Bricks Not Books

VintageHistorian

Would you believe that shortly after my last post someone on eBay made an offer on the CK pyjamas. They were up for £40 with free postage, and they offered £20! I refused and then went and switched off the "accepting offers" bit so they couldn't try to counter (I hadn't meant to have it on in the first place) and a few hours later someone else bought them for full price.

So they were packaged up and sent off earlier in the week. After robbing me blind for fees eBay sent me £34.58, all of which I put towards the mortgage and just took the postage out of personal funds (postage was £4.6-something so it would have been close to £30 OP anyway).

Greenjinn finally sent me £7.95 without me having to complain, and I got PA up to £5.54 so cashed that out. Along with a tiny TT of £1.46 I ended up overpaying £49.53.

I have a bunch of vinted postcards and books in my shop that I could list on eBay but the fees put me off a bit, nor have I sent off the Ziffit box (although I did find another book to add to it). I'm tempted to try and sell some of the excess pyjamas on Vinted as I know some of them are barely worn, but I'm not sure I can face packing and post office walks for the sake of £2 here and there. They certainly won't go for much more than that as everyone on Vinted wants an absolute bargain (and if I'm honest they're not worth more, I think most are from Tesco).

That meant that this week I focused a bit more on PA. I'm currently just over £7 on there. Might not end up much higher than that as activity on there tends to be a bit sparse over the weekend, but who knows if some PhD candidate somewhere panics about lack of data and shoves a load online just as I log on XD

Mr VH has been out this evening (a very rare event so I hope he's enjoyed himself) so I made myself a picky tea and then had some yellowsticker cheesecake bites with a cup of tea for pud. I'm on late shift with Baby Boy. If he's woken up for an 11.30pm feed then he generally sleeps past 6am. Except for this morning of course, when he woke up at 5:45. He'd already woken me up at 4am by fidgeting a lot in his sleep. But he's had a pretty decent series of naps today and he fell asleep on me at 8.30 this evening so I sat on the sofa with him on me for 10 minutes. He's so heavy now that my arm starts to go numb after a while.

Have a good weekend everyone!

VintageHistorian

We are now in October! And I now have a 6 month old, and I'm just on Statutory Maternity Pay so money is starting to come out of my maternity leave savings pot. It'll be sad to see that deplete but the whole point of saving it was so I can continue to be home with DS so at least it can serve it's purpose (but I will hate seeing it dwindle, all I can see is £11k that could go towards my pension T_T).

In total my September overpayments were £196.48! A little short of my aim of £224 but still really good and it's given me impetus to do more on PA and sell a bit more on eBay. I've got a few things I purchased during the year to resell for winter so I need to get round to photographing and measuring this week, one top in particular would be a lovely Christmas party wear so I must prioritise that if nothing else.

Part of the reason why I didn't fall over the £200 mark was because I forgot to transfer my PA money from last week out of Paypal and also forgot to log in to online banking for a TT payment. My memory has really been shot by the baby hormones.

Mr VH has been a bit unhappy about the amount of clutter about the place, and while I'm feeling a bit aggrieved about his annoyance (because if he told me earlier I would have dealt with it sooner) I've pulled my big girl pants on (because he is right and it has got a bit silly) and had a 20 minute dash about sorting things out. He's now got a pile of things to go in the loft (including 3 boxes of DS's tiny clothes) and I've shoved things into the Kallax unit to clear floor space. We've also packed away the Nintendo Wii, which I only bought so I could play Harvest Moon during the pandemic and which has now been superseded by the Switch, but which I'm reluctant to get rid of. So it can go in the loft for the time being and at least Mr VH doesn't have to clean around the cables etc.

Finance-wise I've transferred just over £14 from Paypal, which is over £7 I earned on PA from the past week and another £7 from them from the week before, still got £2 pending approval which will start me off nicely tomorrow. I need to get one top listed on eBay. I have a WI talk on Thursday which will net me £25, although that will go in my S&S ISA so isn't an OP. I also need to make a decision on whether to try listing the pyjamas on Vinted or just accept that it's not worth the tiny bit of money I'll get for them and stick them in a charity shop bag. Currently the charity shop bag is winning as I need to prioritise my time, but then I need to find time to actually go to a charity shop and donate them.

I also need to go through my planner and tick off the things I've actually decluttered and remind myself what else was on the list. Socks and PJs were the easy ones, I suspect there's more lurking that I need to tackle head on!

This weekend has been a slow cooker one. Yesterday I did lamb stew with dumplings (just bunged the pot in the oven for the last 30 minutes to cook the dumplings), and today I'm doing a whole roast chicken. I was going to do sausage and mash tomorrow but that involves a lot of washing up for Mr VH, and he's taken Wednesday and Thursday off this week, so I might do steak tomorrow and then the sausages can be had on Wednesday when he hasn't had a long day at work.

Have a good week everyone!

f0xh0les

Congratulations  on Baby Historian VH!   That is so lovely. 

Well done you ( Mr VH too, I suppose he did help a bit so deserves some credit )

LadyWithAPlan

Congrats indeed! 6 months now wow.
Good to see you still managing to OP on mat leave

VintageHistorian

It appears that all the mouse talk on @Cheery_Daff's diary has spread, because the damned mice are XD

There I was, sitting on the sofa on Thursday morning, giving DS his second breakfast of the day, when a caught movement out of the corner of my eye. My first thought was that it was a huge spider, which nearly sent me into a panic right then and there. But as I stared at the spot in the hallway where I had seen the movement, a small mouse crept out from around the side of the shoe bench!

Cue much swearing, which startled the little !!!!!! back into hiding. I called my Dad, who couldn't hear much over the sound of DS crying because he was scared and I'd taken his bottle away, but he heard enough to go to his local DIY store and buy some traps. We paid our usual Thursday visit to my parents and came home with two humane and two poison traps, and stopped off for Nutella and peanut butter on the drive home.

Mr VH primed the humane traps with Nutella, neither of us wanted poison around unless it was as a last resort, and then put one in the kitchen and one in the hallway. I then moved it to the side of the shoebench I had seen it. He also checked the hallway and couldn't find the mouse so we assumed it had escaped, it probably got in through the tumble dryer vent.

Got up Friday morning - no mouse in the trap. Give DS his first bottle and put him down for a nap - no mouse in the trap. Take DS out for baby yoga, come home to pop to the loo before we go to Waitrose - and there's a mouse in the shoebench trap! I devised a convoluted system of putting the trap in the bucket for our papershredder (since it's very deep and has smooth plastic sides) and then put that in the large box our highchair arrived in, and then wedged that into the footwell of the car. Drove to a coutry park, DS typically fell asleep in the car as he was worn out by the excitement, and I released the mouse into some trees on the edge of the park's car park.

The second trap has now been moved to the shoebench space but so far nothing else has been caught. And long may it stay that way! I then had another small panic on Friday afternoon after I found three little mouse droppings on top of a quilt I use to pad DS's little playmat T_T So lots of things were bundled into the wash on a 95 degree cycle and Mr VH cleaned downstairs yesterday, including wiping things down with Dettol. No other mouse poop was found. No idea how or when the little !!!!!! got onto the playmat as it was hung up most of Thursday, but they are ingenious little climbers and it may have had the run of the house on Thursday while we were out, or on Friday morning.

I want to block up the tumble dryer vent and use the space under the sink for the bins. Mr VH wants to finally get a new tumble dryer as the bedbug crisis in France is freaking him out a little bit (he's had a bedbug experience in the past). I know it's not very MSE or very environmentally friendly, but I wash everything at 60 or 95 degrees as standard anyway, so tumble drying is less of a concern to me. But he wants to make sure there's enough heat to kill them so we may get a tumble dryer.

TCB suddenly had my car insurance cashback ready to pay out, so I got £42.38 from them along with £6.82 from PA and £2.96 TT, giving me £52.16 OP which I sent last night.

Still haven't listed anything on eBay though. It's been that kind of week!

Dinner tonight will be some kind of roast dinner from the freezer, with ready to roast potatoes and veggies.

Have a good week everyone!

Cornish_mum

Oh no, poor you. I suggest checking behind the kick boards in your kitchen for signs of more (this is what we were advised to do, the last time we had them). Keep the traps down for a while in the same place as they can be very neophobic, so it can take several days to approach a trap. Hopefully it will be sorted soon CM

VintageHistorian

Jumping on as I expect DS to wake up from a long nap at any moment.

OPs since my last post:
October - £196.21
November - £149.61

I've dropped the ball in the past few weeks as DS has hit a clingy phase and it's quite hard to do any side hustles when he's swapping between wanting to snuggle on my lap, then play on the floor with me nearby, then come back to the lap cuddles again.

I also had an expensive November as we renewed the buildings and contents insurance (but did get it cheaper using the comparison platform on TCB), and I had a dentist check up (expensive train tickets) that then required a filling to be replaced (more expensive train tickets plus the cost of private treatment). But it's done and dental work is something that I won't compromise on when it comes to price.

In more exciting news, Mr VH has applied for a 12 month career break for next year. It'll be unpaid of course, so we'll be living off just my wage. I'll go into that more in another post as I can hear little noises over the baby monitor, but suffice to say that I'm keen for Mr VH to get more time with DS (I'm having my year after all!) so I'm happy to spend a year being financially careful in order to let that happen.

Dinner tonight will hopefully be spaghetti bolognese, assuming DS will sit in his highchair long enough for me to get the bolognese started.

ruby_eskimo

Lovely to hear a little update and exciting plans on the horizon for next year.

VintageHistorian

Mr VH has been given the nod from his boss so now we're just waiting on the official confirmation from HR, so it looks like the career break will be going ahead!

My maternity leave finishes mid-March but I then need to take some built up annual leave before I go back officially, and Mr VH starts his career break at the end of March but needs to use up his annual leave before his end date. This should give us some cross-over but if we've miscalculated and there's a day or two gap then grandparents will happily have a day with DS.

As far as Mr VH is concerned, he's taking this break because we still don't have confirmation of a place from our preferred nursery and our second choice is £15 a day more, which we can't really afford. By having a year with DS himself we can push back the nursery application to March 2025 and give ourselves another year on the waiting list, which will hopefully secure our place (also I suspect they have fewer older children coming in and more of them going out as family circumstances change).

As far as I'm concerned, Mr VH is burnt out in a job he doesn't particularly like, but is too worn out to work out what else he could do or even look at other options. I'm hoping that after 6 months with DS he'll have enough mental distance to be able to start thinking about what he wants the next 18 years to look like in terms of being there for DS throughout his school years, and can maybe start looking around at other jobs and realise that he has a lot of skills and experience that can be transferred. He's only ever worked for one place, and after a while that can make you feel like you're stuck there with no hope of getting out. We can't afford for him to be a permanent stay at home Dad, but we can give him the year.

Financially speaking it will be tight. Our current mortgage deal expires in April so our monthly cost will be going up, but overpaying means that it won't be as big a shock to the system as it could be! I've budgeted for DSs monthly expenses including him growing out of his clothes, and estimated what our council tax will be based on the assumption that it'll go up by 5%.

The two biggies will be food and energy, but we'll have a bit more wiggle room with food once DS is off formula. Energy is more of an unknown but we don't want DS to go cold so we'd rather rejig the budget elsewhere if costs ramp up suddenly. There's also the cost of petrol, so I'll have to get used to walking to work in all weathers like I did before the pandemic! It'll be good for me anyway, and better for the environment.

I've told my family that next year their gifts will mostly have to be homemade, which they're all fine with. I made a list of everything I know how to bake last night so I'll just send them the list a month before their birthdays and ask them to pick two things, and I'm planning on buying their birthday cards from Etsy after Christmas so that side will be paid in advance.

Side hustle wise, I'm planning on using my WI talks money for my savings, but otherwise OPs and extra treat money will have to come from other sources. We already use Clubcard points for Disney+, I've also got some vouchers for magazines that I need to use, and we have our National Trust life memberships for cheaper days out.

Hopefully it will all work out but you just don't know until you're in the thick of it! As long as we can pay the bills and feed DS we'll be fine.

And now I need to go feed some apple porridge to a baby. Dinner tonight is oven pizza! Have a good weekend everyone!

f0xh0les

Sounds fab V_H.  It will do Mr V_H the power of good to take that time and re-evaluate.  Plus he is going to get all of Spring/Summer with baby V_H to bond when he is properly getting a little personality ( the baby, not DH. 😂)