line drying and other changes

so i'd like to get honest here and tell you just how cool i really am. instead of blogging in my free time about all of our family happenings and scrap booking our life like i intended to be wisely doing. i have been spending that time on a new obsession. this is my cycle by the way. i always have something that i am over thinking, overdoing, over loving. this is usually something that is entirely wasteful of my time and brain space like britney spears' mental condition (thank God she seems to be doing well now - i was so worried) or for a month too long for comfort i would spend from the time the girls went to bed till i went to bed, happily and therapeutically crying while watching ryan adams on you tube and drinking red wine all the while. but really, how can you not?



maybe this is all just a little too honest.

but this new interest (a much nicer, healthier word than obsession) may prove to be good for my family. time will tell. my new thing is living a more frugal life. i'm not sure if every household feels like this, but the past year we have really begun to see that we can't afford the lifestyle that we had acquired. i admit that a big part of this was our own doing and just being plain careless and self-satisfying and bored really. we had slowly started eating at restaurants with more frequency when neither of us had a dinner planned or simply because we just felt like it. nothing wrong with that every now and again, but it was becoming often. or if i was running errands with the girls, instead of planning ahead and bringing snacks or packing a lunch i would run through the drive through. oh and our beloved grocery store, amazing savings, is not so much when you're stocking your freezer up on every single amazing (for organic) deal. and in our recent efforts to see what we are spending more money than we can afford on, these are just a couple of things that we have run across. but some things have felt a little out of our control...like gas prices and food prices rising. we all know about it, i don't need to go on and on. something had to give or we were going to see ourselves in major debt.

so we have begun the process to make a change. we have dreams for this house that we'd like to afford. a remodeled, modernized kitchen for one that i would love to be able to enjoy the conveniences of while i have little ones and things can get so chaotic so easily. do you know how often all of my sippy cups come crashing down on me from their tiny space that i cram them into?

i read a lot of blogs (oh my gosh, i just counted them on my favorites - around 50- ok that's embarrassing - but you know how one leads you to another), devoted to this exact subject. every day they will give you tips, finds, inspiration on how you can cut back somewhere or save money some place. and i think it's really working or helping at least. they are mostly just blogs of stay at home moms. these women have the art of saving money down. it's a game and they win every single day. i'm not lying when i tell you that these women have found a way to get tons of groceries for free and close to free (oop stands for out of pocket - these ladies even have their own language). and while i'm not so crafty with the deals yet, maybe someday i can be and could honestly learn to feed my family for $200 a month. and i can't quite subscribe yet to the idea of a budget or a price book or stockpiling up on 20 tubes of toothpaste while they are dirt cheap. but i can't say it hasn't gotten a little nerdy around here. i did spend an entire saturday night constructing a coupon book made out of a photo album and about 30 tabs indexing the different aisles in my grocery store. yeah, i'm kind of getting into this.

one of the many things we are doing differently is coordinating and consolidating our trips past black mountain. no more heading to asheville for just one stop. we have to at least need to go to two different places and turn the whole thing into an event for the morning.
but i really don't want this to turn into something that i focus too much on. we all know someone that never seems to stop talking about the prices of things, managing to bitterly work it into every conversation. so do stop me if this becomes me. i just want to be more intentional about where our money goes, so that we can have money for things that we can really get excited about. so what about you? have you guys had to make changes or were you already working it with your bad selves?

i will leave you with some pictures of our frugal, little lucy bea. she really gets into saving money. she practically forced us to start line drying our clothes.