Finding our Design/Build Firm
10 months ago, I wrote the first post on this blog that mentioned our upcoming renovation. We’d been saving up for five years at that point and had a decent idea of how much money we could borrow to supplement our cash to finance the work, but we hadn’t actually talked budgets with anyone yet.
Not for lack of trying, mind you - I’d reached out to a few design/build firms to get a sense of how much what we wanted to do would cost so we could have a savings goal, but none would give me an estimate without hiring them to draw up preliminary plans. So we decided on our own and, when we reached it last spring, I started vetting firms.
What I Read On My Summer Vacation
I’d read that vacations shift into another gear - less “parenting somewhere else” and more of an actual holiday - once your youngest turns four, and this summer, when Claire was three and a half, was a glorious preview of that.
She still needed supervision, especially when we were by the pool, but she is able to play independently for decent stretches of time these days and, equally thrillingly, has become a good playmate for Robbie. Because of that, I was able to read five whole books in the two weeks we were on Martha’s Vineyard!
A Thank-You To Daycare
Tomorrow is Claire’s last day at daycare. We’ve been with this daycare for almost six years; Robbie started when he was nine months old, in September 2018, and he and Claire overlapped for a few months before he moved on to preK-3.
I’m not going to delve into the bowels of Reddit or conservative parenting blogs to find exact quotes from people who think that sending a child to daycare is tantamount to abuse, but one I remember seeing repeatedly over the years is “Well, I could never let someone else raise my child.”
Our Approach to Extra-Curriculars
… So there we have it: our approach to our kids’ extracurriculars. Look, who knows what we’ll do if Robbie or Claire shows a real aptitude for a sport and wants to pursue it intensely. But that’s not something we want to encourage at these ages, so we’ll not worry about it unless or until we get there.
Dining Tables for our Post-Reno Dining Room
Just before we moved from our apartment into this house, we bought a very stylish Crate and Barrel Parsons dining table with black steel legs and a glass top from a friend ready for something new. It is, it turns out, not a great table when you have young kids; while the top is easy to wipe clean, every spill seeps and every crumb dives into gap between the top of the frame and the glass.
I can’t wait to pass it on to its next owner.