Ho-ho-hope your holidays are bright

There's nothing like a little bit of Christmas arm wrestling, . . . 

 . . . especially if you're getting strong enough that your uncle, a house builder and all-around strong-as-an-ox guy, shakes his arm after whomping you and says, "whew! that's getting tough!", and your aunt in reindeer antlers takes a photo.




Although opening presents with a dad/grandpa who's dressed in his Santa hat, and who likes his Alice in Wonderland as illustrated by Salvador Dali so much that he forgets about other presents around him --- well, that's pretty sweet, too.

Here's hoping your holidays brought you memories that you will continue to treasure. 

What she bought: bags and chocolate

A friend of mine asked me, ". . . but . . .  you must go shopping sometimes; you must buy some stuff, right?"  And so I figured it might be fun to start documenting actual purchases I make.

So, here goes:  Saturday I went to the grocery store and I bought bags and chocolate.   Or, the way I think of it, I bought "bags wrapped in trash, and chocolate without trash".  Total expense:  $9.08.

Cloth bag to canning jar for some trash-less chocolate;
paper bags in a (sigh) plastic bag.

The chocolate ($6.65 for a bit more than a pound), I bought for baking purposes because SOMEONE ate all of the rest of the baking chocolate in the house! It wasn't my kids, and it wasn't my husband, which means it was . . . well, let's just say I felt it was my responsibility to refill the baking chocolate jar. I bought my chocolate pieces in chunks from the "bulk" section of our local grocery. Although I chose the bulk section to avoid garbage, I've found that many candies there (like M&Ms) are cheaper than buying them in commercial bags. I use a technique I learned from the Zero Waste Home: I use my own cloth bags (made from cutting down a pillowcase), and write the code number on the bag in a washable crayon. (Crayola makes those). When I got home, I transfered the chocolate to a glass canning jar.

Well, I transfered most of the chocolate to the canning jar.  But there it is.

I also bought a pile of 100 paper lunch bags ($2.43).  Some of these immediately came in handy when J-son packed his lunch for work later that day.  And yes, I know he could use a reusable lunch box, but he tends to leave things behind -- the amusement park is already richer two canning jars that he's left there, so I don't mind him taking paper lunch bags.


But the real reason I bought the bags is for wrapping presents.  We've done our usual "x-Mass Production" lines, and since then, the boys need to wrap their many gifts for family and friends.  The boys decorate the bags and plop the presents inside.  I get a kick out of the pictures N-son does on his bags (J-son is a little more stoic in his style).

Here's an N-son original for our next-door neighbor, the one with the beautiful garden.   Sweet drawing, right?

J-son gets a job! (briefly)

J-son, nervous before starting
the first day of work.

Saturday was J-son's first day of work.  He was seriously nervous beforehand.

And good reason: this first job has been a long time coming.   How long?  We started the process of job searching a year and a half ago -- not searching terribly seriously at first, mind you, but still a start.  I had a "Financial Summer Camp" for my boys in 2014, and as part of that, the boys created their first resumes and filled out their first-ever applications (for a volunteer position).

Nothing ever came of that application, aside from a few nibbles ("you're next in line when we have an opening", but they never had an opening).  But it was a good first-round lesson on paperwork.

We started job searching again in earnest at the beginning of this summer, using what I called my "Viktor Frankl summer plan".    We filled out what seemed to J-son HUGE numbers of on-line job applications (I think it was three or four of them).   As always seems to happen, though, it was networking that got J-son that first big break; I heard from a neighbor that a local amusement park was a great place for teens to work.  J-son sent in a job application, and in July, there came a call back for a job interview!  yay!

That job interview was both J-son's big break, and also what broke J-son.  He stopped applying for other jobs, because this one was obviously imminent.  We hunted unsuccessfully for official paperwork (a social security card -- somehow, that didn't seem to come through with all the rest of the adoption paperwork back in 2011), and then we gave up looking and applied for a new card and a work permit.

But J-son did eventually get the interview scheduled.  Setting a time for the interview took several tries (another few weeks, I think?) because of all the many trips our family was going on.  In early August, our family got the good news:  J-son had a job!

But before the job could officially start, there was orientation.  And then training.  We'd get last-minute calls inviting J-son to these sessions at seemingly random times, and only at a moment's notice, and the last-minute-ness of these combined with our own schedule delayed first the orientation and then the training.

[I have to say, though, I'm super-impressed at the orientation and training materials from this place.  It's clear that they know this is most kids' first jobs, and the place seems determined to do right by the next generation.  It shows them how to set up direct deposit, what to wear, how to clock in, and even starts everyone in a 401K plan that they have to actively opt out of, rather than opt in to.]  

By the time both orientation and training had happened, we were well into the fall, which is, of course, a slow time for amusement parks.  J-son used the time with me to open a checking account to go along with his existing savings account.  (Hooray for our FoolProofMe lessons, which prepared the kids for this day!)

And now, with a mere two weeks to go before the park shuts down for Winter, J-son has had his first day of work.  I might have mentioned he was super nervous.  Did I mention that?  Did J-son mention it 85 million times beforehand?  Mom, when I get there, are they going to show me what I'm supposed to do? Yes.  Adorable.

I bought him a bus ticket.  We watched videos on how to ride the bus (I *love* our local bus service and how helpful they are.  These videos are great and non-judgmental and step-by-step.)  I had my husband watch a video on how to put bikes on the bus, and he got so excited that he rode the bus with J-son to work the first day.  Here's J-son inside the bus, and the two bikes out the front window of the bus.  (See the bar mitts on J-son's bike?)

Okay, so J-son will only have about ten days of work before the park closes down until May.  But look at how much he's learned, so fast, from this little bit of paid employment.

1. How to interview.
2. How to dress for a job.
3. How to open a checking account.
4. How to clock in and clock out.
5. How to read a bus schedule.
6. How to ride the bus.  
7. Bring a lunch.  Even if you tell your mom, "no, I won't get hungry" you really need to BRING YOUR LUNCH!
8. Keep track of your badge, your official sweatshirt, your official water bottle.
9. How to use an ATM to deposit checks (before direct deposit kicks in).
10. And yes, your boss will tell you what you're supposed to do.  You're going to be fine.

As for me, what I sort of already knew, but got to learn again:  this takes lots and lots of time.  N-son is certainly going to start a lot earlier than June when it comes time for his summer job search.  Also, make sure you have social security cards somewhere.  

Encouragement. Rewards. Drums.

N-son started drum lessons back in 2009, when he was a youngster of 9 years.  I'm not a Loud Noise Lover myself, but I knew he was, and I also knew he needed some kind of therapy/training to help him connect his left and right side, which had trouble communicating with each other because of a stroke he'd had in utero.  I figured drum lessons would be something he might enjoy and that would force him (in a good way) to do the hard work of mending his own body.  I bought him a drum pad and a pair of sticks, signed him up for lessons, and told him he could get the actual snare drum (that actually made noise -- ouch) if he diligently practiced all summer long.

In my very first blog post back in 2011, I wrote about drums and frugality:

I know it's not easy at first to live a life of thrift and discipline, but most great things aren't easy. Like making music or excelling at sports or learning to cure illness, living a life of frugality takes practice. It's something I teach my kids every day, and they're just about as good at discipline and thrift as they are at playing the drums (that is, they're still wild and loud, but they're getting there).

And in this 2012 blog post on "love, money, and employment", I wrote about drums and rewards:

When N-son started drumming, his first snare drum was a long-awaited reward for a summer of good behavior. And later, the hi-hat was a similarly long-awaited reward for practicing regularly with the snare drum. As time went by, we kept "rewarding" his drum practice by eventually "letting" him have more and more pieces of his drum set. Now we "reward" his practice by "letting" him perform in public occasionally. We are totally messing with his mind, rewarding his music practice with even more music practice. But if we'd gone the route of say, paying him for good practice by giving him extra allowance or extra dessert, I don't think he'd be the avid drummer he is today.

Somehow, all that "messing with his mind" seems to work.  It seems to have worked both in the physical sense of developing coordination and timing, but also in the mental sense of developing a passion for music and rhythm.  In the physical sense, man, this kid is good.  He's started playing at our church services occasionally; I've heard him at a few recital concerts; he's got some real talent.

The room around this drum set is a swamp of everything-ness,
but the drum set itself is an oasis of order. 

But it's even more gratifying to see how the drums have become a source of joy and discipline in his own life.  Last summer when I was doing a presentation on organizational techniques, I pointed to N-son's bedroom, where just about everything appears to be a mess -- but his drum set remains completely free of clutter, and ready for action.  When we asked what he wanted for his birthday or for Christmas, the only things he could think of were "a djembe" (which is a kind of an African hand drum) and drum brushes.

And recently, when N-son started swirling a bit into social difficulties, we turned back to drums as a way to throw him a life line.  N-son can be a bit of a hedgehog, a little prickly, especially when he gets uncomfortable.  He tends to get uncomfortable when he's in groups of children his own age, so social settings at school can be a source of frustration and/or alienation.  To help N-son find a path around this, we turned back to music.  We signed him up for a local chorus, run by the enthusiastically welcoming group called "Music for Everyone".  Welcoming is exactly what N-son needs, aside from the music aspect, and this group met and exceeded all expectations.  (And it's largely adults, which is great for N-son's comfort level and also for giving him good role models.  Double win!)

After just one one rehearsal, N-son is hooked.  Here he is, one day later, avidly checking his music on his phone.  Rehearsing without someone reminding him.  Driving his brother J-son a little bonkers by walking through the house singing Carol of the Bells over and over.

And speaking of J-son going bonkers, I really wish I could find something like this for him.  J-son has been sailing in and out of the seas of moral rectitude, and lately he's been more out than in.  I want a star to steer him by, one that doesn't shine with the light of a teenage sneer group.  What he wants most of all right now is to be liked, to be cool.   But the twin siren songs of coolness and boredom have been luring him onto dangerous rocks.  

Aside from re-starting the process of therapy (thanks to my husband making appointments and arranging school  excuses and bike-transportation), I think I want to try to get J-son involved in a MakerSpace near us, one where he'll get to play with metal machining, 3-d printers, and laser technology, and also with adults who know and love the equipment and its potential.  I need to find a way to "parent out", to use the adult communities around me to help guide him toward a stable future, one that he'll actually want to work hard at, even without his mother looking over his shoulder.  I need to help him find a virtuous path that becomes its own reward.

Why Miser Mom spent $214.62 on gloves

So, in fact, I spent $214.62 on three pairs of gloves (meaning $71.54/pair).  I don't know if that makes it sound better or worse: one huge splurge versus three large splurges?  I dunno.   And the gloves aren't even people gloves; they're bike gloves.

Here's the SPDM sporting a fabulous pair of bike gloves.  Actually, the brand name (emblazoned in glow-in-the-dark letters, is "Bar Mitts", which has me and my husband constantly wanting to add a "Vah" below: "Bar Mitts Vah".  It just might happen).

These fancy bike gloves are more than just a fabulous conversation piece (although we've certainly had a lot of other bike riders strike up conversations with us to ask us how they work).  And they're more than just trend-setting style accessories (although we certainly do turn a lot of heads).

No, these bike gloves are capital investments.  They're going to help my family keep riding through cold weather.  And that's going to save us some serious money on commuting costs.

How much money will that save us?  Well, of course it's hard to tell. For the past two years, our one-car family has spent about $700/year on gasoline.  That doesn't include the amount I spent in rental cars, which were reimbursed by the places that invited me to give talks, but it does include a vacation trip from Pennsylvania to Minnesota (and back, of course), and a few trips down to Virginia, and all of our local travel.

Well, that $700 includes all of our local car travel.  But we do a lot of local non-car travel. For example, our typical week includes

• weekly drum lessons (2.4 miles away),
• daily boxing practice (2.2 miles away),
• weekly food shelter (2.1 miles away), and
• weekly speech therapy (2.1 miles away).

These little regular trips would add up to at least 35 miles/week in a car (and they add up to more miles than that by bike, because some of these trips have multiple riders).  And recently, for behavior problems, J-son was kicked off the school bus (school is a bit over 6 miles away); all of a sudden the ability to bike is saving us an extra 60-ish miles/week driving back and forth to school.  Plus, there are all the random extra trips -- to a friend's house, to a doctor's appointment. Being able to send kids off on bicycles saves us, I'm figuring, over $5/week in gas alone.

Not only that, but the bikes are time savers for us as parents.  We don't escort the kids ourselves to most places; it's a great amount of freedom to be able to kiss the boys good-bye as they head out the door for their daily boxing lessons, and then sit down to finish a blog post.  No sitting in evening rush-hour traffic for me!

All this is to say, biking matters a lot to us now, for reasons financial and fitness and other.

N-son demonstrates how the hands slide right in. Toasty!

But in winter, getting ready to get on the bike gets more and more convoluted.  We're keeping track of lights, front and rear, because of the darkness.  We're putting on warm clothes.  We continue to keep track of helmets and bike locks, as in the summer.  Keeping track of gloves . . . well, I just don't want to get into the situation where for want of a glove, I had to spend an hour in mall-congested traffic driving my kid to and from school instead of drinking coffee and doing my math.

I got myself a pair of these mitts (or rather, I got the SPDM a pair) in mid-October, and immediately the boys developed a severe case of jealousy.  Which was exactly what I wanted, because that was their birthday present when N-son's birthday rolled around in November.  By the time they unwrapped their gifts, they were all primed to be delighted.  The boys' brand new  Ride-Your-Bikes-all-Winter-Long-Bike-Mitts were a great frugal torture device, disguised as a present. You're welcome, boys!

Questions we've gotten from others:

• Can you get your hands out quickly if you need to signal?  Yes, no problem.
• Do they actually keep your hands warm?  Actually, sometimes my hands start getting sweaty.  The nice thing about these compared to regular gloves is that, to cool off, you just take your hands off the handlebars momentarily.  I haven't needed additional gloves yet, although if it gets much colder I might wear gloves under the bar mitts (vah), because the bike handlebars conduct cold fairly well.
• Can you get your hand back in quickly?  Almost always, yes.  I ordered the largest size just to make entrance and exit easy.  Sometimes if I signal and then have to brake right away, I can't quite get my hand back in in time (that's happened two or three times in as many months). But they're soft enough that even when I didn't get my hand in quickly, I could grab the brakes even through the mitts.
• Where did you get them?  It's possible to order them online, but I like our local bike shop so much that I had them order the three pairs, and bought the mitts from them.  
• What does your dog think about them?  He's quite sad about them.  One of his very favorite chew toys is when he discovers yet another pair of new $75 bike gloves that my non-miser husband purchases occasionally, apparently just for the dining pleasure of the dog.  Now the poor dog has nothing fancy to eat.  

A happy guest-post from N-son

This is n-son, miser Mom's youngest son. Today she is letting me do a guest post. 

Today we adopted k-daughter at 1:30 and it was FUN. We got to talk and smile and cry a little. It's cool having another sister to look up to and to have around to help us and to see us on the weekends. K-daughter is fun to be with because we can hang out and make a place a party or a laughing zone within 10 minutes. This is another day to remember and to hang on to for life. 

When she first moved in with us it was weird because it was just me and j-son still living at home and then she came. But after a while I got use to having a sister in the house and then she would go places with me and j-son  like to drum practices. When j-son and I would come home she would help us with our homework.  When she got a job as a lifeguard she would take me to the pool she was working at for the day and I would have so much fun with her. 

When I was just six weeks old I got adopted into this family and I really didn't have a choice. But k-daughter did and she could have picked not to be adopted but she came into our home and we loved it.

Pass the Plate (community version)

Why have I bought hundreds of plates these past few months? And a hundred cloth napkins?  And similar quantities of cutlery?

It was an exercise in community, in seeing how far I can extend the oddities of my trash-averse life, past the shark-filled moat of the "don't drive them crazy" mantra, into the broader public realm.

At my church, there's a woman who puts on amazing lunches for a hundred people, and she does this just for fun.  She's not a caterer, and our church has no kitchen, so this is no minor feat to pull off on her part.  She hauls in chafing dishes and crock pots galore; she jerry rigs everything together so that the circuit breakers don't blow.  She brings vast quantities of food she prepared in her own kitchen.  She sets up table upon table upon table.  She gets a few volunteers to help her with set-up and also with clean-up, but mostly she is a one-woman culinary force of nature.

Several times a year, thanks to this rather formidable generosity, a hundred people from my church gather together for lunch.  It's a wonderful gathering.   We come away with a stronger community, with connections to new people, and full bellies.  And we leave behind bag upon bag of trash.

My friend June says that at her church (a much more eco-crunchy kind of a church than mine) families bring their own plates and flatware to church lunches.  That, I just have to say, ain't gonna happen at my church.  We're not exactly a think-ahead, do-it-the-frugal-way kind of church.  So if there was going to be a change, it was going to have to happen top-down structurally instead of people-up structurally.

There was no way I was going to ask the Force of Nature to take on the task of washing plates and silverware and cloth napkins -- especially because our church has no kitchen, and in the space where there is no kitchen, there is likewise a conspicuous absence of a dishwasher.  (Ditto for laundry).  I took it as a given that I'd end up hauling stuff back and forth between the church and my home, and that I'd spend an afternoon loading and emptying the dishwasher, not to mention a lot of time folding napkins.  Finding plates that were unbreakable, good-looking, and light enough to carry in my bike trailer turned out to be one of the big challenges.  (So hurrah for the Restaurant Supply Store!)

But the bigger question -- beyond expense and time and such -- was how this would go over socially.  Would I be insulting the Formidable Generosity of a woman who is a distant friend, at best?  Would the mere act of inserting these plates (etc) into an already meticulously synchronized and complicated affair be one straw too many for an over-burdened camel?  Would the many lunch eaters roll their eyes about the burdens of being Ecologically Correct?  I had no illusions that I was a white knight in shining armor, rescuing the villagers from the dragon that terrorized them daily.  No, the dragon was all mine.

I bought plates.  I offered them to the Force of Nature.  She shrugged her shoulders and declared that washing plates (etc) was just "too much work".  I agreed that she shouldn't be the one doing any of the cleaning, and I insisted I'd do it myself.   It was as though I'd just offered to scrub the parking lot with a toothbrush:  "whatever: suit yourself".

And so, in this way I joined forces with a Force of Nature.  She, with her garrison of chafing dishes, crock pots, sternos, and extension cords.  Me, waving my little green (cloth) napkins and brandishing the shield of melamine plates.  And we prepared for the onslaught of a hundred hungry presbyterians.

And you know what?  People loved it.  They loved it.  I had friend after friend coming up to say, "I'm so glad we finally got reusable plates"; "I'm so glad we're not throwing away paper napkins."  I'm sure there were people who thought the whole thing was silly (or worse); but they didn't come say anything to me.  Instead, a bunch of people got to have one more previously-unshared wish answered in public.  In fact, I've ended doing much less of the cleaning than I'd originally offered to do, because so many other people have spontaneously joined in the sudsy fun.

Since then, several people from my church have borrowed the plates and napkins to host large events of their own, returning everything (washed, stacked, folded) when done.  I don't know how many bags of trash I've averted from our local landfills, but I'm feeling like a pretty successful crunchy eco-nut right now.

But I'm also, I have to say, really happy that this all worked out in a way to build the social good, that far from weirding people out, I got to give us all something to be collectively proud of.

yay.