There’s a line in an episode of The Simpsons where Mr Burns asks: ‘From the mightiest pharaoh to the lowliest peasant, who doesn’t enjoy a good sit?’ It’s funny because it’s true. Everyone, no matter who they are or where they come from, enjoys taking a load off now and then. Sitting literally is the great leveller.

Every civilisation had its own sitting rituals and furniture designed for a bit of sedentary action. The Aztecs might have missed out on inventing the wheel but they definitely figured out the chair. The history of sitting can interestingly be charted by looking at the various words for seats that we use today.

The word originates from the Middle English but it comes from the Old French noun couche, itself coming from the verb ‘to lie down’. A couche was originally designed as a long flat piece of furniture that one used for sitting on or lying down, equivalent to a more contemporary day bed.

The term sofa, however, has some slightly more exotic origins. It is believed to originate from the old Arabic word suffa, which was used to describe a carpet or divan. You can just imagine a Turkish living room from years gone by covered in rich silks and beautiful tapestries surrounding the soft and cushioned suffa. Sounds very comfortable and a great place to relax. If we could recreate that kind of space, even to a small degree, today with sofas in our living room or with luxurious duvets then they would be nice places to spend time.

The word settee is believed to have come from the old English word setl which described a long bench with a high back. It doesn’t sound quite as comfortable as the couche or the suffa but then we Brits are all about stiff upper lips, aren’t we?

These days, sofas, couches and settees are all very similar. There really isn’t anything to distinguish between them. The only difference is the word that we choose to give them and that really depends on which you are most comfortable with.

Still, the next time you are sitting on you couch, sofa or settee, spare a though for the Arabian princess sitting on her suffa, the old English country squire on his set or the French philosopher reclining on his couche. The sofa ties us all together with the peasants and the pharaohs.

This is a guest post provided by Sainsbury’s. Their fantastic range of household furniture covers an impressive selection of corner sofas; take a look at their collection online today.

I thought it would be fitting to share my thoughts on The Fatherhood given this is a dad blog and all!  I couldn’t help but laugh at all the parallels in this video compared to my life as a dad.  The video opens with mum putting the kids in the back seat for dad to drive them around for a while to put them to sleep.  I can totally relate to trying to keep the kids from a) crying in the back of the car, but then b) once they start crying, trying to calm them down and maintain my sanity while driving. Thirdly, this poor chap is in desperate need of some peace and quiet and sleep and none of that’s going to happen until those kids are asleep.  I personally know many new parents that literally drive their kids around the block trying to get them to sleep.  Now, how much petrol is consumed in the process, I’ll never know, but I’ll tell you, the cost of silence and sanity?  Priceless!

So, the setting here is an old-style 80s song with the requisite horribly dressed 80s band in the background and some of the lines are absolutely priceless.  Any video with a unicorn is bound to be funny, but the dad starts reciting various experiences we can all relate too – lack of sleep, vomit on his shoulder, wondering if he’ll turn into his father! (I totally have, I hate to admit it).  Some of the scenes have him questioning his own sanity, surely due to lack of sleep and well, I’ll let you watch the video to see how it ends.

In this case, the video is professionally done and brought to you by Fiat, so you’ll probably see this going viral in the next few days.

Take a look and surely you’ll see the parallels!

So, we hosted the dreaded boys’ sleepover this past weekend and it was one for the record books.  We’d hosted one last year where they were probably in bed by 1 AM.  Evidently, at another house, the parents let the kids stay up until 4Am, so a new benchmark was set.  This time around, the kids all had in their mind that they had to exceed this prior record for sleepovers amongst their peers.  I was unaware of this until about 2AM when they were wired and jumping around with no intention of going to sleep.  Here’s what our night consisted of:

• Arrive 8PM
• Play with toys, Legos, Wii and talk until 9:30PM
• Watched Avengers (with them) on the big screen projector in the basement until midnight
• Snacks along the way
• Some more Wii until 12:30 AM, into bed
• 1:00 AM – lights off
• 1:30 AM – warnings to go to sleep
• 2:00 AM – pleading with them to go to sleep
• 2:30 AM – yelling at them to go to sleep
• 3:00 AM -final threat that I’m separating them all and they’re not coming back
• 3:30 AM – finally fell asleep
• 7:30 AM – our youngest daughter up.  GREAT!

Needless to say, it wasn’t a very productive Sunday.  I still got a job in somehow.  But I’m wondering if this is now par for the course that kids think they’re always going to stay up until all hours when there’s a sleepover.  It pretty much wrecks them for the next day, as well as the parents.  I don’t recall staying up that late when I was a kid.  But now I sound like an old fart myself.

What’s Been Your Experience? 

Boys Ranged in Ages from 7-9.

After a few years off from weddings once all our highschool and college friends were married, we hit a new spate of weddings this past year with second marriages and our neighbors’ kids getting married.  So, as a dad who will inevitably be attending my own kids’ weddings in the future, I had some random musings on the one we just attended and weddings in general:

• Who Pays?  This is a point of stress for us, even while our kids are still in elementary school!  We weren’t aware of any financial issues for this particular wedding, but the one before it on my inlaws’ side had some issues.  Evidently, the groom’s parents had initially agreed to kick in some money for the wedding and then when time came to settle up, they had a change of heart.  This is such a sensitive and confusing topic.  On one hand, tradition used to hold that the bride’s parents paid for the wedding.  That seems a bit outdated and one-sided these days, so it isn’t always the case any more.  In the case of my wife and I, we paid for the wedding completely ourselves, but each set of parents gave a nice gift (ON the wedding day) which helped offset our costs.  But we didn’t get into any pre-wedding bickering over finances and who pays.  We now wonder, with 2 sons and 1 daughter, will our sons end up marrying into a family where they expect equal funding from bride and groom, and then when our daughter gets married, it’s expected that by tradition we pay?  We could kind of get the bill on al 3 in a worse case scenario.  Ideally, we’d have our kids handle it the same way we did – kids pay, parents give a generous gift.  But kind of like college, first cars, first home and so many other things these days, kids don’t seem capable of affording things that prior generations did.  Inflation, lack of high paying jobs at graduation, etc.  So, who knows; I’d like to think money will be the furthest thing from everyone’s mind on the special day.

• Religious Ceremony?  Everyone’s entitled to their own beliefs; I just happen to have a rather minority opinion on creationism, religious beliefs, etc.  Let’s just say I’m a scientist and a very objective person.  So, much of what I hear from the pulpit just sounds so implausible, sexist and 17th century to me that it’s tough to take seriously.  So, at this weekend’s wedding, the religious leader of some sort (not sure what he was exactly) was talking (literally, not figuratively) about how woman was borne of Adam’s rib bone and all that good stuff (the original Adam and Eve story) and he closed with her giving him children and helping him be “the man the Lord meant him to be”.  There was no mention of, well, her becoming the woman she could be and to me, it seemed a bit premature to start pushing kids on someone on their wedding day.  Heck, give them some breathing room to enjoy a few years together first!  Anyway, it made me think back to how a Catholic priest said some pretty rude and outrageous stuff on our wedding day and how we then gave me a dirty look when I “only” tipped him $50 because I was pissed.  Personally, I think some of the real preachy and overly religious ceremonies only detract from a wedding celebration and don’t enhance it.  I’ve personally enjoyed the speeches that are more fun and inspirational in nature as opposed to pushing a religious agenda.  What my kids decide will be up to them, but I certainly won’t push for a religious opening of any sort.

• Open Bar – I have to say, the DJ, the food and the drinks make or break a wedding.  In the case of my wife and I, since we were paying and we were young (the first of all our friends and family of our generation to get married), we ended up having open beer/wine, but people had to buy their own mixed drinks.  We had heard all these horror stories from our parents about open bars costing the bride and groom thousands and thousands of dollars at the end of the night.  We thought having alcohol supplied in some manner was a suitable compromise.  I drank beer this whole past wedding (since my wife was sick and agreed to drive – score!) so it made no difference to me; but I did notice most other people were slamming down the mixed drinks.  So, I wonder what sort of impact having free mixed drinks has on the “fun” to be had at a wedding.

What Are Your Thoughts on Weddings, Finances and Ceremonies as a Parent or Parent-to-be?

In recent weeks, there has been a lot of talk in the presidential election cycle about 47% of Americans that don’t pay federal taxes.  Most recently, Republican candidate Romney was secretly recorded where he highlighted this number of Americans that don’t pay federal taxes and that they are likely to vote Democratic and rely on the government.  Without getting into politics directly here, I thought I’d just share some objective facts about what he is referring to, the different taxes people pay in the US and how it might influence your opinion in future tax policy decisions and voting.

• The 47% – It is true that in recent years, an increasing number of Americans do not have a federal tax liability at the end of the year.  While they may have been paying taxes out of their paycheck throughout the year, come refund time, the deductions and credits afforded to them through the tax code are high enough that they offset any taxes paid and get a full refund.  47% is about half the country; in prior years the number was lower, but the trend is increasing.  There are various reasons for this ranging from higher unemployment to an aging population to recently enacted tax provisions allowing deductions and credits.  The mix of these various factors seems to push the number up each year.  One oft-cited argument against why this is a bit misleading is that Americans pay all sorts of other taxes.  This is true, and for people that don’t have a high income, the share of their income going to these taxes is quite high!  For instance, if you’re making $30,000/yr but paying $10,000 a year in all the other types of taxes below, that’s a full third of your income, whereas a millionaire might only be paying a much smaller portion of their income, even if they spend $50,000 on taxes.
• Payroll Taxes - This is a fixed tax that comes out of your paycheck and is paid by both the employer and employee.  The payroll tax goes to fund Social Security payments, so in theory, you’re just paying into a system that will pay you back in retirement.  It’s tough to argue that these taxes benefit someone else since it’s supposed to be net neutral and you should get out what you put in based on a calculation on how much you made during your career.
• State and Local Taxes - Most people end up paying state taxes based on their income and don’t get the same credits and deductions that the federal income system allows.  So, people that make less money end up spending a higher portion of their payroll on state and local taxes.  These taxes pay for everything from local roads to schools.
• Sales Taxes - State sales taxes are based on your consumption, so again, since people that don’t make as much money still need to buy gas, pay cable bills and other expenses that have a sales tax, they end up spending a higher portion of their income than rich people on taxes.

In all, the main reason fewer people are paying the federal income tax is not necessarily their fault; it’s just the way the tax system is structured and reflects the greater number of people without high paying jobs.  If the jobs situation were to improve and the government peeled back some deductions and credits, that number of Americans paying the federal income tax would increase.

This past week we were at the shore on our annual trip and we always like to break up the routine of staying on the beach all day with some memorable activities for the kids. In years past, we’ve gone to the Cape May Zoo, rented family bikes to ride around, went dolphin-seeing on a boat, or one year, we saw a “Walking with Dinosaurs” show over in Atlantic City while we were in the area. Now that they’re getting older, I thought I’d take them crabbing.

I hadn’t gone crabbing for about 25 years since I was a kid. I remember my dad waking us up at about 5AM to make the 2.5 hr drive down the shore to get an early start to jam crabbing, the beach and the boardwalk all into one day trip. Those were some great times, but having the house down here for a full week certainly makes for the ability to spread things out a bit more.

So, first off, I researched a few places where you can rent a boat for crabbing. Some of the reviews I saw referred people to where you could crab under a bridge or off a dock, but I always liked the ability to drive the boat around and try out different places, especially if the land options were crowded. We found a good place with 4 hour rates and then also rented out lines, cages, life vest and sold bait. It was really a one-stop shop.

My kids are animal lovers so as odd as it may sound, even though we had a good time and caught a few crabs, we just let them go again and didn’t take any home, which is what 99% of the rest of the people are there to do. They really enjoyed being out there on the boat and the thrill of catching the giant crustaceans. The only regret is that I didn’t bring the fishing polls this year. Next year, I’d like to try fishing off the boat as well, as they’ve never gone salt water fishing and they’d probably get a kick out of the various strange looking fish you catch here as opposed to the typical fresh water bass or sunny.

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Contrary to popular belief amongst a lot of guys my age, dancing can be quite rewarding and is very much mainstream for boys these days. I would know. My 6 year old is Mr. Hip-Hop around the house. It’s pretty funny; I don’t know where he gets it from, but he’s real into whatever hot pop song is out there each month and he loves dancing. He liked it so much so that my wife ended up signing him up for a hip-hop class at the local dance studio and the class was packed with boys ranging from 5-10 years old. He had this really fun recital where they had some funky childrens dancewear and did a choreographed routine. The parents went nuts, it was great.
This year, coincidentally, at my older son’s school event, they brought in a popular hip-hop teacher to do a whole demonstration for the school about hip-hop through the ages. The show was great and it brought back some funny memories from break dancing, the robot, and other moves I used to see and do as a kid.
While a lot of dads think their sons should only be playing football and doing “cool kid/tough guy” activities, the reality is that a lot of parents push their kids into activities they don’t really enjoy and that’s a shame. My middle son who’s in dance now does baseball, soccer and basketball as well, but this is something recreational that he enjoys which is unique to him in our family and gives him a different outlet and experience compared to organized competitive sports.
I remember as a kid (and to this day), I can’t really dance. It’s not my thing. I don’t like it, I don’t like how I look ridiculous, etc. My wife is polar opposite and loves to dance. At weddings and parties, she’s out there dancing away and I’m standing in a corner drinking beer or talking to the other stiff guys like me about how we hate dancing. I’m glad my son’s getting the confidence and skills to be able to dance; it certainly won’t hurt with the ladies when he’s older either.

Many people have grown weary of the stock market with all its volatility and constant scandals from major companies (witness the recent LIBOR manipulation scandal in the press).  Therefore, people with funds to invest are often looking to diversify into new asset classes or types of investments.  Sometimes, this just means a new tilt on existing investments, but using leverage or stock options; other times it means entirely new asset classes.  Here are some thoughts you might want to consider:

We’ve been paying for piano lessons for our oldest son for 2 years now.  We’ll probably continue to do so at least through middle school.  By the time he reaches high school, he’ll probably be inundated with sports, hobbies, girls or perhaps take up a new instrument like guitar.  Many people don’t bother with music for their children, and focus solely on sports or scholastics, but there’s plenty of evidence out there that starting to learn music at an early age develops certain regions of the brain that are helpful later in life for spatial recognition and other science/math-related studies.

Aside from potential early development, you also learn about math and most importantly, discipline.  Each week, the piano teacher expects him to have practiced a certain number of pages and master a piece to a certain level, which is akin to homework, writing papers and doing projects that he’ll have to contend with later in his academic career.  I’ve also personally enjoyed doing the lessons with him.  I used to play guitar as a teenager so I have a pretty good grasp of music and was able to pick piano up pretty quickly myself with a couple basic lessons alongside my son when he first started.  Now, somewhat comically, for his recitals, the teacher insists I do a duet with him up on the stage each year.  While I feel kind of goofy, my son really enjoys it and it’s something we do together.

As far as pricing, we end up paying $20 per lesson which is pretty cheap considering my parents used to pay $25 a lesson 20 years ago when I was playing guitar.  I drive him to the teacher and she’s a retired school teacher so I presume she’s doing it cash under the table.  Anyway, not everyone has the same outlet, so for instance, if you’re in the market for chicago piano lessons, there are plenty of options to choose from, but given that it’s a large city, expect to pay a bit more; we’re in a lower cost suburb in PA.  Regardless, in the grand scheme of things, from both a scholastic and discipline standpoint, I think piano lessons are well worth it.  Check out pianolessonsinchicago.com for more details.