Build Tomorrow - Another Day Of Life

Today I am going to take a break from my Now and Then Series. It’s not finished by far, because I have so many thoughts about it, but for those of you that have been following my blog for a while, I figured I would give some overall updates.

My wife is doing well, we are at the 13 week mark. As I had posted earlier we did have that scare last week when they couldn’t find the baby’s heartbeat, but the ultrasound showed it happy and healthy in there. We are still hoping her Placenta Previa will resolve itself by week 20, as does her OB. So we remain in high spirits.

As for the boys. Well after all of the trials and tribulations from last year with them, so far this years seems to be much smoother. Will is absolutely loving 2ND grade. He loves his teacher his classmates, and won student of the week for this week for his behavior, and working hard. He is also involved in little league.

Jon went back to school full-time this year, and that was a rough decision for all of us. Him especially. But we honestly felt he had had enough time with his doctors to learn some techniques to manage his anxiety. We also put him back with the same teacher for special education, even though they didn’t have the best of years last year. I am happy to report other that a rough morning on the first day of school, thus far he is doing well. His teachers have taken a different approach that promotes social behavior over academics, as they assessed him again over the summer and found him to be on grade level for everything untouched by his language disability, and that too was better that expected. So that has helped immensely.

I haven’t updated my debt box lately, and sadly that is not going as well as I had hoped by this point. But we continue to find other ways to work down our debt. We have had some emergencies that had impacted our ability to pay down debt as quickly as we hoped.

I am still working on developing a second income, and have finally gotten the Community Center back on-line. It’s still in it’s early stages, but I hope I am better able to keep it going. I am looking for guest bloggers, as well as folks that would like to post product reviews, so please check it out.

I am also doing much better at reading blogs. I have just found so many that have great content it’s hard to keep up.

I have been seeing a lot more traffic lately, much in part due to Tricia at Blogging Away Debt. She was one of my original Spotlight blogs, and I continue to read it faithfully. She gives me hope that someday my family too will be debt free. It you haven’t you really need to check out her blog.

And lastly, I am now on a diet. My goal is to loose about 15 pounds before the end of the year. So I will be posting more on that later. Check back later this week for part III of Now and then. I think you’ll be surprised at it!

I never thought in writing this series that it would elicit such feedback. But I think the idea of nostalgia and change in the world is common to everyone. And how much things have changed.

We hear every day about the effect of divorce on children, and mine are no different. Mine have carried it with them, and will for their lives. However the divorce rate in the 1980’s was statically higher than it is today, yet you heard about it less. Why? Well divorce carried a stigma with it even through the 80’s where it wasn’t publicized, or represented on TV, or in media. Most entertainment was still family oriented designed to insulate from many of those ideas, and how to deal with them. Also many times in the 80’s divorced parents rarely shared custody, and often the custodial parent never remarried.

With the advances in the 80’s and 90’s remarriage became more common, as well as second and third divorces. Custody became more shared, and children were exposed less and less to the “stable” family environment we were used to seeing on TV. TV became more “real”, and the idea of the nuclear family changed, and divorce became more and more of an accepted practice. After all, divorce was no big deal right? Now I speak to this with some knowledge, as I am divorced, and remarried.

One thing I find vastly different is the idea of entitlement. Even twenty years ago, when you started a job after college if you were lucky enough to go, you stayed there until retirement. Today the average time an employee stays with a given employer is four years. Never before in human culture, have people been so involved in “what” they have. The average consumer owed approximately 25% of their annual income in debt (not including housing) in the 1980’s and today the number is closer to 50%. And some reports have it even higher today.

I must sadly admit that to a point I am one of those folks. I look back now and realize that there were many steps I could have taken to avoid where I am today. But I am a product of the generation that grew for the entitled generation, where technology and the art of need outgrew our ability to wait.

Today we also move and upgrade at an alarming rate. We feel entitled to the better car, the bigger house, and many do it “for the children”, when what our children need is love, and values, not “stuff”. Our sense of entitlement has hurt our family degraded it value, and it’s up to us parents to return it to a valuable item for our children.

I am looking forward to the next entry in this series, and I hope you will check back.
~Another Day

When writing a series such as this sometimes, that technology can cloud you memories, and you can forget what you did and didn’t have. I have received quite a few comments on the first post in this series, and all of them had valuable insight.
So fist I must say that the last 20 years and the advance of all of this technology has had immeasurable benefits. Take for example the advances in medicine. My wife who is 12 weeks pregnant now has benefited from the advances, in that they helped in identifying a potentially dangerous problem, now at 12 weeks, where 20 years ago that wasn’t possible. And in today’s world it was found and can be managed and monitored. When I think about how much the last twenty years have benefited us it’s amazing. But also scary when you think about what it can take away as well.

Jim from My Debt Blog has some valuable points. He said,

“Something you have to consider is what we see today and how we used see will
never be the same. Everything will progress because that’s what history does.”

He is absolutely right. My grandfather too grew up with a car with a crank (his first was a Model-T), and distinctly remembers the lamplighter coming by every night, before his street was electrified. He remembers that when you got electric street lights it meant you were in a really high end neighborhood. But he also will say that in his 94 years he has never seen things change so quickly as they have in the last 25 years.

I too remember the days of the TV taking a minute to warm up, and I in fact was the remote many times. If you wanted to have a conversation it involved the phone, or mailing a letter. You paid for things via check, and if you were lucky you had a MasterCard, or BankAmericard, which was a huge deal when they changed their name to VISA. An how about this, do you remember “Ma Bell?”

Stacey at Never Wanted Nothin’ More, also hit a nail on the head when she said

“I work with kids on a daily basis and agree with you that they are missing out.
Perhaps if they had more human interactions the world would be a different place
than it is.”

So you think about what it is they are missing out on. And it’s the need to live in society, and challenge issues face to face.

Take my 13 year old for example. He has a rather extreme anxiety disorder, and is having a rough time with school. For the long time readers of my blog you will know how hard the road has been for him to transition from home school to public school. It has been over a year and we are still working on it. One of the questions I often ask is why? Well part of it is technology. Because he had such problems he could be home schooled using technology. What id did was take away that face time, that all children need, and now he is having a hard time adjusting.

Think about it. For those of us 30 something’s, our day was school, homework, playtime (outside with the other kids if the weather was OK), dinner, bath, family time, and bed. Today it’s school, homework, playtime, which can be on-line, or playstation, or something that isn’t outside, dinner, more Internet or video games (after all what is family time), and then bed. Of course in the midst, there are text messages, IM, or something that was done on TIVO, after all with 400 channels there is always something on right? Oh yeah and mom and dad are probably on their blackberry or finishing something from work right?

I try not to make that the case in our house, but there are days that it’s almost impossible. I mean the kids hate that I have the no TV with dinner rule, and they hate the shows we watch, so seriously why they would have family time with mom and dad since there are so many other things to do that are more fun.

Kids today, and even adults have so much more coming at them, more than ever before, and it can be hard to carve out that all important family time. I often worry that we are expecting them to grow up way too fast. Gone are the easy days of little league, and now it’s a true competitive adventure, not because of the kids but the adults.

Gone are the family shows, like “Family Ties”, “Little House on the Prairie”, and many others who focused on family. We are in a boom world, and everyone including me moves at a different pace. But there are days I can close my eyes, and remember lying on my elbows next to my sister, with Mom and Dad, watching family ties, after a rousing game of “Connect Four” (Remember that).

So for part three of the series I will look at entitlement, and how it has changed the landscape of the family.
~Another Day