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Mind on my money

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (9)· June 25th, 2008

… and money on my mind.

I’m lucky, for a combination of reasons, we don’t have to worry too much about money. Good job, generous family, and any number of other things mean that we don’t have to stress about the essentials. Sure, the value of our house has probably dropped (ack, we bought at the tip top of the peak in summer 2005!!), but we have no immediate plans to move or sell, and we have a good rate on a fixed 30-year mortgage, so it’s all good. We’re just not big spenders, either, so thankfully we haven’t had to work too hard at managing our money in order to make ends meet. And we did plan ahead for me being a SAHM. From the time that we got married, we changed the direct deposit so that my (much smaller) salary would go directly into our savings account. It allowed us to “practice” living on one salary, but the money was right there in case we needed it. A good tip for newlyweds if you’re considering one person not working after kids are born…

No, the aspect of money management that is crowding my brain today is more about consolidation and long-term planning. I know, so exciting, right? But it’s one of those not-so-glamorous things that you really need to do, and no one talks about because they’re boring. Well, money needs to be talked about, especially if you’re married, getting married, or having kids. Spouses need to have a plan, know where they stand, know how much money is where. Talking to a financial planner to cover the finer points is on my list, but first I want to make sure I know where all of the accounts are and what they’re up to. So, here’s what we’re (and I do mean the royal we) doing:

Consolidating old retirement accounts. You know how it goes, you switch jobs, the new place does their 401(k) at a different company, etc. They’re all over the place. As I’m not working at the moment, I’m taking my old pre-tax retirement stuff and rolling it into a Traditional IRA. At least, as soon as M gets around to having his signature notarized on the form. Yep, your spouse needs to be in on that, too. M could stand to do some consolidation, too, but at least all of his happen to be different accounts with the same investment company.

Consolidating other investments. My mom and M’s grandparents had given us gifts of stocks over the last however many years. Again, all over the place. Half of mine still have my maiden name, M’s have his name misspelled in a few different variations. And they’re all these little, individual pieces that are hard to keep track of, especially at tax time. We have a little custodial account that will hold all of those, so we only will have to look in one place for them. That is, as soon as I manage to get my name changed on them, anyways. Ugh. More notarizing.

College accounts for the kids. Compounding interest, people, compounding interest. The sooner you start, the better you’ll be. $50 now could be way better than $100 later. We opened two different types of accounts for our kids. A 529 plan, because it has tax advantages, and the money can be used for (and only for) educational expenses. It doesn’t have to be a 4-year college, but it does have to be educational expenses. We also opened up a UTMA account, which does not have the same tax advantages as a 529, but use of the money is more flexible. We have them set up, but they do need to be better invested. My dad’s rule of thumb growing up was to not do individual stocks, but just buy a market index fund. For the first 13 years or so, he put roughly 80% of the money in stock index funds, and 20% in more conservative bonds. And just let it hang out, no need to fuss when you’re planning long-term. When I hit high school, he swapped the balances, so 20% was in the riskier stocks, and 80% in the conservative bonds, since it was going to start being used in the shorter-term. If you don’t know much about investing, that’s a good, easy balance to remember. 80% riskier if you’re doing long-term, 80% more conservative as you approach the time when you want to use it.

Moving our checking and savings. We have regular old checking and savings accounts at one of the big banks that has bought plenty of the other banks. That’s fine, but it’s not doing anything for us. We aren’t getting charged, but we aren’t making money, either. So we’re moving to a Schwab checking account. I’m sure other investment companies have similar deals. This one is linked to an investment account, so we can do more with our money than have it sit in a savings account and earn pennies in interest, but it’s still readily accessible if we need to get at it. And the checking account earns interest on its own, and though they don’t have any of their own ATMs, they refund all ATM fees. Not bad! Might as well have the money doing something for us, other than just sit there. And I don’t believe there’s a minimum balance requirement, so it’s not like you have to be rolling in the dough to do something like this.

Anyways, that’s the exciting things I’m doing on our summer afternoons: getting things notarized! Wohoo! Next up, wills. I know, Marci, I know. I still haven’t done it. I will, though, I promise. Shame on me for having nearly 1-year-old kids and no will! Ack!

Comments (9)

Categories : Home, Just me

Tags : college savings, financial planning

New space, new skills

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (7)· June 24th, 2008

We finally rearranged our den to create a nice little play space for the kids. We still needed it as an office, so we got an L-shaped desk from Ikea (nearly two months ago – oops). M and I now share a desk and get nice and cozy. But half to 2/3 of the room is now child-proofed, colorful, full of toys, and enclosed. Hooray! Hard to get a good picture of it, but I did my best. Much of it is from Target, including the cube shelves and fabric cube box/drawers, and the area rugs (it’s two 4′x6′ rugs). The chair is the very one M stole from his dorm room when he left college, and it makes for a great place for babies to pull up to stand. It still wants for some details and decoration, but it’s nice to have a space where the kids can safely play and I can hang on my computer.

Oh and… um… did I neglect to mention that Daniel is finally crawling? Wohoo! Only two months after his sister! As with anything, it seems to have been largely a question of motivation. Rebecca’s motivation was chasing the dog. Daniel’s, as it turns out, was so that he could get to more places in order to stand up. Mobility is nice and all, but standing is where it’s at. Within five days of his first real crawling, he’s already pulling up on me and letting go, standing unassisted for a few seconds before plopping down and trying again. My suspicion is that he would really love to just walk, while Rebecca may be content to speed-crawl for quite a while longer. We’ll see.

Two babies crawling, as it turns out, more than twice as challenging as one. But it does mean that Daniel can hold his own in fighting for the coveted toys… like the pack of wipes?

Comments (7)

Categories : Child Development, Home, Infants

Tags : Gross motor

Boston, you’re my home

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (3)· June 22nd, 2008

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_C5DAeO-I7Y]OK, I think it’s kind of a lame song. Nothing compared to Frank Sinatra singing “Chicago.” But regardless of soundtrack, eight years ago yesterday, Boston became my new home town. I was four days post-college-graduation, starting my one-year master’s degree program at Boston University a few weeks later. In fact, I was starting it later than the program intends, because my undergrad college gets out so late in the summer that I actually missed BU’s first summer session and had to double-up my classes in the 2nd session.

At any rate, I got off my plane and went straight to the BU student apartment office to pick up my new keys. My dad was in the area for meetings, so rented a big van and met me there. I had only a suitcase or two with me, and had shipped some of my random tchotchkes and books to my aunt’s house up in the ‘burbs. In one short day, my dad and I hit the store for a bed and dresser, futon/couch, TV, and desk. We spent the rest of the afternoon assembling my bed and the futon so we’d both have somewhere to sleep that night.

That first summer was a little on the lonely side, but I did enjoy my new city. I lived practically right under the Citgo sign, and my neighborhood was a madhouse during Red Sox home games (I even went to two of them that year – that’s me on the left looking a lot younger and thinner… sigh.). I threw on my rollerblades and went up and down the Esplanade. I hopped shuttle flights to visit friends who had moved to New York or Washington, DC after graduation (no one else had moved to Boston, sadly).

At any rate, I met M through a random set of circumstances a few months later, and stayed in Boston. I think part of me always thought I’d return to Chicago, and maybe that will still happen. But I also remember spending time with my aunt that first summer. My mom’s sister, she’s the only one of the seven siblings that does not live in our home town. That summer, eight years ago, she welcomed me to Boston and told me I’d never leave. So far, it’s true. I’m settled in the suburbs with my husband, my kids, my dog, and my 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. But never say never…

I’m a little ambivalent on Massachusetts, to be perfectly honest. On the one hand, I really like it. I love the history and the charm, the rolling landscapes (I come from the midwest, it’s flat as far as the eye can see), and the politics (blue as can be, baby). I get a kick out of how small New England is, and how easy it is to get from one state to another. But there are things I don’t love, as well. While people are nice, they aren’t as openly friendly as the people I grew up with in the Midwest. There, you said hello to strangers you passed on the street. Here, you avoid eye contact whenever possible. Privacy can be good, but it can also be isolating. And the “smallness” of New England seems to translate into an attitude of “why go anywhere else, everything you need is right here!” Sure, there are people who travel and all, but as a guidance counselor who’s “not from around here, are you?” try getting your seniors to apply to college any farther away than Albany, NY. Washington, DC? Ooh, that’s far. They really just stay in New England. I don’t have a problem with liking where you grew up and settling there, obviously. But I do feel like sometimes you need to get away, in order to really make a conscious choice to return. Otherwise, you’ve just never left and have no experience of people who live differently than you. I don’t think it’s such a coincidence that the vast majority of the people I’ve become friends with out here are not actually from here.

But still, this is my home, and I do love lots of things about it. Would I have guessed, eight years ago, that this is where I’d be? Maybe, maybe not. Hey, I didn’t even think I’d ever be able to drive somewhere in Massachusetts without getting lost, so I’m making progress.

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Categories : Home, Just me, Reminiscing

This Old House

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (5)· June 10th, 2008

Three years ago today, we moved into our house in the ‘burbs. Much like today, it was insanely hot and humid. We hired movers (best money ever spent), and the three incredibly tall and thin college-age Eastern European guys ran up and down our stairs, carrying two boxes of books at a time. I kept sending M to the store for more gatorade.

At the time, we were newlyweds. We had gotten married in October, and by January, we were house-hunting. The apartment we had shared for two and a half years was a nice one, second floor of a two-family home in a quiet neighborhood. But we were ready to have our own space that we controlled, and to not hear our downstairs neighbors… ahem… at 3AM. Nevermind that it was the absolute peak of the real estate craziness. Hindsight is 20/20, and we were thankfully not taken in by the whole sub-prime mess, so it’s all good.

So, prices were crazy, houses were moving fast. You practically brought your checkbook with you to showings, and seldom was there enough time to actually go back for a second look, or so it felt. We hemmed and hawed and places we thought we liked disappeared off the market in a heartbeat. We finally decided on a house built in 1895 that was vacant and had wood paneling in every single room and a seriously old kitchen, but we saw potential. The sellers were a pain in the ass, and we probably should have walked away, but we were first-time homebuyers and stuck to it. Finally settled and we were on track. Until five days before our scheduled closing, when the realtor and attorneys finally “remembered” to tell us about this enormous easement going through the yard, yadda yadda, we backed out. Ugh.

Back to looking. We even branched out and looked at some townhouses, including some brand new ones (brand-new construction, do you know how rare that is in Massachusetts?!) that were very tempting, but in the end not what we were all about. We wanted independence (not a condo association) and space (not a shared back porch and nowhere to put M’s tools). April came, and M saw a nice-looking picture on our list of new houses on the market. It only had a single bathroom, so I almost didn’t schedule the showing. But he liked it, so fine.

So many of the houses in our price range were old, in questionable condition, had odd and awkward layouts and additions. We were perfectly willing to overlook outdated decor and nasty carpeting. We were actually looking for something that we could improve upon and therefore increase the value. But some of them seemed downright hopeless. And then we walked into the sideways-facing colonial with only one bathroom. Despite the peeling apple wallpaper in the kitchen and the overcrowded dining room, we both knew it was a good find. It had a good layout, and lots of potential for making it look less dated. I’m pretty sure we made the offer by the next day, and one of our contingencies was that the sellers had to give us their answer before the Sunday open house. I think it had been on the market for three days.

Oh sure, the inspection revealed an old roof and some previously unknown termite damage. But no truly fatal flaws, and we got the price down to something that seemed reasonable (I don’t want to think about what it might go for today, but that’s not the point). We closed Memorial Day weekend. M and I both walked out of the closing, new keys in hand, and had the same thought: are we really old enough for this? It seems very important and official, shouldn’t our parents be signing something? Nope. We were married adults who had just put a down payment on a house and signed our names to our 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. Wow.

Moving day, as I said, was sweltering. High-80s, at least, and humid. The movers were drenched within about 15 minutes, but man were they fast. It took the whole day to load the truck and then unload it again, but by 6pm, we were sitting and eating pizza in our brand new house. Well, our 85-year-old, hideously-wallpapered, sorta-smells-like-cats new house. Close enough.

I think we went to Lowe’s at least four times a week that first month. Every day, there was a new discovery, yet another reason to exclaim, “WTF?!” One outlet in each bedroom was wired to go on and off with the light switch. There weren’t ANY light switches on the first floor (only lamps and pull-chains, very classy). The kitchen ceiling has no fewer than four layers of drywall and plaster. The wallpaper upstairs hid the fact that they’d never plastered the corners between pieces of drywall, simply covered them with wallpaper. But over time, we got all the wallpaper down, new furniture, remodeled the den, added a downstairs powder room, replaced the roof… it’s all ours.

It’s not perfect, and we’ll never be “done.” The upstairs bathroom is too small, the kids’ room doesn’t have a closet. If you want to start a fight between me and M (and we really don’t fight, it’s not our thing), ask about whether or not the kitchen is going to be remodeled. But we have enough bedrooms that we won’t outgrow it anytime soon, enough space in the yard for a swingset (and maybe a new patio this summer?). It’s a nice old house, and it’s home.

Comments (5)

Categories : Home, Just me, Reminiscing

Transition

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (2)· June 2nd, 2008

We are in the middle of reorganizing our den for the benefit of the kiddos. It has served as a sort of office for me and M since we moved into this house, nearly three years ago. My desk and computer on one end of the room, his on the other. Last July, in the waning weeks of my pregnancy, my dad and M set up the Pack & Play, and it took up residence in there as well, to the left of my desk.

When they first came home from the hospital, they would sleep there, even combined coming nowhere close to the weight limit of the bassinet. Their cries weren’t yet so loud, so we had the base of the monitor right in there, next to their heads. They got older and stopped napping in there, and the bassinet turned into something of a laundry/junk basket, but we still used the attached changing table for about 95% of diaper changes. Almost two months ago, we removed the bassinet (finally) and used it as a handy playpen, or a contained space for them to sit and drink their bottles. But now that we’re making 2/3 of the room dedicated to them, the Pack & Play is becoming redundant.

At any rate, I was looking forward to this little mini-remodel. I took a trip to IKEA last month to get a desk to relocate both computers to one end of the room, but it has been sitting in the basement ever since. Waiting for me and M to get our act together and de-clutter and rearrange. We’re a little lazy that way. But with Rebecca moving faster every day and Daniel toying with the idea of crawling, it’s way overdue. And so, this weekend, we made some progress. The first step? Disassembling the Pack & Play. There were two amazing things about this. The first is how much bigger the room suddenly felt. I was so used to it, I almost forgot how huge it was.

The second unexpected consequence of removing the behemoth was a sudden wave of bittersweet feelings on my part. It’s funny, because it was possibly one of the first times I have actually felt sad about waving goodbye to one of my kids’ phases. In general, I really do not miss the newborn phase. The screaming, the unpredictability, the poor sleep… no thank you. Yes, they were cute and small. Yes, it was nice when they’d almost automatically fall asleep in their carseats and stay that way for more than five minutes. But now… even when they’re crabby because all they want me to do is hold their hands while they stand up, I’d take this phase over the newborn phase every single time. Sitting, crawling, laughing, babbling… I love it! That’s why it was such a surprise to me to feel badly about putting away this icon of their infancy. The first of many times I’ll feel this way, I’m sure.

And the new playroom? Um, yeah, still in progress. A certain crabby little girl with a 103-degree fever didn’t exactly leave us with a lot of free time this weekend. Eventually, though, I swear…

(Cross-posted at How Do You Do It?)

Comments (2)

Categories : Home, Infants, Reminiscing

A benefit to living in the ‘burbs

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (7)· May 24th, 2008

I always knew I’d be a suburban kind of girl. For as much as I sigh when I look at the pretty brick buildings on Beacon Hill, and imagine the fabulously urban lifestyle my alter ego would live, it’s just not me. I don’t actually like how crowded things are, I don’t like hearing my neighbors through the walls, and I like to be able to park my car within a mile of my residence. But there are downsides to having moved further from the city. Not being so close to culture, my fellow “liberal elites,” and good ethnic restaurants is a bummer.

But I can drive downtown and get good sushi, Ethiopian, or Greek food. And living out here means I have a four-bedroom house, and I only share walls with my husband, dog, and kids. Even better, said four-bedroom house sits (strangely positioned) on a quarter-acre lot, which is definitely larger than the average suburban Boston lot. When we were house-hunting, three years ago, much of what we saw listed lot size as “.05 acres.” Bummer. But not us, we lucked out with our whopping “.25 acres.” And you know what’s cool about that?

Our new swingset arrived.

It was a gift/hand-me-down from my aunt, as my cousins have gotten too old for it. I actually found a company that specializes in assembling, moving, and inspecting swingsets. They drove to my aunt’s house, took it apart and packed it in a pickup truck, drove to my house, and set it up in less than an hour.

I was so psyched to try it out (and wanted to do so before the promised late-afternoon rain showers) that I carried both kids outside without bothering to put pants on them. Ah, whatever, it was nice out.

I think they had a good time. Oh, the fun we’ll have this summer

Try putting that in Beacon Hill…

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Categories : Good times, Home, Stuff, stuff, and more stuff

IKEA!

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (0)· May 3rd, 2008

I was psyched when they finally brought Ikea to Massachusetts. When I first moved to Boston, the nearest one was in New Jersey. Doh! I ended up going to the one near Chicago when I was home that summer, because I was going to drive my car the 1,000 miles on I-90 back to Boston. A year or so ago, when I was largely past the age of assembly-required furniture, they finally opened one out here. It’s still far from me, a good 45-60 minutes on the opposite side of the city. We took a trip there when I was pregnant and we were looking for cribs, but we didn’t buy anything, and I remember being starving and exhausted from all the walking. But still, just because you don’t want to assemble your own couch, doesn’t mean Ikea is dead to you. There’s always something good to be had.

As the kids are becoming mobile, it’s time for yet another reimagining of our space. Not only is there plenty of child-proofing to be done, but maybe we don’t need to spend every waking moment in our living room. In fact, we have a very sunny den off of our living room. Well, in truth, it didn’t used to be so sunny. When we bought the house, it was dark and dingy and cold. Filthy purple-ish carpet, cheap faux wood paneling on the walls, foam tiles on the ceiling attempting to mask old water damage. (photo from before we bought it – those are not our nasty curtains and recliners!) It’s a tricky shape, about 8′ wide by 16′ long, with fully five windows and a door. Last spring, we had it gutted. Put in insulation (there was none), a wood floor (there was linoleum under the carpet), new walls and ceiling, and even overhead lighting (oh, the luxury!). It is bright and sunny, and possibly our favorite room in the house. Hard to take a picture of a small, long room… but you get the idea.

Anyways, it remained our computer room. Mine on one end, M’s on the other. I even got a big table instead of a desk, so it could hold my sewing machine. Ah, back when I used to sew! When the kiddos arrived, the Pack & Play joined us. It’s a convenient place to have a changing station and all of that. But we knew it was a short-term arrangement. This room’s destiny is to be a playroom.

Neither M nor I want to completely give up on it as a computer room. We spend a lot of time on our computers (blogs and photos for me, World of Warcraft for him), and we like having them in this space. Plus, there isn’t really anywhere else we’d put them. We decided the new arrangement would be this: both computers on one side of the room, gated off, and the rest of the room (more like 2/3) will be set up for the kids.

This rambling explanation is how it came to be that, while taking the kids for a walk before their morning nap, my mom and I decided to make an impromptu visit to Ikea. We dashed back into the house, threw together a bag of necessary baby stuff, measured the room, and put the kids in the car. As hoped, they both took a little nap in the car, enough to do the trick. We arrived just as the store opened, and wove our way around to the work space area. As soon as we laid eyes on this one, we knew it was what I had come for. A nice man wrote up our order for us, and our main mission was mostly accomplished.

[As yet another an aside, I find Ikea incredibly overwhelming. I love everything in there, I love the little rooms they have set up. I want it all. But it's also exhausting to walk around, and there are so many choices, I often end up leaving with nothing at all. And then, two days later, realize what I really needed and should have gotten. It's one of those stores that I have to go with a clear and defined purpose and list. Otherwise my head starts to spin.]

Anyways, we purchased our desk, waited forever for the furniture pickup folks to get all of the pieces together. The kids were really great the whole time, and of course were a total magnet for people to come look at them, make baby talk, and the usual twin comments. When we finally got our myriad boxes of components, and got creative with the seat layout in my minivan, we headed home.

There is much reorganizing, purging, and childproofing yet to be done before the boxes in my basement become our lovely new desk, and the den becomes the playroom it was always meant to be. And I can already see that I’ll be returning to Ikea in a few months (if not sooner) to pick up one of those adorable kid-sized tables and some other fun things. But still, the transformation continues…

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Categories : Home, Out and about, Stuff, stuff, and more stuff

What do I do with this information?

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (6)· April 16th, 2008

We got a letter in the mail from our city’s police department. I assumed it either had to do with the fact that they will shortly be tearing up my street, or was in regards to the pickup truck that drove through my lawn a few weeks ago. [Yes, it was crazy, a man with the flu lost consciousness, knocked down my neighbor's fence, and hit an oak tree next to my house. Everyone is fine, save for the fence, my neighbor's swingset, and some forsythia bushes in my yard.]

But, indeed, this letter was something else entirely. [emphasis theirs]

… the individual who appears on this notification has been designated a Level 3 Sex Offender by the Sex Offender Registry Board. The Board has determined that this individual is at high risk to reoffend and that the degree of dangerousness posed to the public is such that a substantial public safety interest is served by active community notification. This individual is NOT wanted by the police.

OK, seriously, this man lives down my street. He was convicted of three counts of “rape of a child with force” in a neighboring state. A few years ago, in the abstract, I might have said “hey, the guy has to live somewhere. What can you do?” But, yeah. Now I’m a mama bear. “High risk to reoffend”?!?! Then why the hell is he on my street?

I’m kinda freaked out. I walk the kids in the stroller with the dog that way. Well, I used to. I can all but guarantee you I won’t be going that direction again. And, of course, then I had to go on the state Sex Offender Registry Board’s website. There are no fewer than 8 level 3 sex offenders in my town, but the others at least aren’t in my neighborhood.

I don’t really know what to do with this information. I mean, I won’t be walking on that end of the street. But it makes me a little sad to think that I’ll probably keep my front door closed and locked more of the time when I’m home. I guess it adds fodder to my thoughts of moving, but the housing market being like it is, I highly doubt we’ll be trying to sell our house anytime soon. Ugh, just creepy, creepy, creepy…

And here I thought I was going to start a campaign to build a park on an empty neighborhood corner. Maybe not so much.

Comments (6)

Categories : Freakin' out, Home

Tags : sex offender

Weekend in Chicago, part 3: Home

By Goddess in Progress · Comments (1)· May 4th, 2007

Life with my family in Chicago is very different from my life in Boston. My husband and I live a pretty quiet life. We’re not especially adventurous or outdoorsy. We don’t have a lot of family and friends nearby. Weekends aren’t terribly exciting. I wake up relatively early, take the dog out, and hang for a while in my pajamas. Maybe I go to the grocery store, maybe I do a little sewing, maybe I go back to sleep. My husband wakes up when I get him up, usually around noon. He’s the night owl, while I’m mostly a morning person. [We're hoping this will serve us well when the babies arrive.] The rest of the day is sometimes lazy, sometimes chores, maybe we’ll go out for dinner. On the rare occasion that there’s something out we both want to see, we’ll go to a movie. Sure, there are variations on this theme. We might have visitors from out of town, we might have people over for dinner, we might do something fun and unusual. But mostly, life is quiet.

It’s very different when I go home to Chicago, in particular when I’m at my mom’s house (which is, by the way, about half a mile from my dad’s house). Let me set the stage a bit. My mom is one of seven children. They were born and raised in this particular suburb, and my grandmother still lives in the little townhouse she had with all of these kids. My mom is a block and a half east of that townhouse, two of her sisters are two blocks southeast, another is half a block north. One of her two brothers is two and a half blocks northeast. That leaves one brother on the other side of (the same) town, and then the one sister who left Chicago. She, funny enough, lives about 45 minutes east of me in Massachusetts.

So, you have my mom sort of in the middle, with her mother and four of her six siblings within a 2-3 block radius. And they’re all close. And they almost all have dogs. And they’re almost all morning people. When my mom moved into this house three years ago, my stepdad almost considered not buying it because it was so close to everyone else. They compromised. He got a neon sign that said “Open” that he could stick in the window and turn on when he wanted.

Every morning, it seems, at least two or three people stop by. Maybe they want to borrow a tool from my mom, maybe they were out for a run, maybe they were walking the dog. But before 9:00AM, it’s not unusual to have several visitors. This continues throughout the day. After my shower on Sunday, suddenly three of them were taking their dogs to the dog beach together. At 5:30pm, the phone started ringing, and by 6:30 there were 15 people over for hamburgers and shower leftovers. It was Sunday, after all, and they almost always have Sunday dinners at someone’s house. And it’s usually just as casual. Phone calls start around noon, figure out who’s bringing salad or dessert, and people just start opening the door and pouring themselves a drink by 6:30. It’s so casual, but has become such a part of their routine that my cousins will complain if a Sunday goes by and they have to eat dinner by themselves at home.

It was fun to be there and be a part of it, as I was for the first 21 years of my life (though regular Sunday dinners are more recent), even if it was a somewhat stark contrast to my life in Boston. A large part of me really misses being that physically close to my big family. I’m jealous of my brother and his fiancee, who recently moved back to the area from Colorado. I’m sad that it will be such a production to visit with the twins, instead of just walking the stroller down the street or hopping in a car across town. I go through phases where I really want to move back. After all, we have no real attachment to Massachusetts, except that it’s where we live and work. It’s nice, but we could live and work somewhere else.

There are reasons not to move. My mom and her sisters can get bossy, and a bit of mob mentality takes over when they come to your house to work on a room or do landscaping. They have an idea of how it should get done, and sometimes aren’t so keen on outside opinions (like those of the actual homeowner). They still occasionally treat me like a 15-year-old who’s just playing house. It’s particularly hard for my husband. Not only did he not grow up with such a crowd, so all of the people and chaos is just too much for him, but the bossiness is something he can’t quite tolerate. We also aren’t the type to just up and relocate and figure out the details later. We’d never move if we (and by we, I mean my husband, who are we kidding) didn’t have a job to pay the mortgage. And if you’ve ever tried to look for a job across state lines, you’ll know it’s no easy feat. Here in Massachusetts, we have a house we’re in no rush to sell, and my husband has a brand new job that he actually enjoys. We aren’t moving any time in the forseeable future.

And I also know there are plenty of people out there who don’t live close to their families. They do just fine. Their kids still love their grandparents. They visit as often as they can, and they establish lives and surrogate families where they are. It’s certainly harder for us right now because many of our close friends have moved away from Boston as well, so we aren’t left with a big support system. But hopefully having kids will open up another world of possiblities with things like playgroups and school.

But when it comes right down to it, I harbor a vague but consistent hope/desire/vision that we’ll someday move to Chicago. My husband isn’t totally against the idea, though it will take some convincing (and a great job opportunity). I just can’t help but think it would be nice for my kids to grow up around the crowd that I did. And I’m still the homesick little girl that wasn’t ready for full-day kindergarten and cried to come home from camp. I always want my mommy.

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