Ignatz Graduates

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Written from my perspective as a/an: Mommy

Sending Children to College: Three Don’t(s)

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I’ve sent a total of one child off to col­lege. In blo­gos­phere terms, that makes me an expert in the in’s and out’s of get­ting your kid into col­lege. As such, here are SuburbanWife’s three basic Don’t rules for help­ing your child choose which col­lege to attend:

ONE: Don’t Do It For Them

As over-obvious as this might sound to some of you, this is absolutely my Número Uno not-to-broken rule and the one that a lot of par­ents are going to ignore (at everyone’s peril). No mat­ter how bril­liant lit­tle Johnny is, if he can’t get his stuff together to do the research, write the essays, and fill out the appli­ca­tions him­self, he will not be ready for the rig­ors of college.

Baby­Doll, about to go off for her sopho­more year at col­lege, did all the work of select­ing and apply­ing to schools her­self with very lit­tle input and almost no help from us. … click here to read the other two Col­lege Don’t(s) »

Sharing iTunes Mobile Apps on Multiple Devices

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If your house­hold is any­thing like ours, you’ve got mul­ti­ple “i” devices float­ing around the house. In our house­hold, we’ve man­aged to col­lect an impres­sive num­ber of these App Eaters is the past year.  Baby Doll was the first with the free iPod Touch she received as part of Apple’s Back To School pro­mo­tion last sum­mer when we bought her a MBP as a grad­u­a­tion gift.  Then we gave Ignatz an iPod Touch for Christ­mas.  I scored a first-generation iPad when Ver­i­zon put them on sale a few days after the iPad 2 was released.  And, most recently, Baby Doll finally decided she what she wanted for her 19th birth­day — an iPhone.

Even though we’ve been shar­ing com­put­ers for years, the kids and I have always main­tained our own iTunes accounts.  Nat­u­rally, with this sce­nario of main­tain­ing indi­vid­ual iTunes accounts but shar­ing com­put­ers, we’re well famil­iar with the dif­fer­ent means of shar­ing music. But shar­ing pur­chased apps is a rel­a­tively new issue for us. I’ve known for some time that shar­ing apps within the fam­ily was both tech­ni­cally and legally pos­si­ble but I wasn’t quite sure how to make it hap­pen. … click here for the full tutorial »

SuburbanWife Gets a Job

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For the past few years I’ve been vol­un­teer­ing more and more of my time to Ignatz’s school (Baby Doll’s for­mer school).

The nature of my vol­un­teer work has ranged from the sim­ple warm-body anyone-could-do-it task (like dri­ving on field trips) that makes up the vast major­ity of school vol­un­teerism to more spe­cial­ized, fairly-skilled IT work (web design, graph­ics, pay­ment inte­gra­tion, and 3rd-party Spe­cial Event soft­ware customization).

Back in March, when we were elbow-deep in cus­tomiz­ing our Spring fundrais­ing event web­site, I was informed that it had been agreed that I should be paid for my more tech­ni­cal endeav­ors. As much as I liked the idea of con­tribut­ing a lit­tle cash to the family’s cof­fers, what really thrilled me was the expla­na­tion of the argu­ment used to con­vince the Board that I should be paid. It was rea­soned that the skills I brought to the table were spe­cial­ized enough that the school could not rea­son­ably expect this job to be filled with vol­un­teer labor.

As a middle-aged middle-class sub­ur­ban house­wife with a self-taught techno-geek alter ego who hasn’t been gain­fully employed for the bet­ter part of 20 years, this was a huge boost to my oth­er­wise sag­ging sense of self-esteem. Oh, and the check was very wel­come boost to my check­ing account.

Amazon “Lend” Restrictions

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Here’s one for the “I’ll be damned! Did you know?” category.…

Did you know that you can lend a book only once?!?

I found this lit­tle gem of info buried deep within the Ama­zon Kin­dle help forums. No where on all of Amazon’s Kin­dle Help pages or their FAQs do they men­tion this par­tic­u­lar fact. No where was this fact men­tioned on the page when I filled in the form to lend my book.

I am not an unin­tel­li­gent per­son. I under­stand that eBooks and eRead­ers (Kin­dles, iPads, and other tablets) are new ter­ri­tory. I under­stand that those in the pub­lish­ing busi­ness need to make a liv­ing and I believe that authors deserve to make a liv­ing. So my shock and dis­may are not nec­es­sar­ily directed at the fact that a book can only be lent once but rather that that infor­ma­tion was not clearly and unequiv­o­cally com­mu­ni­cated to me at the outset.