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Yep – I’m a Joiner!
Exhausted Yet Still Going Strong!
I went to bed at ten last night. Before Randy went to the store. Then, I woke up at 7:30am (after a wonderful night’s rest) and he wasn’t in bed.
I freaked the hell out. Jumped up, practically ran through the house, only to find him making coffee in the kitchen.
The love-fest ensued 
Yesterday was a really busy day. We started off going to my midwife appointment (an hour drive, a fifteen minute appointment, an hour drive home *sigh*) the kids’ martial arts class, and then we went to Governor’s State to see Mags in a play. She was adorable and for being a five day (all day) drama program…I have to say she nailed the choreography! The girls were thrilled to see her and acted so great sitting (mostly) and watching the play. Then we went for ice cream and Abby almost fell into her bowl she was so tired. Everyone was great.
This morning is the farmer’s market, then Randy goes to take care of the grammas and I go to take the girls to Zoe’s birthday party. Another full day, and I just hope I make it through without collapsing.
At least we’re all having a busy and fun summer!
Allowance and Kids: Our Working Plan
Even though my kids are young, one of the things my husband and I talked about before the first one even came home with us was, “How are we going to teach this child to thrive in this society?”
While I totally realize there are about a billion things that can go horribly wrong through a child’s life, it’s still good to have a plan that changes than to have no plan at all.
So when I read the BlogHer post Why I’ll Be Paying My Kid for Chores I found myself really excited to know I’m not the only mom that’s thought this through.
Of course, I don’t totally agree with her plan, even though I think it will work out fine in her family. She is going to make the kid do chores and she will or won’t get paid based on how promptly and with what attitude she does those chores.
Here’s how our plan is different.
We are going to have a baseline minimum that each child has to do and does not get paid for.Then there will be a list of optional chores the children can choose to do (or not do) and get paid (or not paid) for the chores.
Why the difference?
Trying to teach that you help your family with the exact same chores that you are trying to teach your child how the world works and how money is made won’t work around here. I don’t understand it, therefore would not be good at explaining it to a child.
Plus, our girls are really competitive. If we have each child with an assigned chore (or two, or three, you get the idea) and then a list of “optional” chores and the price each one is worth next to it…I think my girls will compete pretty hard to make sure they have more than the other child. It will also reward the child that works faster and sooner. (That whole “early bird gets the worm” thing.)
If one child is saving up for something special, she may offer to do the other child’s main chores for money as well. I would love to know I’m teaching my kids how to subcontract work out.
So…how much money?
No clue. This is the big problem. My girls are 3 and 4, so it’s not like they need this right now. But it’s coming up soon and it’s a number I have to come up with. Not only figure out the price for each chore (based on difficulty and time it takes to finish vs. ick factor) but make sure if one kid does everything they aren’t going to get $50! It has to be appropriate from top to bottom.
I mean, I’m creating an economy here…I want to do it right….
What about credit?
This is a sticking point. I want to get the girls “pretend” credit cards so they can make a larger purchase and institute a very simple interest rate (like twenty-five cents a week or something) that will accrue. I’d rather create a fake system than wait until they have a real card – that way if they make a mistake when they are young they are only hurting their credit with me, not messing with their real credit report.
I’ll probably use one of those fake credit cards that come in the mail stuck to a credit offer. They look almost real but not real enough to get stolen.
Am I missing anything? (other than life stepping in and messing it all up LOL)
My Fantasy Life: Sewing
The “My Fantasy Life” series also includes homeschooling.
I just saw what may be the cutest thing ever on Etsy. I found the link through Adventures in Babywearing. Pillowcase dresses made out of old t-shirts. You really just cannot get any cuter than your little one running around with your old Lollapalooza shirt from back in the day in dress form, right? If you don’t have any cool, old t-shirts for five bucks more she will provide the t-shirt. What an easy way to give your kids cute, cotton dresses that look all retro.
When I see listings like that I start to think things like, “I could make that!” and “I need to get the sewing machine out of the attic!”
Because I could make something like that. It wouldn’t be as cute, and it wouldn’t have awesome edging around the arms or the bottom, but yeah, I think I could make something serviceable until I made a few and got better at it.
But then I think of how much time it’s going to take to even begin making something like that. A trip to the fabric store for ribbon or fabric to make the ties with, getting the sewing machine out of the attic, figuring out how the hell to make a dress from a t-shirt…you know, the stuff you need to know to make the dress.
My friend D makes beautiful baby blankets. They are perfect in every way and the last one I got even had this funky-awesome threaded ribbon through it. They are amazing. She should be selling them on Etsy…but they take hours and hours to make. If she were to make a profit based on how long a blanket takes it would cost at least $100 (that’s a guess on my part) – I mean you’d have to have super-human crochet skills to be able to make a blanket fast enough to make it cheap enough to make it enough of a value to make it worth doing.
So, instead of making my kids beautiful sundresses I go to the consignment shop and buy someone else’s dress and tell myself I’m being green by not buying new all the time.
But, sometimes, I really wish I’d just throw everything else aside so I could spend some time really learning how to make my daughters some beautiful outfits. You know, before they’re in school and just have to have the latest piece of crap all the other girls are wearing. The age where she’d rather drop dead in the middle of the street than wear something her mother made.
You know, unless I was so good I could make shirts so cute her friends were all jealous.
It’s my fantasy life, I can make shirts that cute if I want to….in my head.
I’m thinking the “My Fantasy Life” theme has a lot to do with priorities, time vs. money, and other kind of deep things that I usually avoid thinking about. Or maybe the part of my soul that wants to be a hardcore crunchy homeschooling, sewing, organic mama is just trying to have her day in the sun.
I Am A Sorta-Kinda Crunchy Mama
Sheena, from Mommy Daddy Blog, is one of my favorite mom bloggers.
She recently did a post (linked above) on ways that she’s a Crunchy Mama. We’re all a little crunchy in our own way, whether it’s getting organic fruit or bathing two kids at once…because we’re totally only doing that to conserve water…right? LOL
The point is you probably have some crunchy behaviors even if you’re not trying!
Here are some of the ways I’m crunchy:
- Me and the kids (and sometimes even Randy) drink kiefer (it might be keifer, but I just don’t have the energy to check in the fridge right now.)
- I drink goat’s milk, and the rest of the family drinks raw milk.
- Almost all of our fruits and veggies are organic. We have a garden in the backyard so pretty soon we’ll have organic, homegrown fruits and veggies to snarf down.
- Since it started getting warm, most of our meals have become “raw” – a.k.a. no cooking required.
- I cut my kid’s hair myself.
- We are buying a rain barrel for garden watering next weekend.
- We go to the farmer’s market (starting today, HA) so we are buying local as well as organic.
- I have a midwife for my homebirth – if she can’t get to my house in time I’ll be having an unassisted childbirth.
- We are selective with vaccinations and give them out on a schedule based on weight and age (Sadie is just too petite to jam a bunch of vaxes into all at once.) The goal is to be caught up by Kindergarten. Or 1st grade. Whatever. I have an awesome supportive doctor so either way won’t matter.
- My goal, every summer, is to keep my air conditioner on as little as humanly possible. Fans don’t use as much electricity as air conditioners do, plus, being cooped up in an air conditioned house contributes to allergies and other potential ickiness. Our windows are open and the fans are on. Other than that, get some iced tea and relax to cool down. I will probably break down sometime in August for a few hours a day – last year our highest electricity bill was $190. The year before (when we did not do this with the air) our highest bill was $360. Almost a 50% reduction. So it’s frugal and healthy (in my opinion.)
- Most of the children’s clothing in our house comes from the local consignment store. Why buy new when you can buy almost-new that preschoolers are bound to stain within a week anyway? LOL
- I’ll be wearing my new baby in a sling. I tried one out with a friend’s child and it was comfy!
- We eat whole wheat pasta.
- We co-slept with our girls until they slept through the night. When they slept through the night was also right about the time they would take over the bed and start trying to push us out. When I end up on the floor, my kid ends up in a crib. While I loved sleeping with my girls, I don’t think a 2 year old REALLY needs a king size bed to sprawl out on. Juuuust sayin’
- This is a little crazy, but my girls take a total of four vitamins a day. One Flinstones (when the bottle runs out we’re replacing it with something more … vegan) two calcium + vitamin D vitamins – one straight up vitamin D gelcap. My girls call the gelcap the “swallow vitamin” and they have been swallowing vitamins since they were 2yo without a problem.
- I take a total of (wait for it….waaaaaait for it….) 8 vitamins a day. A prenatal, a beta-carrotine, two vitamin d, a co-q-10, a lutein, a vitamin e, and a vegetarian DHA. When I am no longer pregnant I will cut down to one vitamin d and will probably continue taking the rest. Yes, I understand I am probably over-vitamined, but I’m okay with that. You can steal my pee and sell it on the black market if it makes you feel better about my wasteful vitamin hossing.
It’s funny, I have a long list but none of them seem particularly OMGreen you know? We don’t compost (yet) or do a lot of the other things I consider mandatory for being a really awesome dirty hippie.
Not that being an awesome dirty hippie is even my goal. I just want to create a life that if I saw it on a show or during some documentary I’d say, “Wow, I want to be like that!”
I don’t think it’s so wrong to try and turn your life into the one you’d want if someone else had it. Unless that’s just a twisted way to think about it.
Basically I don’t want a life others will be jealous of….I want a life *I* would be jealous of … and we’re well on our way there.
How are you crunchy?
My Fantasy Life: Homeschooling
One of the things I’ve been thinking about lately is homeschooling.
Mostly because I’m insane.
But today I had the idea for a co-op homeschool where five families get together and all the kids go to one house for school each weekday. This gives all the parents a chance to homeschool while giving all the families four days without kids. Kind of a best of both worlds strategy. Plus, if you’re only homeschooling one day a week you have time and energy to get a really great lesson plan together instead of trying to scramble it all together over the weekend.
The problem that I see happening is that I want to make a cirriculum for my kids that I don’t think matches any I’ve currently seen out there.
Let’s take math for an example.
Kindergarten – Learn about fractions and become comfortable with them through basic cooking/baking. Learn the names of pieces of money and what they are used for. (You know, concept and recognition stuff, no hard math yet.)
First Grade - Explore using fractions through the use of money and get deeper into the topic of finance. Buying, selling, adding, subtracting, fractions. (All through hands on training and examples.)
Second Grade - Concepts like interest, compounding, and more advanced finance topics. Maybe take them to the Chicago Board of Trade. Not so they can learn specific things, but so they can be overwhelmed by the awesomeness of the world economy.
Now, don’t get me wrong. There would be some globalization thrown in there – my husband is the geography whiz in this house – but the basic premise is first introduce the concept so they are working with something familiar, THEN teach them how to manipulate the familiar concept they’ve learned about.
If you know of a pre-existing homeschooling cirriculum that does things this way, please email me and let me know. I’d rather not create workbooks for the next year in addition to all the other stuff I’m already doing.
Using grades is just a guideline. Since if we do homeschool we’d be doing it during summer too (why should learning stop??) this may still be too fast for the kids, or they may take to it like ducks to water and we’ll be past these sooner than I anticipate. That’s not something I can know until the kids are doing it and I can see how it’s going.
At the same time, I could also just put them in kindergarten and call it a day. We did move to this town for the schools, and they are fantastic schools.
Luckily, I have a year to figure it out!
First Step to Financial Control
If someone dropped you in the middle of a forest and told you to find the ranger station to get home, it would kind of suck.
You wouldn’t know the right direction to go and if you started walking you would have no idea if you were making any progress or if you were going backward.
Budgeting and getting your finances together is the same way.
If you randomly decide to start paying your debts lowest to highest without knowing if you even have ten extra dollars a month to throw at that debt, you may dig yourself deeper into debt or find yourself not being able to afford payments on other bills (like the electricity) if you just start spending more money without knowing how much you have to spend. Even if the spending is for awesomeness like debt repayment.
Making a Map
If you were dropped in the middle of the forest with a map, you could figure out which way that ranger station was and get your happy ass out of the forest before you were eaten by mosquitoes and other scary forest creatures, right? (Even if you don’t know which way North is…if it was get to the ranger station or become Cheetah food…I have total faith in you that you could figure it out.)
Your finances are your forest, no one else’s. That means the best person to make a map of the area is you!
Even better? The very first step involves one piece of paper, one pen/pencil, and your memory – for a start.
Make one column called Income and one column called Expenses on a piece of paper and start scribbling. Your mortgage/rent, electric, gas, cable, phone, tv. Don’t play the “I don’t know how much the bill is” game with me, either. You can look it up online or make a good guess or check your bank records. It doesn’t have to be exact to start with…but you have to have some idea.
If you find you have to keep looking things up because you have no idea how much your bills are – that means you’re doing the right thing and this mapmaking is totally in order.
Now get your income down. Everything counts! Do you get $4/mo. from your blog? Add it! Figure out where every penny that comes into your house comes from and write it down.
The Goal of the List: Are your expenses more or less than your Income?
Knowing where you are right now can really help you understand if you are stressed about money because you don’t have enough, or if you are stressed about money because you could be doing better.
Not having enough money is an emergency situation that needs to be looked at and solved immediately. Either by drastically reducing expenses or getting another job or a more reliable income from home.
If you have enough but aren’t sure where the extra is going, start keeping track of how much you’re spending at the gas station, at fast food or restaurants, at the bookstore…you know, the money you spend when you aren’t paying attention. See what expenses you can reduce while tracking your spending to balance out and keep that extra money in your hand, not down the tubes.
Pregnancy Brain and Deadlines
As a (self-confessed) workaholic, I believe that deadlines are sacred and to miss one is to be banished from my good graces and lose my trust. There are exceptions where writers had good reasons and let me know something was up before the deadline, and when that happens I always extend and don’t give grief for it.
So…I’m eating massive amounts of crow.
I thought I had a Friday deadline, I was thinking about asking for an extension until Monday (yesterday was draining) when I double checked the email and – viola! – the deadline was Tuesday.
I felt awful.
The worst part is I’m still not feeling well so instead of blazing through them – which is what I would normally do – I am, at best, eeking through the assignment at a snail’s pace.
There is no moral to this story. It’s just a crap happens kind of moment that I thought I’d share. That and you don’t have to wonder why I’ve disappeared if I’m not around for a couple days.
Brown Cow Yogurt – Gluten Free and Yummy!
When I buy yogurt, it’s gluten-free.
Not because we need gluten-free, but because what the hell would wheat be doing in yogurt in the first place? Unless it’s being used as filler.
I don’t like when food has “stuff” in it that shouldn’t be there.
We tried Brown Cow yogurt (coupons are available on the website) and the first thing I noticed was that it is “Fruit on the bottom, cream on top” – the cream layer isn’t an inch thick or anything, but WOW it makes a difference. This is the first time I had to set down the yogurt halfway through eating and take a little break because it is so rich and filling.
It’s REALLY good.
It’s a little less than a dollar a yogurt, so again, make sure to score a coupon before you shop! (But it is so worth it to spend a dollar to eat six ounces of heavenly, rich yogurt that will actually fill you up!)
As for that FAGE greek yogurt I’ve been seeing all over the place online…skip it and buy the Trader Joe brand instead. Just as awesome at half the price.
Note: This is not a sponsored post, nor did I receive free product.
