Retire from 8 to 5 

Where has the summer gone? We have no idea how the last two months have blown past us – it is evident from the lack of blog posts and monthly updates. While it has been a fabulous summer weather, with little rain and glorious summer sunshine, between two bouts of toddler Noro virus, we feel wiped.

Except for typical monthly expenses, we had one massive expense with taxes which resulted in 0% savings this month. In fact, we had to widthdraw 4.5% from our savings to cover this month’s expenses.

Due to S’s USA to UK work related relocation financial benefits that kicked in last minute, S had to pay a significant tax. While it was painful, it always reminded me of a colleague who put it eloquently in 2012 – “would you rather pay a lot of tax because you make a lot money, or pay no tax because you make little money”. The option of no tax on lot of money – we have not figured this out yet, and don’t want to be devious about it either. In UK (or any developed nation), we consider paying tax as a duty. In return, roads and parks are well maintained, trash is collected every week (mostly), government public schools are relatively good, there is free healthcare with NHS and street lights work. Let us consider in India, wherein paying taxes almost gets you nothing – roads are bad, parks are mediocre and government public schools are avoided. So yes, we pay tax and we are ok with it.

And our other expense each July is around car annual maintenance and annual insurance. We bought our car in July 2022, rather hastily we must add due to sheer panic after arriving in UK. After having lived in USA, with a car each, for 11+ years, not having a car for a month (all of June 2022) was a bit too much to adjust mentally. But atleast we bought a good solid reliable Toyota Auris. With the amount of feet on seats and food eaten in the back seat by our son, we are happy it does not break our heart when it gets dirty! S always compares this to her first lovely Toyota Corolla where nobody was permitted to eat, ever, for 11 years. Apart from the occasional coffee, which was always drunk half-way at the drive through window, to ensure no spillage in the car, there was limited drinks as well. How much changes when a child shows up!! Little dirt monsters make their way into our hearts.

Anyways, like we said above the two bouts of Noro virus and resultant diarrhea kicked our ass for two weeks, with about three weeks of normalcy in between. Atleast the weather was lovely while the son was throwing up the whole day. It resulted in a reset of a lot of hard learnt sleep habits (i.e., sleep independently) and clinginess (i.e., God forbid if mommy leaves his sight to get a sip of water), which have left us feeling just mentally exhausted. Thankfully, one of the local parks we frequent has a restaurant and bar. And due to UK’s open carry policy drinking near the slide is ok! So we have normalized a drink at 3pm on a Sunday while our son plays with a friend. Someone with an older child will need to comment if this gets better over time.

And K’s parents visited us, for three months July through September. At some point, we will write a blog post on this very Indian (or Asian from what we have seen) mentality of visiting for 3-6months. Enough said for now.