Life on the Road

Miss J has apparently decided that she has no interest in being potty trained by the time the new baby comes, which had been my goal.

In the interest of everyone’s sanity, I have decided to let the issue go, and go back to the potty training philosophy that actually matches the rest of my parenting model:  She will be ready at some point, and then it will happen naturally.

One thing I decided, though, was that the $40/month or so for disposable diapers had to stop - especially in light of the fact that it would shortly be doubling.  At that rate, it seemed like I could pretty quickly amortize the hefty-seeming startup cost of making the move to cloth diapers.

I did cloth with Nick for a while, but used a diaper service.  I just tossed all the diapers and (cloth) wipes into the pail, and once a week (or was it twice?) they came by and swapped out the dirty ones for a bag of clean ones.  POOF.

No “poof” in Homestead, Florida, I’ve come to understand, so I’m on my own.  I’ll actually have to deal with rinsing stuff off in the potty, and laundering it all … and of course with our electric dryer, I’ll definately want to be line-drying something as thick as diapers - which means I’ll need to have a larger stock and/or do laundry more frequently, since the laundering process will take longer.

It didn’t take me long to get a little overwhelmed…  There are SO many options out there these days, things that weren’t even dreamed of when I did this over a decade ago!

Prefolds, Fitted, Pocket Diapers, AIO, Bio-Friendly, DSQ, bleached or unbleached, knitted soakers, pins or clips or Snappis…  Whew!

I’ll keep you posted - and in the meantime, all advice is welcome!

I recently read two great books about kids and money:

“Financial Peace: Revisisted” isn’t primarily about kids, but he has the sound and simple basic principles, and there is a chapter specifically about teaching kids.  (He has actually put out a “Financial Peace Junior” that is entirely devoted to the topic, which I may have to check out…)

“Debt Proof Your Kids” is, yes, all about kids.

I found it interesting how much of what they had to say was fundamentally the same … yet almost equally intriguing were the differences.

Everyone agrees that we must teach our children to be able to see through the glamorous promises of credit card companies seeking to snare unwary college students (and even high schoolers!) with their too-good-to-be-true offers - because, of course, they are!

Both books advocated giving your kids increasing control over finances in their life…  Beyond just getting an allowance for spending money, letting them learn to budget for some of the necessities you’d spend money for anyway teaches them the important lessons while they’re still over the safety net.

One of the chief areas of debate, it seems, and certainly an area of frustration in our implementation, is how to handle chores in relation to allowance - and specifically defecits in the child’s performance thereof.

Dave Ramsey concludes that while children are a part of the family and need to contribute in certain things, they need to learn the way things work in the grown-up world:  You work, you get paid.  If you don’t do the work, you don’t get paid.

Mary Hunt tackles the issue a little differently.  If you get a speeding ticket, she explains, the judge doesn’t call your boss and have the fine deducted from your paycheck.  There is a consequence, and it is even financial — but you now have the additional responsibility of taking care of it yourself (i.e. paying the ticket), or facing the (increasingly ugly) consequences.  She issued her children “citations” for chores not done, and they had to pay them by a stated deadline out of the money they had already received (or would receive in the meantime).

I thought we could walk a sort of middle road with this, which has not been a notable success.

I love Mary’s idea of a monthly salary for the kids, as this is a considerably bigger budgeting challenge.  But as we are just getting started, we opted to go with weekly for the time being.

We decided to designate half of the budgeted amount as a salary paid each week regardless of anything else, and half paid on successful completion of certain weekly chores.  This was a bomb, and Nick seemed content to deal with having less money as opposed to putting out the effort to actually get his chores done.  NOT what I had in mind.

Now we’re going to try Mary Hunt’s way…  Chores are expected to be done, and there will be stiff “fines” associated with the “citations” for any failures.  And I do mean hefty.  After actually emaling Mary about it, we set the fines at $2 to $5 per chore - enough that he could easily owe me back his whole week’s allowance in a single day if he really put his mind to it.

The theory, naturally, is that it doesn’t take long at that rate for him to figure out that he’s better off doing his chores.

What do you think?  Stay tuned, and I’ll let you know how it works…

Check out this great post on ParentHacks for making Tye-Dyed Tissue Wrapping Paper!

Not only does this make beautiful wrapping paper, and make it inexpensively, but looks like a fun project to do with the kids…  (Who do you suppose will have more fun, me or them??)

Not that I hve a lot of snowy/rainy days to occupy this winter, but this should prove a more appropriate way to get our snowfake-cutting symmetry lessons in!

I wanted to share how proud I am of the power bill I just got…  but I guess I need to begin at the beginning.

The house we live in is provided by Knaus Berry Farm for the person doing the job Wolf is doing.  Instead of that much more salary, they give us a place to live. 

They keep the power bill in their name, and we just write them a check for it every month.  This means that the bill includes the cool historical data like “this month last year” - with the previous occupant’s usage.

 When we first moved here, we were warned that - especially not being accustomed to the weather - the power bills would be astronomical.  They said that the guys who were in here before us spent about $300 a month!  Whoa!

There is just no way I can put $300 a month into the power bill, so we worked like mad the first month we were here (before the Berry Farm opened for the season) doing the structural things we could do to help. 

• We shelled out $250 for a new air conditioner unit in the main living area.  They had a big old thing in here that was drawing WAY more power than was needed to cool the space, plus it was old and inefficient, PLUS it had the old school kind of thermostat so that the fan ran all the time while the compressor cycled on and off as needed.  The new one is half the wattage, plus it’s an Energy Star model with a great thermostat system.  We figured that would pay for itself really quickly.
• Wolf (who is afraid of heights), and Nick (who is just learning to be a handy guy) climbed up on the roof and installed three turbines to let the hot air out.
• We installed a door in an open doorway between the part of the house that’s climate controlled and a room that’s not.
• Wolf switched out a badly rotted out window in the master bedroom with one we removed from the living room wall (here’s that story, if you missed it).
• Caulk, expanding foam, weatherstripping, thresholds…

I boldly… BOLDLY! put $150 in the budget monthly for the power bill.  It was a bit of a nail-biter…

Of course we did all the usual power-conserving things:

• Turning off lights when you’re not in the room
• Setting the a/c thermostat a degree or two higher than you might really like
• Using the ceiling fans rather than (and in addition to) the a/c when possible, to minimize a/c usage
• And so on.

The first two months came in just under $150.  I made it!

Needless to say, I quickly decided that wasn’t good enough.  I want to be a better steward of the money that Wolf is working so hard to earn.  But what else to do?

God provided the answer, of course, and the blogs and newsletters I read regularly all started pointing out quirky little ways to save power, all of which we pounced on!

• A single ceiling fan running all the time, rather than switched on and off at need, costs an extra $7 every month.  And they don’t actually DO anything unless you’re in the room feeling the breeze, so it’s just wasted.  We because more vigilant fan-turner-offers.
• Energy vampires are loose in your home!  Everything with a little green “ready” light, everything that remembers your stations, or the time, or anything else… is using power to do that - often a surprisingly high percentage of the full “on” power.  To simplify the vampire-slaying, I plugged things in groups into power strips (themselves vampires - ack!).  Now with the flip of one switch I can slay the stereo, DVD player, and video game consoles, and with another I can nullify my computers, printers, and accessories.  And I do, overnight as well as when we’re leaving the house.

But the biggest thing I have been doing battle with is ELECTRIC APPLICANCES!  [insert horror movie music]

There is no natural gas service in this area at all, and this house doesn’t have an outside propane tank, or any other option.  Not owning the house, getting one installed doesn’t seem like the way to go, either.

• I really prefer cooking with gas, so the electric stove/oven is a struggle for me anyway, not to mention costing more.  But nothing I know of to do about it, either.
• I don’t know how much power the washing machine uses, but I don’t suspect it’s too huge, relatively.
• “Luckily,” as odd as that sounds, the refrigerator gave out, and the owners replaced it.  It’s still not wonderfully efficient, perhaps, but I have no doubt it’s far better than the old clunker was.
• The water heater is, I susect, a major, major power theif, that I also have no idea how to improve.  It’s old and corroded on the outside, so can’t help but be that way on the inside, too, drastically reducing the efficiency of the already-expensive process of heating water with electricity.  (The water here is horrible, so the lime and mineral deposits are plentiful).  Maybe I’ll have some more “luck” and it will need to be replaced, too! 

Then, there’s . . . The Dryer

Yes, it’s the grand-daddy of expensive electric heat generation, and you can just watch the wheels on the power meter fly when you push that “On” button.

When we finally got our things from storage, I was eager to put my folding drying-rack to use.  In this humid weather I can’t rack-dry everything, since it takes so long.  I’d like to find a place to string up some clothesline to make it easier to dry linens and things - but again, the weather is somewhat limiting, and I’m not sure were to go with that (we’re having a weird, brief rain storm again as we speak, even though it’s 82 degrees outside and I’m running the a/c!).

So I’d say I’ve cut our dryer usage to somewhere around 1/3 of what it was.

It’s hard to compare apples to apples, of course, since other factors get involved each month.  There were actually a couple of days last month - for the first time since we arrived in Florida - when we didn’t have to run the a/c, which of course makes a difference…  But I’m still awfully excited about this:

$86.95

Woohoo! 

That’s just 23 kWh per day, and this month’s usage last year (for two bachelors who were working 80 hours a week the whole time) was 50/day!

So it’s possible to do far more than I ever realized, with the cumulative effect of all those “little things.”  Now, where do I go from here??