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.

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!

The parents of our good friend down the street have an organic chicken farm and we are getting our first delivery of 6 frozen birds today (at the wholesale price of $2/lb!). I’ve always been a boneless/skinless breast and thigh girl myself, until recently when I started getting rotisserie chickens at Whole Foods and using the meat as well as bones. This is a whole other ballgame, though. I have no idea how to deal with an entire frozen chicken, from butchering to cooking and beyond. It’s clearly time to learn.

Anyone have an tips or ideas for me?

If this is your first time at sage after hearing about BeCentsAble on Good Morning America, welcome!

sage is the frugal shade of green parenting — it’s easy to go green if you want to spend a lot of money, but sage will show you how to live within your values and your budget.

Like BeCentsAble, our mission is to help families save time and money. At sage, we round up coupons and other discounts on organic grocery products, share new resources for recycling household items and creating homemade, nontoxic cleaners for pennies on the dollar, and innovative craft projects you can do with your kids that use household items.

Who am I? A mom to 4 adorable boys (a preschooler and one year old identical triplets), a passionate environmentalist, and a dedicated bargain shopper. I don’t want to pay full price for the things I have to buy, and I want to recycle, upcycle, and create as much as I can. I visit the couponing, discount, grocery store savings, green lifestyle, and parenting advice blogs so you don’t have to, bringing to sage the best the internet has to offer for natural parenting!

Subscribe to sage for weekly sage finds updates of coupons, discounts and specials from across the web, and sage reads, a round up of timely, inspiring links for parenting green on the cheap. I also tweet deals as I find them, along with the goings-on in our house with four boys under four.

parenting

Ohdeeoh has another take on the family interview, giving me even more fodder for something I hope to execute this weekend. Fun!

PopATot: Ingenious or not worth the money? I feel like we could be at the perfect age/mobility range for one of these in the spring, to keep one baby safely contained if another needs immediate attention. But probably I’ll just bring the less-popular of our exersaucers outside (the one we got at a yard sale for $5) rather than shelling out $50.

crafting

Crafting a Green World is hitting all the right notes with me lately, the way that Ohdeeoh seemed to be in my brain a few months ago. This week, cute small projects with fabric scraps. Also, more organic fabric and yarn sources. Must get that chicken print! Or perhaps spend some time making rubber stamps out of shoe soles.

eating

Re-nest helps us eat local! It doesn’t seem especially accurate for my state (why would a pile of produce be available right now in Minnesota that is not available in Wisconsin?), but it does give a sense of regional best buys.

The NRDC, Natural Resources Defense Council, has an online tool that can help you minimize the amount of well-traveled foods you consume. You can plug in the time of year down to early and late part of each month, plus the state in question. Once the tool churns out foods harvested or cellared in your state this time of year, it will also offer foods from neighboring states.

I’ve been having a leftover bottleneck lately, so the Parenthacks post on the topic comes at a good time for me.

resources

Whole Foods highlights their new recycling programs: Brita water filters and #5 plastics to be turned directly into toothbrushes and other hosuehold goods.

Kelly at Almost Frugal talks about rethinking your behavior to provide new ways to be frugal, and I totally agree. It’s easy to be prisoner to ideas that maybe have worked in the past, or items that are easy and comfortable.

Mommies with Cents posts a free opportunity to fight childhood hunger, an important cause to me and countless others.

Share Our Strength is an organization dedicated to ending childhood hunger. Some food banks across the country are reporting a 40- to 50-percent increase in demand.

Share Our Strength’s “Operation No Kid Hungry” works with the Mobile Giving Foundation to raise funds for food banks across the country. By simply texting the word “SHARE” to 20222 on your mobile device, you can instantly make a $5 donation to Share Our Strength. Wireless users can choose to donate once, twice or even up to five times to contribute.

My post today at BeCentsAble is bit about me. An actual picture of P and I, too. Enjoy!

Crafty Crow send out the addresses for the ornament swap, and I didn’t get any. Then I checked over my email carefully, and there it was, still in the draft folder… my request to swap! Of course, I just posted about how orderly my universe has become, right? Hubris!

Anyhow, dear readers, I know you’re out there. Google Analytics tells me so. Anyone want to make a few ornaments with their kids and swap with mine? P is *so* excited to do this and mentions it every day. If 2+ readers want to jump in, that would be so much fun. Any takers???