Pixel Posybytes of life

After Turkey Day was over we decided to stop in at Wal-Mart and pick up some rest of the Holiday weekend supplies. Mainly alcohol for festive drinks.

First let me say that shopping at Wal-Mart on Thanksgiving around 9 PM is total bliss. There was barely a soul in the store. All the last minute meal shoppers were long gone, and the crazy Black Friday shoppers were safe at home gathering their battle plans. If we only had to shop at Wal-Mart one day out of the year this is the day and time we’d do it.

Well we made our way to the back of the store in search of Peppermint Schnapps (so so good in homemade coco) and Absolute for some cranberry pomegranate martinis, but were shocked to discover that the liquor aisle was no longer anywhere to be found. After finding a helpful employee we were directed to the front of the store to the cigarette and now liquor check out lane.

Interesting, we thought. Well after searching the case we realized they had severely limited their selection. Peppermint schnapps was no where to be found on the shelves, but there was one paltry bottle of Absolute.

We waited in line, the longest line of all the check outs as this was the only line with access to liquor and cigarettes. When it was our turn, I asked the lady checking us out if she knew if the store still carried Peppermint Schnapps… she looked at me blankly and said quite flatly “Well, you would know better than me.”

I was stunned silent… my husband scolded me for expecting a Wal-Mart employee to be helpful.

In our house there is no laying out fresh clothes on a bed, preparing to dress for the day, without finding a furry body or two instantly curled up and snoring away.

As much as our pets love to sleep on clean clothes, I was excited to find this blog posting, about turning old sweatshirts into those cute tie blankets typically made out of fleece. That’s DIY Maven’s cat  on it’s new sweatshirt blankie to the right.

Inexpensive pet blanket and they are really quick to make! I like Maven’s idea of making extras to take to an animal shelter.

This morning I watched an irate man in a wheelchair bang on the nose of a car because it was in his way and wasn’t backing up fast enough. And just last week a man rolled out into the middle of traffic against a red light, causing the stream of cars to slam on the brakes. He in turn rattled his fists at all the oncoming traffic.

Maybe since the downtown busses have promised to implement measures to stop hitting people, the wheelchair bound are deciding to raise the stakes?

I’ve never really considered happiness a factor when thinking about if I want to be a mom one day. Babies are supposed to be little blessings wrapped in a bundle of joy package, right?

Not so much according to this:

“Parents experience lower levels of emotional well-being, less frequent positive emotions and more frequent negative emotions than their childless peers,” says Florida State University’s Robin Simon, a sociology professor who’s conducted several recent parenting studies, the most thorough of which came out in 2005 and looked at data gathered from 13,000 Americans by the National Survey of Families and Households. “In fact, no group of parents-married, single, step or even empty nest-reported significantly greater emotional well-being than people who never had children. It’s such a counterintuitive finding because we have these cultural beliefs that children are the key to happiness and a healthy life, and they’re not.”

Read the full story here.

Obviously a study like this is going to make parents instantly insane over the ludicrousness of calling them unhappy in comparison. But, if you stop and think about it, it totally makes sense that parents are less happy. Pre-children your life revolves around mostly yourself and your interests. Once baby makes its way into the world, a parent’s wants and needs more often than not come second to the child’s.

This isn’t to say that those that choose to have children are on the raw end of the deal. I’ve never heard my friend’s with children utter any regret at becoming a parent. It’s often cited that children offer purpose and meaning to parent’s lives. However, I’ve heard from my parent friends their envy at the amount of freedom and indulgence my life still has.

The Newsweek article also raised another point that I feel may have more to do with our happiness levels then having kids or not. And that’s the work/life balance most of us currently have.

A key study by University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Sara McLanahan and Julia Adams, conducted some 20 years ago, found that parenthood was perceived as significantly more stressful in the 1970s than in the 1950s; the researchers attribute part of that change to major shifts in employment patterns. The majority of American parents now work outside the home, have less support from extended family and face a deteriorating education and health-care system, so raising children has not only become more complicated-it has become more expensive.

As our society shifted from 1 working parent homes, to 2 parent working homes, we lost some freedom, along with what was gained. I’m all for anyone being able to have and do it all, especially if that’s what makes them the happiest. However, due to financial reasons a lot of us don’t have the freedom to choose whether or not both parents should work outside the home. With limited evening hours to jam all of family life in, along with chores and other obligations, any parent can become stretched thin. And maybe that’s what’s taking the happiness out of parent life?

Either way, I think we’ll see a societal shift with time. More stay at home moms and dads, corporate life becoming more family friendly with flex time, telecommuting, and unstructured work weeks that allow employees to schedule their time as work and life permits. Or maybe we’ll see more young couples choosing to opt out of the child rearing phase of life.

As for myself, I think knowing we could be less happy with children won’t be much of a factor in my husband and my decision to start a family, but it defiantly puts a different spin on things.

Or at least I love the concept of it, as I haven’t ordered anything yet, but I plan to! Spoonflower.com is a fabric printing company that lets you upload custom designs. Eventually they want to expand to letting users sell their fabric designs, which I imagine will have a Café Press type set up.

Does anyone know of a wrapping paper site like this? I’ve always wanted to create custom gift wrap.

Anyway, my first Spoonflower project will be to create a fabric photo collage out of our wedding photos. I made table runners for the reception and now have 18 strips of fabric itching to be made into a quilt. I want to back the quilt with photo collage fabric.

Spoonflower warns that their color reproduction for photographs isn’t the best, but I’m going to chance it anyway. I’ll post an update and pictures with how it turns out.

If only my cats were as motivated as this little guy. Unfortunately they’d rather chew on the broom than use it.