Educating the Wheelers

Nothing like waking up at 3:30 in the morning to your 2 year old throwing up on you.  She hasn’t been sick like that since her baby spit-up days passed, and the poor girl was scared, didn’t know what was going on.  But she was so brave!  Endured a shower with Mama and new jammies and crawling into the guest bed downstairs … which she promptly also threw up in.  Another shower, more jammies.

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 … ] 

We moved around a lot when I was a kid.  My dad wasn’t in the military, he just had the itch and had to scratch it.  I used to joke that we didn’t go on vacation, we moved.  [His father was a carpenter, so they went where the work was.  He probably went to 20 different schools before he was out of the 8th grade.]  I’ve moved a few times in the 13 years or so since I left my parents’ house.  Let’s see: Olympia, Tri-Cities, Seattle, San Francisco, Sunnyvale and Austin.  And sometimes more than one place within those towns.

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.]

The stereotypical "nesting" instinct has kicked in for me, big time, not always in completely rational ways. 

Filling the freezer of heat-n-eat foods for after the wee one is born, that makes sense.  Getting plenty of diapers and wipes and cream and milk freezer bags and whatnot, okay, those make sense, too.  Cleaning out the "nursery" and crib and stuff, even though we never even used them for our first child … well, okay.  Sure.

Some of the other things I’m feeling driven to do?  Not quite so much sense.

Now, even when I’m not pregnant, I’m somewhat apocalyptically minded and make sure we have 2 weeks worth of water and at least a month or so’s worth of food and other household provisions stored up.   [I’m not Mormon — which is obvious, otherwise I’d have a year’s worth! — but  I do think they have some good ideas on self-reliance in emergencies.]   Lately, though, our pantries have been looking a wee bit little crazier than normal.  I’m sure the National Soy Sauce Council salutes me, but perhaps we don’t need quite so many bottles in the closet…?

There’s good survival-reasoning in wanting to have everything stockpiled before the new one comes, so I’m not going to knock it.  It would be totally just my luck to have an otherwise very unlikely avian flu outbreak occur right around the end of April/beginning of May.

But maybe we wouldn’t need quite so much mustard to get through it

Now that we’re in the waning days of this pregnancy, it’s been harder and harder to do anything more strenuous than sitting down with my feet up.  [Not that I can even tell where my feet end anymore, I lost my ankles last weekend.]  I am figuring out real quick which frugal habits are well-ingrained and not going anywhere, and which ones will be jettisoned at the first speedbump.  [Well, the ninth-month speedbump.]

I’m still hanging up all the laundry rather than just tossing it in the dryer.  I made some homemade biscuits and gingerbread from scratch this week, but instead of filling the freezer with homemade heat and eat meals for post-birth, I just picked up some pre-made meals from Sam’s Club.

And blogging has gone straight out the window.  Heh.

About three years ago, when I was pregnant with Audrey, I took an infant/child First Aid/CPR course offered by a local fire department.

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’d run with my hammer, and trip in the pile of leaves!

(Anyone know how to get pfblogs.org to not aggregate personal posts?  ) 

Free Money Finance has a post today about using a shopping list at the grocery store.  I was going to comment there but realized I actually had a fair amount to say on the matter.  You wouldn’t think there was that much to say but like Walt Whitman, I contain multitudes.

 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’m about 32 and a half weeks pregant now, so I need to get moving on getting things ready for the little guy.

I’ve been on the lookout for good deals on diapers [I decided not to switch to cloth for this guy, though I kicked it around for awhile], so I’ve got a bit of a stash already. All other diaper changing gear [wipes, cream, rags, etc], we already have plenty of since Audrey is still in pull-ups.

I haven’t ordered a Medela parts kit for my old pump yet, and I need to do that. That’s about 25 bucks. I know you can reuse the parts with yourself, but I gave my pump a thorough thrashing before Audrey could finally attach at three months, and looking at the old thing … it just doesn’t feel like even a thorough boiling and sterilization procedure is going to make it feel clean again. Oh, and I’m going to need new milk freezer bags, too. That’ll be about 17 bucks. Again, I’m paying more than I have to here, there are cheaper varieties, but these will hold up for 6 months in our deep freezer. So if we don’t need them in that time, I can donate them to the Mother’s Milk Bank, like last time.

I picked up a handful of “new” outfits for Little Guy at the thrift store in MN, practically brand new stuff for about a dollar a piece. Didn’t feel bad about that, though I’m sure I could have made do with Audrey’s unisex hand-me-downs.

The freezer is already full, but mostly with meal “parts” rather than completed meals. I’ll want to change that ratio a bit before he arrives, because I won’t want to be doing any cooking for awhile.

I think that’s really all that’s left to purchase. [I’m not counting the actual cost of the birth, etc.] Lots to do, but not lots to buy. That’s a plus.

Audrey and I are back home from our nearly month long vacation visiting my folks up in Minnesota. She got to play in snow and make her first snowman! [Also, her first igloo.] Very exciting for her since we almost never have snow in Texas.

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.

I haven’t always been frugal. It’s been percolating for awhile, but the actual implementation has been gradual. Because of the slow pace, I haven’t realized really how far I’d come, and somewhat unfortunately, how that might impact some other things in my life.

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.