right now, based on what we’ve learned by moving away from Nashville.

You can imagine that if our anniversary dinner was a sandwich and salad combo at Panera Bread, that we know now more than ever, how to appreciate living on little.  So as we re-enter a lifestyle where our combined income will be well over double what it has been for the past several months, we will maintain our current 1930’s Depression Era mindset from now on.

Yes, this has been our version of The Depression that our grandparents experienced.  We are forever changed by it.  More income for us will simply mean more money wisely managed.  It’s been a baptism by fire; no doubt.

So as for next year for our fourth wedding anniversary, I plan on the two of us being able to go away to a bed-and-breakfast again, in a quirky town where we can enjoy a few nice meals.  I will buy her really nice flowers, too.  But still, this will all take place as frugally as possible, without compromising the enjoyment of it.

We’ve got nothing to lose; everything to gain back… and more.

Leave a comment Posted on Nostalgia, parenting, Storytelling

The New Version of Our Old Selves

July 14, 2011 at 7:08 pm , by 

Seven months.

After all the plotlines my wife and I have lived through in accordance to our move from Nashville to my hometown in Alabama, and now back to Nashville again, it’s only natural for us to wonder: Why?

Q) Why did we spend seven months and [x amount] of dollars to live here in my hometown, only to have to go back to where we came from?

A) It took moving away from Nashville to cause us to become positively changed people so that we could go back to Nashville as the necessarily improved versions of ourselves.  But we didn’t know any of this when we left Nashville.

I can confidently say that living in the small town of Fort Payne, Alabama has caused us to fully adopt the millionaire mindset (living as frugally as possible.)  Because we became Dave Ramsey followers shortly after we got married and have since been living on a budget, we thought we were doing pretty well when it came to financially planning our lives.

But we had much more to learn.  And I know for a fact I would have never learned to be this much of a penny-pincher if it weren’t for my unemployment and my wife’s inability to get a job, despite having a Master’s degree.

The move to Alabama has been the most humiliating process I have endured in my life:  Note that when I used the word “humiliating” just now, I meant it in the sense of being humbled and disciplined, not embarrassed or shamed.  (Here’s Wikipedia’s definition: “Humiliation is the abasement of pride, which creates mortification or leads to a state of being humbled or reduced to lowliness or submission.”)

Looking back, I can see how our former budget allotted my wife and I too much “blow money” (Dave Ramsey’s term for extra cash for personal enjoyment), too much “gift money” (money spent on gifts for birthday and Christmas gifts for our friends and family), and too much “food money” (money spent on eating out at restaurants and going out for coffee on the weekend).  Not only that, but now we have learned to ask the question, “What will cause us to earn/save the most money?” when making any decision, big or small.

The version of me from a year ago just didn’t care about money.  I only cared about happiness.  And that was an epic flaw in my thinking.  Now I realize that without conservative financial planning, I will not have sanity.  And without sanity, I can not be happy anyway.

The truth is this: Without moving to my hometown and being psychologically broken down, I would have never been a responsible enough decision maker when it came to finances.  Moving to Fort Payne was the only cure for my disease.

It’s more than just refusing to use a credit card or to buy name brand products.  It’s a matter of taking my finances nearly as seriously as I take my love for my wife and son, health, and my religious beliefs.  So now as we rebuild our lives again, we will be able to be better stewards of our income.  Our money will be better saved, better spent, and better given away.

Photos courtesy of Moments in Time Photography in Fort Payne, Alabama:

www.mitbyamie.com