Life skills

I saw a post on Facebook last night about the things (they used a naughty word) that all young adults should know how to do like check the oil in a car, change a tire, balance a checkbook, drive a stick shift, cook something more than mac-n-cheese, and basic first aid.  The premise was that these skills should be taught in a classroom.

Our premise is that parents should step up there, although I sort of dropped the ball on most of those things.  However, I did teach Princess how to balance her checkbook.  Created a monster there because when I balance my personal checkbook--not the farm books--if I am within $20 of what the bank says I have, I’m good with that.  Nope, she has to have it Down To The Penny.  

Princess operates mostly on a debit card, and she has saved every single receipt she has ever gotten since she first got her debit card back in high school.  That’s about five years’ worth of receipts!  Good for her, I say.  Not that I don’t save my receipts because you just never know when you might have to return something or get audited by the IRS, but hers are in chronological order.  That’s just a little bit crazy.

My poor children do not know how to cook anything more than mac-n-cheese or maybe tacos.  Not because I didn’t cook to give them an example.  No, it’s because in my house, I don’t like people in my kitchen when I am cooking.  You can sit on the other side of the snack bar and keep me company, but don’t get in my space please.  

Captain, on the other hand, viewed meal preparation as a family event and everybody had to help.  So, if my kids know how to cook anything, it’s due to Captain’s influence, not mine.  

Captain also taught the kids how to check the oil in their vehicles, same as my daddy taught me.  My daddy also taught me how to change a tire by making me take off and put on all four tires when I got my first car while he stood by and watched.  

That came in handy one day in college when I came out to find a flat tire on my car.  Apparently someone had gone through the parking lot and let air out of tires because just as I got done putting my spare on, three other people came over and asked if I would change their tires as well.  And, get this, two of them were GUYS!  I made $50 that day changing tires.  Thanks, Daddy!

The other thing that we drilled into our kids that they took to heart was the evils of credit cards.  They saw us get upside down on credit card debt when they were young and learned how painful it is to restructure a budget to pay all that off.  We all went without a lot of things (insert naughty word) during the four years it took to get that accomplished, so they are extremely aware of being responsible with their credit.  

As far as first aid goes, in this house, first aid usually involves the emergency room unless it’s just a shaving cut.  Captain learned after two or three trips with something stuck in his eye (cornstalks, piece of metal) that the emergency room uses the Life, Limb, Vision triage method, and if you are in danger of serious damage to or loss of one of those things, you get bumped to the top of the list.  

Young Man tended to be accident prone in his teenage years, so we spent many a-night in the emergency room with lacerations, contusions, broken bones, and an emergency appendectomy.  Young Man's trips to the emergency room started young when he was 2 years old and got into another daycare kid's bottle of Ventolin and chugged it like Kool-Aid.  Yeah, he was TOP of the list in the ER that day due to near-death circumstances.  Freaking scary times.

In comparison, Princess only had a couple of major events in the emergency room--one for getting teat dip (that’s a chemical solution applied to cow udders to kill bacteria) in her eye and once for the rabies vaccination series after getting chomped on by a neighbor’s dog with no vaccination papers.  Even though they don’t do the shots in the belly button for 12 days in a row anymore, that is still an extremely unpleasant experience!  However, she did spend a night in the hospital at six weeks old with an unexplained fever.  More freaking scary times.  Yeesh!

While practical skills of vehicle, finance, and health maintenance are essential and should be part of every one's wheelhouse, I hope we also taught our kids the more abstract life skills of honesty, hard work, mutual respect, and perseverance and that they will teach their kids those things as well.