Vet Buddies: Priceless

Some things change. We're not as young as we were.  We have a lot of kids.  We've all moved about a million times. There have been Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, injuries, PTSD diagnoses, VA ratings, marriages, and even sometimes divorces.  The war we used to think was exciting and glorious has now dragged on for more than a decade, and we're all sick of it.  We now shake our heads and laugh when young soldiers think they're badasses, mostly because we used to be those soldiers.

But then, there are some things that never change, like the fact that we are brothers and sisters, and the fact that we can never be serious for too long.  It's definitely NOT all business for us vets!  Was good to see you this morning, D.  We'll have to do it again real soon now that we're all back on the same side of the country.

PTSD Awareness Day was yesterday.  Yes, I'm a day late with this.  It's my way of being different.  OK, so it's really just my way of being too busy all day to do it, and now it's 1 am, Thak is watching Starship Troopers, and I have a little time before we go to bed.

I tried to write a whole post about this thing, but no matter how many times I tried, it didn't do it justice, so I'll just say this:

I love a veteran whom the enemy harmed, and although his deepest scars are invisible, they're still real.  It hasn't always been an easy road, and it hasn't always been terribly difficult, but it's always worth it.  He has shown me what courage is, not only by going to war as many times as he did, but by realizing when something wasn't right, and finding help for himself when he got home.  He isn't always stoic, and I'm not always as strong as a lot of people think I am, but somehow, most of the time, we do just fine.  There have been dark times. There have been negotiations, restructuring, rebuilding, and hard work.  There have also been victories, and good times.  Things aren't like they were before, and they never will be.  I'm here, though, because I want to be, for one simple reason.  He's worth every bit, and then some. True story.

You hate Tricare? Please, regale me with your tales.

But first, let me remind you that your monthly premium is $0. If you have chosen Standard, your deductible is $150 if your husband is above the rank of Sergeant, $50 if he's below.  If you have chosen Prime, you have no deductible.  Might I remind you that your copays are extremely low, and if you have chosen Prime, you have no copays at all, and if you get a bill, you are expressly told to refuse to pay it and let the insurance company take care of it.  Finally, let's remember that services that civilians have to hunt high and low to get, are readily available to you, whether on post, or from off post doctors who have agreed to provide that service for military patients, yet often refuse to provide that same service to civilian patients.  Basically, you're getting better healthcare than most of the nation, and paying either nothing, or practically nothing, for it.  Please remind me how exactly you have it so bad.

If you don't spank that child, they'll be a total brat.

"You want your kid to run all over you? Don't spank them." 

"You've got to show them who's boss sometimes."

"If it's a matter of safety, you're damned right they'll get spanked! How else will they learn not to run into a busy street?!" 

Really, people?  You honestly think that you have to hit your kids to assert authority or teach them right from wrong?  This couldn't be more off base.  Trust me. I know this.  I used to spank.  I am telling you from personal experience that it does not work.  All it does is make a kid fearful of getting caught, and in the end, it makes them sneakier. (Ask me about my 8-year-old sometime.  She's the only one of my kids who ever got spanked, and she's extremely sneaky.  The only thing she learned is that getting caught is bad.)  That's probably not what most people are going for.

To give another example of that, think of training for the Army (any branch of the military, really, but I was in the Army, so I'm going with what I know here).  Even if you have never served, you probably know that the Drill Sergeant is always yelling, and that he has the shortest fuse in the history of the world.  You're afraid to screw up because he's going to make your life hell if you do. Sure, on the surface, it makes you do the right thing.  You learn to shine your boots, to press your uniform, to carry your rifle just so, to call cadence correctly, to march, to shoot, to run, to eat... You learn what he wants, because if you don't do what he wants, you're going to pay for it, and it won't be pretty.  Then right below the surface, there's what really goes on.  My buddies and I used to joke that we broke every rule but the unimportant ones, and that was just about true.  Drinking, smoking, fraternization, tattoos, trips way outside pass distance, you name it, we did it, but you bet our boots were shiny and our uniforms were pressed, and despite being ridiculously hung over, we marched correctly in formation every morning.  We were sneaky as hell, and after a few short months, we got really good at getting one over on old Drill Sergeant. Kids and young soldiers aren't so different.  If you tear into them and punish them harshly at every turn, they just figure out how to not to get caught.  They don't do the right thing.  They just expend that much more effort figuring out how to do the wrong thing more effectively.

I think of Orren.  He's at work with daddy right now.  He really loves going to the hangar, and everyone there really likes him.  He's like a part of the crew.  Not every 3-year-old could be trusted around sensitive, multimillion dollar equipment, but Orren can.  When you tell him what he can and cannot do, and explain to him why, in terms he can understand, he will generally do the right thing.  When he doesn't do the right thing, if you redirect him, it works well about 99% of the time.  For that other 1% of the time, he might need a time out.  The way we do time out is not as a punishment, but as a tool for helping him to regroup and calm down.  We sit with him, and help him to sort it all out.  This works remarkably well. 

Orren has never been spanked, or really even yelled at.  He is not a brat, and he does not run all over us.  He is not an intolerable kid who pitches fits every time he doesn't get his way.  He is definitely not a bully.  He's a curious little boy who can explain the physics of flight to a high ranking officer one minute, and then play hide and seek with his sister the next.  He can also tell you exactly how he's feeling at any given time, using the right words for his emotions, and when he is upset about not getting his way, he's to the point where he's pretty likely to talk to us about it.  I'm not exaggerating a bit when I say that a lot of people who meet Orren are pretty impressed with him.  We didn't have to spank him to make him able to function in society, and even be well liked by others.

Somebody's thinking right now, "Yes, but every kid is different."  Trust me, I know. I've got three of them.  No two are very much alike.  I still maintain that spanking is inherently unnecessary and does more harm than good.  I also believe that there are always other ways to accomplish the end goal, which is to get the kid to do the right thing, and that other ways are generally more effective than spanking, because the kid is doing the right thing for logical reason that they understand, rather than simply out of fear.   Spanking is a hard cycle to break, but it's definitely worth doing.  Don't worry.  Your kid won't be a scourge upon society because they weren't hit regularly. 

Gluten

Recently, I heard about something called the Paleo diet.  The basic idea is that people didn't evolve to eat grain or dairy, so we should just not eat those things.  You can eat all the meat, eggs, fruits, and veggies you want, but not grain or dairy.  At first, I thought it was a real crock, but with a huge percentage of the people I know going Paleo every day, I became curious about it.  I could see how well it was working out for a lot of people, so I decided to try it out.  I knew Thak would never go for it, so I just started phasing grains out gradually, without telling anyone what I was doing.  We don't use much dairy anyway, so I left that part alone.  Plus, a lot of people do Paleo + raw dairy, and that sounded better to me.

After about a month, we were consuming extremely minimal amounts of grain, and about that time, Thak found what he considered the deal of the century.  Loaves of bread, a type he thought we would actually eat (100% whole wheat, no high fructose corn syrup) on sale, buy one, get one free.  He bought 8 loaves, and boy was he ever pleased with himself.  I think I went 50 shades of pale when he walked through the door with all these loaves of bread.  I just went with it, though, and figured that once it was gone, it was gone, and we wouldn't have to worry about it anymore.  I didn't mention that I had been phasing out grain and that he had basically sabotaged my efforts enormously, because I didn't think it was that big a deal.

With all this bread in the house, it was toast for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, sandwiches for snacks, you name it.  I didn't let them gorge on it unrestricted, but I did let them eat the stuff up because I wanted it gone.  Then it happened.  Erin lost her mind.  She was running from one end of the apartment to the other, just destroying everything in her path.  We'd tell her to stop, and she wouldn't.  She was totally out of control.  The final straw was when she pulled Orren off the couch by his feet, and made him hit his head so hard on the floor that we thought he might have a concussion.  I locked her outside for 15 minutes at that point, just because we needed to get Orren calmed down, and I couldn't do that with her tearing through every room like a tornado.

After we finally got the kids to bed for the night, I realized what had happened.  It was the gluten in the wheat.  She had been receiving very minimal amounts of it for the past month, and then when she got this massive overdose of gluten, it literally made her crazy.  After that, I told Thak what I had been doing, with minimizing grain consumption, and why I was doing it, and that the huge dose of grain that Erin had received in the form of all that bread is probably what caused her to go nuts.

Luckily, he understood my point, and we put Erin on a gluten-free diet for the next week.  She didn't understand why she couldn't have any biscuits when he brothers did, but she did enjoy the extra bacon she got.  She did not understand why she couldn't have a sandwich for lunch, but she did enjoy the extra fruit she got along with her meat and cheese. After a relatively short time of gluten-free diet, she was totally fine. 

We kept her gluten-free for a few more days just so that she could have that much time to sort of reset her system after having that much grain in it, but now we have her on what I call a "gluten-minimal" diet.  We do allow her to have a little bit of grain sometimes, just not much.  She can't handle it.  Some people can, some people can't.  Grain, like any other substance known to man, affects everybody differently.  Erin is sensitive to it.  It's no different than how some people can drink five beers and be fine, but other people are tipsy after one.  Some people can eat all the gluten they want, and not go nuts.  Some people have a very low tolerance for it.  Erin falls into the latter category. 

The main reason we don't go completely gluten-free for her is because a lot of gluten-free foods are full of soy, which is really not a good thing to eat.  I think the healthiest thing we can do for her at this point is to make sure her diet stays low in gluten, through natural means, just focusing on foods that naturally do not contain gluten (basically everything that isn't made of wheat).   I suppose this is one good thing about not qualifying for free or reduced lunch.  It is actually cheaper to pack her lunch, so if she is up here for school next year, we'll have no excuse for allowing her to be exposed to all the gluten in school lunches. 

It's actually really good to know that gluten was affecting her that way.  It's easier to fix things when you know what's wrong.  We'll be explaining to her, little by little, why she can't have much grain, so that she learns to avoid it on her own as she gets older, but for now, we have pretty solid control of what she's eating, so it works pretty well for now.

Sometimes, they grow up.

We had suspected Erin of not washing properly, whether hair or the rest of her.  All the signs were there.  Then we realized we were barking up the wrong tree.  It was the products.  The kids' products that were great for her this time last year are now making her hair greasy and flat and her skin dry and dull.  I told Thak that we needed to upgrade Erin's bath products.  He thought that was a good idea, so off to Target we went.

Erin was so excited, standing there in the shampoo aisle, and finally picked John Frieda Sheer Blonde shampoo and conditioner.  Then she was equally excited in the shower gel aisle as she picked out a hot pink pouf made to look like a cat, and some snazzy blue shower gel that smelled just right. 

Of course, when we got home, I had to teach her how to not pour too much out of the bottles, and they're big bottles, so I told her they need to last AT LEAST a month.  You see, a month is basically forever to an 8-almost-9-year-old, so I think, "Use as much as would fit on a spoon from the kitchen. This bottle has to last at least a month." got the point across. She seemed to understand, so I think we're set.

It is a small thing, yes, but she was happy, because kids that age love anything that acknowledges that they are, in fact, getting bigger whether their parents like it or not. ;-)

Today we made banana blueberry ice cream.  It's not really ice cream, actually.  It's just frozen bananas spun around in the blender until they're an ice cream consistency.  Then once you get that, you can add in whatever else you want.  We put in a spoonful of blueberry jam, but anything will work. Other people I know do peanut butter, Nutella, strawberries, mangoes, even chocolate chips.  There's really no limit to the ways you can go with this, so add whatever you want. 

Then after you do that, you can either eat it right away, with a consistency like soft serve ice cream, or you can freeze it again until it becomes harder and scoopable like regular ice cream.  Of course, my guys aren't big on waiting, so they had to eat it right away.  It was definitely a hit!  We're sure sissy would have loved it, too, but she went to work with daddy today (another of the contractors has his daughter for the summer, so the girls play together out there) so she wasn't around to try it this time. 

This time, we did blueberry. Next time maybe we'll do chocolate chips!  Orren's best friend's mommy also tells me that if you add an avocado, it's REALLY creamy, so maybe we'll give that a shot, too.

I want to be like George Washington.

George Washington was a land surveyor, and he served in the Army.  There's one more way in which I want to be like him, and no, I do not want to be president.  I want to grow hemp.  Hemp is an awesome crop, and it's actually illegal for US farmers to grow it.  That really needs to change.  Yes, there are ways for people to get licensed to grow medicinal marijuana in California, but textile grade hemp is not legally farmed anywhere in the US.  I think this is dead wrong.

The demand for textile grade hemp is so high that we import tons of it every year.  From that, everything from building materials to clothing is made.  Everyone knows that hemp is one of the strongest and most versatile fibers there is, and that it is useful for pretty much everything.  What some people don't know is that the plants are extremely sustainable to grow, especially organically, and that not only could we help the environment by encouraging US farmers to grow organic hemp, but we could also help our economy.  Right now, hemp is expensive because it's imported, but if we grew it here, it would be cheap, like cotton is.  The difference is that hemp is useful for a lot more things than cotton, and is far more sustainable to grow.  A move toward reliance on hemp would make things more affordable, keep more dollars in the US, and help farmers.  I don't see a single downside.

I want to grow hemp because I live in the perfect place for it.  The terrain and climate are excellent for hemp plants to thrive, and since this is a big cotton producing area, there is already a market in place for fiber crops.  I could easily sell any hemp that I produced.  It would quite possibly be our best crop.  We've looked into a lot as far as what directions we want to go when we get our farm when Thak gets home from Afghanistan, and really, hemp is far and away our best option for a cash crop, but I'm pretty sure the result wouldn't be pretty about the time we planted 15 acres of textile grade hemp in the middle of Bulloch County.  We'd probably have police helicopters landing on our lawn before we knew what hit us.  This should not be.  My hypothetical field of hemp should be just as accepted as the field of cotton down the road.  The US needs to get over its hangups about hemp production.  It's good for the country if American farmers produce hemp.

How can we get our government to legalize textile grade hemp production?  I'm not even talking about medical or recreational marijuana  use this time (although I think that stuff should be legal, too).  I'm talking purely about the fiber crop I believe I could make a good living growing.  We need this thing to be legal, preferably by 2014.

Because it's always been cool to grow stuff. Wait...

In talking with this one organic farmer at the market the other day, I just had to laugh because of how things change.  She was selling quail eggs, and Erin was asking what they were.  I told her how my FFA chapter had raised quail one year.  This farmer said, "You know, it's so funny. When I was in high school, we all thought the FFA kids were total freaks.  Now I'm an organic farmer.  I never would have seen that coming."

I could identify in a way.  It reminded me how in my high school, ag was king, but it was definitely conventional ag.  As the lone organic farm kid in my FFA chapter of roughly 200 members, I was regarded as a total hippie freak, even in a school where everyone was always growing or raising something, and you could totally get away with wearing a blue corduroy jacket to school any day of the year. (I still have that jacket.  If it fits them, my kids will wear it for their first livestock shows.  It's tradition.)  Even in that place, organic farming was seen as freakish and strange.  Now, 12 years after I graduated, I barely go a day without someone telling me how lucky I was to grow up on an organic farm.  I agree with them. I am lucky.  For one thing, I'm healthy in a world where it seems like an ever increasing number of people are sick. Growing up without constant exposure to chemicals and synthetic growth hormones is a good thing.  Who'd have thunk it? 

For another thing, it's good to know what real food is.  Today, food is a minefield.  You can't just go pick something off any given shelf and assume it'll be safe to eat, even if it is a food that should be healthy, like produce, cheese, or a nice cut of meat.  Things are covered in terrible pesticides. Some of them even synthesize pesticides within their own cells.  Some things are full of synthetic hormones that will kill you eventually if you consume enough of them.  Our food supply isn't safe.  Eating cleanly requires work.  Growing up with the knowledge of what good food is, and what it isn't, helps when it comes to navigating that minefield.  People often ask me questions about foods they don't know the safety of, and I'm glad to be able to help them learn about it, and if possible, find sustainable alternatives to things that they're better off without.

It's funny how organic farming has become cool.  It wasn't cool 10-15 years ago.  I will never forget the looks and comments I got when I stood up in agriculture class and said that pesticide use is unnecessary and not sustainable, and that maybe we should consider companion planting and beneficial insects instead.  Now, if I say those things, people listen, and ask how it works.  My organic watermelons are the envy of all my friends, and people think it's cool that dinner often is determined by what's ripe in my garden. 

I guess the idea is, it seems like people are coming around to the right side of things.  I know plenty of people who still think organic food is overpriced, or think there's no difference, but those numbers of people seem to be shrinking. I just wonder, now that it's finally cool to grow organic produce, when will we see societal change in the important ways, like banning (or at least labeling) GMO's, stricter regulations on pesticides, and more restrictions on hormones in meat and milk?  The people are calling for it.  Now it's time for the government and the industry to give us what we want.

In the meantime, it's as important as ever to keep shopping with your local farmers, and growing your own as much as you can.  We've gotten to a point where our supermarket shopping is pretty minimal.  In fact, this pay period, we won't be visiting the supermarket at all.  It can absolutely be done, and it should be done.




Next time:  Why the government should allow me to grow textile grade hemp.

Wow. This is crazy.

So more came out about what happened with my friend's son.  Read this article.  I seriously cannot believe this.  Apparently, and this is from her, so it's the truth, this guy supplied alcohol to minors, held her son against his will, shot him in the chest at point blank range, then dragged him out to the parking lot and left him to die.  Then he (her son, the one who got shot) called 911 on his phone and that's the only reason this is an assault case and not a murder case.

Originally, the media reported it as an accidental shooting.  Some outlets said that he was in the apartment by himself and a gun went off.  Others said he was with this other person, and the gun went off accidentally.  They also reported that he had non-life-threatening injuries, when really, he spent two days on life support, and has a lot of organ damage and a severed spinal cord.  The media sure dropped the ball on this one. He was shot, very intentionally, by this guy, who's actually a soldier at Ft. Bliss.  Oh, and check this out.  Their apartment complex originally tried to evict them over this!  It says in their lease that nobody in the place can be involved in a crime, and they took the media's word for it being an accidental shooting.  She set them straight on it, and they agreed not to evict them, and to let them break their lease without any problems, but the fact that they ever considered evicting them was just insane.

This is totally ridiculous.  I can't believe this happened.  It's like, every parent's worst nightmare, and now they have to find a new place to live (3rd story apartment won't work now) and get a big van.  In addition to being a total pain in the ass, especially under the circumstances, that stuff is expensive!  There is no word on when he might be able to leave the hospital, so maybe she has a while to get all that stuff together, but still.  It just kind of adds insult to injury.

I'm still trying to chase down ways that all of us who aren't local can help, but those who are local can get on the meal calendar.  The whole family is basically at the hospital 24/7, so they have no time to cook their own food, understandably.  Help if you can. 

I can't believe people don't understand this.

This crap has been going around all day, and I'm tired of looking at it.

OK, first of all, let me just say, I agree that politicians are grossly overpaid for what they do.  There is no reason we should be paying them so much, especially when the rest of the nation is struggling so hard.  We do need to make budget cutbacks in their salaries.  Point taken.

Now, check this out.  "Average salary of a soldier DEPLOYED IN AFGHANISTAN... $38,000". 

You guys, that's a lie.  There's no other way to say it.  OK, so maybe base pay is roughly that, although if we're talking about a mid-career NCO, a senior NCO, or any flavor of officer, it's going to be higher.  Now, here's what the average civilian doesn't know.  Base pay is far from the whole story.  Add to that number these things:

-Housing allowance.  This depends on duty zip code, but these days, it's always over $1000.  Let's be conservative and say it's about $1500 on average. (If they live on post, they won't see this, but dude... If they live on post, they have a house they don't have to pay for and all utilities included. It balances out.)
-Food allowance.  This is only on the enlisted side of the house, but it's an extra $300 every month.
-Special allowances while deployed.  Hazardous fire pay, Save Pay (whatever the hell that is), Family Separation Pay... Tack on about $600 a month for all that.
-Also recall that every dime a deployed soldier earns is tax-free.
-If they've been gone more than 12 months, add $1000 a month to the total.

Now, think of all the things they don't have to pay for, things like health insurance. Then think of the things they get for dirt cheap that civilians pay a lot more for, things like that nice $400k life insurance policy, and their retirement.  Add about $500-600 a month of their pay that they see in their bank accounts that nobody in the private sector would.

Are you getting the picture?  Not only does the average service member NOT make $38k a year.  They also see a hell of a lot more of their money than anyone else in the rest of the world does. People have pointed out that it doesn't work out to a hell of a lot per hour because military people work long hours.  This is true.  There are a lot of jobs like that. We can't really say military pay is crappy because long hours come with it.  That's the thing about salary.  You have a steady paycheck, but your hours can be anything in the world.  Trust me, it beats hourly.

Now, people wonder why I care that this thing is misrepresenting the big picture.  What harm is there in it, right?  The idea is, people want to pay our military better. How could I possibly have a problem with anything to that end?  There are a lot of problems with this. 

First of all, it's INCORRECT.  Do you have any idea what it's like to go through life with people pitying you because your husband goes and fights a bullshit war for peanuts?  Like, that poor thing... her husband is gone, and she has no money.  Dude... It's annoying!  It's almost as bad as the fact that the lower-enlisted wives in my housing area on post thought I was rich because I was married to the highest ranking soldier on our street. I never wanted to be regarded as rich or poor.  I just want reality to be represented accurately.

Secondly, this thing feeds one of the most rampant urban legends in the military. "We are underpaid. Military pay sucks. I/My husband can do better on the outside."  This is one thing I never bought into, even as a soldier.  I pretty much had to beat it out of Thak, though.  He really thought he was below the poverty level as a Sergeant.  You'd be surprised how many military people really think they are living at or below the poverty level.  At one point, I actually printed up a chart of the federal poverty guidelines, and carried it around in my purse to show to people who said that.  That's how rampant that misconception is.  Things like this only feed into that.

Finally, on a more practical note, I think our entire nation needs to be a little more up front about how our military is paid, and how that compares to average civilian salaries for certain jobs that it is common for vets to get.  Look, it's no secret that a lot of vets fall flat on their faces when they get out of the Army. Why do you think so many are homeless?  Even the ones who aren't homeless often have issues anyway.  Did you know unemployment is like 30-40% for me and Thak's era of vets?  That's insane.  It doesn't even take into account the ones who thought they could do so much better on the outside, got offered $40k somewhere (and that's a serious best case scenario), and then found that they couldn't support their family of 5 or 6 on that, and maintain their lifestyle. 

This is something we owe it to ourselves as vets to be honest about.  That $38k base pay in the military functions a hell of a lot more like $80-100k would in the private sector.  Don't believe me?  My husband makes $55k a year.  By the time it hits our bank account, it's about $2000 a month LESS than he was bringing home in the Army.  We went from being able to arrive in a city and find 75% of the houses well within our price range, and buy a new car every couple years, to shoving our family of five into a 2 BR apartment, and selling our second vehicle.  Our military friends are shocked by this.  They are shocked that we have to live this way.  You guys, this is reality.  Military pay doesn't suck.  I'm not necessarily saying what we make out here sucks either.  (What Thak made at BMW, that sucked. This doesn't suck.)  I wish it was more straight forward, though. 

As it is, we've got civilians donating to things like "Heroes at Home" and "Operation Homefront" which give military people things like holiday shopping trips, when they're probably bringing home less money than the people they're donating to.  We've got people saying the military is grossly underpaid when they aren't given the whole story.  What's worse, we've got most of the military believing this!  I'm not saying that the military shouldn't be paid fairly.  They absolutely should, and I believe they are.  It's an important job, but not more noble than other jobs.  It's just something that has to be done.  I did it before.  Nobody can accuse me of being anti-military or unpatriotic.  I'm a vet, too.  I'm just one who remembers that when I enlisted, my income doubled and I acquired benefits for the first time in my life.  We just need to look at this stuff for what it is.  Soldiers are not scraping by on $38k a year.  They're just not.

If you are a vet, you will love this.

I've got to say, I absolutely love my generation of vets.  These videos are so funny.  My favorite part of this one? "Army guys have the BEST pick-up lines."



My favorite one here is, "You know, I pay you."  That is EXACTLY what I want to do to everyone who ever said that.

It can happen to anybody, I guess.

I woke up this morning to terrible news.  A friend from El Paso's son has been shot.  She was on shift at the birth center when it happened, and she didn't even find out until the morning.  He is alive, but it's bad.  He's in a coma, his spine was severed, and there's a lot of other damage, too.  He's had two surgeries so far, and I don't know if there will be others, but I can only imagine that there will be.  It's not good.

It's scary to think about that this happened to her family, and by that standard, it really could happen to anybody.  She's a great mom.  By all accounts, she raised her kids right. This isn't the kind of thing that's supposed to happen to her.  It's just not.  We always delude ourselves into thinking that if we raise our kids well enough, bad stuff won't happen to them, and I think that's one of the reasons this really blows my mind.  She did everything right, as much as any human can. Obviously nobody's perfect, but she's a great mom.  Yes, there were a couple times he got into a little bit of trouble that I knew of, but it wasn't anything awful, definitely nothing that would make you say, "That boy is gonna get himself shot someday."

Edited:  Here's a story from El Paso Times.  It was an accidental shooting.

Stuff like this makes me think.  Our influence, in the grand scheme of things, is so limited.  We put so much into raising our kids so well, so that they will be the kinds of people who will add something positive to the world, and we like to assume that they'll have good things happen to them in return.  We birth gently, we breastfeed on demand, we wear our babies, we gently discipline our preschoolers, we avoid corporal punishment, we try to regard our kids as little humans with a full set of rights.  We do all this, and it consumes us for so many years, and then all we can do is turn them out into the world and hope for the best.  That may be the scariest thing to think about.  My friend has two grown kids and three younger kids.  Of her two grown kids, one is in college, and the other is in the hospital fighting for his life because of a stupid accident. It is all so obvious to see, we turn them out into the world, the world does what it will with them, and all we can do is hope for the best.  Our time of being so influential, and being able to keep them from harm is so small.

Anyway, I'm probably going to call the birth center she works at here in a few, and see if there's a fund set up for donations.  When I know something about that, I'll post that information.

UPDATE:  They did another surgery this afternoon, and it went great. They are going to try to let him breathe on his own tomorrow.  This is very good news.

UPDATE AGAIN: He is beginning to wake up!

More update: Better and better every day.  He's now breathing on his own and can eat and drink.  Of course there is a long road of recovery ahead, but this is big progress, and it really bodes well.  For those who are local, and are able to help with meals, there's an account set up for that on Meal Train.  The link is on Mel's FB page.   Still no word on a fund being set up, but some people are working on it.

It's just never enough, is it?

I've breastfed for a year.  I fought through a ton of difficulties to get to this point, but I did it because I know breastfeeding is the right thing to do.  I have never been one of those who puts breastmilk on a pedestal.  I know that it is the standard food for babies of our species.  Formula is subpar.  Breast is normal.  I did what I had to do in order to breastfeed Chai, and I had to do quite a bit, especially at first.  Ultimately, though, I made it.  It's been a year, and a massive weight has lifted from my shoulders.  If Chai stopped nursing tomorrow, it would be ok.  I have never had plans to forcibly wean him.  I have always planned to let him decide on his own when he would quit nursing.  It seems like he is heading in that direction, cutting down his feedings, not being as interested in the ones he does take, just kind of phasing it out.

I mentioned this on a group I'm in.  It's just a bunch of friends, most of whom have been shuffled around enough by Uncle Sam that we don't live near each other anymore, but we all know one another from various assignments over the years.  Everyone is very alternative and AP.  When I mentioned that I thought Chai might be weaning, the trash talking began almost immediately, with passive-aggressive reposts of an article written by a blogger I cannot stand because she horribly misquoted me recently, and essentially mocked me in an article she wrote about cosleeping. Anyhow, people were really foul about my assertion that Chai might be starting to wean.

Let me just say, I haven't ever pushed him in this direction.  Every single time Chai has wanted to nurse, I've nursed him.  OK, not every single time.  There was one time when I just felt sick and rundown, and could not stand the thought of nursing right at that moment, so I had Thak take him away and give him a sippy instead. That's the only time.  Every other time in Chai's entire life that he's wanted to nurse, he's gotten to.  I have never forced a feeding schedule, or tried to cut down on the number of nursing sessions in a day.  I have nursed on demand from the minute Chai was born, and I continue to do that today.  I haven't done anything to deserve people talking trash about the fact that I think my son MIGHT be showing signs of weaning.

I understand, most people in the AP community nurse for at least 2 or 3 years.  I get that.  I was planning on nursing at least two years, longer if Chai wanted.  I also understand that the international idea of when is the right time to wean differs drastically from the prudish US idea about it.  I also know that the often bandied about statistic that the natural age of weaning is between 2 and 7 years old, is actually quite possibly incorrect because there's no real way to quantify this, and effectively organize the data needed. I do know that it is common in many places around the world to wean between 1 and 2 years of age, but that in other places, it is common to nurse longer than that.  I know that in Mongolia, they say the best wrestlers (they're obsessed with wrestling there) are breastfed at least six years.  I also know the World Health Organization and the British Medical Association recommend 2 as a minimum. 

I have the knowledge on this thing.  What I also have is the capacity to observe my own kid and see what he's doing.  If he wants to wean, I'm not going to stop him from weaning.  He eats plenty of solids, drinks goat milk or almond milk from a cup like it's going out of style, and is totally healthy.  While the thought of him going without the immune boosting properties of breastmilk does concern me, I know he would be fine if he decided to wean.

The other thing is that I am part of this equation.  It's unpopular to acknowledge oneself in these things, but I'm going there.  The hormonal shift that comes with weaning often causes depression-like symptoms, and I need to be able to deal with that during a time when my life is in fairly decent working order.  There's a very good chance that my husband may be deploying next year.  What if Chai weaned then?  Also, what about trying to get all the kids to bed, hopefully in the same room by then, while Chai still has to nurse, and I have no help?  There is a lot that would be practical about Chai weaning sometime in the next six months or so.  On a purely trivial note, breastfeeding makes me fat (for me), and I know that the extra 20 pounds I'm lugging around will fall away when he weans, and I'll be able to wear all my clothes again, even the ones I can't nurse in.  This stuff isn't supposed to matter.  I'm not supposed to count myself in the equation, but I am. I would let Chai wean if he wanted to, because there would be good things about it for me.

I will reiterate, I have never, and have no plans to, push him toward weaning.  However, I will absolutely not attempt to delay his attempts to wean.  He can wean whenever he wants.  If that's tomorrow, or if it's three years from now, he will wean when he wants.  It seems like he's going to want to do it sooner rather than later, and yes, as frowned upon as it may be in the AP community, I am totally ok with that, and I'm ready when he is.

The Cheap Food Trap

I recently learned about all the horrible things that are in store bought almond milk.  I mean, it's bad.  I definitely don't want to feed that to my kids, especially with how much of the stuff they drink.  It would be really harmful in those levels, especially to Chai since he's so little.  The only solution is to make almond milk at home, and so I did.

The thing is, it takes raw almonds, and those can be pretty expensive.  Bought locally, it would cost about $7 a day for enough to make all the almond milk my boys drink. That is TOO expensive, but an astute friend turned me onto nutsinbulk.com, where I can get all the raw almonds I need to make my boys' enough almond milk for as little as $3.75 a day. That's the same price as the store bought stuff. Score one for the good guys.  Granted, it is a lesser quantity of milk that we get from that amount of almonds, but it is still enough for the boys.  They just won't get their cups FULL full 3x a day.  It's still enough, and it lacks the additives that would harm their health, so it's a good trade-off.

I had mentioned that I am now making my boys' almond milk, and a friend who is a military wife approached me about it.  She asked how I make almond milk, because her boys drink it, too, and she thought making it would definitely save money.  I explained that I don't do this for cost-effectiveness, although I have found a way to get the cost down to the same as buying the store bought variety, that I am doing this because of the harmful additives in store bought almond milk, and that I don't want to expose my boys to that stuff.  I also explained that if you look at the actual cost of raw almonds, store bought almond milk is actually unrealistically cheap.  It's like store bought meat in that way.  When you factor in what it actually costs to correctly produce this product, you should have questions about why the stuff in the store is priced as low as it is, because something isn't right if it costs that little.  Obviously, for the meat, factory farming is to blame, and for the almond milk, it's full of harmful chemicals that nobody should ever ingest.  That's why it's so cheap.  Cheap food is something to be skeptical of.

Now, I've been in a position of having to eat cheap food.  I'm not one for canned garbage, so we never did that, but my family spent about half of last year living on beans and rice, plus whatever vegetables we could grow in the hard desert climate we lived in, mostly peppers and squash.  I know that the beans and rice we ate were not organic, but I also know that it doesn't cost that much to grow beans, so it makes sense to me that they're cheap.  I don't know much about rice farming (insert joke about being Asian by marriage, and how I should know that, here), but from what I can tell, the price of rice is pretty believable, too.  As far as cheap food to eat as an alternative to starving to death, beans and rice are about as good as it gets.  They may not be the most appetizing things after you've lived on them for a month or so, but I still stand by my choice to eat beans and rice as opposed to things like Spaghettios or Chef Boyardee, which is the other style of cheap foods.  That stuff comes in cans sealed with BPA, is full of preservatives, artificial colors, artificial flavors, and stuff I can't pronounce.  Give me the beans and rice over that stuff any day.

Now, here's my thing about food.  I think that those who can afford to eat well have somewhat of a social responsibility to do that.  We, as a society, have to vote with our dollars against Monsanto, factory farming, and irresponsible food production practices that put us all at risk.  Not everyone is in a position to do that.  The $16 that I spent on local, organic, pasture raised, pork chops last week, would have had to feed my entire family a week's worth of food this time last year.  Then, when we were living on beans, rice, and whatever we could grow in the dirt, we were not in a position to vote with our dollars in any meaningful way.  (Although, in a small way, choosing beans and rice instead of certain other cheap foods is still voting against Monsanto.) Now that we have actual money to spend on food, it's important that we spend conscientiously.  No, we don't spend an inordinate amount of money on food.  To be honest, we spend less than a lot of people.  Our grocery budget is about $100 every two weeks at the grocery store, and then $80 a week at the farmers' market.  That adds up to $520 a month, which isn't much when you consider that there are 5 people in our family.  Even so, that's $6240 a year that we get to decide who to support with.  We try to make sure that as much as possible of that goes to local farmers, ranchers, and fishermen who are doing it right, and that as little as possible goes to big corporations with questionable methods, and of course, we shoot for not giving a single penny to Monsanto (although that's easier said than done since they have their hands in everything).

Don't give me that line about how if you're military, you're poor and can't afford to eat well.  Military culture has a huge emphasis on being a major cheapskate when it comes to grocery shopping (I've never seen so many extreme couponers in my life as I did on Ft. Bliss), but don't fool yourself.  You can afford to do better if you make it a priority.  On the enlisted side, there's this thing called BAS that every soldier who doesn't hold a meal card, gets as part of their pay each month.  Look on your LES, it's there.  It's about $300 a month, and it's for food.  Assuming you spend about what we spend on food in a month, that means you're only really spending $220 out of pocket.  That's not bad, and the benefits outweigh the drawbacks.

You'll be making yourself and your family healthier.  Sure, in the military community, nobody has medical bills, but who actually wants to require medical attention beyond the simple and routine when they're in their 20's, 30's, or 40's?  I would hope, nobody. Even if you don't pay for your medical care, an investment in your health pays off nicely in many ways. The fact is, we don't HAVE to be sickly and in need of medication while we're young.  If we live in a healthy and sustainable way, and feed ourselves foods that we actually evolved to eat (read: NOT a bunch of ingredients we can't pronounce, NOT feedlot meats, NOT hormone loaded dairy products) most of us will find that our bodies work pretty well. 

What's more, it's socially responsible, because when you vote with your dollars for good foods, local farmers, and sustainable production methods, then you're sending a clear message that that's what the people want.  If you're in a position to be able to send this message loudly, then you need to do that, because not everybody has the means to cast as substantial a vote. Trust me, the loss of profit from the person who chooses beans and rice as opposed to Spaghettios is a tiny fraction of the loss of profit from the person who buys a side of beef from a local farmer instead of the store shelves. All our voices must be heard, but some speak undeniably louder than others.

Food is an issue, and these days, there really are only two ways to be. You're either part of the solution, or you're part of the problem.  Be part of the solution.

The beginning of weaning?

I've noticed over the course of the past few days that Chai has been nursing less.  He's always taken both sides at each feeding (probably because my supply has never been awesome), but lately, he's been taking one side, and then going back to whatever fun and busy thing he was doing before he stopped to nurse.  He's down to nursing just twice a day and once at night anyway.  Then last night, he skipped his nighttime feeding, sleeping from 8:30 pm to 7:30 am, and when he woke up, he only wanted one side, and then was done, instead asking his daddy for a sippy cup of goat's milk and some toast.

If I'm not mistaken, this looks like a step toward weaning.  I'm totally ok with that, although I am a little surprised since it seemed to me like Chai was the kind of guy who wouldn't wean until sometime in preschool.  I wouldn't deny him of nursing that long, of course, but if he wants to stop earlier than that, it's totally ok with me.  Truth be told, I'm tired of getting bitten, and I really would like to be able to wear all the clothes I have that I really like but cannot nurse in, and also shop for clothes without having to make sure I can nurse in them.

It's his call.

In other news....

Chai took a step!  He'll only take one step at a time on his own, and then he sits down and claps for himself, and he'll only do it at all for daddy.  I have a feeling it won't be long before we have a full fledged toddler on our hands!

Since it's an election year, this is kind of obligatory.

America, you frighten me sometimes... more than anything, I just think some of the ideas that are popular are really strange.  I don't really understand how some people really think the way they do, but these are my thoughts on a few matters.

First of all, as someone who does not really find organized religion to be a worthwhile thing in my life (although I'm all for people going that way if that's what they want), I cannot, for the life of me, understand why so many people want this country run like a theocracy.  Who cares what it says in the Bible about gay people?  I read the Bible once.  It was really inconsistent.  It said I shouldn't wear clothes with mixed fabrics.  Right at this moment, I'm wearing a cotton-poly blend t-shirt that the US Army issued me.  If the US Army issued it to me, and it's of blended fabrics, then that means that the US government does things that go against the Bible.  Actually, I distinctly remember my Drill Sergeant serving me shrimp cocktail in the chow hall on Thanksgiving Day just a few months after I was issued this lovely shirt.  As I recall, the Bible forbids consumption of shellfish as well (shrimp is considered shellfish, right?).  Everywhere we look, the US government does things that the Bible doesn't condone.  Evidently, this isn't a theocracy.  Oh yeah, and there's that whole Bill of Rights, freedom of religion thing....  So let the gays get married.  Who cares?!

And also, sanctity of marriage, my ass.  We straight people have done enough to mess that up over the years.  Do you know, I totally almost got married when I was a PFC in the Army so I wouldn't have to live in the barracks?! (Don't hate. If you've never been through a totally routine room inspection by the MP dogs and my First Sergeant at 5 am on a Sunday, you have no idea what lengths you would go to, to never have to do that again.) Somehow, it would have been totally hunky dory for me to marry any male person of legal age, just because I wanted to never again wake up to my First Sergeant's *lovely* face at *lovely* hours of the day, but a gay person can't marry someone they love (or some random person just to get out of the barracks, for that matter)?  This is ridiculous, America.  Just stop with it already.  Nobody cares what your religion has to say about it, and there really isn't any sanctity left in the institution of marriage. (Individual marriages, yes.  The institution, no.)

Secondly, this war on women bullshit needs to end right now.  Homebirth midwives are losing licensing, birth centers are closing due to crack downs on back-up physicians, abortions are getting harder and harder to get, Planned Parenthood clinics are closing left and right, and I just paid 800 freakin dollars for an IUD last week.  I'm pretty convinced that next, they're probably going to come after my right to vote, and alter my military record to state that I was not, in fact, a regular soldier, but a member of some auxiliary or something.  OK, so maybe I'm being a bit facetious about that last bit, but the fact that we've lost so many reproductive rights, and our insurance companies are totally allowed to screw us (hence our insurance company covering exactly $0 of my recently purchased IUD) is pretty scary when you really think about it.  First of all, it makes no sense from a financial standpoint.  Yes, let's take away, or restrict access to, every service that could possibly prevent someone from having more babies than they're able to afford to care for.  Births are so much cheaper than IUD's, of course.  If you have enough unplanned babies, maybe you even qualify for Medicaid, and then the tax payers can pick up the tab for it all, including those babies' health care.  Is this making a single bit of sense to anybody?  Me either.  It seems like a good portion of America thinks that what we need is more population in this country.  Those people are, what I like to call, full of shit.  Stop this war on women.  Stop restricting choices when it comes to all things reproductive.  This is really stupid.  Any woman who votes for anybody who agrees with this stuff seriously deserves to be voted off the island.

Now, food.  What the hell is wrong with you people?!  Why haven't people totally demanded GMO's to be labeled, if not outlawed.  You know, Monsanto may have their hands in a lot of stuff, but there's a lot of stuff they don't have their hands in, and we can still vote against them with our dollars.  We can still do this, and it doesn't have to be super expensive either.  Even if you still have to buy some of their crap, you can still demand that your elected officials push for GMO labeling.  The food supply in this country is ridiculous, and we should not have to go to the lengths we go to just to eat something that isn't going to poison us.  The fact that the citizens haven't demanded decent food standards, quite frankly slays me.  We're the fattest nation in the world, we're incredibly unhealthy. Why do people think that is?  Demand better.  We should have done this already.

War.  America, it's not our job to be the world police.  It really isn't.  You know when we leave Afghanistan, there's going to be a lot of upheaval, and that the government we set up probably won't last but a little while.  Why? Because that's what's happened to every government in the history of Afghanistan.  It doesn't matter if we pull out now, or in 20 years, it's going to be the same.  Let's plug the hole in our national pocketbook, and end the war now.  This is getting pretty old.  I was 19 when this thing started. I'm 30 now.  That's pretty much my entire life as an adult that there's been this war (and that entire time, I've had some stake in it, so nobody talk to me about service and sacrifice. I know better than I want to.).  It's time for it to be over.  Oh, and attacking Iran because they might have a nuclear weapon?  Dude... have you checked out our arsenal lately?  We are definitely not in a position to be getting onto people for having nuclear weapons.  That's like whatever's worse than the pot calling the kettle black.  Maybe we need to take a long hard look in the mirror before we start trying to tell other people what they can and cannot do, when doing the thing in question ourselves. If I were them, I wouldn't listen to us either.  Dismantle a few (hundred) nuclear weapons, end some occupations, and then maybe we can talk about nuclear non-proliferation.  Stop being hypocrites, America.  It makes us look stupid.

Drugs.  Why are people so scared of marijuana?  It's just a plant.  You roll it up, you smoke it, and it makes you calm and mellow.  You might eat a lot.  You won't kill anybody.  You won't become a drain on society unless you use it too much, but that's true of a lot of other things as well (alcohol, anybody?)  Everybody knows "that person" who totally ruined their life by smoking weed, but don't we all know a few drunks, too?  Yet somehow, alcohol remains totally legal, and pot will land you in jail in most places.  That makes absolutely no sense.  America, people are going to smoke pot one way or the other.  It's just like alcohol in that way.  Ask yourself, how well did prohibition work?  Exactly.  It would be easier on everyone to just legalize it and get it over with.  Not only would this cut down on costs from prosecuting non-violent "drug offenders" (aka, frat boys who got caught smoking a blunt behind the math building), but the prison population would decrease, and that would save us a ton of money, too, because we wouldn't be prosecuting, and often jailing, every person who gets caught growing some plants and selling their crop. 

Basically, our country is in kind of a mess right now, and it needs to be fixed.  There's more that's wrong than all this, but this was long enough as it was, so I'm going to leave it at this for now.  By this standard, it looks like I'll be voting for myself come November, because I don't know one politician in all of Washington who has the balls to actually do this stuff.


OK, I don't really plan to vote for myself.  I am totally unfit for public office.  It's a lovely thought, though.

Meanwhile, in the swamp...

Today, we have a couple good things to report.  First off, the first of our squash was ready to pick.  We always grow squash, just because it's so easy to grow (and to grow a lot of it since there are a lot of us!), and it's good.  Well, the first of our yellow crookneck squash came in today, and it was delicious! 






Then there was this!  Look closely, and you can see a tiny watermelon just starting to grow on the vine.  I cannot wait until our watermelons are ready to pick.  All our melon vines (crimson sweets and green cantaloupes) are covered in blooms.  This was the first actual fruit I saw set so far, though, and that made me very happy.  Not too long now and we'll be eating homegrown melons!

The tomatoes, have set some fruit, which is also good, and the basil plants are really big. The kale is growing really fast in all this rain, and we'll be picking a bunch of it probably tomorrow to make kale chips. Since we've gotten so much rain these past couple weeks, everything has really taken off, and is doing just great. 

We'll also have to go check and see if we can't go pick some more blackberries this weekend since the kids have run through so much jam that there is no way that what's left will last until next season. We have about half a flat of blackberries in the freezer for crisps and cobblers, but the kids eat the jam every day, and with three of them, it goes fast.  It's good to have, though, because it costs us almost nothing to make it from the wild berries, and at least we know what's in it.

After three years in the desert, every day in the swamp is good.

Babies aren't expensive! Just wait.

This picture was shared by a blogger whom I sometimes like and sometimes don't like.  Honestly, having one foot in the baby/toddler world, and one foot in the school age world, bloggers who are regarded as experts in parenting when their oldest kid is younger than Orren sort of irk me sometimes.  Of course, there are those who don't, but many do.  Stuff like this has a lot to do with why that is.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.  Babies really aren't expensive.  Everything I have that was expensive really wasn't necessary.  I fully admit that.  No, I didn't need that $800 stroller (which, in my defense, I scored for $450 on Craigslist), or that beautiful organic cotton crib set.  I probably didn't even need my nicer cloth diapers.  I just happened to like this stuff, and have a husband who used to make good enough money to afford it.  Surely, there are cheaper alternatives.  All a baby really needs is 2 dozen cheap cotton diapers, 6 cheap PUL covers (or wool soakers if you can crochet), some clothes from the local consignment shop, a sling that you can make for cheap, and of course boobs.  This stuff is all pretty close to free, if not totally free.  I get that.  That's awesome.  Even on our current crappy income, we could afford an army of babies, if my milk supply were anything to write home about.

Here's the wrinkle.  Babies grow up.  By the time they're 3, they want a bicycle.  Sure, you can thrift store or Craigslist that for pretty cheap, but then they need preschool, and that can be expensive.  By the time they hit Kindergarten, you're getting a million flyers a day home from school about soccer, and tae kwon do, and summer camp, and the YMCA's many great programs for children, and guess what.  Your kid wants to do ALL of them.  Of course, you can't afford all of them, but it's only fair that they get to do one or two, right?  Even if you're homeschooling, your kid probably has some outside activities.  I hope they do, anyway. Every homeschooled kid I know does dance, or cheer, or karate, or something. This stuff isn't cheap at all.  Factor in about $100 a month per kid if you live in a city, maybe less in a small town, but more if they do more than one activity.

Then you've got to also figure that kids grow up, and they need clothes, and they're going to want clothes that actually look decent.  Sure, you can say all the time as an adult that fashion doesn't matter, and that it's ridiculous to follow trends.  Tell that to your 4th grader who's being told they look stupid because they're wearing shoes from 10 years ago, or your high schooler who has none of the things their friends are wearing, and feels like an outcast because of it.  This stuff may sound stupid to an adult, but think back to when you were that age.  It isn't stupid.  We get away with buying at at the consignment shop right now because we have a very decent one in our area.  We'll probably be able to continue this indefinitely because we have a teen consignment that's really good also.  This still adds up.  Even buying used adds up.  We can manage to decently clothe our three kids by buying used, but if we had more kids than this, it would be nothing but hand-me-downs for them.  While no kid ever died of that, it definitely sucks to not be able to choose much about your clothes, because you have to dress out of bags.  Is it a necessity to be able to have your own style, and clothes that you like?  Well, not in the way that food, water, and shelter are necessities, but it's pretty important at certain ages, and honestly, that's ok.

What about when they want a car, or a cell phone, or to go to prom?  How will you do that for six kids on $40k a year?  (That's an example.  I'm not talking to anyone in specific.)  Yes, it's well and good to say, "Well, they'll have to work and buy their own car."  That's lovely, but what if you live in a very rural area, like we do, and realistically, their best shot at getting a job is in a city 20 miles away?  I'm not going to be driving my kids to Statesboro every day after school for work, and then picking them up at whatever ridiculous hour of the night they get done.  Realistically, we'll end up buying them cars, and they'll be paying us back for them, and covering their own insurance and gas (if possible), as they earn the money to do that.  For three kids, we can probably manage this somehow, although they will have very used cars from Craigslist (and there is nothing wrong with that!).  For more, there is no way we could. 

Everyone loves to cite the fact that most baby gear is unnecessary as evidence that kids aren't expensive.  While this is a lovely thought, and actually quite true (yes, a $40 sling really does replace a $800 stroller, and free boobs really do replace $2400 worth of formula), it's hardly the beginning of the story.  I honestly didn't see this stuff until I had a kid reach school age and start participating in activities like dance and cheer, and need new shoes every few months, and they had to be the ones like the other girls in her class were wearing.  What's going on in my house is barely the tip of the iceberg, and I know this.  I can tell you, this stuff sneaks up on you fast.  We're already halfway through Elementary School.  Today it's cheer, and dance, and sparkly clothes. Tomorrow, it'll be a cell phone and a car.  This stuff does not wait for us to catch up to it.  It comes at us at a million miles an hour!  That cheap or free baby is going to be a kind of costly school age kid before you know it, and then, I'm assuming, it will not feel like long at all before the kind of costly school kid becomes a teen whose expenses will totally pillage your bank account, because that's how they roll.

I'm not saying people shouldn't have babies.  I don't think that at all.  What I'm saying is, don't go believing they're always as cheap as they are when they're little, because that's definitely not the case.  When they're babies and toddlers, yes, "things" are expensive, and those things are largely unnecessary.  When they get older, oh yes, children are definitely expensive.  It's pretty important to look at the big picture here.

Well, that pretty much sums it up.

Taking this into account, think we could buy a side of organic grass-fed beef out of our HSA funds?  I mean, Joel did say.... ;-)