The neighbors’ roof project continues, which means that recording in my office during work hours is pretty close to impossible. This resulted in my attempting to record all the Before Breakfast episodes for a week on Wednesday night after the baby went to bed. Unfortunately, he refused to go down until 10 p.m. This has not been an uncommon occurrence of late.
On the plus side, we got our family photos back from Yana and they turned out well! I’m posting some over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). As predicted, wrangling the children was stressful but also as predicted, I’m really happy to have the pictures. Now we need to make the Christmas card!
I started holiday shopping in earnest this week. Some children are easier to shop for than others. I am really struggling with what to get the 12-year-old. He has promised to think about it and help me out. I should note that he has about $60 in birthday gift card money that he has yet to spend. Contentment is good but this does make gift giving challenging! I welcome ideas on what anyone buys pre-teen boys.
Also in financial news: We set the 10-year-old up with a bank account. Our family policy is to get the kids an account at age 10 so they can start learning about saving and investing. This has been fun to watch. The 14-year-old bought Disney stock on the dip of the pandemic when the theme parks were closed. He was bullish on them coming back and has been rewarded for that bet. I should note that in general we are index-fund-oriented investors who don’t try to time the market, but that is a lot less interesting for kids starting out.
I’ve been pondering what to choose as my 2022 year-long read. I have really enjoyed reading through War and Peace at the pace of one chapter a day during 2021. Right now I’m having to restrain myself from just finishing the darn thing (only about 150 pages to go). After some thought, I’m pretty sure that I will spend 2022 reading through all the works of Shakespeare. I found a reading plan that assigns the plays and poems and sonnets to appropriate times of the year (we start with Twelfth Night, of course, for early January!) and I have a copy of the collected works, so I think that should work well. Humorously, the front of the book notes that it was “purchased at Stratford on Avon, England,” by my husband, during the summer of 1988, back when he was bumming around Europe as a student.
And speaking of books — though not quite so classic…the Kindle version of 168 Hours is on sale for $1.99 today over at Amazon. If you haven’t read my first time management book and were thinking about doing so, today would be a good day to get a copy!
Photo: I think of this as the album cover image. There are some with our faces over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). Photo credit Yana Shellman.
Could you share a little more about the kinds of accounts you set up for your kids? This is great idea but the only reference point I have in my head is the paper-passport kiddie savings account I had at our local bank when I was a kid!
@Carolyn – they are brokerage accounts at Fidelity. So fairly similar to what any other Fidelity customer would open up.
Yes! Brokerages make it easy to open custodial accounts for minors. At least with E-Trade, can see them when logging into your own account, so it’s all super streamlined.
Ours hold Disney too! Anything to get them interested. Somehow ETFs just don’t inspire the same passion. 😉
I love the idea of reading all the Shakespeare plays throughout the year! It’d be really great if you could share your plan for that. Love the blog and the family photos look beautiful.
In 2011 I resolved to finish all the Shakespeare I had never read — it was a really interesting project! I chronicled it on my blog: https://www.mostgladly.net/cj/crazy-shakespeare-project/
The first post in the category is a suggested 10-year plan for reading the plays, for anyone who finds the one-year project a little too daunting.
When my boys were that age, they were heavy into Weird Al. If your guy is similarly inclined, there’s lots of fun offerings in the shop on his website https://shop.weirdal.com/
This is the first year I have had a hard time thinking of gifts for my four boys age 9-15. My 9yr old is still ok, but the rest??? Some ideas: spike ball, ripstik, roller blades, graphic novels (mine really liked The New Kid), magnetic darts, nerf basketball, electric scooter, led light strips, sculpey clay, board games, pickle ball racquets, favorite sports team gear.
How about an outing for your son and his friends? It took me a while to come to the conclusion that buying stuff just to buy stuff wasn’t that great.
It’s also never too early to start making a small donation in his name if there is something he believes in. I didn’t think of it until college age for my son. He was volunteering his Friday evenings to a non-profit inner city organization in Oklahoma City and I made a couple donations to them because of that.
Another thing I learned when he was in college but can be adapted: he studied to be a youth minister and the instructor told me there was a youth ministry conference that has a really low rate for students so they can start making connections. If there is something he likes that has a local class – like programming for games or drawing or anything like that, that would be an idea. Hope this helps.
Cindy, these are great ideas!
I hope you will write more about selecting a year-long read again. I’m in a serious reading slump and working out what to do about it.
@Griffin – good question. I really enjoyed reading through W&P at this pace. It’s a book that stands up to it, and the 360-some chapters is really convenient for making it a year-long project. I wanted to do another year-long reading project (well, or I could see 6 months maybe for some books…), but I needed something that I thought would be worthwhile. I have read a number of Shakespeare’s plays in various classes, and I have seen some performed. I also listened to audio performances of them during a filing job I had back in the day. I’ve read a lot of the sonnets. But I’ve never studied all his writings as a unit and since I have a book of all his works, which is about 1000 pages, this seems like a good idea for a year long project. I found an online suggestion of how to read them (google something like Shakespeare 2020 project…) which I could just transfer into 2022.