"How can you afford to have so many children?"

This was going to be a Letter to my Daughters, but it just wasn't sounding very letter-ish, so I'm posting it here!

When people hear of how many children we have in our family, we get a lot of common responses!  We often hear "you must be very patient" (I tell them I'm still learning that one), or "are they all yours" (of course they are!), or "God Bless You!" (and I say that He has, richly).  One comment or question we often get is what my husband does for a job, or how can we afford to raise so many children.  I usually share with them that we try hard to live inexpensively in order to make it possible!  Sometimes it's nearly impossible, but for the most part with care we do just fine.

We are not independently wealthy, my husband has a decent, hard working job.  But he is not our ultimate provider, God is.  God has not chosen to give us the trial of wealth (we keep asking for this trial so we can prove that we can handle it, but He has not seen fit to grant us this request!).  We have a moderate income, rich when compared to most of the world's population.  Due to the cost of our current housing, we have to be very frugal to make ends meet and this tends to lead us to live simply.

We have learned the hard way through the years that incurring debt is a very bad thing.  Even recently we have again learned this lesson the hard way.  About 1 1/2 years ago we purchased Financial Freedom Seminar, which we had discovered while looking around at the Duggar Family Website.  This really transformed the way we look at our finances.  We highly recommend this to everyone!  For us this resulted in a renewed conviction to get out of debt in every way that we can.  This has been a huge struggle for us, but we've learned so much in the process.  We have successfully paid off all our business debt, but it took over a year to do this.

Before I go any further, I need to make a confession.  This is the area of biggest struggle for me.  I know what it right, but so often I am tempted to spend money the wrong way and we end up paying for it in the long run.  God is working on me in this area, but for some reason I keep "thumping."  I'm so thankful that I serve a living God who loves me and forgives me even when I fail Him so often.

I'm going to share with you some of the ways we have "tightened our belt" so to speak - ways we have found to reduce our cost of living.  I'll start with some of the biggies and work my way down.

First things first.  Giving back to God out of a thankful heart comes first and foremost.  We have learned the hard way that when we skip this because we don't think we have enough money to last, we end up in dire straights in no time.  For some reason we keep having to learn this one over and over again.  Giving God 10% of your income right off the top is a great place to start. We tithe to our local church as well as some other worthy ministries, as God has led.

For our home loan, we have gone to a weekly payment plan, as this makes an extra payment every year, and that payment goes 100% towards the principal and this one thing will reduce the length of our mortgage by years, saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars in the long run.  We are also looking at possibly selling our home in order to reduce our debt there, but with the housing market so depressed right now we are not sure if this would be short sighted.

For our transportation, our cars are all used (well used in most cases), and we do not owe anything on them.  Daryl does some of the repairs, but we do use our local, reliable auto mechanic for the big jobs.  We pay far less in car maintenance and repair than we would ever pay in car payments with interest.  Also, by owning our cars outright, we are not required to have comprehensive car insurance on our cars and this lowers our insurance expense more than you can imagine.  Due to the high price of gas, we think twice before leaving the house, and try to use the most efficient car for our errands whenever possible.  Right now that means not going to town for shopping, as the gas alone would cost around $20 round trip and we would not be saving that much by buying at the big stores over shopping at our local grocery stores.  I would recommend never purchasing a new car, or even a newer used car.  Shop around, get a mechanic to look over a car you are interested in, and learn to do car maintenance yourself - oil changes, for example, can be done by the owner and save a lot through the years.  We also shop around for the best deal in auto insurance as we are required to have that.  Our older children don't get a driver's license until they can afford to pay for their auto insurance to reduce our outlay there.

In the last year we have given up many things that we used to take for granted - we quit Netflix, we stopped renting movies (with the exception of the occasional $1/night ones) and started using the library, we stopped eating out as often as were accustomed to, I rarely get anything from an espresso stand (this was a huge sacrifice, let me tell you!), we reduced our budget for birthdays/Christmas, we reduced the number of cell phones down to just 2 (from 5),  we severely curtailed going on expensive dates (Daryl and I still date!), and found ways to date with little or no expense (like renting a movie and popping popcorn, and locking the kids out of the living room), and we gave up bowling.  Recently we decided to reduce our personal time on the computer, cutting our use of YouTube type videos and Facebook, especially the games.  We have found that our bandwidth usage has been cut in half, and we are going to be able to drop to a lower usage plan, saving us approximately $30/mo.  There were probably other things, but those are the things I can remember!  We looked over all the things we were spending our money on and got rid of or reduced in as many ways as we could.

Monthly bills can be challenging.  It's so easy to sign up for a monthly expense (magazines, cable, movies, products, album of the month, etc), yet we don't know the future, and it's easy to ignore the accumulative cost - a $20/month commitment costs $240/year!  We looked at every bill that we pay monthly and talked about how we can work to lower them.  We started being careful about leaving lights and computers on, and we were able to reduce our electric bill by over $50/mo!  We also turned down our thermostats, and although our bill hasn't gone down, it hasn't gone up at all even thought he cost of propane has gone up considerably since we started conserving.  We try to keep our water usage low conserving where we can.  We also try to always do full loads when washing/drying clothes.  We have used a clothes line in the past, but at present we do not have one set up - when it can be done, hanging clothes on the line can also lower your energy usage!

As far as school goes, we try to keep our expenses to a minimum. Switched On Schoolhouse works very well for this as multiple students can use the same curriculum with no additional expense, and they can be saved for younger ones coming up.  We also shop at our local homeschool second hand store (Homeschool Recyclers) and get most of our materials second hand, saving a lot!  We also re-sell our used homeschool supplies there and then can use the credit once they sell to purchase what we need - the last time I was there she actually owed me money!

Soaps we made last year!

We also save a lot of money making our own soap, shampoo, conditioner, lotions, deodorant, and cleaning solutions!  I highly recommend researching the internet for simple recipes for these.  Even soap making is easy if you do melt and pour, and it's fun too!  This also saves on garbage as you re-use your packaging over and over again!

Clothing with this many people in the family can be a challenge.  We use a consignment store in town (Wee Ones) to re-sell any clothes/books/toys that we are finished with that are still in good shape.  I also re-sell returned/second quality items from my home business there.  I almost always have some credit there to use to purchase clothes/shoes/books!  If we can't find what we need at Wee Ones, we go to Goodwill and/or Value Village to get what we need.  Once in a while we just can't get what is needed and will purchase new at Walmart or Target, but that is rare.  Although I haven't used it yet, I have heard of a place in our county where you can go to get free clothes, I'm sure that is a great saving for many families!  Of course we also make great use of handing clothes down from one child to the next.  I keep bins of sized clothing in our attic for when clothes are not in used, and it's so nice to be able to go up there and get the next size of clothes out!  Having 3 little boys in a row (and now 3 little girls), the older they get, the fewer clothes actually survive well enough for storage or re-selling.

Carese, just 5 pounds, wearing our old style Snap-EZ Preemie Pocket Diaper!

And, of course, I have to talk about using cloth!  Even though I now own a cloth diaper company, Snap-EZ, I can honestly say that I would use cloth diapers even if I didn't.  I started using cloth right from the beginning - back in 1986 I used prefolds, pins and plastic pants with our first baby, using a diaper service.  I only did that for about 6 months, as I was working out of the home and disposables were more convenient.  I used cloth diapers again once I was a stay at home mom, and each of my subsequent children have been in cloth diapers at least some of the time.  I've used so many different versions, but I really love using pocket diapers, especially the Multi-Size pocket diapers, as I can bring some Snap Extenders along and use Carese's diapers on Esther when needed!  We rarely purchase disposables, as using cloth saves us so much.  When we were using cloth (like when Esther was in the hospital for weeks at a time), our water bill didn't even flinch, so I know we are saving money doing cloth.  We also use cloth wipes.  I estimate that with two in diapers we are saving around $40 - 50 per month, plus we don't have stinky garbage!  We also save money by using cloth for our monthly cycles most of the time.  It's easy to do, saves money, and then we don't have to purchase these items in the store (I'm always a little embarrassed to purchase these private items).  Each of the women in our home has their own personal stash and they care for them.

Baking Bread - a Whisper Mill and a Bosch are great,
but not necessary - I made our bread by hand for a long time!

And lastly, food. This is a biggy!  One of the biggest things we do to keep our food budget low is to make all our own bread!  We purchase the wheat berries in 50 pound bags, grind it into wheat flour and make our own, delicious bread.  We also pick berries at Barbie's Berries in season and freeze them to make jam all year round (when we run out too soon, we purchase the frozen gallons of berries from the Barbie's Berries).  This tastes so much better than store bought, and is cost effective too!  We try to have hot breakfasts during the week - oatmeal, cream of wheat, pancakes and such - all made from scratch.  We don't buy pop or koolaide, and only the little ones get juice (Esther has a milk allergy).  Our kids are encouraged to drink water, and our milk is reserved for cooking, on hot cereal and cold cereal when we have it.  We shop at Costco for things that we can really save on there - butter, almonds, chocolate chips and toilet paper to name a few - but we have to consider the cost of gas to get there which might not off-set the savings.  Generally speaking, we have a food budget at around $150/week to make cooking/eating comfortable.  I'd love to have $250 a week as that would allow for a few conveniences, but it's been a long time since we had that much available every week!  More recently we have been making ends meet for even less - last week we only spent $90, and this week $70 so far (not counting the 60 pounds of frozen strawberries I picked up at a steal of a deal since the new season is starting!).  To keep our costs this low, it means using up the items on our shelves and in the freezer that we don't normally use, but it's good to clean out the freezer and use up older canned goods once in a while!  One sacrifice we make when we have to is forgoing fresh foods - fruits especially can get very expensive.  I don't recommend this, but sometimes we have to do what we have to do!  I used to do a lot of canning, and I hope to do that again this year.  Not sure if that saves a lot of money, but it's fresher, home canned and there when you need it through out the year!  We eat simply, and use left overs for lunches a lot.  We try to make snacks instead of purchasing snacks - popcorn and cookies instead of chips and twinkies for example.  One way we also reduce our grocery bill is to use the weekly ads and make our menu to use what is a good price that week.  We tried "couponing" but found that we ended up purchasing things that we would not normally purchase (luxury items), plus we spent more on gas to get the "deals" negating the savings.  Also, going to lots of stores also used up my valuable time too.  It works great for others, but we not profitable for us.  One of the biggest things we do to save on groceries, is we create a menu for the week, including breakfasts, lunches and dinners as well as snacks, before we leave the house.  We base this menu on what we have available, and what is on special at the stores.  Then we make a comprehensive shopping list, noting the approximate cost of each item.  Then we check the total to see if it is close to our budget, and if it's too high, we try to trim off a few items that are not essential.  I try to have the list be less than our budget just in case.  We try to never shop while hungry, take cash and stay in the budget.  If we remember something we missed on the list, we can get it, but hopefully something cost less than expected to cover the overage.

Berry processing 2011

In general, I do our bookkeeping once a week, tithing and paying the bills and see what's left over.  I use that as our budget for food and clothes, after setting aside money for gas in the cars.  Then I make up our menu and grocery list.  We never seem to have anything left over, but that's OK as God is giving us exactly what He has deemed the right amount of income for us at this time.  I struggle with this when times are tight, but as Paul says in Philipians 4:6, "Be anxious for nothing, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God."  We have done a lot of praying this year about our finances.  We've even gone so far as to make specific prayers for our needs, and watching to see if we got orders in our home business that would cover those expenses!  This is great for building our children's faith in God's provision (and ours too!).  We are doing this right now as we have had some unexpected expenses this year (new baby, septic system crashed, attic needed venting to name a few), and God has and is providing for us.

I think that's everything...but there's probably more.  I don't think we are experts in frugality, but we are working hard to live as economically as we can.  I have heard that the Duggars shop second hand and save the difference...wish we could save the difference, but that is a great way to do it!  They also live completely debt free, and I highly respect them for accomplishing that!

I hope someone has benefitted from my sharing our adventures in home economics! If I haven't touched on something, ask me and I'll do my best to answer your question.  If you have found a way to cut your expenses, please share by commenting below!  We're always looking for more ways to save!

And Summer Begins

With the arrival of my mother for a 2 week visit (see photos on my last post), our summer had officially begun.  We enjoyed quiet days with her - playing Uno and doing crossword puzzles with her in the evenings!

While our school year was less than optimal (mom on limited activity/bed rest/recovering from surgery/knee injury and lots of doctor appointments), our children completed their year end testing and did well - some of them skipping several grade in some subjects!  I can not take credit for that, it's just kids learning at their own rate, some years it's slow progress, and other years it's stellar!  Some kids learn to read early, other learn late.   Some kids learn to read over the course of a couple of years, others take to it like water and are devouring books their second year of reading.  Some kids struggle with math for years, and then suddenly something clicks and it's easy and fun for them.  Our philosophy for homeschooling is to teach the kids to learn.  We want our children to be capable to learn on their own.  When something catches their attention, we want them to have the skills it takes to learn about it - whether it's reading a book, doing on line research, going on a tour, joining a club/group...whatever.  When you learn something because you are interested in it, it sticks...learning facts and figures because someone somewhere determined that certain materials are the *right*  materials for a given grade level does not automatically mean that your child will do best learning that material at that age.  Our homeschooling never seems to look the same from year to year, and some years it is very minimal due to situations beyond our control that keep us in survival mode for weeks or months.

The house Rachel and Elizabeth built!

Summertime is a great time to re-evaluate our past year and plan for the next year.  Of course, we hold all our plans loosely as we do not know what the future holds (like last year - we planned for group study with me teaching in a couple of subjects, like history and science, but due to my pregnancy I was unable to follow through with that plan).  To play it safe this year, we are going to return to Switched On Schoolhouse (SOS) (computer based Christian School type education) for most of our school aged children.  Elizabeth and Dayton will be doing traditional learning for reading/writing/math for another year.   For Rebekah this will be her last year in school officially. Since we haven't been using this curriculum for her recently, we are going to do the same thing we did with Jason and Jessica for her last year in school - she gets to select the courses she is most interested in for each subject, and that will be what she will study for this year (for example, she can choose between Government/Economics (12th grade), American History (11th grade), World History (10th grace) or World Geography(9th grade)).  If she works hard and completed any subject early, she will be finished with that course!  Jason chose to finish his last year once subject at a time, and that worked great for him.  Jessica did the more traditional approach, using the SOS program to schedule out her daily work and completing it through a more traditional school year.  We are planning to use Math-U-See for math for the other children doing SOS, and selecting one subject in SOS for all the kids to study together for History, Bible, Language and Science, instead of choosing it according to age/grade as the rest of the children are close enough in grade levels  that this will work and have the advantage of their being able to help each other and be learning the same information/completing the same book reports and such.

It's Esther size, but they all enjoy it!

So enough about school on a summer blog post!

What does our summer look like? So far the children have been working very hard around here on large projects like weeding, rototilling, clearing out brush and soon will be putting in new lawn outside.  On rainy days they have been doing the spring cleaning (they got the downstairs finished last week).  I have not been able to be of any assistance due to my knee injury and caring for Carese.  You may be wondering how in the world we have been able to get our children to accomplish such great feats, and I'll tell you - BRIBERY!

Last April Daryl and I attended the Christian Heritage Homeschool Conference and we were shown a long trailer for the movie "Captivated."  It inspired us to severely limit our intake of media.  We shut down all our electronic games (Wii, Xbox, Facebook, computer games), and packed up all our videos into the attic.  This has led to quiet evenings doing crossword puzzles, lots of board and card games being played, and lots of outdoor fun - including the kids building a house out of mill ends!

Esther hanging out with her Daddy
 at Seattle Children's Hospital

We decided that we would reserve having a movie night as a reward for work done.  So we compiled lists of things that needed to be done around our place, inside and outside, and broke it down into "projects."  So far they have earned 3 movie nights - complete with pizza and popcorn!  There's still lots of work to be done, but things are looking so much better around here.  The amazing thing is that it's getting done without my help and I don't even have to encourage/nag them to get it done!

June's calendar is blissfully empty!  We took Esther down to Children's Hospital for a cardiology check up this past Monday (you can read about it on Esther's Story).  We started the summer reading program at the library today, and the kids have spend literally hours reading today..they want to win the pass to the Birch Bay Water Slides like nobody's business!

July has every weekend booked - BBQ on the 4th, Daryl's work camp out, my 30 year class reunion, my family reunion and our week long camp out that ends with the church camp out!

The girls goofing off on the way to the library!

August looks pretty boring, but I am hoping that we can get away as a family camping once more this summer, possibly up to Salt Creek (just past Port Angeles) or Baker Lake (our two favorite camping places).

Serious reading after our visit to the library!

I am planning on using at least some of my extra time this summer to invest in our home business - I'm developing a new infant multi-size diaper right now, but my main focus is building our inventory now that our business debt is paid off.  I am still very limited in my activities due to my knee injury, but I can get things done if I do it bit by bit.  As far as my knee injury goes, I did go to see a orthopedic surgeon and he hopes I can avoid surgery by doing the PT exercises and icing it two to three times a day (this is getting old), but I am scheduled for an injection to reduce the swelling if it hasn't gone away by the first week of July.  So far, it was improving until I spent too much time standing a couple of days in a row and now I'm paying for it...learned that one the hard way as it doesn't always hurt when I'm doing something I shouldn't - it hurts later!

And, finally, an update on our newest little Einfeld!  Carese is 3 months old, and as of last weekend she has passed the 11 pound mark!  She's still tiny, but she makes her presence known around here.  She has learned to smile and talk.  Her latest accomplishment is blowing bubbles.  She is learning that she has a tongue and by playing around she makes bubbles!  It's weird, but so cute!  She also loves to bounce when you hold her in a standing position - never had such a little one enjoy bouncing like that!

She's so nice to her old mom - she sleeps at least 6 hours every night, waking only once around 3 am for a night feeding.  I have finally achieved enough milk that she was only getting about 12 ounces a day of formula, but starting yesterday I am not giving her formula after every feed, and so far she's been feeding a little more often, but I have only had to give her 1 ounce yesterday, and the girls gave her 2 ounces this afternoon so I could get a nap.  She is so much happier when she doesn't get a bottle, so I'm going to keep working to keep up my milk supply for her.

Photo Extravaganza

Our camera battery died and I needed to order a new charger as ours has gone missing...so here's a bunch of photos that we had taken in the week before the battery went dead:

We were invited to spend the afternoon at our neighbor's house and enjoyed fishing, roasting hot dogs and marshmallow and relaxing in the beautiful surroundings!

Our catch from our neighbor's pond!

One happy fisherman!

Our little Indian with her first catch!

Esther loves to point, and she love watermelon too!

Rachel loves to hold Carese, anytime, anywhere!

classic fishing photo!

hanging out in the shade, and enjoying each other's company!

Jonathan saving the day, getting the fishing line un-stuck!

Esther Loved going out in the boat!

She wanted to go again, and again, and again!

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My mother and Carese, so sweet!

Fishing in action - everyone had a lot of fun fishing, that is for sure!

Jonathan - I love his new hat...

Rebekah caught the most - she caught 4 of the 8 fish that we caught!

So Sweet!

Esther's new hair cut!

My mother found a new friend, our oldest cat, Abbey!

Mom enjoying our goofy girls!

OK, so it's a "bad" photo, but I love it anyway!

My three little girls in green!

Princess Carese - she wasn't too thrilled with the idea!

My mother and my daughters, beautiful every one!

The little girls last Sunday in their almost matching dresses!

Esther in Pig Tails!

Dayton holding Carese - he's a very helful big brother!

Carese's Newborn Photo Shoot (#1)

Carese actually had two newborn photo sessions (I'm blessed with two friends who are great at photography!), but I have not gotten around to posting the photos...until now!

Here are the photos that my friend, Ruth D, took when Carese was 1 week old.

She looks like something a leprechaun left on the door step!

The hand on her back is her biggest sister, Jessica, trying to calm her back into deep sleep!

That's my hand - I was going to adjust her leg and Ruth D took a picture to test the lighting,
but we just love this photo as it shows how super tiny she was!

no baby fat on this skinny mini!

Oh so tiny - that is a regular size rose!

This is Daryl's favorite photo - looks like those photos of babies in the womb
And she doesn't really look "finished" since she had no baby fat
making this photo just that much more realistic
(it she had gone full term, she would have still been in my womb for another 2 weeks)

Which is your favorite photo???