• I need a new toothbrush. I’ve been holding out until I can get it for free. Looks like with a printable I can at Walgreen’s this week!
• Planning out a preschool homeschooling curriculum for our nanny to start in the fall. Hoping to use blogs like this one as much as possible, will resort to premade kits only if necessary. (Aside: Can you believe my babies are old enough for preschool? Sob!)
• Some way to make enough money to live on without going back to having a full time job. Are any work-at-home opportunities for real?
• Kohlrabi, grated, and sauteed with garlic scapes and olive oil. Serve with chicken sausages and lots of parmesan cheese. Yay for the farmer’s market!
• That the only things my little ones make in their play kitchen is coffee for mama. “Mama, more coffee!?”
• My husband. He’s been amazing through my transition, even as he goes through a few of his own.
• Swagbucks. Those free Amazon gift codes add up quickly when I’m working on my home computer all day!

That’s what this summer is all about. Catching up with friends and family. Extra time with my boys. Volunteer work. And a little job hunting!

Over the weekend, we got a small coupon book in the mail from our local conventional grocery store. With the weekly ad, I noticed that there was a promotion to buy 6 boxes of General Mills cereal and then get $10 back and coupons for a free gallon of milk and a free dozen eggs. Clearly, it was time to look for coupons!

Between coupons.com, Smart Source, and Box Tops for Education, I amassed enough coupons to head out confidently for double coupon day today. I also planned on picking up a couple of other things we needed. Here’s my plunder:

Besides the cereal, I got English muffins (coupon was for $0.88), pasta (coupon for $0.44), vinegar that we needed for laundry, granola bars ($0.40 printable doubled), toothpaste (printable for $1.00 doubled, plus a bonus $3.79 lip balm for free!), frozen waffles, 21 Luna bars (10/$10, I eat them for breakfast every day), a can of tomato soup for a recipe, and a jumbo of Huggies for $4.49 (store coupon for $7.49, printable coupon stacked for $3.00 off). In return, I also received a register coupon for $3.25 off any gallon of milk and $1.85 off any dozen eggs, which I will use to steeply discount some organic products in the near future.

So my receipt shows that I saved $34.33, but that doesn’t count (1) the $5.05 on future purchases and (2) the free lip balm, which brings my savings to $43.17 when I spent $41.73. I can tell you that in a household where we purchase ~80% of our goods natural and organic, this kind of savings is really, really rare, and very exciting!

Doing well, doing well. Except for a huge welt/hive right below my right eye (1) making it hard to see and (2) necessitating benadryl which is now making me kinda sleepy. I’ve checked in with some contacts and already have a coffee date for tomorrow, drinks on Wednesday. I made a pile of appointments for before our insurance lapses. I walked the big boy to his first day of summer camp, and will walk to pick him up. Quite possibly, my biggest accomplishment is my meaningful, targeted to do list, focused on doing the right things first. Like, for example, meal planning!

I did this again for the first time in months and months, 3 weeks ago with the big P. By involving him in the plan, he tried all sorts of new foods willingly, like pasta salad. He’s always liked ethnic food, but getting him to try new things has waned since he turned 4 or so. He’s not here for me to plan right now, but maybe next weekend.

Monday:  Already in the slow cooker, anticipating a medicine-induced nap, is slow cooker tortilla soup, one of our family’s favorites. I used fresh corn leftover from last night’s dinner.

Tuesday: Grandma Fran’s porcupine meatballs, garlic bread & steamed brocolli. I have two lbs of ground turkey in refrigerator I need to use this week. This will make dinner and some awesome lunch leftovers for me.

Wednesday: Spinach ravioli, some veggie side. I’m going to hit the conventional grocery store on double coupon day, so I’ll grab something fresh to add to the ravioli.

Thursday: Pecan maple chicken and roasted potatoes. This was a recipe P selected that I haven’t had time to make yet. I’m excited to try it.

Friday: Leftovers.

Saturday: Both of my brothers will be in town, a rare treat, so I’m sure we’ll be grilling or splitting some take out.

A living list of the things I pledge to do, each weekday, to improve my household, take steps towards employment, nurture my marriage, and spend time with my sons:

• Reach out to three contacts in my network, whether it is having coffee, planning a lunch meeting, or whatever. (Follow ups count, my network isn’t that dense.)
• Work on fixing our school’s aftercare program so that we can ostensible cut our personal childcare expenditures dramatically this fall, and then a little more each year.
• Wash and put away least one load of laundry.
• Make pocket change, by pricing things for a garage sale, listing things on Craigs List, or taking items to resale/consignment stores.
• Tackle one nursable grudge on my list in our house, from the upstairs bathroom closet to the basement and beyond.
• Do yoga, take a walk, or otherwise engage in something physical.
• Eat breakfast and lunch in the house, unless I have a career-related obligation.

The list will grow, but I’m trying to not make too many lists, since I have the tendency to make them longer and longer so that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit and I don’t have to get to the tough stuff!

I am newly unemployed.

If you look at my last post, you can see why I might not be too unhappy about that. Yes, I need to find something as soon as possible with health insurance, but I was working in a job that made me very unhappy, trying to find ways to still pursue any of my passions and be a good mom

I was writing things like, “Realized that if I could have more of either, it would be time, not money.” I’ve been reading Just Let Me Lie Down: Necessary Terms for the Half-Insane Working Mom. In April, I developed stress hives and then eczema from my job. I was starting to wonder the long-term impact of all of this stress on my health.

So I have more time, and for now, way less money. I’m not okay with that, it’s not fair to my very hard working husband or kids for that to be the case, but I’m okay with finding the place I can be *me*. I’ve lost me, I’ve been Program Director and Mom, but not Meagan for a very long time.

Expect a blog resurgence!

Perhaps in another year or two, right?

What are we doing now?

• Had splendid 2nd (Monkey) and 5th (Jedi Training) birthdays, an uneventful Passover, and a kind of lazy May.
• Held a huge PTO-sponsored clothing swap at school, followed by starting a local swapping group with it’s first meeting today (gasp!)
• Finally found the temple we should join, but unfortunately it’s 60 miles away. I don’t think that’s going to stop us from going, though.
• Thought a lot about romance, have to get better at doing it on a budget…
• Realized that if I could have more of either, it would be time, not money.
• Lots of laughs, tons of rummage sales (now remembering to look for the big boy stuff first, it’s so hard to find nice stuff in good condition, but when I do I buy it all), and realizing I just don’t remember the nuances if I don’t write about it, so I’m trying to get in a better blogging habit. (Again, I know.)
• Two proud parenting moments: that my big kid (5 years, 2 month old) enjoyed a 14 hour road trip (7 each direction) to our college reunion and back without a DVD player, computer, or any of that fancy stuff; and that he was rewarded for that yesterday with his first library card, which he was so excited about.
• I need to learn how to be a mom of a big kid! We’re going to full day kindergarten next year!
• I’m learning a lot about saying what I mean, even if it’s hard to say. I credit my husband with that, and it’s paying dividends at work and with family. I can’t wait to see what he learns (and what he’ll teach me) when he starts law school in the fall.
• My life is very, very hard, but I love it.

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.