I've been absent for so long. But I love it when my followed blogs of old post something so I am doing the same.
Health
I wouldn't exactly call 2020-2024 my years of thriving. The best thing to happen was George's birth in 2020 and I've made so many wonderful memories with the children. Unfortunately, undiagnosed hypothyroidism sidelined me for 1 year plus some. But after making lifestyle changes that helped and then starting synthetic thyroid hormone, I began feeling better.
Then I feel like I had a midlife crisis. Just a small one to make me feel very restless in my life. Maybe it was also about not having a little baby anymore. And starting perimenopause symptoms. But in 2024 I took the kids on an amazing 18-day trip to visit the Great Lakes and tour Michigan's Upper Peninsula--tent camping in national, state, and municipal parks. And I did some more therapy, which seems not to help too much but I'm sure it helped some to figure out how I feel about some things.
And then I started to feel more settled again. Yay, midlife crisis over! And I planned a once in a lifetime solo trip to Denmark and Sweden. Yay again and a big deal for me who had never really traveled alone and who hadn't been in Europe for 25 years.
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And then my perimenopause systems which I had been managing....surviving....got terrible. I'm talking 12 days a month of extreme and very significant fatigue and depression among other symptoms that were every day. This happened a few months before my trip. Luckily my travel happened at an easier time of the month for me and I had an amazing experience as a solo traveler, mainly visiting Copenhagen in Denmark, as well as Gothenburg and Stockholm in Sweden. It was an extremely impactful, often stretching or stressful, but an overall wonderful experience for me that I took now because the future is always uncertain and my husband is on a sabbatical from work this year and had the availability to take care of our children while I was away. Plus I found a very cheap <$400 roundtrip flight on Going (referral link).
But when I got home, I had to pursue a solution for my bad perimenopause symptoms. Long story short, I ended up going through Midi Health to find a gynecologist to prescribe Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). I love to do things naturally, and my understanding is that both my thyroid hormones I take to replace my missing thyroid hormone and my estrogen and progesterone I take to replace my fluctuating and falling hormone levels are naturally replacing what my body used to make.
For me, the important point is that I felt terrible, and now I feel normal and healthy in a wonderful way. My creativity and energy has returned to levels I hadn't felt in years. I am taking on home improvement projects again. I am setting fun goals again. I am being a better and more engaged mom and wife. And I am sleeping better than I can ever remember sleeping. Progesterone plus this magnesium is pure gold for me. Now, I have no more hot flashes, no more depression related to my cycle, and no more weird tachycardia symptoms.
Thus I have returned here. Because I actually have some bandwidth for non critical things again. So I'm just going to do random updates.
Frugality
Life and homeschooling is more expensive with older kids. I cloth diapered and cooked from scratch all these years to pinch pennies and I'm so glad I learned frugal ways because older kids eat a lot, hand-me-downs and second hand clothes are harder to find for men's size small where I live, and outside activities and handicrafts are not always free and we value experiences and skill development.
My tiny, wild garden provided this year, especially in saving me from buying green vegetables all summer long. I also had huge volunteer pumpkins that we carved instead of buying pumpkins from Aldi. I also grew tons of butternut squashes which store wonderfully for months and months in my basement.
I've been shopping Aldi and discount grocery stores, keeping Christmas gifts simple and low cost, and remembering to use Rakuten for cashback. Which if you don't use, now is a great time to do it because there will be large cashback percentages on cyber Monday and a special $50 bonus if you spend $50 after clicking through their site or using a browser extension. If you want to try it, here is my referral link which I always appreciate to make the odd referral bonus. I have received over $1000 in cashback over the years and only a small amount of that was referrals. Most have been just by shopping at places like Thriftbooks, LL Bean, Target, Vitacost, and Shutterfly.
And if Rakuten doesn't have a link, I will even shop through Swagbucks (referral link) to earn gift cards. And if they don't have a link, I've been stooping so low as to use Fetch (referral link) which I think is earning me pennies per purchase but due to weird bonuses I may get $4 for 2 Target pickup orders last week. Feel free to drop your weird cashback saving options in the comments because I seem to be into them.
And isn't it annoying that you can look up a price online but then if you go to the store it is a different price? Three times in the last month I had to ask a store to adjust the in store price to match the online one--2 times at Target and 1 time at Lowes. At Target last night, the cashier said, "50 cents?" and I did feel just a bit judged but, yes, I do want to save 50 cents.
But my best frugal hack is just not buying stuff at all. Whenever I choose not to buy stuff, I tell my husband how much money I just saved him by making do. And even when I do buy things after much deliberation, if it doesn't live up to expectations, I immediately return in. I've found that I can sometimes find a good substitution. Like I took over my son's barely worn slippers that he had outgrown after I realized that 7 years of wearing barefoot Xero Shoes made my feet get 1 size bigger. I still need to buy another pair of Xero Shoes, but I may try to wear a son's hand me downs for right now because we all wear the same style of shoe.
Homeschooling
I'm homeschooling kids in 10th, 8th, 5th, 2nd, and Kindergarten this year. The days are long even with some outsourcing of classes for my older two. So I'm back to a strict homeschool schedule that is mostly strict for me, not everyone else. I must make myself start at a specific time and rotate through the kids who need me to get done what I feel is important to do and to help them with. The days are long but the years are short in homeschooling as well as life.
Already the big kids don't do bedtime read aloud books anymore. So I still cling to our lunchtime read alouds even if we only get to them some days of the week when all are present.
Does anyone else use Black Friday sales as the opportunity to purchase homeschool supplies at the best prices? Every year, I buy Tillberry Table Composer Guides, standardized tests required for homeschooling in PA (coupon is usually posted on their Facebook page), and Sabbath Mood science guides (WONDER20 for discount starts Friday). I also purchased the next level of Thinkwell math for my 8th grader at 25% off even though we won't start it until after Christmas.
Homeschooling older kids is more complicated with outside classes and dual enrollment. It is harder to travel because the outside assignments don't stop even if classes are asynchronous or watched later. And the cost of everything adds up. I'm not a high school expert but I have learned a ton about earning college credit or potential college credit from Homeschooling for College Credit and the founder has a new book that is on my TBR list because I need tips to save as much money as possible on college. I was very pleasantly surprised when my 15 year old was awarded 16 credits at University of Alabama just for the CLEP exams he took for free! The best part was that his College Algebra CLEP score allowed him to register for Microeconomics to take next semester.
My teens mostly work on their own with me checking in, troubleshooting, and grading when necessary. I work much closer with my younger three students. Or lets be serious, with my next 2 youngest, because my kindergarten is not rigorous. We try to be done our book work before lunch, except for high school, and then we do a very short afternoon session of 20 minutes at least three days a week. Some people have to work later because they like to sleep in. But that is a benefit of homeschooling that would have really helped me as a teen, so I encourage them to work with their body's needs and rhythms.
Strange Hacks that I Never Get to Share with Anyone
The best way to store Legos under a low profile bed is wreath storage containers (link just for reference because that price is crazy. Target will have some on sale after Christmas). My kids have a very low profile bunkbed but I wanted some kind of storage container they could pull out to work on Legos every day. These are huge and have handles and each half can store so many Legos. They have been the perfect solution for us.
If you want to get a promotional membership at Sam's club (and probably other places) but you have already had a membership in years past, you can just put a period somewhere in your email to create a new account. Like instead of valleybirth@ wherever, try valley.birth@ wherever. This works for gmail, I know. It seems like an ethical grey area because I know it isn't what they want. But I'm not lying, just creating a new account to spend more money at their business.
If you are camping in a site with electricity and you own a rice cooker, you can cook so many delicious meals. I have had the earlier version of this rice cooker for almost a decade and I like traveling with it because it doesn't have easily breakable parts and isn't super expensive. On our Great Lakes road trip I used it to reheat chili, make mujadarah (a family favorite), boil water for ramen in a cup, cook a chicken taco dump soup, heat up cans of ravioli, and make warm breakfasts of oatmeal mixed with canned pie filling. The best part was that after eating, I would heat water in the cooker and add detergent and cold water and use it to wash my dishes. We traveled for 18 days with 1 adult and 5 kids and ate out 3 times total.
If you like books and aren't using Library Extension you are missing out. Once you download it, you set it up with any of your libraries. Then, when you go to Amazon or Goodreads or Thriftbooks and search for a book, it shows you if any of your libraries (including Archive.org) has a copy. I explained more about it here where it is #2 on my list of Library Hacks. I also rely very heavily on #1 on that list to get access to more libraries. In PA, I have a free card from both Philadelphia's and Pittsburgh's public libraries, which is amazing. I've also paid for out of state library cards to get access to Kanopy and Hoopla. This is why we don't need Audible.
Finally, an anti-hack. Let me be the cautionary tale why you should never try to save money by buying new with tags Crocs on eBay. I thought I was doing so well to buy these Crocs which are the primary shoe my kids wear all year long. They were only $25 a pair. All of them failed. Every single pair broke. They must have been counterfeit although they looked completely real. Of course, it was past the complaint window so I just consider it lesson learned.
Thank you for staying still the end of my frugality and homeschool obsessed ramblings. Hopefully, I will be back sooner than later for more homeschooling and books and frugality discussions but no promises. I now know why all my original old favorite bloggers stopped writing . . . because life with older kids is busy but fun. Fortunately, I have found some regular moms still writing and I appreciate you!
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