Hello all,
I’ve been busy preparing and traveling for a business meeting, so I haven’t had time to work on the blog lately. For the foreseeable future I will be concentrating on recuperating all the sleep I haven’t been getting. So blog updates will probably be sparse (or non-existent) for the rest of the week.
Please try to do what you can to continue on.
In the meantime, feel free to use the comment thread for anything you’d like to discuss.
As you were.
–The Management
Me: “Huh, my accordion strap just broke.”
Ollie: “Oh no! That’s my favorite accordion!”
Me: “Wait a minute. You just told me this morning you wanted to get some new shoes. How did they get here already?”
Sara: “Well….maybe I already ordered them yesterday.”
…
Sara: “If they had just come tomorrow, I would have been fine!”
Ollie: “I want syrup too.”
Evie: “Ollie, you’re always copying me! You always pick the same thing!”
Me: “Hey, he only had two choices. Maybe he just felt like syrup today. It doesn’t mean he’s copying you.”
Ollie: “Yeah! And also, I like to try what Evie’s trying.”
So much for trying to help him out there.
It’s the end of an era: for the past 5 1/2 years, I have been working from home one day a week in order to watch the kids. Now that the kids are both in school, I will be going into the office (for most of) Fridays.
First off, I feel very fortunate for the ability to work from home. Most people don’t have the option, and I feel like it has been a huge benefit. Working from home allowed me to be a part of my kids lives that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to be a part of. It allowed Sara to keep her job, which was important to her and therefore important to me.
I honestly don’t know how other people manage their childcare without it. I guess the answer is they pay someone to do it, but this is so much simpler than it sounds. It’s ridiculously expensive, hard to coordinate, and depends on finding the right person. And when it comes to raising your kids, even the very best person is not you. So I am very grateful that we were able to keep the kids with us the majority of the time, and put them in day care for only 2 days a week.
Working from home is a blessing and a curse. Some of the blessings are what I outlined above, and those are the obvious advantages. But what people don’t realize is how difficult it can be to work from home, and there are a lot of negative stereotypes. People (my boss) picture someone lazing around in their pjs and generally slacking off. I suppose there are people who do that, but if so, I think people would catch on very quick, because you wouldn’t be completing your tasks on time. I simply have too much to do to take one day off of every five.
Here’s the secret: I hated working from home. Hated it. But I did it because of the obvious benefits to my family.
I meticulously tracked my time using a timer. Because I didn’t have time to work much on Fridays, I had to make up all of my work at other times. This mostly meant working here or there Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night, and frequently on Sunday night. Often I would finish my work at 10 p.m. on Sunday night, go to bed, and then it’s back to work on Monday. If we went away for the weekend or had visitors (which basically describes every single weekend), then I would instead have to work every night of the week. It was exhausting.
I have to say that I’m kind of relieved to only be working from home one night a week now. I feel like a new man; like my nights are suddenly so free. Also, I have been walking on eggshells for years at work, since my working from home was not very popular with my boss. Despite having no major problems and getting all of my work done on time and then some, I always felt like it was using up all his good graces, leaving me no benefit of the doubt on anything else. It was constantly made known to me that I was lucky to be allowed to do this, and therefore should not complain about anything else. Basically, I was living on borrowed time. This caused a lot of stress, and I am certainly glad to be out from under that.
On the other hand, it requires significant gymnastics to make our current schedule work, including relying on the kindness of strangers. It also requires an extra 2 hours of commuting on my part. I honestly don’t think one realizes how awful 2 hours a day of commuting is, and how much it negatively impacts your life, until you’ve done it for 7 years. It’s just dead time that shortens your day, not to mention stressful, driving-in-traffic time that shortens your life. I work the bare minimum 8 hours a day, and yet my wife is always mad at me for getting home so late. I was more than happy to skip that one day a week (and that’s not even counting the impact on the Earth or the impact on my wallet of all those extra miles).
So all in all, it’s kind of a mixed bag. I’m very glad for the opportunity, but maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be.
For all you employers out there, please consider an arrangement like this. Believe me, your employees are not getting away with something! In the right situation (in a computer job like mine with a dedicated employee who will actually work), it can really help your employee out with minimal cost to you. This is a significant benefit you can offer at practically no cost! In this day and age, it is so easy to reach people, with cell phones, emails, video chats, etc., that it hardly matters where they are physically located. Happy workers with good home lives are worth vastly more to you than the dubious benefit of bodies in the office.
There is a new predator in the garden making a significant dent in the insect population. Evie has taken a keen interest in bugs.
It all started when my dad gave her a little butterfly net and plastic bug cage. It didn’t seem like much at the time, but I don’t know if Evie has ever been so enamored with a toy. She went from whining and complaining about having to go to the garden to begging to go. She’s deadly with that net, and she basically never goes without catching at least one butterfly. She wore that bug cage clean out, and had to buy a replacement, something so dear to her heart that she actually spent her own money on it.
Her usual pattern was to catch between one and three butterflies, give them flowers and sticks until they died, then dump their corpses on the back porch and go fill her butterfly house of death with a new crop. We tried to convince her to let them go while they were still alive, but we were never really successful with that. She’s very patient and very good at catching them (although not necessarily as good at getting them in the cage).
Evie: “What’s a talent show?”
Me: “Oh, Evie. You would *love* a talent show. It’s like at a school or something, when you get on stage and perform. You could act out a skit, or sing a song, or do a ballet dance.”
Evie: “Or for my talent you could release a bunch of butterflies on stage, and I’d catch them!”
The butterflies were relatively cool, but the whole thing really went to the next level when she nabbed a couple of caterpillars.
These were big fat green ones, with yellow and black spots on their backs. We identified them on the computer (Eastern black swallowtails, as Evie was fond of pointing out to everybody all of the time) and identified what they liked to eat. Evie carefully collected all of their favorite foods and the caterpillars quickly responded by chowing down like there was no tomorrow before crawling up and making some nice big cocoons.
I’m a 33 year old man, and I’m not going to lie, it was pretty cool. We all spent a decent amount of time watching these little guys crawl around, but I never thought they’d make cocoons. It was a pretty exciting event around here. They’re fun to watch when they’re crawling around. They’re fun to watch when they’re eating. And don’t even get me started on how much fun they are when they poop! It’s like christmas morning at the Halbach house. Luckily for Evie, those caterpillars pretty much did nothing BUT poop.
For a while, Evie was taking these things everywhere she went, especially school, and every person she met, kid or adult, was fascinated by them. They were so cool! Evie seemed to get a particularly big reaction, though I’m not sure if that was due to 1) her general enthusiasm for the subject, 2) the fact that she was a girl that was into bugs, or 3) the fact that we live in Chicago and seeing living creatures is something of a novel concept. I mean that for real, I actually saw people on a bus stopped at a light pointing at her caterpillars as we walked by on the sidewalk.
Things somewhat calmed down now that all the caterpillars are chrysalises (chrysali?), except that now she’s captured a big, fat grasshopper. It’s got to be at least 3 inches long, and just as hungry (and full of poop) as those caterpillars. My only problem with the grasshopper is that there’s no end point, other than his death. So we’re kind of back to the butterfly situation again, except the grasshopper seems to be quite a bit sturdier than they were.
In the meantime, our chrysalises are wintering on the back porch. It turns out that they won’t turn into butterflies until spring! So we’ll see if the enthusiasm can last that long (to say nothing of the actual chrysalises). But if they do, then Evie will have shepherded these little guys through their entire life cycle, which is pretty dang cool.
The September food swap had one additional swapper this month: Evie.
She was *so excited* to go to the food swap with her mama. You could just see how proud and grown up she felt. Sara had her make yogurt to bring for her special swap item, and she had big plans on what she was going to swap for.
I wasn’t actually at the swap, so my knowledge is second hand, but it sounds like she tried a lot of samples. Her yogurt was reasonably popular, but she unfortunately didn’t get her first choice of red velvet cupcakes (how could someone resist trading with a proud 6 year old with homemade yogurt?) Nonplussed, she turned around and scored some orange chocolate cupcakes with dark chocolate swiss meringue buttercream and black sesame seeds. (Can you believe we haven’t eaten them yet? They got a lot of desserts.)
Her other exciting swap was getting her daddy some bacon cupcakes. She was so excited to tell me about them! She convinced someone to take some pickled radishes (they were NOT a popular item), and nabbed 2 bacon maple cupcakes and 2 pistachio nutella cupcakes. That’s a good deal, right there (thank you for making so many cupcakes!)
All in all, a very successful swap.
Shane Halbach 