I will not judge others parenting styles, I will not judge others parenting styles....

I will not harshly judge other people’s parenting styles!

The other day I was at a family gathering when someone said something that shocked me. A parent of two of the other children informed their mom upon first meeting my little girl that she was “not very nice to them because she stuck her tongue out at them” And was “A brat”. At that point I must have had a look of shock on my face, because I was floored by what this parent was saying to me! My daughter is 4 years younger than these little girls, and had been in our home a grand total of 3 weeks when we took her to her first family function. Considering all she had to overcome, and that suddenly after 4 years of being a foster kid she had a real forever family sticking her tongue out at someone is the least of my worries. I nearly told her “Yes, introducing an adopted child into the family would be a great time to teach your children about understanding, grace and love.” But this parent is the type of parent who can’t really see past her own parenting style. So I bit my tongue and instead let her know that I’m very proud of little girl and that she is doing the best she can, and covered my offense.

But it got me thinking, am I the kind of parent who can’t see past their own parenting style? To consider other children’s individual needs and what they have to overcome? Do I give little girl’s friends grace? Do I teach her to have tolerance towards the children she comes in contact with? I think about the little friends she has, some of them really high energy, some of them momma’s boys and girls, some of them with sensory disorders, or little diva complexes and a lot of wonderful special little people! None of the parents of the children in our social circle are doing a bad job at parenting. They are all doing the best they can. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t tell each other what we are doing with our children or what is working for us or more importantly what didn’t work, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work for them. I can bribe my daughter into cleaning her bedroom by playing Funky Town by Lipps Inc, I realize that will not work for most people….okay I don’t know if that works for anyone else!

I think the most important thing about parenting is trying! If a person is really trying then their child will reflect this. I find the harder I try with little girl, the harder she tries and we me and we both have a better life. Trying also requires me to set up structure and give her safe boundaries to operate in so she knows what is expected of it. I just hope that we as parents can be a little softer with each other, easier on each other. None of us are perfect parents, and all of us are learning, so when a parent either hasn’t learned how to work on something you’ve got down, or what you did didn’t work with their child cut them some slack, smile and be happy that you child doesn’t do the same thing. Hopefully they will do them same thing when your child is driving them crazy!  

Mother's day- if you wait until you are ready

With Mother’s day being last weekend I thought I would share a little blog about my own journey to motherhood.

We had always had plans of adopting a child… when I was older! 30 seemed to be the magical age when adoption seemed to be within our future. Not only because 30 is the legal age to be eligible to adopt in places like China, but also because 30 feels stable to me. At that magic age my husband and I will be married 9 years, he will be done with school, we will be out of debt besides student loans and the mortgage, and we will be in our house for 5 years, more than enough time to make any improvements we needed to make before we bring a child into the mix. 30 was the age I was going to be ready to be a parent! 30 was the age where we would have our lives in order. But it’s been said before, that if you wait until you are ready to have kids, if you wait until you can afford it to have kids, you’ll never have them.

During the summer of 2012, 3 months before my 28^th birthday we brought home our daughter. A beautiful brown eyed 4 year old full of energy, opposition, and just enough sweetness to make us still fall in love with her. She had been living in foster care at my parents from the age of 2 and had a pretty rough start to life. We had decided after much prayer and consideration that we would try to adopt her. We started before she was a freed child, meaning her biological mother was still in the picture, and went through a roller coaster ride of nearly 2 years before we were able to take her home. In this time we grew as a couple, grew as a family, and learned to rely on faith more than we ever had before. I have never been so stressed out, or cried so much in my entire life as at one point it looked like we were not going to be able to adopt her. We were very bonded to her, and she was very bonded to us. Every time she said “I want you to be my daddy.” To my husband, my heart broke a little bit more as we explained to her that we would have to just wait and see. I gained weight, gray hair, and more than anything else maturity as we went through this process.

This year, a week before Mother’s day we were able to finally legally adopt her! To change her name and let her know forever and ever she is ours. It was an unconventional way to build a family, but for my husband and I, it’s the only way that seemed right. This past year has been filled with building special amazing memories with our little girl, and going from being a couple who stayed up late, had tons of alone time and had little routine to thinking about this little girl first in every possible way. Like all parents we jumped in with both feet and even with knowing it would change our lives in every way, still had no idea how significantly it would change our lives. People become parents through a lot of different means, Birth, Surrogate, Adoption, Marriage, Death, and Fostering. All methods of becoming a parent are noble and good as long as the parent is willing to love their child, and work hard to set them on the right path to becoming decent human beings. For those people who every day make the choice to be the best parent they can be, they deserve honor regardless of the method they became parents. To them I gladly applaud you, on a Sunday, that isn’t a Holiday, but a day you continue to be a fantastic mother and lay down your life for your family.    

Reflections on freezing

We are almost done with our spending freeze. I can’t believe how fast this month has gone!

Tonight we got sandwiches for dinner because we had a pre-planned thing. We were doing a “bring your own sandwich” get together with family to talk about my brother’s upcoming wedding this summer in Minnesota. It was nice when talking about how expensive that weekend is going to be, to know how much power we really have over our own spending. There is something really empowering about not giving into every want need and desire that comes across our minds. To not allow the constant marketing to fuel inside of us a burning pit of discontentment. Every dollar we don’t spend we value even more then the dollars previously. I hope that we can become even more frugal in the future.

That brings up something that has been rolling around in my head. I’ve always been somewhat frugal.  Even from a young age I had a natural impulse to save money. While my brother and sister spent their allowances, I was naturally inclined to stock it away until I saw something I really wanted. I’ve always had the urge implanted in me to seek out sale items, and things discounted. I’ve always taken a sense of pride in finding the best deal possible. And yet while I hand over a stack of .50 cent coupons there are times that I have $5.00 lattes in my hand. I realize now that I have a false sense of being frugal. How can I value pennies while throwing away dollars?  

I’m not saying that every second of my life needs to be a fiscal tight rope walk, but maybe the times that I should splurge should be further apart than the way we have been living? What if instead of all of those lattes I saved my dollars for something really special, like a tropical vacation? Or never having to make another credit card payment? I’ve long felt my quality of life go down when I did not allow myself things like lattes, or new shoes but my quality of life should not be built around things. Instead I should seek out memories, experiences, and financial freedom! With this my life will truly be what I would like it to be.

Would you like a little whine with your coffee?

We are coming up on about a week of our spending freeze. The hardest day was a day without enough coffee. I was so tired! I sat at my desk thinking about the coffee cup that sat just a few feet away. I kept envisioning myself taking a dollar out of my wallet and walking downstairs. Who would know, except me with a little extra pep in my step? After sending a very whiny text to my husband about not liking it when I don’t get what I want (okay about 15 texts about not getting what I want.) I was done dreaming of dark roast and sucked it up. A Few hours later I did happen across an expired thing of Starbucks Via in my desk drawer that I consumed with only a little bit of complaining.

Reflecting on this week, it makes me realize how self-indulgent I am. Not getting enough coffee can spoil my day when there are people not only far off, who are not getting enough food. I am sure they have more grace then I exhibited complaining about my coffee during a self-imposed fast on our spending. What would it be like to really go without? To have a sense of want, not because of greed, or being accustomed to more, but to want because I don’t have the basic things that sustain life? I have a slight pain in my stomach thinking about this situation and to experience that kind of hardship. Honestly it’s something I pray we never have to go through. It has made me realize though, how much I take for granted and how much we are truly blessed with every day.  

I will continue on with our spending freeze, with a lot more grace and gratitude than I’ve exhibited in this past week, and can hopefully extend that past the spending freeze into my daily life.

Spending freeze! Day 1!

After last month’s failure in couponing we decided to take even more drastic measures. Instead of allowing ourselves the gray matter of discounting and couponing it’s time for a spending freeze! A spending freeze in our house is a time period set aside by us, where we do not take money out of our checking accounts unless it’s vital, or preplanned. Gasoline to get to work for example would be considered a vital expense.  A bill like our daughters preschool is preplanned or something we already expected to pay. The rest of it we are not allowed to buy!

Why do we do it? It allows us to really reflect on our spending habits, and reset them. We have a few leaks in our budget. I’m guilty of spending money at coffee shop right down stairs from my office without thinking about it. Other things we are guilty of are quick meals out and about due to poor planning, or because I’m too tired to cook after a long day. And of course there are the impulse buys, and retail therapy we are all guilty of.

Tonight I kicked off the spending freeze by looking at what we have in the fridge and mentally planning some meals based on those items. It’s about making do with what we have, and hopefully at the end of this developing a better sense of gratitude for the things we are provided instead of always wanting something else, or something extra. I’m going to try to update my blog at least once a week so you can follow along in our success, failures, and attempts to better account for the way we spend our money.

In the spirit of being a shameless self-promoter you can also check out the food I make during our freeze at http://laurasmaking.blogspot.com/ to learn how I make do with what we have on hand, or make a recipe when I don’t have everything I need to do it.

A week of couponing and price checking

This past week with the couponing has been hard. Our week has come unraveled and I would be lying if I said we had been perfect on using discounts and coupons for everything. We have had to grab something to eat a few times and I didn’t have a coupon or discount for every time- although we have tried to eat at places that cost significantly less then I would have spent if we were not trying to save money, like this very shabby little Vietnamese restaurant we haven’t visits in ages where the cost is very reasonable. I am not going to dwell on my discounting failure though; instead I would like to talk about the things I’ve learned this week.


Due diligence:

I’ve always just assumed that things are cheaper where we have always gotten them, because once upon a time I price checked them. Costco was one of those places. We’ve always bought giant bags of Iams dog food from Costco because it was less. I found out though Walmart actually has food for less if I order it into my store and use a $3.00 off coupon. More due diligence though, had me looking at generic labels and comparing. Kirkland dog food seemed to have the same ingredients as the branded food, and as we opened up the bag it looked exactly the same. We will be saving about $18 dollars a month.

We also found this month eggs were less at Fred Meyer then Costco with a coupon. I was really proud of my husband who went to pick up these eggs and walked in with his coupons in hand and his head held high.

We also signed up for the Target Red Card debit card after looking into it and realizing it was really worth the deal. I had always planned to look into it, but never have. I shop there anyway so I might as well save 5% on my purchases. We needed things like deodorant, kitchen cleaner, and shampoo. Just having them route the purchase through my red card alone saved me $4.00 on my purchases today. It’s going to be extra appealing to me as I always hit target for clearance for clothing. An item at 70% off is now going to be 75% off and I’m okay with that as I’ve been dressing myself (and my family) almost exclusively with Target clearance for a while now. There is always a risk that I’ll shop there more now that I have this card, but I’m already a pretty loyal Target shopper, and pretty thrifty so I'm not really worried.

Shopping today for food was also successful with a $10 off $75 at Safeway, as well as some great deals for buy one get one free deals on things like sausages my daughter will eat, a sale on milk, and Chex for 1.52 each. I love watching the club card, and coupons reduce my total down, chipping away at it little by little until we saved 49% total on our grocery bill and over $120!

Finally we found some really great savings at Michael’s craft stores. Between 40% off coupons, BOGO sales, and a $10 off of $30 coupon we managed to spend money for a few upcoming art projects for a savings of 50%.

Over all I’m happy with my savings this month as it’s been over $200 in our household expenses so far this month. We are still learning to save money, and still finding ways to make our money go further but having Josh start to pay more attention to price, examining coupons and looking for red clearance stickers has been the greatest achievement of all!

Our Couponing Challenge

A few weeks ago on my daughter Birthday we decided to take some money given to her by her great aunt and go to Toys R Us. Because I’m one of those couponing people I already signed her up for the Toys R Us birthday promotions and got a $3 off coupon in a birthday card. So we took the $5 and the $3 coupon and found a toy for $8. When we came home with our $8 stuffed zebra my husband expressed that he would have bought the zebra without the coupon and just spent the extra $3. I guess it made an impact on him realizing how much money can be saved if you look for discounts because he challenged me to only buy things I can get on discount, with a coupon, or otherwise on sale.



So with February just around the corner- and it being a shorter month we decided it would be the perfect time to do a month of couponing, discounting, and only sale shopping. There are a few rules we decided to attach to this challenge to make sure that we are saving the most money and they are as follows.

1) The only things we are allowed to pay full price for are staples- milk, eggs, whole grains, and dried beans. If I can get a coupon for these items though they need to be used.

2) We are allowed to buy an item at Costco without a coupon if it is less than a couponed counterpart at another retailer. These items must be price checked online with other retailers, and a coupon for the item that could be used at another retailer must be present.

3) Fresh fruits and vegetables, meat and other items like these are allowed to be purchased without a coupon as long as we purchase the items that are on sale, and produce will be checked against the produce stand we often use.

4) We are able to buy the generic if it’s less than the name brand counterpart with a coupon. We are not allowed to buy the generic if we do not have a coupon for the name brand counterpart.

5) We are going to go out of our way to use the gas stations that we have discounts at, and websites like www.fuelmeup.com or www.gasbuddy.com to figure out what is going to be our best purchase price. We will also plan to fuel up when we are in the area of the less expensive gas stations.

6) Eating out is allowed only if we can find a coupon for the restaurant or can apply a discount. (Very happy my Starbucks card gives me a discount.)

This experiment isn’t aimed to totally change the way we shop, but rather is intended to make us focus in more on what are staples and what aren’t, get in the habit of price checking, and grabbing the discounts that are right in front of us that we are not already taking advantage of. I’m already a Jr. crazy coupon lady, and find ways to shave the family budget, but let’s see how much better we can do! Having Josh on board for this is going to make a big difference in our couponing and saving.

This challenge starts February first and I’ll keep a blog for the month to keep track of the savings, the discounts and the things we’ve learned.

Don't wish us luck! Wish us willpower!