Audrey is really starting to read more and more, and is starting to sound out words that she doesn’t have memorized by just hearing the same book 100 times. Owen is flipping himself over and starting to army crawl. And babbling up a storm! When it was just Audrey and I at home alone, I hadn’t really figured out the whole how to talk to something that doesn’t talk back thing, so she grew up in a very quiet world. Our doc had us bring her in some time after her first birthday to check her hearing since she wasn’t making any moves towards talking. Owen’s world is much louder, crazier, more boisterous … and he definitely wants in on the conversation.

Finance-wise, everything is in … well, let’s not call it turmoil due to negative connotations, though it is the first term that came to mind. Let’s call it “in flux.” Andrew loves his new job, and we’re still in the process of figuring out our new insurances, new savings plans, the whole shebang. We’re sitting on a junkload of cash, but that’s only because we’re still squatting at my parents’ house.

Actually, living at my parents’ house is not the nightmare that it could very well be. The weirdest thing for me is not being in my own space. I’ve been a stay-at-home mom now for almost three years, and it’s weird being in another mom’s [my own mom's!] domain all day. Not my kitchen, not my pantry. Not my fridge! I’m doing a fair amount of the cooking, but my parents’ have, let’s say, a different palette than we do. But we’re finding common ground.

Thankfully, this is a problem that you can help — though not completely alleviate — by throwing money at it.

I’ve managed to scrounge up a neighborhood girl who can come by once or twice a week for 3 hours and for 5 dollars an hour, she’ll play with my 2 and a half year old while I tend to the newborn, or if by the grace of God he is sleeping, I can take a shower or do laundry or something, anything.

There are no other babysitters in our neighborhood that haven’t already turned me down for being too busy, so I also occasionally hire a post-partum doula 1-2x a week for 4 hour shifts on weeks that the babysitter can’t help, and she’ll handle one or both kids, or do housework for me. That’s 15 dollars an hour.

I usually end up having some sort of help twice a week. So it’s not cheap, that’s for sure. But I keep reminding myself that there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. And I just have to keep myself sane until we get there.

*** At least I can look to Audrey’s example to know that he’ll grow out of it. He’s already starting to, thank God.

Finance-wise, things have been uneventful. We haven’t yet received our portion of the bill for the birth, but it’ll be biggish, because our midwife is “out of network” [as if our insurance had "in network" midwives ... ] and it’s early enough in the year that we haven’t chipped much away yet on our yearly deductable. On the upside, we’ve been squirrelling money away into our HSA this year, so it’ll at least be paid in pre-tax dollars.

Unfortunately, like last time, I’m in the midst of post-partum depression, and I’m just hunkering down and waiting for it to pass.

The children are, of course, as beautiful and awesome as usual.

With that in mind, our meal plan this week is primarily out of the pantry and cleaning out the vegetable crisper of what we already have:

• Sunday: Gnocchi with Pesto and Turkey Sausage & green salad [It was very yummy, and Andrew's getting the leftovers for lunch tomorrow.]
• Monday: Pot Roast with Carrots and Mashed Potatoes
• Tuesday: Chicken Souvlaki Bowl
• Wednesday:  Penne with Blue Cheese Pesto, Walnuts and Asparagus
• Thursday: Baked Taco Chicken and Broccoli
• Friday: Thai Roll-ups or Vietnamese Chicken Salad [depends on whether I'm willing to go get a cabbage for the salad]
• Saturday: Low-fat Hamburger Gravy on Whole Wheat Biscuits and Broccoli

With this menu plan, I should be able to avoid going to the grocery store all week, though we will run out of green leafies pretty early in the week. 

[Update on previous post about Audrey's sickness: She's better now, thankfully.  She was able to feel better enough around 7:30am to go back to sleep until about noon.  She's been pretty normal since she woke up.  I, however, am a zombie.]

We have a spare folding mattress-like thing that we put out on the floor of the playroom … but this time I heard her stomach start to gurgle, so I managed to get her onto the tile floor before she got sick again.  

Hey, it’s not every day that you get to wear 4 different pairs of jammies!  [And, well, the night's not over yet.  Heh.]

So we’re up now, and she’s watching a "Special DVD" [as she calls it] and eating bread while Andrew and I veg out and do laundry until we think it’s passed for good.

I’m so tired I don’t think I can even find a way to make this relate to personal finance.  Make sure to have a lot of beds? 

[ ... I hope I don't go into labor this morning ... ] 

As a result, I’m not terribly attached to "place" — I am definitely a "home is where you hang your hat" kind of person and there’s not a whole lot my externalities can do to make me happy or miserable.  I have few needs: I don’t want an intrusive environment, and I don’t want things to be inordinately expensive.  The rest is gravy.  [The only place I ever felt like I had to flee was San Francisco.  See my criteria.]  Texas is fairly low cost, and while it isn’t quite the free-wheeling live-and-let-live of the New Hampshire of my youth, it’s close enough.  Heck, with the rise of the Internet, I don’t even require a good bookstore in town anymore.  [Nonetheless, we have them in spades here in Austin.]

Now that I have kid[s] of my own, I wonder about all this in a different light.  Are we going to move around?  Since we’re homeschooling, that would make some transitions easier for them, though it wasn’t that big of a deal for me when we moved mid-school year.  But I guess I don’t think moving was really terribly "traumatic" at all.  My core family was stable and it gave me the opportunity to meet lots of different kinds of people in different types of cities and neighborhoods in different parts of the country.  It certainly taught me not to be provincial in my thinking, and it’s hard for me to get to worked up over insular group/regional pride once you’ve "been around," so to speak.

Then there’s the personal finance angle, though since I’ve only owned a home in two of these locations, it hasn’t always been that big of a deal.  When I was just renting, it was pretty easy to decide to pull up stakes and go if I was going somewhere that offered a job making more money.  [Though it was kind of a cosmic joke to make 30% more in SF than Seattle but have a lower standard of living.]

Last night was the pop quiz.

[Audrey is doing fine.  The offending piece of strawberry has been dealt with.]

I only took the course because I would have felt guilty to not take it.  It’s not the sort of thing that I’m interested in or terribly good at, for that matter.

What I’m trying to say is that if you’ve never taken First Aid before, either because you always forget to, or you’re busy, or you’re not interested, do it anyways!  You never know when you’re going to need it.  Twenty five dollars and a 3 hour course over 3 years ago saved my daughter’s life last night.

 I keep a notepad by the computer in the kitchen all week long, and as I think of things or as we start to run out of items, I add them to the list.  My brain just won’t keep that sort of thing in memory for very long anymore, I have to write it down right away or it’s gone.  Then the night before I go shopping, I select a menu for the week either based on what’s on sale wherever I’m going to do my primary shopping, or what’s in the freezer, or what we have to use up.  I have almost all of the recipes I use on a regular basis on the computer, so if I’ve got sour cream that’s going to go bad, I can just search on "sour cream" or whatnot and find a selection of recipes to choose from.

 I used to jot everything down that I needed to buy and then rearrange the list by where it is in the store, but that was a pain and only marginally useful because my lists are usually so small.  [Every week is pantry/freezer challenge week at our house!]  Now what I do is bunch things together by recipe and mark a line between bunches.  This way if I get to the store and they don’t have one of the items for that recipe, or if the quality of an item is particularly subpar, I can easily tell which other items to not buy.

The most important thing that I do to make shopping easier, though, is keep our toddler at home with my husband while I shop.  I used to always bring her with and get it done during the week, but, man, it’s so much easier to do it alone.  I tend to go early in the morning on a weekend before it gets crowded, but even if I go when it’s mobbed, it’s still my only child-free time for the week so it feels like a vacation nonetheless.

I spent more money up there than I usually do at home — but, these days, I spend very little money at home, so that’s not too big of a surprise. I’m enjoying getting back in the swing of things here.

Case in point, a relative of mine wants to go out to eat or go shopping with me while I’m here visiting. Multiple times a week. She has suggested a few other activities, all involving going out and spending money. Instead, I’ve suggested she come over here, let’s make some lunch, talk, whathaveyou. She has apparently had about enough of that. Heh.

For the first year after Audrey was born, one of my pre-mother friends [ironically, a woman from my birthing class, so she had a kid that was only a month older than mine] who only wanted to get together at a restaurant for lunch, as well. No great shock, we drifted and I haven’t even talked to her in almost a year. She rarely wanted to take up any of my non-restaurant suggestions.

I mean, I don’t believe in having an austere life, or never having fun or never getting out. But both of these folks were as insistent about going to a restaurant as I was resistant to it.

There are three issues for me. First, I’ve always been somewhat of a homebody, though those feelings have intensified since I became a mother, and they’ve really exploded since I’ve been pregnant again. I am wholly uninterested in being around large groups of other people, especially folks I don’t know. Second, I realize this may be a passe notion these days, but I don’t like bringing babies/toddlers/etc into adult spaces. Audrey is astonishingly well-behaved for a 2 year old, but that doesn’t mean she isn’t unpredictable and doesn’t ever fuss. Folks pay good money at most restaurants, in movie theaters and the like and I don’t understand why parents — particularly of my generation — think it’s okay to bring their kids into adult spaces where there is a reasonable expectation of not being disturbed. Finally, of course, is the cost issue. What used to seem to me a totally reasonable sum of money to spend on lunch now seems like a big waste and opportunity cost.

I’ve gradually shifted my social life to spend time with folks who are on the same page as me in this arena. On the upside, most stay at home moms with toddlers that I meet tend to not want to blow money, and tend to not want to deal with the “will they or won’t they?” stress of bringing a toddler into a restaurant. So we’ll meet at one or another’s house, and if someone gets fussy or melts down … who cares? We’re all going through the same thing.