Here at the Goddard residence we often substitute the word ‘Ady’ instead of ‘Baby’ in song lyrics. I know, we’re that wacky us 😉
Anyway, he’ll be home later and despite very lovely and welcome distractions at the beginning of the week we have missed him terribly. The children have both spoken to him on the phone daily and recorded several video messages to text to him but Davies says he just wants to cuddle him and kiss him and Scarlett appeared in the bedroom beside me at 4am saying ‘Mummy, where is Daddy?’ (and I don’t think it was an educational map plotting session she was after 😉 ). Seeing how much they have missed him depsite it being Monday to Friday when they probably would have been lucky to see him for an hour a day anyway has added further clarity to our different life ponderings. Chats with Barbara about perspectives on life and seeing other friends prepared to make fairly dramatic life changes coupled with our own pressing need to do ‘something’ different if we really can’t face the long hard slog back to solvency meaning ever longer working hours and ever less treats and luxuries.
This morning the children played with playdoh for ages while I messed about online. They watched Class TV while they were doing that and were both quite into Words & Pictures which is one I remember watching at school – about a peregrine falcon, so it was very bizarre to suddenly find myself singing along to the ‘magic e’ jingle – strange how something can be buried so deep inside your memory but be called back if needed eh!
Anyway there’s been preparation aplenty for his return. We baked biscuits in the shape of letters spelling out welcome home Daddy and then decorated them:
I particularly like Davies’ ‘o’ in ‘home’ – he did a repeating pattern which I think is the first time he’s done such a thing.
Then Davies and I made a banner, which he is just finishing off. I asked him to write each letter but he did them without any help and then he decided he needed to decorate each letter to ‘make them more creative’ (his words!) so while the actual letters are not quite so clear as they were we now have various creatures and illustrations on each one. Some he’s done with something to do with the letter (Lion for L, Horse for H etc) and some he’s just been totally creative with such as turning an ‘e’ into a picture of Ady driving his car. The last picture on a ‘y’ is Ady leaving his hotel and coming back to our house which I think is my favourite one.
Right, tidy up time and then we’re going to read some stories. Ady should be home around 8pm so I don’t intend being around much tonight…
Tomorrow I have a basket weaving course with Julie which is slightly bad timing really but was booked long before we knew Ady would be away and will at least mean he gets a day with the children and they can be as giddy and noisy as they like without me tutting 😉 I’m also quite looking forward to a day to myself having played at single parenting this week! And I get to bring home a basket too 🙂
Max and i spent last night discussing whether a particularly exotic salary might be worth him being away 5 nights a week for a while (like a couple of years). I’m quite positive about the idea, but reading this makes me realise how hard it would be.
It’s something we’ve talked about too as one of the possible routes for Ady’s job in the next year or two would be being away from home Monday-Friday – again it would be made ‘worth his while’ financially but for us the trade off is too great. No salary is worth the impact it would have on our family life and the relationships within it – both between him and the children and between him and I. I think is is a lifestyle choice and I do know of several families for whom it works very successfully but it’s never been what we’re about and neither do we want it to be.
That said looking around some of the Home Ed families I know where the wife and children are regularly on the roam with the husband home alone anyway if there was financial reward in the husband working away then it would be worth it. For us the only time we’ve ever voluntarily been away from home without Ady was HESFES and I know I wouldn’t do ‘that’ again!
Love all the welcome home stuff, Nic 🙂 Hope you have a lovely weekend.
Jonathan had a job for a while that required him being away a lot, while M was tiny, and it really didn’t suit us at all. We were all relieved when they fired him after six weeks, even though he was then out of work for a few months and I was working about 4 days a week. It helped us sort out our priorities, and we wouldn’t do it again, if there was any way round it.
Yeah, Before Alys was born Helen was working down in Huntingdon for about 3 months while me and elinor stayed in Leeds. It’s wasn’t much fun for any of us. doing somethign like that for a couple of years would be hard work, though I understand the motivations Merry.
I worked for 8 weeks away from home when pregnant with BB. it was weird nd not pleasant, but not as horrendous as i thought it would be – maybe cos there was a fixed endpoint, and actuslly chris and SB came for a few 5 day weekends. also wouldn’t rush into repeating t hough, and unsettled sb
Oooo, lets play comment snap 🙂
Yeah, its the 65 grand that might do it 🙁
Fran howled at the mere idea today though, so who knows. Considering dumping this house if he gets a job and roaming the country via friends and HE camps for the summer though, just to save a few thousand extra towards a deposit.
I dunno, 4 nights a week might be survivable, in a place with lots of support and friends. It isn’t like our evenings amount to much atm anyway, they only see him for an hour or so most nights.
I suppose we all have a price. For me £65K wouldn’t be nearly enough. We’re going through all possibilities here and ultimately the children only get one childhood and Ady doesn’t want to miss any more of it than he absolutely has to. More money simply wouldn’t cut it for us. The children would rather have Daddy here for an extra hour a day than room fulls of toys, they’d rather go walking along the beach or up the downs for free with their Daddy every weekend than go to Disneyland twice a year, they’d rather walk hand in hand with both parents to the park on a summer’s evening when he gets home than be driven everywhere by just me in an expensive car.
I’m no one to preach – I’ve placed far too much value on material things in the past but it has never actually been at the expense of our time together as a family. It could now threaten that retrospectively in Ady working longer hours or seeking a higher pressure job with a bigger salary – or indeed by me getting an evening or weekend job to pay off the debts we have as a result of having the materials things *and* the time together. But after lots of consderation it is simply too high a price to pay.
We have had too many friends for whom working hard to ‘enjoy our retirement’ has simply never come and whilst you can’t possibly live every day like it might be your last you can certainly work towards enjoying the here and now and making the most of it while it’s here. Childhood is an especially precious time and one we will never get another crack at.
Well, obviously here is not the place to be defending myself – i only mentioned it in passing really because it fitted the conversation.
But for us, at some point, we have to get back on the property ladder to give our kids some security. We have, if he leaves work here now, the sum total of £12K toward buying a house. That is a pittance in terms of what we need, or what most people have in equity in their houses. We can barely afford to buy a house big enough to live in. To buy a 3 bed semi we’d need a mortgage of £140K – £850 a month.
We’re considering it simply for that reason, to claw back some of the money we’ve missed in making money on a property. It certainly isn’t about Disneyland – it’s about saving manically to buy a home. Even i’m not shallow enough to send him away from our kids just for a few holidays; give me some credit. If he did it, we’d be holidaying on cheap campsites in our tent, same as normal. Right now, i’d kill for a home that i owned a bit of; i’ve had 5 years of managing to make a home in a rented house. I’ve had enough of it.
Sorry Merry, of course you don’t have to defend yourself and I was not actually talking specifically about you (coincidence that £65K is the amount as that’s a relevant one here atm!)
Similarly I was using the Disneyland holidays as an extreme example, although not relevant to you there are plenty of people who do make that trade off.
If there is a choice then as hard as it is coming to me to live like it (and believe me it is coming bloody hard) I would rather have less money and more time as a family. I do realise that is not always a choice – and indeed it isn’t for us really, we’d love for Ady to work a 3 or 4 day week and have even more time at home but financially that is impossible without really extreme lifestyle changes.
And having lived in a rented house for 3 years myself (even though we still owned this one but were renting it out to tenants ourselves) I do totally understand where you are coming from with wanting to get out of that situation.
Blimey £850 for £140k mortgage seems marvellous. I suppose that when we have remortgaged we have always kept it to the original term (25 years from 1996) so are paying more monthly for a lower amount of borrowing.
To be honest if I was in a similar situation the only consideration would be Alison, not the kids at all. Kids are resilient little creatures who adapt very well to the circumstances in which they live. I think if they didn’t see me Mon-Fri they would get used to it very quickly and not be bothered. Plenty of kids only have one parent; I don’t assume they are all living some sub-standard childhood because of that.
But the impact on Alison, that would need to be very carefully considered.
But let’s be honest Nic I don’t know anyone else who would bake welcome home biscuits for a few days away on course. That’s just weird and unhealthy 🙂 You’re making a rod for your own back too, I wager hundred quid that *both* your kids are still at home when they are 50. It’ll be like the return of ‘Sorry’, in fact D does have something of the Ronnie Corbett about him already.
Nah, I reckon they’ll be out the door at 16, desperate to escape the suffocating clutches of such odd parents 😉 Although I may start calling D ‘Timothy’ cos that did make me laugh!
You are of course right, the children would get used to it very quickly if they had to – but Ady wouldn’t. 🙁 He hates missing out on things to do with the children already. Actually I think that is more the worry really isn’t it? That we would all get used to it and eventually him being here would be more an interferance in the life we had created without him (like when he’s off work for a couple of weeks and gets in the way of what we normally do during the week 😉 )
Two final things – the biscuits were quite unhealthy I’ll concede as we used so many sugary decorations on them they would have been total tooth rotters 😉 secondly do you want to bet on any other area of our lives which might have a quicker return if I win? 😉
“Blimey £850 for £140k mortgage seems marvellous. ”
Does it? That would be starting a 25 year term… and would still only mean we could spend £150K on a house, which doesn’t seem to get a lot theses days. In fact, it wouldn’t get us much more than we bought 10 years ago 🙁 At the moment, it would amount to just about 2/5s of max’s bring home pay.
Yeah, that was what C meant – that because we have increased our mortgage but kept it to the original end date, we’re paying not that much less per month to borrow quite a bit less money. We tortured ourselves slightly last night with the prospect of extending our mortgage term to 25 years again and being a few hundred quid a month better off!
I’m sure you could find someone to lend you a bit more (we could go up to about 170K I think), but it’s the paying it back that might hurt 🙁
Merry, I just met in terms of outgoings. Our mortgage will soon be 38% of my take home – but for less borrowings – though it is over shorter (15 to go). I made the mistake last night of working out how much better off we’d be if we reset our mortgage to 25 years, however, keeping it so it is paid off when I am 51 is one of the things that keeps me going. The though that in 15 years I could quit my career, we could sell the house and do whatever we wanted 🙂 Which brings me back to the point which is I can see really good reasons for short-term sacrifices to get an injection of cash.
Nic, I can see it from Ady’s point of view but your comment was from the kids’. Our kids would deffo go for Disneyland over walks in the wood and to be honest so would I!!!!
Oh, if he got the cheaper salary of the two jobs he’s looking at, and went for a 4 times mortgage, i guess we could look at houses up to £200K – trouble is, we’d go bankrupt! We pay £550 a month in rent atm and we aren’t exactly rolling in it, though i don’t pretend we are hard up. I rofled at that ebay link – i could cut a LOT out of their outgoings!
We made a bad choice, at least, Max refused to listen to me when, for once, my financial sense was better, but you can bet your (very) bottom dollar, that if we pushed ourselves on a mortgage, we’d precipitate a market crash the next week!
Our position is pretty good – more by accident than design – in that we only owe about 2.5 my income and only have 15 years to go. We could borrow another 60k, extend the term and be no worse off than we are now – this gives a huge buffer for things going wrong in life. I’d feel really nervous borrowing a large multiple – there’s no buffer of being able to borrow more.
Generally I think we are very lucky financially. What is much harder is working out a way of benefitting from this *before* we are too old and decript to enjoy it. Perhaps I’ll go and buy something expensive this afternoon on the credit card 🙂
Ooh I would – infact I did…. and well the rest is history :-0