Penny’s Birth Announcement

I sent these out to many of you but for those who read this blog that I don’t send cards to, and for posterity, here is Penny’s Birth announcement. I don’t mean to brag but I am quite proud of it. I designed it myself and it turned out so great. I have it pinned to our bulletin board in the kitchen and I often stop and look at it and smile. I hope it does the same thing for all of you who I sent one to!

Front:

Back:

Penny’s Birth Story

Time to put this all down before I forget it in the fog of sleepless nights and being a mom of three. Be warned that this is the story of how Penny was born so there will be some talk of epidurals, episiotomies, and all other manner of birthing subjects that may bore or gross you out. Proceed with caution!

Slice of Life- Facepaint!

We have been trying to survive here so please forgive the lack of blogging:). Three kids is seriously impossible some days. Blog posts to come, including Penny’s birth story, as soon as I get some more sleep!

For now here are some quick pictures I snapped the other day of Reese and Zoe in our backyard with some cute matching face paint. We stopped by SmugMug HQ to visit Mark for lunch and the SmugMug facepainter was there to make up some of the new employees. She had a free minute and was kind enough to give our girls some love. They were thrilled of course and I was immediately inspired to snap some pics. Unfortunately picture taking had to wait until after they woke up from their naps since they were a mess when we got home (yes, I let them sleep like this just so I could take pictures later). Hence-Reese’s paint got a bit smeared.

I love that Zoe is finally old enough for the sister-thing to start kicking in. They love it when they can wear matching outfits, have matching stickers, etc. They have such fun playing together, especially when I am out of sight. As soon as I am around they stop playing with eachother and focus on me, but if I leave them to their own devices they play so well together. Reese is a thoughtful big sister who tries very hard to play nicely with Zoe and make her happy. Zoe is a rebel who leads Reese into devious acts but they have much more fun than when Reese is calling the shots. I can see that these two are going to make many fun memories as they grow up together, and I can’t wait to watch them form that deep friendship that will last the rest of their lives.

Minimum Wage and Living Wage

So I recently came across an incredibly stupid statement from a politician: “If we took away the minimum wage -if conceivably it was gone- we could potentially virtually wipe out unemployment completely because we would be able to offer jobs at whatever level.” Of course, simply looking at societies without a minimum wage who have significant unemployment shoots that theory down.  It turns out, for example, that someone with an advanced degree is often better suited waiting and searching for a job in their field than temporarily picking up a job flipping burgers at $1 an hour.

But really, it’s sad that politicians focus so much on the unemployment number and don’t mention the living wage.  Living wage is defined as the minimum hourly wage necessary for an individual to meet basic needs.  Obviously that number varies wildly by a number of factors (location, family size, etc.) and is therefore much harder to report, but isn’t it a far more telling statistic than a simple unemployment number?

Anyways, there is a fantastic calculator put together by the Pennsylvania State University.  If you drill down to Santa Clara County, you get this.  It doesn’t even list the possibility of having as many children as Meghan and I now have, but I found it interesting that $33.51/hour or $69,705/year before taxes is the suggested living wage in this area for a household having one working adult with a spouse and two children.  According to the site, that’s an estimate of the minimum wage covering the cost of living for “low wage families.”  Wow.

But perhaps even more interesting, the poverty wage is $9.83 an hour.  So instead of deciding that companies can pay employees as low as $0.01/hour, shouldn’t we focus on making sure more families can make at least a living wage?  I think Americans are so enamored with the idea of social mobility, or the idea that everyone can become rich, that we have blinded ourselves to the hard truth:  that more than 50% of Americans are lower on the socio-economic than what is often called the “lower middle class” and that less than 1% are part of the “upper class” or super rich.  So the wealth gap is larger than it has ever been in the history of the country, yet we have politicians proposing the idea that we should pay the very poor lower wages while those very same politicians successfully gave the super wealthy greater tax cuts than everyone else for the past decade.  Wonderful.

I’m kinda famous…

A good friend sent out an e-mail a few months ago to ask if any of her pregnant friends would be willing to pose for photos for the STOP CMV campaign. I thought it was a great cause so I joined 5 other pregnant women from our circle of friends to be models for a day. Imagine my surprise when I found out that my photo ended up being the one used on their website(second photo in on the homepage slideshow)! I feel so special:).

Stop CMV is a great cause and you should really take a look at the website for more info about CMV and the risks if you are pregnant. I never knew about these risks until I met Janelle and heard the story of her sweet twin daughters.She is such an inspiration to me and I am so glad she asked me to model in all my pregnant largeness!