So after having my little baby girl in February life only got more crazy. As if moving half across the country and being thrust into a totally new life wasn't crazy enough! In a world of luxuries such as technology and get-it-done-quick gadgets I long to go back in time to the I Love Lucy days. I wish I had been born in simpler times where we didn't rely on the television to keep us occupied. I know, I know who doesn't love TV right? Well i do love television and movies I just don't like that there are over 400 channels to choose from. Now that I am a mom I find myself wishing there were more hours of the day and more stressed out everyday. With my efforts of trying to be super mom and super wife and being 1500 miles from any family and friends I started to feel depressed and overwhelmed. So I have decided to cut the nonsense out of mine and my families life. I came to this decision by remembering Lucy and my childhood.
I grew up in the countryside of a small town named Buckner, located about 20 miles from Kansas City, Missouri. I lived in the same house for 18 years with about 5 acres of surrounding land. My dad, like me, preferred the old fashioned way before the technological way. Until I was over 18 and moved out on my own I had never eaten a store bought vegetable or fruit, just about everything was grown in our backyard. I remember the summers of my dad tilling the garden, me and my brother helping to plant the seeds, and the canning process. I can close my eyes and still smell the stench of making and canning pickles. YUCK! During the summer we would eat fresh salads and by fresh I mean my dad would take a knife outside slice the lettuce from the ground then walk over to the tomato vines and cut down a tomato. Summertime I also dislike though as a kid. Why? Because summertime meant worktime. My brother and I did everything from shuck corn husks, snap green beans, to help weed out the garden. I would think to myself "This sucks none of my friends had to do this!" But now as an adult I wish I could go back to those times and if I could I wouldn't have bitched and moaned about it.
Along with the gardening thing we also had our very own chickens! Yes as with the fruits and vegetables I had never had a store bought egg until I moved out. And I even remember one time my grandmother coming over and her and my dad butchered a bunch of the chickens for meat. We did buy most of our meat so I have no idea of if or when I ate the chickens that ran around the backyard. There were other old fashioned ways that my parents enforced us to live with, like no air conditioning, we didn't get the whole central air thing until I was 16 maybe, I don't remember the exact time. But I do remember how freezing it was inside the house then because we weren't use to it. Also we didn't have a dishwasher either, no I take that back, I was the dishwasher. We washed dishes about twice a day where as most people run their dishwasher once a day. Still to this day my parents do not have a dishwasher. My dad also prided himself with doing it all on his own. I would say 90% of their home was made by my father's own two hands. Some people may argue with me, but trust me you take greater pleasure in things if they came from hard work, creativity, and your own mind and hands.
With keeping up with old fashioned ways I was taught that women's place was in the home and men's place was the outside. The husbands bring home the bacon and the wives fry it up and serve it. My mom was a stay-at home mom and I loved it. I loved it when she was home when we got home from school and could give us our snack and tell her about our day and what we learned. I also remember snippets of before school and how much fun me and my brother had with my mom being right by our side. Before I grew up and got married and had a baby I really didn't think I was going to just be a mom, I did have some aspirations of a career. I thought I was going to become everything from a doctor to a detective to a music video dancer, and before I got married my career of choice had become an optician.
Let's flash forward from my childhood to adulthood. Two years ago I married my dream man, Chris. He is in the United States Marine Corp and he changed my life. In these very short two years we got married, went through a deployment to Iraq, moved half way across the country to San Diego California, and had a baby girl. My life pretty much changed overnight, I went from only taking care of myself and a cat to taking car of a husband, a baby and 2 cats! My days use to consist of work and watching TV alone in my tiny apartment. Now it consists of laundry, cooking, cleaning, oh and that baby which needs to be changed and fed every few hours by the way. When I lived by myself I could eat for a week with a $20 trip to the grocery store, now a $100 barely feeds the two of us a week. My new life has definitely became more chaotic, but having a handsome husband and the cutest baby ever are the things I would never change!
During the realization that baby's aren't cheap and how much money and time my husband and I waste, I decided we need to be more frugal. I had already started without realizing it. Last year when we moved to sunny San Diego and I was newly pregnant I was shocked to see that every apartment we looked at had only a tiny wall unit air conditioner. Coming from the Midwest where the heat index during the summer can get all the way past the 100's I just could not believe it. How was i going to survive being pregnant and sweaty? We ran the a/c non-stop and even purchased a $30 fancy wall fan for the bedroom which didn't fit in the window by the way and ended up breaking in the end. Our electric bill ran us around $150 a month for our small 2 bedroom apartment. This year I'm not pregnant and we are use to the weather now, so we have a fan in each bedroom and the living room and we leave all the windows open and we haven't turned the a/c on once I am super proud of that! Our electric bill has gone down to $75 a month that's half the savings by just not running the tiny window a/c. And I am already starting to save more money on the bill my next goal is to unplug anything that isn't being used so we will see how much our bill will be in a couple months.
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