So I’ve tracked each and every dollar we’ve spent for the last few months, and now I finally have a realistic picture of where we are. And, unfortunately, how unsustainable it is. We will be playing the bill-pay shell game until July, when our childcare expenses will go down $800/month. Only then will we meet all of our expenses and maybe have a little left over, barring any unforeseen circumstances. And we are the masters of the unforeseen! (Have you met them? They are blond and almost two.)

The Target dollar bins had other plans for me, loaded with cute accessories to match my birthday party theme for the triplets this weekend. I always tell myself I will be able to resell anything within our community, where anything theme-y is popular (in this case, 3 monkeys). My boys love their stuffed monkeys, so I’m not sure if I will part with the accessories or save them for their room when we move them to the master bedroom later this spring. Pics to follow!

The big P has his birthday at the end of the month, and we are hosting a Jedi Training Academy in our basement. Assuming we get it cleaned up, that is! Lots of handmade stuff in process, and I’m enjoying the opportunity to be creative that wasn’t so easy last year. But all of the materials for both parties cost money, about $65 so far, and that’s part of the “no margin” our budget has. Luckily, one of our credit card payments can make due with a little less this month and we can celebrate our boys.

We’ll do better in April, right?

I wrote this long post detailing the process of the 50+ valentines I was going to make with the 5 year old and involving 200 paper hearts, lolipops, hole punching, and the killer, writing his seven-letter name way more times than he was willing. So yes, the prototypes were pretty, but when I let him just be creative instead of following *my* plans, we opted instead for the box of Hot Wheels valentines my mom had sent, but then turned the box into a puzzle, which lead to turning a cereal box and a piece of his artwork into another puzzle, and a whole DIY afternoon unfolded for us, just not how I expected.

So then this post “When it’s OK not to DIY” from ohdeeoh (of course) caught my attention today, and I tagged it simply in delicious as “mantra”:

…a few guidelines and questions that we ask ourselves when we’re thinking about adding a new project to our already long to-do list.

• Will we end up spending just as much or more money if we make it ourselves? Very often, we start out a project ourselves to save money, but by the time we’ve purchased all of the materials we need- we’ve spent more.

• If we try to make it ourselves, will we actually ever get around to it? Especially if it’s a project for our daughter, we realize that it might be time-sensitive. She may outgrow the stage the project’s for before we get around to making it! In that case, we’d much rather buy it so she can use it right away. We find having pieces of another 1/2 finished project laying around drains us of our energy.

• Is it going to be fun to do or just add stress to my life? If it’s not going to be fun, why do it?

• Will I sacrifice quality time with my child to make this for her?

• Can we find something already made that’s just what we’re envisioning?

• Are our skills up to the task? Sometimes someone else could just do it a lot better than we can.

I am **way** to quick to beat myself up for not making things more often. I would have spent hours on homemade valentines rather than follow my kids’ bliss. Maybe I can cut myself some slack for awhile if I just keep repeating the mantra…

I’m really kind of bad at being a girl. Woman, yes, mom, of course. But I never had an influence in my life in terms of grooming and I remember a roommate in college who particularly found my lack of knowledge about panty hose and shoes to be incredibly amusing and starting teaching me the things most people pick up from their mothers or sisters, I assume. I got good at it during my big career years, but in my years as a parent (and working predominantly in the nonprofit sector), I’ve fallen off the wagon.

Today, I fell hard.

A friend and very important professional contact invited me to a networking reception tonight, and I was wearing a nice black sweater and cute shoes, but I had khaki pants and a so-so white t-shirt as well. It was not 23rd-floor-cocktail-lounge suitable, at all. No time to go home and change, and no clean clothes any way! I’ve let our ‘to be drycleaned’ pile take over the majority of our closet and just generally have let my nice wardrobe go.

Quite fortunately for me, if not for our strict household budget, I work adjascent to a very nice shopping district in our city, which happens to have two high-end resale stores. One is a boutique run by Goodwill and one is privately owned. I stopped by the Goodwill store first and grabbed a cute necklace for $1.99, J Jill dress pants for $12.99 and a dressy Gap tank for $4.99. 

Much better, outfitwise, but the truth is, I need to dress like this everyday now that I am working full time again. Which means I need to get to even more swaps, because I am in no mood for buying clothes! I actually went to an amazing swap this weekend and brought home a garbage bag sized load for myself and the boys. I grabbed another bag of boys clothes from freecycle the next day.

And still somehow, we need more. We always need more. Boys really destroy their clothes, don’t they?

I’m trying to figure out who I am in the blogging world since I’m no longer a stay-at-home mom to infant triplets trying to maintain a connection to the outside world. I love to write and I miss writing, so I keep getting called back here.

These days, our world is a little most focus on the *frugal* than the *green* because we’re really trying hard to pay down our debt. It’s especially difficult when our childcare costs are so high, but we both love what we do for work so they are costs we are willing to bear, and they will go down significantly in another year when the little ones will join their brother in our neighborhood public school (it’s a public Montessori school that starts with half-days at 3 years old). Until then, we have to do everything we can to meet all of our sometime staggering financial obligations, which these days means I am watching every dollar very closely.

But yes, we’re still shopping almost exclusively at Whole Foods, and my diamond shoes sometimes do feel a little tight! I know I am insanely blessed and that we’re still very lucky and will come out of this unscathed. Something like the pile up of becoming pregnant with triplets, losing my job and benefits, and the economy tanking is not likely to happen to us again, and if it does, the next time, I’ll be better prepared.

I can’t decide if I want to see Food, Inc., or if it will just send me totally off the grid.

I thought Swagbucks was one of those things I would always stay away from on the internet, but when I saw how quickly points could add up to Amazon giftcards, I decided to give it a try. Now, from “Deal”icious Mom, I’ve learned:

Also, just recently they added EuphoriaBaby.com. Eupohoria Baby is an online baby and maternity store based out of South Carolina that sells toys, towels, organic clothing, and cloth diapers among other things. The great news and the reason I am mentioning this site is because you can cash  in only 10 Swagbucks for a $5 gift card to EuphoriaBaby.com! That’s a huge steal!

I maximize my swagbucks by always searching through them first, even when I’m pretty sure Google will give me a better result. Yes, it eats up 10 seconds of my day, but it’s worth it. So worth it, I might just cash in my next 60 points at EuphoriaBaby for one of these, since my 4 year old still dotes on his dolls he got at Hanukkah…

Our nickname for taking control of our finances is BROKEWATCH. We describe things when we’re chatting online during the day as VBWC (”very BROKEWATCH compatible”) or deny each other purchases citing, “Sorry, not during BROKEWATCH.” I’ve been reading a finance guru because I lack even the most basic sense of household money management and we rotate referring to him as Dave Barry, Jeff Ramsey, or even Gordon Ramsey when it comes up in conversation.

I find that a little humor about it definitely helps, especially when we’re working really hard at it. For example, this weekend. We were out of town in Atlanta, our first jaunt without kids since, well, since we’ve had kids. We had free airfare from winning a raffle and a free hotel room from DH’s accumlated points since he used to be a frequent business traveler. We had relatively inexpensive tickets to see the world’s finest baseball team. We opted against a rental car for public transportation and set ourselves a strict food budget limited to our cash on hand and a starbucks gift card we got via coinstar.

And you know what? It was kind of fun. I liked the sense of challenge it gave us. We were more creative, for sure, and everything tasted that much sweeter.

My famiy has a Hallmark habit. A bad one. You haven’t shown that you care if you haven’t selected exactly the right mass-consumer paper greeting. Because of the number of grandmas in our life (5), I spent $26 on cards in May, and then another $10 just for my dad for Father’s Day. Add in postage and we spent over $40 in the past two months on something that doesn’t mesh with our budgeting or environmental values. I say no more! I have a bulging pile of kids’ artwork on top of our microwave, and fine printables like these from hotcakes:

I just can’t pay into the “Your Greetings Must Come from Wallgreens” cabal anymore, you know?

A lovely new organic market opened across from the public market in our city. As a promotion, I got a postcard from them in the mail yesterday. For 30% off…. ENTIRE PURCHASE. I think my husband was a little scared by how gleefully I clutched that piece of paper. It felt like a present! I’m pretty certain they didn’t anticipate someone filling up a cart or two of groceries and then presenting that postcard, but I read it 47 times and there is no fine print! I am working really, really hard at reigning in our grocery budget (a post for another time), and this will go a long way towards that goal for this month. Yay!

One household task I’ve never really minded, and maybe even kind of enjoy, is laundry. Good thing, considering on any given Friday, I do 4-5 loads, and then another 3-5 across the course of the weekend. It probably explains, at least a little, why we never batted an eye at the idea of cloth diapering triplets.

I work Tuesday-Thursday, so by Friday my inner domestic goddess is literally bursting at the seams. During the morning nap, I clean up, get the first few loads going, and perhaps a few other household projects. For the school year, we picked up my 4 year old (P) before lunch, and then during the second nap, he and I would do a project of some sorts. Today, we made brownies. But this is our last Friday of the school year, and from now on he will be at summer camp, and by the fall, who knows? I could be working full time and this could be it. Sniff!