Getting shot of the mortgage sooner than 2049!

Bluegreen143

My babies are returned to me! They had a fabulous time at nana & papa’s house. Bambi was all snuggly when she came back 🥰 back to the usual school routine tomorrow which will be a shock to all of us 🙈

Spending

£26.60 B&Q
Garden pot - wood trellis

£31.44 eBay 
Garden pot - long plastic trays for the conservatory window sills, as we want to put loads of seed trays and pots on there. 

Meals

B - chocolate porridge with banana

L - cheese & ham toastie, fruit salad, carrot sticks & sweet chilli dip 

D - veg & lentil loaded spaghetti bolognaise with a mixed salad on the side (made double bolognaise sauce and froze one)

Goals stats

Books read: 11/52

Outdoor hours: 93hr 18 min

Craft projects: still on my first knitting project but getting there! 

Emergency savings: £5,639.50 (£2,700 of that in Help to Save accounts and £2,939.50 in our normal emergency fund)

No S Diet: 3 days in row compliant 😇 

Bluegreen143

Forgot a couple of DDs in yesterday’s spending round up:

£159 Council tax

£100 Help to save accounts (so not actually spent - but no longer in my current account!) 

Bluegreen143

Nice long weekend this weekend - I don’t work Fridays, and I’m off on Monday. 

I’m reading a brilliant book called The Idle Parent and I have to say it’s been a while since I read a parenting book I agreed with so much. 

His basic principles are that, for happy lives as parents, we should strive to:

- be frugal so we can work as little as possible 

- fill our days (and our kids’ days) with as much fun and relaxation as possible rather than worrying too much about how they will turn out in the future; play and enjoy our kids; “fill the house with music and merriment… and happy mess”

- be slightly idle and useless so our kids become more useful 😅 practise benign neglect & encourage independence and feeling empowered. Basically don’t coddle them. 

- learn to make, garden, cook, mend etc and teach our kids these skills; reject consumerism and materialism  

- spend time having low key relaxed weekends at home, outdoors and with friends, and completely avoid spending money on commercial days out or entertainment 

Top quote: “I am not interested in creating a certain sort of child for a certain sort of role in society. I am interested in making everyday life enjoyable for both parent and child.” Amen to that 🙌🏼

Not everyone will agree with all the above points of course! But if you want a parenting book that’s a bit different and quite “old style” in its’ values I’d recommend. Got my copy from the library! 

Went to Tesco today - will update spends tomorrow. Picked up a sheet & pillow cases from the charity shop and a winter coat for Bambi in a bigger size for only £4. 

Cut up the old bedsheet (my old one, which the charity shop one is replacing as it’s in much better condition!) and hemmed a few handkerchiefs. I’ve been wanting to get some to transition away from tissues/using toilet roll to blow my nose but £12 seems the going rate on Etsy for 3x pretty patterned hankies. My plain white wonkily hemmed ones aren’t Instagram worthy but as they are only to collect snot I don’t mind, and they are effectively free as the sheet has done its time on our bed now and needed replaced anyway.

KajiKita

Tbh, BlueGreen, what you have just described;

the “ I am not interested in creating a certain sort of child for a certain sort of role in society. I am interested in making everyday life enjoyable for both parent and child.”

actually equally applies to how I am trying to live since I have found these boards, YNAB thinking etc. I don’t want to fit the expectations and identity laid out for me in this consumerist society I am embedded in! 😊

KK

Bluegreen143

Spending

£3.60 Bus fares

£7.00 Charity shop
£4 winter coat for Bambi in a bigger size; £3 bedsheet & pillow cases

£35.37 Tesco
£2 Household items; rest on food

Baileys_Babe

That sounds like a good book, we have been trying to parent on similar lines.

In this house, we all prefer hankies to tissues. Most of our hankies have started out white but when we have been using fabric pens, tie dying, batik etc we also do a few hankies to make them more interesting. In fact this week a friend admired the colour of my hankie, it was bright green.

Bluegreen143

@KajiKita yes! I think the reason I like this parenting book more than normal ones (I do have a parenting book addiction though) is that it’s really just describing how I want to live in general, not just how I want to raise my kids. 

Spend less, say no to horrible companies marketing rubbish I don’t need, work less, do more for myself? All part of my aims in life!

@Baileys_Babe great idea on eventually decorating the hankies. I’m sure the kids would love to try tie dye!

Bluegreen143

Had a really lovely and very productive day today.

Monkey at first said he wasn’t feeling very well, so we skipped football and spent the day at home. Though tbh he wasn’t too unwell - just had a bit of a cold I think - so that worked out well.

Spent 2.5 hours gardening - as well as managing to jam a massive amount of garden waste into the brown bin 😅 I also planted 30 strawberry plants and 9 rhubarb plants. Hope they take well! 

My sister came to visit this afternoon and she and her husband thoroughly wound the kids up to peak hyper levels - it was quite impressive as they’d previously been quietly and collaboratively working on the same drawing for ages while Red and I were gardening 😆 the kids did both spend a good amount of time out with us helping too today. Well, Monkey helped - Bambi mainly just watered things, including things which didn’t need watered 😅

Then I let them watch TV while I tackled the horror show that was their bedroom and the playroom. The root cause is that they get flooded with new Stuff in December (both have December birthdays!) and can’t manage the level of Stuff now crammed into small rooms. So I basically boxed up more than half. I didn’t throw the boxes away, but put them the cupboard, but I have warned that things they don’t miss in the next few weeks are ripe for donating. This way I won’t hastily donate anything they do want back.

What I’ve left them with is:

- big box of dress up
- soft toys & a couple of dolls (but only 1/3 of the soft toys remain out)
- building toys (Lego, Duplo, magnet tiles and these gorgeous wooden castle blocks they love) 
- various puzzles
- a small tub of playmobil/dollshouse people and a small tub of plastic animals
- the wooden train set and the wooden marble run set 
- a tub of percussion instruments and the ukelele and little guitar 
- the dollshouse with its furniture
- a tub of paw patrol vehicles & pups, because Bambi loves them and they’re good to take in the bath sometimes 
- the nerf guns and a huge robot dinosaur they just got off my dad last week…

Now I’ve written that out it still seems like a lot!! But I can assure readers that in actual fact their playroom is much emptier… which says a lot about what they had before 😮 They do have board games and art stuff downstairs too. 

The best bit about a hard declutter on toys is that you get a lot of very immersive, creative play immediately afterwards… like how pruning a tree encourages new growth. They get put off going in the playroom when it’s cluttered as well, and end up taking their toys all over the house instead. So I’m quite looking forward to lots of peace and quiet tomorrow! 

Of course, I often wonder why I persist in having any toys 🙄 yesterday they spent ages “reading” together (by torchlight) an animal encyclopaedia in a fort they made on the sofa with a blanket. Today Monkey cut some arm and eye holes in a big cardboard box and wandered about wearing it speaking in a robot voice. 

When I came down to make dinner, Monkey (with Red) was making a little fold up chair out of scrap wood 😍 which was lovely to see. Bambi has asked Red if she can make something with him tomorrow which of course he’s agreed to. 

Dinner was shawarma chicken wraps with salady bits, hot sauces etc. Went down well with everyone! 

Spending 

£8.70 ebay
Bundle of 5x summer dresses for Bambi 

Baileys_Babe

Depending on what the packed away toys are could you keep them and every few weeks or months swap them with some of the toys currently in the playroom to take Monkey and Bambi regularly back to that freshly discovered phase?

themadvix

9 rhubarb plants?! Crikey, I hope you like rhubarb!!