Sasha2's Profile

Our splurge was also our kid: international adoption is expensive - close to 30K (although we got around 10K back through the adoption tax credit). Definitely worth it.

The other things: no splurges, everything was repurposed, even our Ergo. The one thing we bought new was a Bob jog stroller, but it was not a splurge - my mother bought it for us and it really was not that expensive.

For my son as a 2-3 year old: one of his favorites was a child sized broom - he loved to "help" out with it at preschool (the kids would argue over who gets it) and then, after I bought him his own for Christmas, he played with it for many, many months; we still use it now that he is 6 - I use it all the time in lieu of the adult sized broom for small clean up jobs.

Hmm - Churches of course also continue to serve as the backbone of right leaning causes. But I guess I don't subscribe to the neoliberal agenda as much as you, OKASHI. Just because not all churches serve the poor or the broader public does that mean we should just unleash market forces on spaces where people build community and transform them into staging grounds for the conspicuous consumption of one household. We are steadily losing our public spaces. Without churches, we wouldn't have organized in this society to win civil rights for minorities - churches were the crucibles of the civil rights movement. And in many cities today, churches are the foundation for serving the needy, a population that is increasingly abandoned by our neoliberal government.

Edited to state: I meant to write "repurposing spaces that had once served the poor" :)

I vote for a regular visit from a cleaner. For two income parents, doing all the housecleaning ourselves was leading us in the direction toward a divorce.

OBLEAK1,
I couldn't agree more with generalizing to the entire city and in fact I did not do so. I said above in my first post: "in our neighborhood, we have quite a high property theft rate and there are also very troubling assaults here as in any city." So no, I wasn't generalizing from my personal experience. I was in my second post replying to the poster who suggested that my questions about privacy were in effect "obsessions." If anyone was generalizing from personal experience, it was that poster, who dismissed my concerns by stating that he has lived here and never experienced any theft or assault. He may be privileged to have avoided crime in a city that has a crime rate nearly double the national average. If you look at the rate of violent crime for 2010 (the most recent year for which such data are readily available), Portland ranks just behind LA and New York city; if you look at the rate of violent rape, Portland ranks just behind Detroit and Baltimore, and is marginally ahead of New Orleans; if you look at the rate of property crime, Portland is just a few cities behind Detroit. So actually Portland's rates of various crime put this city in a category with a number of cities that are more widely recognized as having serious crime problems. I would say that people who move here often wrongly assume that there is no violence or crime here in Portland.

FELTTIPJR,
You are confused by the questions by privacy and put my words "troubling assaults" in brackets and referred to them as products of obsessions, so let me dispel your confusion about Portland and give you an idea what is behind my comments. In my neighborhood, we have assaults and quite a lot of property crime and thefts. I'll give you some examples of the experiences of my immediate neighbors and myself. My immediate next door neighbor in my multi-unit building was raped in broad daylight walking her dog nearby. And no this is not something I "made up" - she testified at her rapist's trial, so he really exists. After the trial, she moved away from lovely Portland because she couldn't get over her PTSD and never again felt comfortable walking around by herself; her rapist was not a hippy "eating rotten watermelon rinds." He was a schizophrenic homeless guy who was living on the streets and had stopped taking her meds. Another neighbor was recently robbed as he was leaving the house by two men armed with knives. Our house has been robbed (someone walked in and stole my husband's wallet while we were upstairs. Our next door neighbor moved here (to a safer neighborhood) from not far away after her house was robbed twice - the second time she was robbed, a moving van pulled up also in broad day light, and removed nearly all of her possessions (everything from musical instruments to climbing gear and racing bikes). She put her house on the market as soon as the second theft happened, as the police said it was likely her own neighbors robbing her, as they waited until she had gone away for the weekend and then rented a Uhaul. Does this give you some idea of why privacy might be a concern for people in Portland?

I always shudder when AT features rooms that look like they were done without input from the child (or even worse, involved limited input from the family and were "done" by an interior decorator). We let our 6 year old make color choices and we also let him choose his bed - he loves green and so it is featured prominently in his bedroom. However, we chose a white and black bed and had the room painted white before moving in a year ago and didn't consult him on that all that extensively because his favorite green paint is way too dark for a room overlooking an alley in the Pacific Northwest, where we get many rainy days. So he gets to choose blankets, sheets and other decor in "Kermit the frog green" but we prevailed with choosing a "neutral" back drop. He loves the things he got to choose and feels it is his own space and doesn't mind the white backdrop at all. I can't imagine having a room decorated without his input. It also makes the process more enjoyable to turn it into a joint project based on mutual give and take.

Do you refer to your contractors as "handytractors"? I must be very old-fashioned, but this term sounds demeaning when applied to a human being.

I believe that zoning laws are the main reason why these "tiny houses" have such a small footprint. The tiny house has to fall within these dimensions to be "legal" as a kind of mobile home so as to not have to follow more restrictive zoning regulations that would apply to most stationary housing.