$160 -- Stocking up and Cherry smoothies

Did I mention this would be a large grocery week?  Indeed, it was.  There were many shopping trips (I count five, in fact), and many kinds of food.  At the end of this post, I'll share C-son's cherry smoothie recipe.

The grocery shopping began early with a trip to Maplehofe Dairy, a dozen miles away from us, to purchase their grass-fed beef-and-etcetera.  50 lbs of hamburger at a bit less than $3/lb.  20 lbs of local no-BHT butter at $2.25/lb.  20 lbs. of cheese for $3-4/lb.  A few odds and ends.  The boys got to gawk at real cows and also to have large ice cream cones.   $245 later, we got back in the car for our next stop, the nearby BB's.

BB's (stands for bent and broken) is a modern version of gleaning.  Dented cans, boxes of food that fell off the pallet, etc.   It's sort of out in the middle of nowhere; the boys stayed outdoors near the horse end of a horse-and-buggy, which was another amusing diversion for them.  First cows, then a horse!  This is a place that takes cash but not credit cards.  The customers are an eclectic mix of the local Amish, resettled refugees, and (now that I've found it) cheapos like me.  We got 20 lbs of spaghetti (80¢/lb), a bunch of dijon mustard at 60¢/jar, a few more dented tomato sauce cans and . . . to the ecstatic delight of the boys . . . AXE!  Yes, they're going to smell like MEN!   Food and fragrance together ran us another $42.

There were two random trips to a real grocery store -- mushroom soup for J-son's stroganoff, pickling salt, and dinky plastic creamer containers that my husband can take along on his army drill these next three weeks.  (Apparently, the army provides 2% milk instead of real coffee cream.  Military service is certainly a dire hardship).  These trips ran us another $36.

And just when I thought I was done, the weekend rolled around.  My first solo days with the boys, and I was looking for a way to keep them busy.  Our latest issue of Chop Chop Magazine -- and can I say, I LOVE that magazine -- has several recipes for fruit smoothies, and my sons are seriously hooked.  In fact, they've experimented with any fruit we have lying around, tricky because there's been less and less of it.  So I suggested going cherry picking.

Cherry picking?  YES!  The younger boys balked, but C-son has lately been on a one-man mission to be as ultra-productive as possible, and his determination was the flame to the moth-desires of the other boys.  We picked 25 lbs of cherries ($55).  We pitted them with a wooden pencil (the metal end, with the eraser removed -- many thanks to Janeric for the suggestion!).

 Now we've got  more than a dozen jars of canned cherries,

several trays of dehydrated cherries,

a bowl of cherries to eat,

and also some cherries for smoothies.  Here, for your own gustatory pleasure, is my new son's recipe:

C-son's Cherry Smoothie:
     - cherries, pitted
     - coconut pieces
     - water
     - yogurt
Mix this together in the blender.  Yum.



******
The summary for the week:  a whopping $378 this week, bringing the 15-week average up to $160/week.

Average per week for the last 16 weeks.  Notice that the average spending is climbing up again.

Total spending per week, for each of the past 15 weeks.
Yes, this week has been a doozy.

Fixing a ceiling light

Several years ago, I pulled a ceiling fan out of my boys' room and installed a ceiling fan/light combination.  It was my dad -- my ultra-frugal (but not as frugal as me), omni-competent dad -- who taught me how to do basic electrical and plumbing work, and I'm intensely grateful for that, to this very day.

Hyperactive boys can be hard on ceiling fans.  A week or so ago, I noticed towels and pants hanging from the fan blades.  Not surprisingly, several days later, the fan looked like this:

In case you can't tell what's wrong, it's not that a bulb is out -- it's that the fixture was hanging at an angle.  Bad for turning on the fan.  Dangerous, in fact.

Fortunately, I'd expected I'd have to replace the fixture -- I know my boys -- and I'd bought a lamp fixture (without a fan) at Habitat Restore for cheap, several months ago.  So the next day, when the boys left for their last day of school, I turned off the power and removed the old fixture.  Sure enough, it looked bad.

That brass thing hanging down, that's what the fan screwed onto.  One of the two screws had come loose, and the brass fixture was completely bent.

No repair ever goes as smoothly as you plan, or so says my dad.  He's the one who taught me that every plumbing repair takes three trips to the hardware store.  In this case, the screws I had weren't long enough for the new fixture.  But screws are easy to get, so I lucked out with only one trip to the hardware store (yay!).  Purists would use electrical caps, but given the old wiring in my home, I was happy to have a bunch of black electrician's tape lying around.  My work is not perfectly up to code, I'm sure -- but I know it's better than a lot of other areas of my old, old home.

One hour of work, plus $5 for a used light fixture at Habitat Restore, plus $1 for an assorted set of new screws, resulted in this fixture going up into place.  For which I can only say again, Thanks Dad;  you're the best.

For the love of labor

I've started putting the boys to work.  In an odd way, this has been easier than trying to entertain them. In fact, to my surprise, things have been going really well.  I'm sort of not sure what to make of this.

This morning, each boy got his own patch of yard to weed, and each boy seemed to appreciate the chance to carry out sanctioned destruction.  So much so, that later in the day, I bought each boy his own set of garden shears and leather gloves.  (Yes, I purchased them new.  Real money was involved.  So you know this is serious)>

The result was delight.  The minute N-son got back from a friend's home, he discovered the new weapons (I mean, garden tools), he was out in his patch of dirt.

N-son chopping down weeds.

J-son and C-son had a head-start on N-son, and they were the first to beg to be allowed to try the new tools out.  They spent all evening -- two and a half hours -- clearing out the weeds under my pear tree.  Every once in a while I'd go to check on them.  And they were still working hard (and harmoniously!) together.  It was C-son's night to cook, but what was I supposed to say?  "Son, stop all that weeding right now!  Come in and cook!"   No, at about 8:00 I told them they were allowed to weed until dark, and I went in and made dinner myself.  Worse compromises have been made.

The pear tree at 6 p.m.

The same pear tree at 8:30 p.m

Speaking of cutting things, earlier in the day, J-son had asked for a haircut.  He wanted his mohawk touched up, and could I please add lightning bolts?  C-son was intensely interested in the process.  He explained (somewhat to our surprise) that he'd worked in a barbershop.  He didn't want to cut J-son's hair himself, but he offered to "touch it up".  And the attention and care he showed to his brother was -- fittingly -- touching.

No beta-fish baiting here.  Just a big brother, showing off his skills, and making sure his younger brother was still as devastatingly attractive as his rep demands.

If things keep going like this, I think we'll survive the summer!

Men are from Mercury?

My social worker recently loaned me a book which begins with many cheery statistics like this one:

In New York alone, since 1986, there have been at least seven occurrences of adoptees murdering their adoptive parents.

This, I think, she gave me to cheer me up.  Okay, so things aren't quite that bad around this neck of the woods.  But since I was writing yesterday about my mercurial new son, it seemed appropriate to take the family over to a viewing of the transit of Venus across the sun.

We began several weeks ago by hyping the event.  I was worried my boys would be bored (in their words, declare that the whole things was "butt-dips").  But a round of enthusiasm from me, from K-daughter, and from their dad -- plus assurances that a similar event won't happen for another 105 years -- seemed to overcome the potential yawn factor.

In fact, the boys were enthralled.  More so than I would have expected. Way more so.

We got special solar eclipse glasses (bling! yes!).

Are these the blues brothers?  No, it's
N-son, C-son, J-son, and K-daughter,
with solar viewing glasses.

We also got (although I didn't picture it here) potato chips and frisbees.  More bling.  Yes.

Beyond the bling, there was science.  There were a variety of telescopes to look through, and my boys returned over and over to them.

J-son is checking out solar flares.

C-son was the Venus-master.  He had lots of questions about astronomy.
Of the three boys, he stayed the longest, and
he returned to me the most times to describe new things he'd seen.

N-son got to see sun spots, solar flares, AND Venus all at once.

Here's an image of the sun projected on paper.
That little zit-like dot is Venus.

There were no special sound-effects, no flashing lights, no dramatic crashes.  But we all had a great time.  I'm feeling a wonderful combination of relief, gratitude, and triumph.

Speaking of gratitude, it was about a gazillion years ago that my own parents dragged me and my sisters out to see a total eclipse of the sun.  I am sure I was grouchy and ungrateful at the start (and possibly all the way through?).  I am sure that we whined about being bored.  But to this day, I remember the cool solar glasses, the camaraderie of our fellow eclipse watchers, and even a little bit of that particular eclipse.  For which I am, lo these many decades later, belatedly grateful.
.

Bringing up big boy

Here's a peek into our lives that probably doesn't match just about anybody else's life out there.  I've tried to write posts about buying groceries, fixing things, disciplining children . . . you know, sort of ordinary stuff.  But bringing C-son into my home makes my life a whole new kind of weird.  Not always bad, but definitely not the kind of life where most of my friends say, "oh, yeah, that happens to me all the time".

To whit:  medications has been a huge, on-going battle.  C-son moved into my home taking 6 different kinds of drugs, purpose unspecified.  First hurdle came about because one of the 6 bottles he moved in with was nearly empty.  The insurance company balked at refilling it because "that prescription had just been filled" (yes, but by a foster mother 3 hours away, not by me).  Since an internet search revealed that the drug was used to treat schizophrenia, I wasn't really excited about finding out what happened if he discontinued the meds, so I spent several hours running around to pharmacies, calling my social workers, and working with the insurance companies.  Yoicks.  It took about 7 trips to the pharmacy, but we finally got his prescription filled.

This bought us 25 days.  Several of C-son's medications are psychotropic, meaning we need to see a psychiatrist to get the prescriptions either filled or changed.  But child psychiatrists are few and far between.  Of the dozen or so counseling services in our area who take his kind of insurance, only one of these is actually taking child patients.  And that one, it took us a month-and-a-half to get a appointment with her.  Thank God our family physician was willing to refill the current prescriptions, one time only.  The insurance company balked here and there, but after only three trips to the pharmacy, we got his prescriptions refilled just 2 days before they ran out.

Then we finally got to meet the one-and-only psychiatrist who takes both children and their insurance.  And she, unlike the kindly shrinks you see on TV, was a rude, terrifying witch of a woman.  Hauled him over the coals.  Asked personal questions about physical abuse, incarceration, misdeeds, in front of his new mom and his social worker both, with neither tact nor discretion.  Told us to shut up when we tried to explain anything beyond what she saw as the scope of her questions.  Railed at him for his past misdeeds.  Told him it was all up to him to turn over a new leaf.  For goodness sakes, he's 15 years old and has lived in 20 different foster homes in his life.  And this is a kid who, since he's moved in with us, has responded to perceived threats from adults by hiding in the closet, not by lashing out or stealing or breaking things.  He's terrified, and she was yet another terrify-er.

So I've fired her.  She helped us by getting him down from 6 meds to 3, and so far he seems to be doing okay.  So I admit she did her job as far as the purveyor of prescriptions goes.  But I fired her  nonetheless, and I have no idea what happens when the magic 30 days come around again, and we need to get another round of meds.  We're working on that, even as I write this.

*******
The other thing that has been occupying a lot of my mind (and even, truth be told, interfering with my digestion) is figuring out how to help the boys get along.  Because although he hides from threats from adults, he seems to feel the need to be the alpha dog around his brothers.  Before C-son moved in, N-son was always the odd man out, and J-son was the charmer surrounded by friends and admirers.  And at first, this pattern continued.  But lately, C-son has ganged up with N-son, and the pair of them just sort of nibble away at J-son, who is suddenly, strangely, in the outer circles.  Picked on, persistently, the way that goldfish or beta fish pick at the one sickly fish in the tank.

I don't want to see my child bullied, not even by his brothers.  There's no real violence, but by the time evening rolls around, there's name calling, pinching, and persistent in-your-face-ness.  (Does the timing mean that meds are wearing low, or just energy levels?).   J-son has responded by withdrawing, or else (paradoxically) by baiting his brothers.  Most of my friends who are parents of teenage brothers tell me this kind of fighting and snipping is normal . . . but in our family, it's not normal; it's new.  And it's troubling to me, just because it is so new and also -- frankly -- so unpleasant.

Nagging doesn't work, and it's unpleasant, too.  Severe talkings-to just send C-son into his closet or under the covers.  So I've been spending a lot of my time lately working on positive reinforcement, on removing the triggers that cause the nasty behavior, on careful monitoring (hard to do without hovering so much that I'm running the whole show).

For what it's worth, N-son and J-son went through a much more severe trying-to-kill-each-other phase about 3 months after J-son joined the home.  This phase of oh-brotherhood, I've survived before and emerged triumphant on the other side.  I'm not worried about the long-term.  I'm just hoping I can make it through the next month.

My reading lists have changed lately.  Gone are the days of Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class.  I've been clutching at Don't Shoot the Dog, sucking up Your Defiant Child, wallowing in Can this Child be Saved?  Math?  Not much.  Blogging, not much either.  I'm believing we'll get through this and become the family he's always wanted, a family that will learn to love one another and get along.  But right now, we're spending a lot of time building.  A lot of time monitoring.  A lot of time praising, and carefully redirecting, and reassuring.  Stitching this family together, one thread at a time.

$144; Summer grocery spending

The summer grocery spending has begun in earnest.  Our 14-week average bumped back up to $144/week (144 is a perfect square because 144 = 12x12; 144 is also the 12th Fibonacci number.  If we had been born with 15 fingers, we would write that number as "99").

How did we get to this point?  In part, because my husband did some necessary pantry restocking:  coffee, bananas, more bananas, eggs, mayonnaise, and peanut butter, not to mention many other 'essentials' I forgot to list.  The "He Spends" part of our grocery bill ran to $155 this week.

But the "She Spends" part of the grocery bill should not be ignored.  $77 of our money -- spent entirely by yours truly -- went to sweet stuff and impulse buys: things I've barely justified to myself under the name of efficiency, even under the name of "spending-to-save".  The early part of this week saw a trip to strawberry fields with my former-student-turned-friend, where we picked $21 worth (about 16 lbs) of this beautiful fruit.   (I followed this up with $9 for sugar and tortillas, the latter completely unrelated to jam-making)\.   We spent the afternoon turning strawberries into jam (about eighteen 1.5-pint jars worth) and into dried strawberries to add to future granola batches.

$21 worth of fresh picked strawberries, and $25 worth of play tools.

The impulse buy was more expensive than the strawberries themselves.  I gave into temptation and spent $25 to buy three items:  a strawberry stem remover with moveable parts, a scoop version of a stem remover, and (showing a complete lack of willpower on my part) a plastic strawberry slicer.  Honestly, I am not sure that either of the first two items actually saved us time over a standard kitchen knife, but they were darned fun to use.  For the record, K-daughter loved the strawberry slicer, and it allowed us to prepare strawberries for the dehydrator more easily than ever before.  Ironically, that might have been the most useful of the three purchases.

At any rate, having three sets of tools allowed three of us -- my friend Steph, my K-daughter, and me -- to work harmoniously side-by-side to put up all 16 pounds of strawberries in just a few hours.   Based on past experience, this ought to be enough strawberry jam for an entire year -- even with the one-time, admittedly frivolous purchase of play-tools, this ran us to less than $4/jar of jam.  I'm okay with that.

Next week will see even more spending.  Our beef supplies are running low, and our local dairy is obligingly doing a butchering.  With summer here and the boys home for breakfast, lunch, and snacks, we'll have to start rethinking our pantry supplies.  So expect to see a surge in spending. 

Summer schedule

June 9.  That's the day that our almost-20-year-old K-daughter heads to Virginia for two months.  The same day that my husband heads for a three-week Army Camp.  The boys will be out of school.  They are too old for summer camp.  In spite of the fact that I would rather be in my office doing math, I will be supervising these three highly energetic kids.  Solo.

Most people, I suppose, would be delighted at the opportunity to stay home with their kids.  No office responsibilities; just time to enjoy the family.  Most Miser-Moms would be delighted at the chance to save so much money on childcare (we're talking something like $1000/month).  But me, honestly, I'd rather be doing math.  Part of the reason that it's taken me so long to put together this post is because it took me more time than it should have, to realize that this staying-at-home-with-kids-issue is not really a torturous thing.  In fact, it might be a really fun month.  I should quit whining and start smiling.

As you might guess, now that my head is coming around a bit, I am preparing by making lists.  Lots of lists.  And schedules.

Here's the plan.  We'll see how it works.

Nannies first; children second.  So says Miss Manners, and I heartily live by that motto.  Because even if I've decided that it might actually be fun to hang out with my own children (really?), I know we'll all need breaks from one another.  With much of my usual help gone, I'm making sure I know where to turn for respite (either for me from the boys, or vice versa).  They'll spend a week with my sister in July.  N-son will go to a sleep-away camp one week.  I'll hire temporary help to take the boys off my hands and give them some teenage-appropriate entertainment at various times -- with any luck, at many times.  I know it's hard to find help once I'm already frazzled, so I'm gearing up, making connections now, before I need them.

Structure and freedom.  Routine and flexibility.  My current plan (and we'll see how long that lasts -- hah!) is to have a very structured morning.  Breakfast, followed by an hour of chores, followed by reading, then snack, then drum practice, then running (maybe?), then lunch.  In the afternoons, though, the play's the thing.  Pool or bike riding or such.  I'm signing us up for a family pass to our county park pool -- that ought to be good for everyone.

As far as mornings go, I figure, if the boys are actually spending time with me, they ought to get (re)trained; they ought to learn to make breakfast and weed and clean and fix things.  They're not going to like it at first, but I've learned from my many-many kids how much easier it goes in later years, if I'm willing to work hard to make the kids work hard now.

But, of course it's summer.  So the work should be fun (ish), to be followed by fun in the sun, with a dose of freedom tossed in.

Biorhythms.  It's no coincidence that I'm putting work in the morning and play in the afternoon.  It's not just that the day will (we hope) go from doing work to the freedom from that work -- a much easier progression than the reverse.  It's also that I've observed my boys are much more docile and pliable in the morning.  And I have more energy/patience in the morning.  N-son and J-son have always been willing to make breakfast (they've often fought over the privilege, in fact).  But making dinner requires a lot more arm twisting, because so much else fun stuff is going on.  So we'll do the chores first, and reward ourselves later.

Special Events.  The United Way website for our city has a page listing volunteer opportunities -- and by "page", I mean a link to a pdf document that is 79 pages long, listing all sort of places we might help out.  (Each organization describes opportunities for families and for children, if appropriate).  I'm hoping we'll take advantage of that.

I've also spent a bunch of time uncovering fun-but-free things to do in our area, ranging from summer football practice at our local high school for C-son, to music concerts, to movie showings, to art walks, to nature hikes, and more.  A month ago April Dykman wrote a post called "Be a Budget Traveller in your own town" -- it was a great list of advice that came at just the right time for me.  Some of these special events have a specific time frame (we'll observe the Transit of Venus on June 5).  But for many others, we'll play it by ear.  See how it goes.

Some people do this all the time, huh?  I am in awe.