Christmas is almost here, and I think I’m finally finished making felt food.   Here is the current food collection:

I’ve already posted pictures and details about some of this stuff, but I’ve made quite a bit more since the last time I posted.

We now have a pizza that comes apart for lots of pizza-making fun.  The crust has a piece of cardboard sewn into it to make it rigid, and then the sauce, cheese, and toppings are all separate pieces so they can be taken apart and put back together any way he likes.  The pizza pan came from Goodwill.

There’s also a banana that comes out of its peel.  I love this!

For my first attempt at the banana, I used four elongated ovals, but it ended up looking more like a football than a banana (so I stitched some laces onto it and gave it to my boys).  For my second attempt (pictured – I’m very happy with how it turned out), I used just three pieces of white felt, and made them much longer and thinner than my original try.  It worked much better.  The peel is three pieces of yellow felt and three pieces of white felt (all the same size as the three pieces of white felt that make up the banana).  This probably took nearly two hours to make, including both attempts.  It’s one of the more complicated pieces I’ve made, but it turned out very cute.

In addition to the banana and the strawberries that I posted a while ago, I’ve made an assortment of other fruits and veggies.  A watermelon slice, celery sticks (two of them are stuffed with peanut butter), a cucumber slice, carrots and carrot slices, banana slices, several varieties of berries, spinach leaves, tomato slices, apple slices, a lemon slice, a broccoli floret, and some asparagus.  Some of these I came up with on my own, and a couple were inspired by other sites.  (asparagus, carrots).  I just found a tutorial for a broccoli floret that looks much easier than what I did, so I think I might have to add a few of those…

I was browsing around on etsy looking for inspiration, and I found these adorable ice cream cones with removable ice cream and multiple flavors.  I had to make some.  So now we have an ice cream cone with four flavors of ice cream:  blueberry, spinach-mint (try it – it’s yummy!), vanilla, and raspberry. 

I’ve made three eggs.  There are still a lot of spaces in that egg carton, but not a lot of days before Christmas.  So he’s probably going to get an egg carton with lots of empty spaces and three eggs in it.

I found this adorable little Melissa & Doug muffin pan and oven mitt at Goodwill last week ($1.49 for the set) and couldn’t resist.  I made a banana muffin and a blueberry muffin to go with the cupcake that I made a while ago.  I may or may not get another muffin made to go in the fourth hole.  Our son has been using my muffin pans and filling the holes with blocks for about the last year (and then he sticks them in his “oven” which is the space under the coffee table).  So I’m thinking he’ll figure something out for that fourth hole if I don’t get another muffin made.

A slice of bread and Swiss cheese were among the first things I made, but I’ve now finished the sandwich – it has a leaf (lettuce?  Too dark?  Let’s say it’s kale.  That would be perfectly normal in our house), a tomato slice, and cheese.

And to round everything out, we have more felt dessert than we’d have in a whole year if it were real.  But it’s felt, so we can have as much as we want In addition to the slices of pie I made when I first started this project, I’ve also made lots of cookies, a brownie, and a slice of mint chocolate cake.

Cookies are easy and fun to make, so I made a bunch of them as Christmas tree ornaments for our nieces and several of my friends’ kids.

I’m pretty excited for our son to see all of this on Sunday morning.  And I’m proud of the fact that everything we’re giving him is secondhand or homemade.  The kitchen was a Craigslist find, and all of the pots, pans, dishes and utensils came from thrift stores.  And of course, I’ve made all of the food (and rescued some food containers from the recycle bin, like my husband’s half-n-half carton). 

In addition to the kitchen, we’ve got two other presents for our son, both from Goodwill.  I scored a large box of Lincoln Logs a few weeks ago, for three bucks.  They were in a generic brown cardboard box, but I happened to look inside and was thrilled to find them.  I had hours of fun playing with Lincoln Logs with my brother, and I think they’ll be perfect for our boys.  I also found a large box of Flexiwheels building blocks for $2.50.  They’re like Lego, but they can hook together lengthwise on hinges or be clicked together like Lego.    

This is the first Christmas that we’ve given our son presents, as it’s the first year that he’s really old enough to understand what’s going on.  We’re not giving our 8 month-old anything, although there are presents for him from Grandma and Grandpa.  He will be more than thrilled with the boxes and wrapping paper from his brother’s presents, and will likely spend Christmas morning snuggled up with us, clapping his hands and watching his brother.

I hope you all have a wonderful holiday weekend.  Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Solstice!  Remember to enjoy the simple things.

For the past few weeks, I’ve been tinkering with felt food for at least a few minutes every day.  I’ve had a few projects (like a banana with a removable peel – picture coming soon) that took over an hour to make, but most of the items have come together much faster than that.  Our son’s play kitchen is going to be fully stocked by Christmas morning, and I’m having so much fun making the food for him.  I even made a felt pizza for one of his friends, and a bunch of felt cookie tree ornaments for friends and family.  My felt pizza inspiration came from this site, although I made all of the toppings double layer to make them a bit more durable and easier to handle.  For green pepper rings, I tried several methods and ended up liking this one the best.  They come together in about five minutes and look really cute.  Our son was watching me make the pizza for his friend (he has no idea that I’m making another one for him) and he liked to line up the pepper rings as if they’re a pepper and then “slice” them apart using a butter knife.  The 3-D structure of this pepper ring style makes it more realistic for that sort of play.

So now for some pictures of what I’ve been up to. 

An ice cream cone, inspired by this site:

A plate of pancakes that I thought of after finding a huge chunk of tan felt at a thrift store for a dollar.  I only had a few minutes to sew that day, and wanted something that would come together fast.  I stuffed them with some leftover felt scraps to give them a bit of dimension, although I’ve found that understuffing is much better than overstuffing with felt food.

The plate was 50 cents at a thrift store.  The strawberries were inspired by this tutorial and are actually pretty quick and easy to make.  They’re just a half circle of red felt sewn into a cone shape, stuffed, and gathered at the top using a running stitch.  Then you add little yellow stitches for seeds and sew a leaf-shaped piece of green felt on top. 

A few days ago I found this site and loved all the pictures of food she’s made.  The tea bags were so cute I had to whip some up – they literally take about three minutes, although I spent about another three minutes embroidering the word “Tea” on the first one I made:

I also really liked her “infinity bread.”  I had been thinking of making tortillas, but I loved the idea of wraps that would hold their shape when you roll or fold them.  She said she was keeping her trick a secret, but just seeing the finished product got me thinking about how I could make a tortilla that would hold it’s shape when you bend it.  I looked in my craft supplies and found a wad of craft wire that had come in a box of thrift store embroidery floss.  It was pretty thin, so I twisted two lengths of it together to make a thicker strand.  I cut two circles out of felt using a medium size plate as a template.  Then I sewed them together with a seam that was about an inch in from the edge.  Next, I bent the ends of the craft wire (don’t want it poking through the fabric) and then tucked it in next to the seam I had made, so that it was hidden inside the one-inch flap at the edge of the tortilla.  Then, holding the craft wire in place as I sewed, I made another seam around the edge of the tortilla, just on the outside of the craft wire.  When I was finished, the craft wire was encased in the felt, with a seam on each side.  All that was left to do was trim off the excess felt to even up the edges, and viola!  A tortilla that holds its shape!

You can roll it up with a bunch of veggies inside (still have to make those…) and it will stay rolled.  Very cool.

I think the picture makes it pretty easy to understand how I did it.  You can see the two seams – the craft wire is in between them.  This project took about 15 minutes.  You probably have some flexible wire lying around somewhere (that junk bucket in the garage, maybe?).  You want it to be pretty flexible – I think a coat hanger would be too stiff, for example – so that little hands can bend and roll it. 

I have lots more food and ideas that I’ll share with you over the next few days.  And as always, I’d love to hear about your creative Christmas gift ideas – things you’re making or doing or re-purposing for other people, instead of wading through crowds at the mall. 

I think I might be on my way to needing a 12 step program for felt food addiction.  I can’t stop making food!  It’s so much fun, and the internet is overflowing with awesome ideas.  Here’s the stuff I’ve made over the last few days.

Bread.

With a piece of Swiss cheese.

Apple pie (inspired by this post but made without a pattern)

Cherry cheesecake.

Cherry pie (my favorite!)

Mushrooms (more veggies coming soon for a salad bowl… I didn’t have any veggie-colored felt until today).  My mushroom inspiration came from here.

And a cupcake.

I picked up a bunch of felt this evening so I have lots of color options now.  If you look at the stuff I’ve made so far, it’s mostly pink, brown, tan, and white.  That’s pretty much what I had in my felt stash.  But now I have lots of greens, reds, oranges and plenty of other shades for whatever foods come to mind. 

Hope you’ve all had a great weekend.  We avoided the shopping shenanigans that goes on after Thanksgiving and spent the weekend hanging out with family, working on our basement, and – of course! – making felt food.  I haven’t been very crafty for the past few years, so I think I’m making up for lost time.  But I promise to write about something other than felt food soon!

Over the last few months, several of our son’s friends have enrolled in Montessori-style preschool and daycare centers.  The parents have had nothing but good things to say about the switch, and my curiosity was piqued.  Our boys are home with us all day, and we have no plans to change that.  But I was wondering if there was more that we should be providing our three year old in terms of the environment where he spends most of his time.

The Wikipedia page about Montessori Education pretty much sums up most of what I’ve read about the concept, and matches closely with what my friends have described about their kids’ preschools.

The main difference between being at home with us all day and being in a daycare or preschool setting is that our sons aren’t interacting with other kids all day.  So we make an effort to get them out and about in social settings quite frequently.  This includes story time at the library, visits to friends’ houses, having friends over here, and impromptu trips to the park during times when we know there are likely to be other kids there.

But in terms of the environment we provide for our boys at home, we’ve always felt that it was pretty good, and now that I’m reading more about the Montessori style of learning, I feel even better about it.

We’ve spent very little money on the stuff we have, and our days are very laid-back and relaxed thanks to our refusal to over-schedule our family’s time.  Here’s what works for us as far as the environment we provide for our three-year-old.

First, and probably most importantly, we don’t own a TV.  Definitely one of the better decisions we’ve made as parents.

Our son’s toys are mostly things that require constant interaction and creative input from him.  Here’s what he plays with the most:

• A set of wooden railroad tracks and lots of trains to go on it, along with lots of cars and trucks that he includes in his train/vehicle play.  We got the train set on Craigslist and the cars/trucks came from Goodwill.
• The box of 2×4 offcuts, which he’s been playing with every day for weeks now.  He makes something new with them every day, and incorporates a lot of his other toys into whatever he builds.
• A large farm that includes a dollhouse-style barn, lots of fence, and numerous farm animals.  We got it at a garage sale for $10, and have added a few more animals from Goodwill.
• A large box of regular wooden blocks.  Some used to belong to my husband when he was little (my MIL saves everything…) and some came from Goodwill.  They are all shapes and colors and sizes, and include pieces from several different sets of blocks.
• A wooden castle that my parents made with our son’s help.  He likes to build train tracks that connect the castle to the farm and then invent elaborate stories about who is going where and what they are doing.
• Lots of little plastic and wooden people/dinosaurs/animals, etc.  These have come from a variety of places (mostly Goodwill and gifts) and he loves to involve them in whatever building he’s currently working on.  At the moment, he’s building train tracks and recreating the children’s book “Dinotrain” using his little plastic dinosaurs as props.
• All sorts of stuff from the kitchen.  Pots, pans, cookie sheets, cooling racks, spatulas, spoons, measuring cups…
• The sink.  He likes to push a chair up to the sink and have all sorts of fun.  A large cooking pot in the sink makes a great swimming pool for his plastic ducks and fish, and he also likes to use measuring cups to pour water into various other containers that he finds.
• His sandbox.  When the weather is nice, he’s out there playing in it every day.  My husband built it out of 2×12 lumber and we filled it with sand from the local landscape center.  If space is tight, a little plastic swimming pool filled with sand works well.  Don’t worry about sand getting in their shoes or on the floor.  That’s why we have brooms and vacuums.  Kids grow up fast, and before you know it, they won’t be interested in a sandbox anymore.  Let them love it while they’re little.

That’s the list that comes to mind off the top of my head.  He plays all day long, using his imagination, building stuff and creating stories to go with what he makes.  He loves to show us the stuff he’s made, and often asks us to come and play with him.  But he’s never bored and he’s almost never confined by structure we’re imposing.  We provide toys that require a lot of creative input from him, and he does the rest.

We do require that all of the toys be cleaned up at the end of the day.  For a long time, that was a challenge, as he wanted no part of it and had to be coaxed and prodded to clean up his messes.  But recently he’s started cleaning up without being prompted and last night he said to me “I don’t need you anymore when I make a mess, because I’m able to clean it up myself.”  Music to a mama’s ears!  We usually all pitch in and clean it up together each evening (it only takes a few minutes because everything just goes into bins – blocks in one, trains in another, farm stuff in another…) but it’s great to see him doing his share.  Cleaning up and meal times are the only real “structured” times that we have during the day when he has to be doing a specific activity that we’ve laid out for him.  The rest of the time, he’s playing and creating his own structure.  We read lots of books, but there’s no specific time or schedule for this – we just fit it in around everything else.  We talk constantly about the stuff he’s doing and the things he’s creating with his toys, and we do our best to answer all of his questions throughout the day.  We don’t have structured “educational” activities, but our son knows his alphabet, numbers, colors, shapes etc. and is starting to be really interested in reading and understanding how letters come together to make words.  He comes to me throughout the day and says things like “house starts with H!”  We’re confident that his academic skills are fine, despite not being in a structured preschool environment.

I did some searching around to see what other parents have done if they wanted to set up a Montessori style preschool environment in their homes.  Some have pictures of beautifully-arranged preschool toys that are all made of wood and look just like the toys you find in a Montessori preschool.  And some take the concept very seriously, following the “rules” of the Montessori environment quite closely.

Our living room doesn’t look like what you might picture when you think of a traditional Montessori preschool.  But on closer inspection (especially if you watch our son play for a few hours), it’s obvious that the specific toys aren’t really the issue.  As long as you have toys that invite discovery and creative play, and little or no TV time, you’re probably on the right track.  You don’t have to spend a fortune on fancy toys and learning tools for your kids.  Limit their screen time and provide them with toys (which can be free or nearly free thanks to thrift stores and Craigslist and the great outdoors) that lend themselves to creative, imaginative play and problem solving.  Let them get wet and dirty.  Don’t worry about drilling them on the ABCs and 123s.  Instead, let them help you bake a batch of muffins and count aloud as they add scoops of oats and raisins.  Keep life simple, let your kids be involved in the things you do on a day-to-day basis, and encourage their creativity and imagination.  Good things will happen – without a lot of money or stress.

I’ve written this post from the perspective of a stay-at-home parent, but I think that the basics can apply to any family that’s looking for inexpensive, simple ways to provide a nurturing environment for their children during whatever time the kids are at home.  I hope it helps!

Over the last several years – ever since my husband and I decided to have children – I’ve read lots of books and articles about the idea of giving up the supermom ideal and getting over the fact that we can’t “do it all” if we want to do any of it well.   The Minimalist Mom recently wrote about rejecting the supermom ideal and I think her post will resonate with a lot of people.  Basically, it’s all about prioritizing, and doing the things that are truly important to each of us, rather than trying to do it all.  It’s an excellent reminder to focus on what matters and well worth reading.

I’m fully on board with that idea, but I see it as the way to truly be a “supermom” rather than feeling like I’m giving up on the idea of being “supermom”.  The way I look at it, being “supermom” has nothing to do with juggling 75 different hats.  To me, it means focusing my energies on the things that will make my life and my family’s life as great as possible.  That has nothing to with carting my boys off to lots of different activities, scheduled play dates, or advanced early learning preschools.  It has nothing to do with having a spotless house every second of the day (although I do like to keep it reasonably clean).  It has nothing to do with keeping myself so busy that I never have time to read to my boys or build snowmen with them.  It has nothing to do with trips to Disneyland or themed birthday parties or working extra hours to be able to afford the newest toys and the best professional photographer to take pictures of my little guys.  The list goes on and on here, and will be different for each of us.  I may not give a hoot about themed birthday parties, but another mom might love them.  Go for it.  Just make sure you’re focusing your time and energy on stuff that actually makes you and your family happy, rather than what you think is supposed to make you happy, or what you see other people doing.  Trust me, it might not be making them happy either.

Instead of saying that we’re rejecting the ideal of being a supermom (ostensibly, the mom who “does it all” – a career, a family, a perfect house, PTA meetings, lessons for every activity under the sun, etc.), why don’t we just focus on the fact that there’s really nothing “super” at all about that sort of life, for the vast majority of people.  True, there may be some people – I imagine they are few and far between – who truly thrive on constant stress and are actually able to devote themselves 100% to numerous different aspects of a fully-packed schedule.  But I think that most of us – if we’re honest about what really matters and what really contributes to our enjoyment of life – feel better when we don’t try to do too much.  When we have a little downtime in our days.  When we don’t fall into bed each night completely exhausted and dreading the alarm clock, but also already running through the next day’s to-do list.

We all have to earn a living.  We can adapt our lifestyles to fit a lower income if we prefer to work less, although that’s not appealing to everyone. Some families choose to have one parent work full time and the other focus on the house and children full time.  Some have both work full time and share the household duties.  Some mix it up with part time work for both parents.  Some are single parents who have to do it all.  In our house, my husband works full time at our business; I work very part-time at our business and spend most of my time taking care of the children and the household chores.  It works for us.  If we choose to have children, we have to figure out the best way to go about raising them – it won’t be the same for everybody, nor should it.  Life is not all fun and games, and it would probably get old pretty fast if it were.  But once we pare down to the basics and get those covered, we have options in terms of where we focus our time and energy.  Saying no to some of the activities and expenses (that are sometimes initially seen as necessary) might be just the thing we need.  Less is more when it comes to filling up our days.  Instead of a several hours at the mall shopping for the perfect Christmas gifts for everybody you know, spend a those hours reading books with your children or playing tag with them at a local park.  Catch up via phone or skype or email with the people for whom you would have been buying gifts.  Instead of feeling exhausted at the end of the day, you’ll feel great.  And you won’t have to work as much to earn money to pay for all the gifts.

So instead of saying that we’re giving up on being supermom (which makes it sound a bit like we’re throwing in the towel), let’s say instead that we’re focusing on what really matters.  We’re giving up the extraneous stuff that was just draining our energy, wasting time, and making us feel badly about ourselves because of the constant comparisons with other moms.  And that leaves us free to truly be supermoms.  Or superdads.  Or superfriends.  Or super-whatever-is-most-important-to-us.

For the past several weeks, my husband has been spending his weekends building stud walls in our basement.  He’s making great progress and should be finished in plenty of time for our framing inspection (it has to be completed by the end of the year).

Building stud walls means lots of 2×4 offcuts.  They were starting to stack up in the basement, and we had planned to give them to my parents to use as firewood.  Then one day our son was down there with us and started stacking them up to make a house.  He was having so much fun with them that we filled an old Rubbermaid storage container with offcuts and brought it upstairs.

For two weeks now, that bin has been sitting in our dining room.  And every day our son empties it out and builds all sorts of awesome stuff with the chunks of wood.  He makes houses, cities, castles, porches, roads… it’s pretty much endless fun.

These blocks are easy for him to pick up by himself at the end of the day and put back into the container.  They don’t end up under the couch or in our shoes like their miniature cousins.  And he absolutely loves playing with them.

If you have small children and a construction project going on, a box full of offcuts is a great free toy.  If you don’t have your own walls to build, check the free section on Craigslist.  There are always people giving away scrap lumber, and you could just chop it up into child sized pieces. 

I got the following email from Connie in response to my post asking you what you wanted me to write about:

It feels like many of the decisions you have made came about as a result of both your values and preparing yourselves and your home for children. How might your decisions have changed if you hadn’t been planning to have children? I find that some priorities, like eating good quality foods and staying healthy are easy for me to implement now, but others are more difficult, in part because I am not planning to have children. I don’t have as much of a reason to settle down in one place, grow a garden, etc. I definitely want to do those things, but they get pushed to the backburner so much more easily when there are new adventures in new places to be had. I am preparing to move to CA, and there have been several discussions about whether to rent, buy, or buy a larger plot (terribly expensive) to accomplish some of those personal goals.

My instinctive reaction is to say that everything in our life would be different if we didn’t have children, since they’re such a huge part of our life.  But when I thought about it a bit more, I realized that isn’t the case at all.  It is difficult to imagine my life without children, but I can remember our life before our children arrived, and we have kept much of it the same.

My husband and I moved into our first apartment together nearly seven years before our first child was born.  We knew that we wanted children eventually, but we had a lot of stuff we wanted to do first.  We traveled at least once a year to relatively far-flung places.  We bought a house.  We started a business that would allow us to work from home.  Having our own business and working from home has been hugely beneficial in terms of parenting, but it’s something that we would have done regardless of our plans to have children.  It allows us a lot of flexibility and freedom, and we took advantage of that for several years before we had children.

Our current house with its huge backyard is excellent for children (what kid wouldn’t love a half acre to run around in?), but we were attracted to the backyard primarily for gardening purposes rather than as a play area for our children.  My husband and I are both devoted to healthy eating, and we both love growing our own food.  Although it’s hard to imagine my life without children now that I have them, I think that my husband and I would have been drawn towards a home with a sizable yard even if we hadn’t had children (or planned to have them).  We might have looked for a smaller house if it had been just the two of us, but I think that we would have ended up buying (rather than renting) and seeking out a place with a big yard where we could have our fruit trees and garden beds.  In addition, we both love dogs and will probably always have one.  Having a house with a yard is a big plus for the dog too – it’s a place where she can run around sans leash and chase a frisbee to her heart’s content.

Although our life does revolve around our children much of the time now (it sort of has to, given that they’re still so little), we’ve managed to fit our children into the lifestyle that we already enjoyed before they were born.  We don’t like rigid schedules (so we’ve avoided many of the over-scheduling problems that plague many parents of little children), we like being outdoors, we like being at home, we love gardening, we like finding free entertainment and enjoying the little things in life… those are all things that we have kept the same.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path in life.  Whether you’re planning to have children or not, you should seek out a path that makes you happy.  If that’s renting apartments for short stints so that you can travel the world, so be it.  If it’s settling down in a fixer-upper house with a yard and a garden and projects to last the next 30 years, so be it.  Or anywhere in between.  If you are planning to have children, you can focus on following your own desires and wishes and avoiding the “you should be doing xyz” traps that are perpetuated by advertising designed to separate your from your money.  You can raise happy, well-adjusted children in all sorts of unconventional settings, and you don’t need a ton of money, stuff, or a white picket fence to do so.  If you’re planning to not have children, you do have some more flexibility in terms of doing whatever you want, since nobody will be depending on you for food, shelter, and years of guidance.  Either way, focusing on your own goals will work much better than trying to keep up with what everybody else is doing, or what advertising tells you that you should be doing.

Connie, thanks for the question, and best of luck with your move to California!

We’ve all heard how expensive children are.  And there are definitely some expenses that are tough to avoid.  We’re paying about $270/month for health insurance for our two boys, and there’s not really a way around that expense (we have a high deductible health insurance policy already, so that cost is on the low end of the scale).  We’re also putting $100/month into each of their college accounts.  Technically that money is still ours, and growing.  College accounts are not a necessity, but they’re something that we feel will be a worthwhile investment years in the future.

Other than health insurance and the college accounts, we have very little in the way of expenses for our boys.  We’re only three years into the whole parenting adventure, but we’ve managed to avoid a lot of the expenses that tend to go along with having very young children.  I still shop exclusively at Goodwill for our older son’s clothes, and our younger son is just wearing hand-me-downs.  We wanted to give our son a bike for his third birthday, and we found one on Craigslist for $20.  It needed a bit of work, and my husband spent a couple hours fixing it up before we gave it to our son.  But for $20, we ended up with a perfect birthday present that our son loves.

Our son adores trips to the library and the local parks.  He likes going for bike rides and feeding ducks.  He spends his days playing in the backyard, “cooking” in the living room with all of my pots and pans and utensils, drawing, and “crafting” with stuff like pipe cleaners and return address stickers that come in the mail.  It’s rare for us to spend money on stuff to entertain him (although we did spend $75 on a used train table earlier this year, and he’s had lots of hours of fun with it).  He mostly uses his very active imagination and the wealth of stuff that he finds in the house and out in the yard.  His clothing costs us next to nothing.  We did spend quite a bit of money on his mattress, but that’s something he’ll use for a long time, and we felt that it was worth the cost.

We don’t make trips to Target or Babies R Us.  We use cloth diapers exclusively, and have never purchased formula or baby food (our son eats what we eat, and has from the time he started eating solid foods, thanks to an inexpensive baby food grinder).  We try to keep clutter to a minimum, and that includes “kid clutter”.  We’ve found that we just don’t need most of the stuff that is marketed to new parents.  We kept all of the stuff we did use with our first son when he was smaller, and that means we literally need nothing at all for our second son.  I’ll probably look for a double jogging stroller sometime this summer once our baby is old enough to sit in one, but they are pretty easy to find on Craigslist.  Other than that, I can’t think of anything we need for our baby that we don’t already have.  I know that hand-me-downs won’t work forever, since we’re starting to get into the stage where our older son will be wearing out his clothes before he grows out of them.  But we have “free” clothes for our baby for at least the first three years.

One huge bonus that we have is that we don’t pay for child care.  We’re lucky, but we also put a lot of effort into establishing a home-based business several years before we had children.  My husband works full time at our business, and I work very part-time (about two hours a day right now) so that I can mostly be a stay at home mom to our boys.  Child-care is definitely a huge expense if you have to have it, but I know a lot of families have found that with a little creativity they can either switch to living on one income or two part-time incomes, or rearrange work schedules so that both parents can take turns being at home with the children.

Even though we’ve kept our child-related expenses to a minimum, just the health insurance and college accounts comes to nearly $500/month.  But there’s a flip side to the expenses that come with having children.  There are a lot of things that we aren’t spending money on anymore, that we probably would be if we didn’t have children.   Before we had kids, we usually took at least one vacation a year, usually to a relatively far-away destination.  We had more shopping trips, and weekend get-aways to little resort towns.  We went out to eat and to the movies…  These days, we much prefer to take our sons to the park or to the library.  Our younger son doesn’t care where he is as long as he can nurse whenever he likes and get snuggled most of the day.  Our older son is just as happy at a lake with a pail and a shovel as he would be at a beach on a tropical island.  We tend to focus our entertainment activities around things that are fun for a three-year old, and we’ve found that most of those things are free or very low cost.  We spent Mother’s Day at a huge park about ten miles from our house.  Our son’s best friend was there too, and the kids had a blast feeding ducks, riding their bikes, and playing on the playground.  Total cost:  $3 for the bread we got for the ducks.

So although we’ve found that there are definitely unavoidable expenses that go along with having kids, we’ve also found lots of areas where our expenses have dropped in the last few years, specifically because we have children.  I know that this won’t always be the case.  Ten years from now, I know I’ll be making a whole lot more food than I am now (leftovers might be a thing of the past!) and we’ll have more expenses for our boys as they approach young adulthood than we do now when they are little.  But I think that we’ll be able to stay pretty frugal with two kids as the years go by.  What do you think?  If you have kids, do you think you’re spending more or less overall than you were before you had kids?

When our son was born, we bought an organic crib mattress for him.  He slept in our bed for a few months, and still comes in from time to time to sleep with us during the night, but most of the time he sleeps on his crib mattress.  Last year, we got a wooden toddler bed and moved the mattress into that, which had been working perfectly.  But with another baby on the way, we knew we needed either another crib mattress for the baby, or a twin mattress for our son so that we could take his little mattress and put it back in the crib for the baby.

My first thought was to just get another crib mattress.  The organic ones are available for a couple hundred dollars, and we’ve been very happy with the one we have.  But I knew that would be a relatively short-term solution.  Our son is going to outgrow the toddler bed and the extreme firmness of a crib mattress before we know it.  So although they are a lot more expensive, I started looking at organic twin mattresses. 

Given that a standard twin mattress can be bought for a couple hundred dollars, the price tags on the organic mattresses were a bit hard to swallow.  But I reminded myself that we’re frugal for a reason.  It’s not so that we can hoard money and just save it aimlessly.  Instead, we want to make sure that we use our money mindfully, on things that really matter to us.  There’s a lot of controversy about mattresses and the chemicals that are in them.  I don’t claim to know everything about the issue, but my gut instinct is to err on the side of caution when it comes to exposure to synthetic chemicals.  That’s why the only cleaning products that make their way into our home are baking soda, vinegar, hydrogen peroxide, soap nuts, and Dr. Bronner’s soap.  It’s why we don’t use any synthetic chemicals on our lawn or garden.  It’s why we buy organic food. 

In general, I try to balance my desire for a toxin-free home with both our budget and with our efforts to be as environmentally-friendly as possible.  That means that we’re not going to replace stuff we have that is still in good shape (like our living room furniture, for example), just to get toxin-free versions.  But when we need to replace something or get something new, we try to choose the most environmentally-friendly and toxin-free version we can afford.

And that brings us back to searching for a mattress.  We wanted to get something that would last our son for a long time.  We looked at mattresses at a local organic bedding store, and of course the solid latex ones were divine.  They were also $1500 for a twin size.  We decided to go with an innerspring instead, and add a latex topper to it in a few years when our son is heavier and needs a softer bed.  The Green Baby Guide has addressed the fact that there aren’t a whole lot of choices available for reasonably-priced twin mattresses, and I agree.  I looked at both of the ones they mentioned, but didn’t buy either one.  The $600 Naturepedic is waterproof and from what I read, it’s just about as firm as the hard-as-a-rock crib mattress our son already has.  I know that’s perfect for babies and small children, but not as likely to be a good long-term solution.  While I liked the price tag on the $400 Natura Kidz mattress, it looks like soy-based polyfoam isn’t really that much of an improvement over regular polyurethane foam, and to get a truly “organic” mattress from natura Kidz bumps the price tag up to $1100.

I liked what I read about Naturepedic mattresses and their non-toxic fire protection system (another alternative to toxic fire retardants is wool, which is naturally fire resistant, but adds a lot more to the cost of the mattress).  Eventually I settled on their quilted organic cotton deluxe mattress for $700.  I felt that would give us a mattress that could be used long-term (with the addition of a latex topper as our son gets older) and was a good compromise in terms of price.  I ordered it from The Clean Bedroom because they offer a ten percent discount if you become a fan on Facebook.  That allowed me to get an organic waterproof mattress pad ($79) essentially for free.  There was also no tax and no shipping charge.

Since we were spending so much money on the mattress, I wanted to find a good deal on a bed frame.  We wanted a bed with a solid support under the mattress (so that we wouldn’t need a box spring) and we were looking for something with drawers so that we could move our son’s dresser into the baby’s room.  I also wanted something made of solid wood instead of particle board and veneer.  Happily, Craigslist rarely lets me down.  After a few weeks of searching the listings, I came across a bed that was exactly what we wanted.  Solid wood, drawers underneath, a solid platform for the mattress, and in excellent condition.  We got it for $160.  It looks a little odd right now, because we have the crib mattress on it while we wait for the new mattress to be delivered:

We moved our son’s dresser into the baby’s room, and all of his clothes are now under his bed.  In addition, the big middle drawer holds all of his stuffed animals, so they aren’t crowded all over the bed anymore.

All in all, I’d say we did pretty well.  We ended up with a solid wood bed/dresser, an organic mattress that should last a long time, and an organic waterproof mattress pad, for a total of $860.  The mattress should be arriving any day now, and our son is very excited about his big boy bed.  The price was more than we usually spend on stuff like this, but in the nearly three years since our son was born, we’ve spent very little money on supplies for him.  And I feel good knowing that he’ll continue to sleep on a toxin-free mattress. 

The only thing that bothers me about this whole process is how unaffordable non-toxic mattresses are for a lot of people.  We’re thrifty and careful with our money, which helps us budget for larger purchases.  But we’re also fortunate to earn a good income and be able to afford something like this if we want.  For many families, a $700 mattress for a child is out of the question, no matter how carefully they budget.  It shouldn’t be that difficult to get non-toxic products.  I do feel like the tide is turning a bit in terms of people understanding that “better living through chemistry” might not be better after all.  Hopefully as time goes by, non-toxic products will start to be the norm rather than the expensive exception to the rule.

We got rid of our TV in early 2009.  We were staging our house to put it on the market, and trying to make it feel as big and open as possible.  So the TV and the table it was on were banished into storage.  When we moved a few months later, we opted to leave the TV behind, and have been without it for the last 16 months.

Obviously, that means we don’t pay for cable or satellite TV.  We have cable internet (a necessity since we work from home and do all of our work over the internet), and we also have a $9/month Netflix subscription.  Between Netflix and a laptop, we have no need for a TV or traditional programming at all.  There’s no hulking entertainment center in our living room.  In fact, our living room only contains seating (a chair, couch, and loveseat that we got from my husband’s aunt when she replaced her furniture last year), a footstool, a big plant, a little cabinet to hold our son’s books, and a coffee table.  It’s a relatively large room, and I love how open it feels.  It’s very inviting – plenty of comfy places to sit – and encourages conversation and togetherness, since the seating all faces each other, rather than facing a TV.

When we want to watch a movie or a TV show, we set the laptop on the coffee table and either watch a DVD from the library or Netflix, or we watch something from the extensive Netflix streaming options.  Yes, our screen is only 17 inches, but we thoroughly enjoy our setup, and especially like that we can take it down and put it away when we’re finished.  Over the last year, we’ve seen all or part of a variety of shows:  Dexter, Lost, Prison Break, Weeds, Bones…. all shows that would normally have required at least basic cable TV, and in some cases, premium channels like Showtime and HBO.  And we haven’t seen a single commercial in over a year and a half.  One of the major bonuses of watching TV shows via Netflix is that a show that normally takes an hour (like Lost) on regular TV only takes about 42 minutes on Netflix, because there are no commercials.  I’m especially grateful for the lack of commercials lately, because I’m sure that every second one has been political mudslinging for the last couple months, and I can definitely do without that.

Our son has pretty much always lived without a TV.  He was less than a year old when we got rid of our TV, and hadn’t yet figured out how to turn it on (we never turned it on when he was awake).  But we have an iPod that we let him play with whenever he wants.  We mostly use it as a music player and book reader, but we’ve also downloaded a bunch of free toddler games to it, and our son loves to play them.  They require him to constantly interact with the game – usually they will hold his interest for about 15 minutes, and then he’s ready to move on to something else.  But about a month ago, we added a Netflix app to our iPod.  It allowed us to access the streaming Netflix library on the iPod anytime we had wi-fi internet access.  Our son quickly figured out how to get into the Netflix app, scroll through to the kid movies, and watch whatever he wanted.  We started noticing that instead of playing a game for15 minutes and then moving on to play with his blocks or read a book, he would sit and stare at the iPod, watching a movie, until we took it away from him.  It was as if he was in a trance.  He was glued to the screen, watching The Cat in the Hat and Dinosaur Train, over and over again.  He didn’t have to think or do anything like he does with the games – there was no interaction required, so he would just sit there forever, watching movies.

I’ll admit, it did make my life easier.  I was able to work without being interrupted every 3 minutes to come build a block city or read a book.  I truly do understand how it gives parents a break to be able to plunk a kid down in front of a TV.  And at least the Netflix movies didn’t have any commercials.  But after about two weeks, both my husband and I realized that the Netflix app on the iPod had to go.  Our son was never choosing to play the games anymore.  Every time he picked up the iPod, he would immediately opt for a movie instead, and he rarely stopped watching until we took it away from him.  So we removed the app.  Our son was frustrated that day and the next, looking for the Netflix icon on the screen.   But by the next day, he had forgotten about the movies.  He went back to playing games on the iPod every once in a while.  He stopped asking for it constantly.  He went back to asking me to play with him all day long.

Our brief experiment with having quazi-TV available to our son proved to us that we made the right decision when we got rid of the TV.  I know that if we had one in the living room, we would either be constantly monitoring to make sure he wasn’t watching TV, or else we would have just started to give in and let him watch it.  The tiny screen on our iPod had a magnetic hold over him when it was playing a movie, and I have no doubt that a big TV screen would be the same way – probably worse.  And it would have included commercials too.  I’d much rather that he spend his early childhood playing in the backyard, going to the park, building cities out of blocks, and reading books.  And in terms of money, our $9 Netflix subscription is definitely a lot cheaper than most cable or satellite TV packages. (No, Netflix is not paying me to write this post!)

Have any of you given up your TVs?  If not, do your children seem to be hypnotized by the TV when it’s on?  If you’ve kept your TV and have children, have you figured out a way to effectively limit them to little or no TV?