What do brand new parents really need... besides sleep?
Last week, a buddy of mine from work and his wife welcomed their first child into their life.
They will never sleep again.
Wait. You can do this now? I'll take one that is healthy and sleeps through the night please.
Not only is Steve my friend, he is also one of my teaching assistants. He works one-on-one with a student with pretty severe physical needs. Because my mom always taught me to "take care of the people who take care of you", I want to get him a nice and thoughtful gift.
Here's the thing, I know he had a baby shower months before. Because he has a lot of family and friend, I'm sure he has one thousand "onesies", two tons of stuffed animals, a dozen activity mats, and enough Dr. Suess books to fill a library. He's not rich but I know he has all of the necessities (diapers, clothes, food) covered.
This is the greatest book ever written. It's even better when read by Samuel Jackson... but Steve's English teacher wife might not approve.
I thought about what my wife and I needed the most when we had our first child. The answer to that was pretty simple. We owned half of a million of those little cloth towels... but we could have used ten million.
Man babies are messy!
There is constantly something coming out of one end of their tiny little bodies. Their mess to body weight ratio is something like 10 billion to 1. How one miniature human being manages to create that much muck is more baffling than trying to figure out this n^2 + 2400n, where n is MVESTS with 100% voting power.
I made a helpful graph:
Event though I know it will be useful, I don't think I want to be "that guy" who gave the new parents a bag of rags.
I want to get them something unique.
So I thought, 'What do parents want the most?"
Sleep!
Ok I can't help with that.
Back to the drawing board. "What do parents want the second most?"
Time
Nope. Can't give that either.
How does the human race not go extinct? Oh yeah making babies is fun!
I thought about just offering my babysitting services, but many new parents simply don't feel comfortable or don't have the energy to leave their babies.
So I figured I could give them something to save them a little time.
It may seem like an odd baby gift, but I was thinking of giving them a gift card for a local restaurant that delivers. I figure it could save them an hour or two of preparing meals for a few days. Plus the smell of good food will cover up the baby smell for a little while. Yeah new baby's skin smells wonderful... but nothing else they touch does.
What do you think?
Humility! Until we have our first kid, we're perfect parents and have all the answers. We get progressively worse as parents the longer we do it, even if we become more effective. ;) The first people we go to for answers are peers, the last are the ones who've actually completed the cycle. Oh how much time I would have saved if I had asked mature adults about parenting rather than thinking I would show them how to do it right with my infinite pre-paternal knowledge! ;)
Since that's hard to package, how about a basket of cryptocurrencies in a new account? It's a good start on a "launch into life" fund (since college is becoming less and less helpful).
That is a perfect answer! Oh yeah I was the exact same way. I read books and talked to friends. My mom would have been a good start. But then again, she raised me... look how that turned out.
But the cryptocurrency ting is a great idea. If someone had given my daughter bitcoin when she was born it would have paid her college tuition. So steem it is!!!
You could set up a BlockPay or Open Ledger account and buy a little of several different coins. A piece of ETH, Dash, BTC, Steem, Golos, ICN, Golem, etc. Then it's diversified and SOMETHING is likely to go up decently within the next 18 years. As long as all the files are backed up and saved redundantly, and Open Ledger (or whomever) doesn't disappear, access shouldn't be an issue.
A Jaxx wallet would be good for some of them, but is pretty limited (and doesn't support Steem yet).
Just brainstorming...
This is brilliant!
Just thinking about this some more... seems like there's some sort of account that can be set up for kids that isn't taxable for one time withdrawals. It was for college purposes, but the details are eluding me.
If it exists, you could set that up and then put the exchange account in it, probably.... kinda like a self-managed IRA. Also, you might be better using Poloniex because they have a lot of diversity and will be required by regulators to provide cryptos to customers at a later date.
The fact that it's under US jurisdiction makes it unattractive otherwise, for many of us. But for this purpose, it might be prudent. If you trust an exchange somewhere else more, of course, that might avoid any SEC and future law hassles that we can't even imagine yet. :s
More brainstorming...
Is it a 529?
But I really like the crypto idea. It also adds some "fun" to the gift.
They really need patience, fortitude and love in buckets...upvoted...
I agree 100%. Now how do I wrap that up...
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I think that restaurant-delivery idea is the best. When my baby was born last year, making food just felt so unreasonably hard!
Downvoted to reduce large self-voting SG reward that is being deceptively hidden by voting after first payout, especially when the ability to view 30 day trending posts was removed from the UI.
I consider this to be intentional abuse that is unfortunately being enabled by accounts owned by members of the development team in order to allow a favored few to scam rewards. It is sad to see that Steemit has come to this.
Response on the matter from the author, with which I don't agree.
I did all the while still helping to reward hundreds of content creators every day.
Who am I abusing besides myself?
Hundreds, or maybe thousands, of posters and curators who earned less as a result of you allocating rewards to yourself.
The entire community and platform by attempting to do so in a non-transparent manner and therefore contributing to a reputation of the system being set up and operated in a corrupt manner, including with the involvement of the dev team.
There are at least 20,000 posts from hundreds of authors that earned significantly higher rewards because of my work over the past few months.
I can't agree that is the case on net, even assuming you have voted on an average of 200 posts per day, which I doubt.
It is honestly true. There was a time during Winter Break that I was actually on about 14 hours per day. I didn't even take off any of the Holidays. I wanted to help people. I didn't want to let them down. I didn't want them to spend part of their holiday writing and then for it not to be rewarded. It may seem unbelievable but I assure you it is 100% true. I know these are just words on a screen but I am being honest.
I did not see the second paragraph when I originally responded. This had nothing to do with me trying to avoid being transparent. I simply did not want to dominate the trending page. I am just a guy who is trying to help regular people and the platform in general. Some people seemed upset that I was on trending all the time so was trying to find a way to avoid being on trending. I'm honestly not looking to dupe or scam anyone. I even took fewer rewards in an attempt to do this.
Hey man, I saw this video on Fascistbook and knew you needed to see this, it is about 15 seconds, you can trust the link, I do not want to spoil this for you friend.
https://www.facebook.com/onlyincanada1867/videos/1003643563154450/?hc_ref=NEWSFEED