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Luke's IEP just got moved to next month because he's met all of his speech goals. If they kick him out of the early childhood program, I probably won't even think about doing anything formal for education until he's like 8. Elementary education is for the birds.

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I'm not gonna say how old I am for personal security reasons, but I am way over 40. 40 is just a number. My input is that if you want to do a career change, do it! Really, 40 should be seen by society as your prime. Don't ever let someone, even yourself (perhaps ESPECIALLY yourself), tell you you are too old to change!

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He had one behavioral goal - to follow a verbal one-step directive by a teacher by complying within 10 seconds 70% of the time. That's something that we knew he could do anyway, but he was just so damn uncooperative during his evaluation that it then became a goal. So yay!

 

He still doesn't speak as clearly or quite as fluently as other kids his age, but he's way more verbally expressive than before. Of course, he'll also be turning 4 on Thursday, so some of his "improvements" are likely due to natural development and maturity. There's quite a leap from 3 to 4. I'm really curious to see if he still qualifies for the early childhood program at the school. He was never as delayed or disabled as most of the other kids in the program, but he qualified easily based on his abhorrent (and not reflective of our reality) evaluations. It was actually somewhat of a joke during our first IEP meeting because he was such a different child during the meeting than what they experienced during all 3 eval days. The school diagnostician even stopped in the middle of reading her report to jokingly comment to the other people there who weren't at the evaluation meetings that she was actually good at her job and swore that he "wasn't like this AT ALL!" We all just kinda laughed. I'd felt like one of those crazy, in-denial-about-her-child's-issues moms saying over and over "I swear he's not usually like this!" during the testing, so it was nice for them to see him be more like his regular self before he actually started school.

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So I did the math and I don’t know if it’ll be worth it to switch if I can’t stay with the state. It took me three years to get close to what I was making in the private sector, and developers have much higher earning potential than insurance adjusters, but the trade off is the pension. No Social Security, but a pension and a 457 (government version of a 401k). Based on savings from every other 401k rolled into my 457, and my pension, if I stay at my current job for the next 28 years and only get annual step raises, I’ll have a very comfortable retirement, and moving that money to a 401k or IRA would require massive savings increases, which would require higher than expected pay raises. It’s the downside of changing at 40, all of that stuff is much more real.

 

I’m not writing it off, and I’m still moving forward with my plans to learn and do whatever I can to prep myself for a career change, it’ll just be a lot harder to decide what to do. Ideally I could get a couple of years experience on my own, either working for pay or volunteering, and then get a job with the State and keep everything. It’s definitely possible, if there are openings, which is far from guaranteed. They have less growth and less turnover than the private sector.

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Yeah, I will look into doing it as a sideline and working on some of my own projects. I'm going to add Swift into my learning plan so I can also do iOS apps.

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Hey, it’s true. We can’t all have our dream job and make good money doing it.

 

Quality of life is important, but not just for today. Also gotta look at quality of life down the line. My wife will probably go back to work one our kids are older, but who knows how old? So I need to make sure that not only is my own retirement savings good, but also hers. My current plan is to retire at 67. If that happens, my wife will just be 60, and could easily have another 25-30+ years left, given family history, projected increase in life span, and her health. I need to make sure she’s cared for, and ensure we have money to eventually get into good nursing homes, if needed. I don’t want to trade a little more happiness at 45 for misery at 80.

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You could make coding a part time gig. Maybe. I dunno. Life is unpredictable but you want to do what makes you happier. Because quality of life should count. Not all of us can be Tank.

I'm offended.

 

My work here is done!

 

NO nursing homes EVER. That's my motto.

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Yeah I have bad news, there are no good nursing homes. Assisted living, yes. Skilled nursing, someone take me out back and shoot me first.

 

I love the work I do and make decent money. I just hate corporate America. But after watching my dad struggle with a small business, I'm stuck working for The Man because I like things like vacation and a 401k.

 

I had an amazing public school experience growing up. Unfortunately haven't had that experience with my kids. Not sure if its where I live (entirely possible, my husband tells me west coast education is terrible) or how badly we've messed it up in the last 20 years.

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I find it so weird that people think public education is bad now. We talk about that in my Masters class for math ed. What changed that this is like this?

 

Yeah, if you get old enough that you need a place to have assistance in your very OLD years, you better hope you have shit loads of money. Recently we took my Nan to look at facilities around Tucson. The only ones she liked with the amenities she wanted were close to 6 grand a month for her small three room apartment where they did laundry and she got three meals a day. We opted for home help and I have to help pitch in as her retirement and medicare don't cover all the costs. Her biggest thing is she won't budge on her out of network doctor so we have to pay an extra premium so she can keep the same doctor she's had for 40 years who never even sees her and she only gets nurse practitioners when she goes in. And she does not want a roommate at all.

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Yeah I have bad news, there are no good nursing homes. Assisted living, yes. Skilled nursing, someone take me out back and shoot me first.

 

There are some that are good. We've had family members in some, and many are horrible and sad, but a couple are good. They tend to be the ones that are attached to assisted living. You're mostly going there to die, so I guess they have that going against them.

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I find it so weird that people think public education is bad now. We talk about that in my Masters class for math ed. What changed that this is like this?

 

Yeah, if you get old enough that you need a place to have assistance in your very OLD years, you better hope you have **** loads of money. Recently we took my Nan to look at facilities around Tucson. The only ones she liked with the amenities she wanted were close to 6 grand a month for her small three room apartment where they did laundry and she got three meals a day. We opted for home help and I have to help pitch in as her retirement and medicare don't cover all the costs. Her biggest thing is she won't budge on her out of network doctor so we have to pay an extra premium so she can keep the same doctor she's had for 40 years who never even sees her and she only gets nurse practitioners when she goes in. And she does not want a roommate at all.

 

 

Yeah I have bad news, there are no good nursing homes. Assisted living, yes. Skilled nursing, someone take me out back and shoot me first.

 

I love the work I do and make decent money. I just hate corporate America. But after watching my dad struggle with a small business, I'm stuck working for The Man because I like things like vacation and a 401k.

 

I had an amazing public school experience growing up. Unfortunately haven't had that experience with my kids. Not sure if its where I live (entirely possible, my husband tells me west coast education is terrible) or how badly we've messed it up in the last 20 years.

 

 

 

Healthy or not, when I turn 75, I'm going out like Edward G Robinson, Soylent Green style.

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75??? fuck that's pretty young still you know.

 

According to my Oma, if you take care of yourself you shouldn't really feel much different at 75 from 65. She said she started to feel physically worsening from about 80. She's 86 now and going strong.

 

My plan is to get into heroin when I turn 90. The problem I think will be finding trustworthy whipper snappers to hook me up with good stuff.

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Some people embrace the cold death hands wrap of the nursing home and sink into it where they take care to make sure your alive enough to keep collecting checks to make money. And then there's people like my parents who are still traveling and building habitat for humanity houses and living in their house. My Dad and step-Mom are almost 80 and last year they danced at their granddaughters wedding until 12 am and then got up and went to Dallas to visit a friend the next day at 6 am and helped do all kinds of things. My mom in Arizona just lies and waits for death in a slow version of suicide and she's only 73.

 

Personally I'm looking forward to retirement and want to do a lot of things so I'm super saving for that and working on my health so I can do it and not have a heart attack and die less than a year after retirement.

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Spam, I think it's because I'm on the west coast. My husband grew up out here and went to private school K-6 and public 7-12. He said it was a total joke compared to his private school education. But I grew up just outside of Chicago where they have a super strong teachers union and my teachers made $90-100k in the late 90s. I did hear that most of my teachers were forced into early retirement so that they could hire younger, cheaper teachers.

 

Honestly, life has changed in 20 years. I don't remember people being so neurotic, stressed out, and crazy. You can't get people to volunteer anymore and most families have 2 working parents to make ends meet.

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Honestly, life has changed in 20 years. I don't remember people being so neurotic, stressed out, and crazy. You can't get people to volunteer anymore and most families have 2 working parents to make ends meet.

We manage pretty well on a single income, but I think we could do better. It's probably partially rose-colored glasses, but I think there's a lot to be said about not having cell phones and just having an antenna to watch stuff. Things were a lot simpler in a lot of ways, and some of that progress is good, but some of it is not.

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