family

14 ways to get off the kid-gift treadmill.

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14 ways to get off the kid-gift treadmill.Last week I went to a nearby Jo-Ann Fabric and Craft to buy a book of brain teasers from the dollar section (60 cents with coupon – an inexpensive stocking stuffer for a young relative). An older woman was visibly fretting as she picked things up and put them down.

“What do you buy for someone who already has everything?” she asked me.

Seems that her two granddaughters, ages 4 and 6, drop by fairly regularly.  Some time ago she started buying little gifts for each visit, and now she’s wishing she hadn’t. Although the first thing they want to know when they cross the threshold is what they’re getting, they often don’t even bother to take the items home.

I gently asked if it were stressful always to have to come up with a new and exciting gift. She nodded, then shrugged and said, “But they expect it.”

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When helping your parents hurts you.

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When helping your parents hurts you.Last month I was contacted by Kira Reginato, an elder-care management specialist and host of a weekly radio program in Santa Rosa, California. She’d come across an article I did for MSN Money called “Are you your parents’ ATM?”

Reginato invited me to be on her program, “Call Kira About Aging,” to talk about this very sensitive issue. If you’d like to hear the result, you can access the podcast here.

No time to listen? Let me give you a few of the highlights, starting with some frightening stats regarding folks currently in their 40s and 50s. According to the Pew Research Center:

  • 27% provide primary support for a grown child.
  • 21% have provided financial support to a parent aged 65 or older in the past year.
  • 38% say both their grown children and their parents rely on them for emotional support.

Anybody but me think that sounds not only emotionally but financially exhausting?

Specifically: If you’re helping out parents whose money isn’t stretching far enough and/or picking up the slack for your under- or unemployed kids, what happens to your own finances?

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The opposite of obligation.

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imagesEver seen the Pixar film “Up”? In the how-Carl-and-Ellie-met montage is a moment when the two of them sit side by side, reading and holding hands.

That was DF and me on Sunday, reading and hand-holding in adjoining easy chairs. For him it was “Mozart in the Jungle” and for me it was one of the “Anne of Green Gables” books. (I’d never read the series as a kid and recently I found several titles in the recycle bin.)

It was so nice to see DF rooted for a while. Usually he’s in constant motion: cooking, working in the yard or garden, hanging out laundry, tidying up. Even when he sits still he’s often working: paying bills, balancing his checkbook, dealing with his father’s estate. Yet there he was, reading a non-work-related book and smiling.

And me? The day before I’d written a post for Surviving and Thriving and finished my Monday post for MSN Money. Thus I felt temporarily free to follow the adventures of Anne Shirley, even though unread personal finance books are currently stacked eyebrow-high on the desk.

For the first time in who knows when, we were observing a Sabbath. I don’t mean that in a strictly religious sense, but as a day of rest. A chance to recharge. A dozen hours of peace. The opposite of obligation.

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I fought the log and the log won.

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th-1We now have an 8-by-8-foot shed nearly filled with firewood. The good news: It’s free heat, from about 20 trees felled on a couple of different properties.

The bad news? We’re not done, because after about seven hours the rented log-splitter broke.

After about six hours of trundling and stacking firewood my arms and shoulders feel very, very surprised. I expect tomorrow’s workday will be very challenging indeed, given that I make my living with my hands as well as my head.

Now I know why people had so many kids way back when: free labor.

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Down the shore.

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I got home from the two-week East Coast trip at around 1:30 this morning, exhausted and suffering from Weird Pattern Sunburn. The back and front of my neck and about three inches of shoulders were scorched stop-sign red where the sunscreen washed away. I’d been wearing a T-shirt and shorts over my swimsuit for a trip to Ocean City, NJ.

It’s really starting to hurt – it may blister, dammit – and my shoulder and arm muscles are seriously wrenched from holding my younger great-nephew in deeper water so we could jump waves. The heavy backpack cutting into the ache/burn during our long day of travel certainly didn’t help matters.

Wish I could have a professional massage, but nobody’s touching that sunburn. When DF put aloe gel on it last night I shrieked like a smoke alarm.

Totally worth it to have gone to the shore again, after decades away. I’d forgotten how lovely it feels to be cradled by the ocean.

 

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Signs you’re in South Jersey.

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thSorry to have maintained radio silence for the past week. Getting ready to get out of town, the overnight journey (15 hours door-to-door), doing Philly stuff for a day and a half, taking the Megabus to Manhattan, doing NYC stuff in heat ’n’ humidity with my niece and her kids, getting the bus back to Philly and then the bus to South Jersey, writing for my day job….Well, it took more out of me than I’d expected.

I’m still pretty flattened even though I’ve been at my dad’s place for two days. It didn’t help that the Megabus out of New York was late, which meant extra standing around in the aforementioned H&H. It also meant that I missed the Jersey bus I wanted to get.

Did I mention the sudden high winds that powdered me with Philly grit while I waited near the corner of Broad and Vine? Or the thunderstorm that rolled in immediately afterward? And for extra credit, the NJ Transit bus was late, too.

Why not get a rental car? Two reasons:

I didn’t need wheels for the first two days, because I was too tired and too busy (I’ve had to write two MSN Money columns since I got off the bus) to want to ram around much. Dad let me use his pickup for short visits with my Aunt Dot and my brother.

Also because I’m cutting corners where I can. We’ve had a great time so far but we’ve spent a boatload of bucks. When Alison and her boys arrive tomorrow I’ll pick up the rental car and we’ll divvy up the usage.

Besides, on the bus ride I saw my first real sign that I was back in South Jersey.

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A get-out-of-town roundup.

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thVery late Monday evening (actually at about 2 a.m. Tuesday) my niece and I will be be at the Anchorage International Airport with her two boys. Our trip will include historical/tourist-y stuff in Philadelphia, a quick trip to New York City, and about a week spent on my dad’s Christmas tree farm in South Jersey.

The kids are really looking forward to the latter because it’s truly Dude Heaven: tractors, power tools, a private gun range and thousands of trees against which to urinate. Tack on a possible one-day trip to the Jersey Shore (the family-friendly part, not the reality-TV zone) and they will be in ecstasy.

I’m still making arrangements for this trip – didn’t book tickets for the Megabus until the other night – and trying to get a little bit ahead on my paid writing chores. Thus no time to devote to fabulous insights for my personal blog. Instead, I’m rounding up a few contests for you to enter.

That is, assuming you could use stuff like a $500 cash prize.

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The first day of summer, the beginning of the end.

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thAll around the country people recently celebrated the first day of summer (calendar-wise). The weather was gorgeous in Anchorage but I was a little sad. Up here, summer solstice means that in a day or so the light turns around.

If that sounds defeatist, it’s because it is. We’ll still have tons of light for quite some time, much more illumination than the Lower 48 gets. But I can’t shake the notion that it’s now going the other way.

I felt that way every solstice during my previous tenure in Alaska (1984-2001) and I feel that way now. May and June are the best months, in my opinion, even if the latter does turn on us each year on or around June 21. 

 

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A satisfied life.

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On Sunday we went to lunch with DF’s mother and her longtime companion. The most exciting part of the meal was the very large black bear that ran around in a field behind the restaurant until employees chased it away. The most interesting part was what his mother said about flowers.

She’d gone to a local nursery and was so taken by the blooms that she bought more than she needed. In fact, it’s been a long time since she bought anything she didn’t specifically need.

“It was nice to want something,” she said. “I haven’t wanted anything in a long time.”

That’s not because she’s clinically depressed or too impoverished to dream. It’s because she’s satisfied.

 

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