a Beer, a Whine and The Spirit

Okay, so we're not broke. Far from it. But we drew up a new budget the other night and there really isn't as much wiggle room as we were expecting, on a week-to-week basis. Hubs and I have been looking forward to this year for over 2 years (since I stopped working) as we would be, as we called it, "raking it in." Turns out it's not so much "raking" as it is slowly collecting in small amounts and seeing the money leave as fast as it's coming in.

I think we were kind of kidding ourselves and it is finally hitting home that the next few years are really going to be (slow) building years. We are only on one salary, and a starting salary at that. People kept suggesting we were getting ahead of ourselves with all the excitement, but we couldn't help it.

I know it's really counterproductive, but I keep having thoughts of "if we were in Wang things would be so much better." I happen to be fairly certain that if we had stayed in Wang, our thoughts would have been "we really should have moved somewhere different this year." Well, maybe I would have thought that. But we would have been heaps better off financially (without having to move, and paying substantially less rent); I feel I would have been happier around my friends in Wang and closer to our Melbourne "family"; we wouldn't be being harassed by our real estate agent (they are getting rude and nasty and we are fed up); Hubs wouldn't have shingles; (oh yeah, Hubs has shingles and has had to stay home all week) and Hubs would have gotten more favourable rotations.

And maybe I wouldn't be biting my nails again. Dammit.

But Wang was never offered, so there's no point dwelling. I know that in a few years time, with some self-control and sticking to the budget, we can meet our financial goals. We just expected to be more comfortable earlier than that. But it will happen. Now that we have the budget I feel better about things already. I function much better when I have boundaries with spending, and we haven't had that the last few months.

Sorry for the big whine. I guess I'm not quite over it just yet...

Posted by Renae at 5:51 PM Comments

Hubs and I invested a lot of time and money in to setting up our cloth nappy collection for Chanbe, and I loved using them. I really did. The extra washing very quickly became a part of life, and it wasn't that much extra effort. When I broke my foot a year ago, we decided (I decided) to give myself (mum) a break from the "extra work" and vowed to go back to them soon.

Then when we moved back to Wang, I started using them again but found it to be the straw that was destined to break my back (or spirit, as it were.) And that was that. I never went back to them.

Until now.

It has taken me a few weeks of adjustment with Quinn, but I realised a few weeks ago that I was excited by the prospect of using them with Quinn, and even starting to use them again with Chance, to try and see if that will make him more interested in using the toilet. (Making him uncomfortable in the nappy ;-) )

So today was day one, and don't she just look a treat?

Next step? Nappies for Chance. That may take a bit more convincing on his part, but as I said, I'm excited!

Posted by Renae at 7:36 PM Comments

"Awayoo? "That's how Chanbe says "where are you?"

So here I am! Life is cruising along without too much to report. Well, not much interesting at least. Until today!

This is Hubs' 3 day weekend, and after we got reprimanded by the real estate agent for the state of the garden*, I suggested that we spend some time on it this weekend. This is after I got a quote from a gardening business to prune and spray for $550. Granted, there is a lot of pruning to be done, but we have better things to spend our money on! (Here comes a tangent!)

Like things at garage sales. As well as gardening this weekend, I suggested we hit the garage sales for drawers for the office (mainly for my crafty and sewing stuff), bookshelves, a cot, and Hubs is always on the lookout for tools and lego. We cleaned up big time! We went to almost a dozen places over 2 suburbs, and I couldn't have been more proud of Chance. He is very much in to doing everything we do, and doing things himself ("Chance do iiiiiiiittttt") but we didn't want to take him out at every place, so Hubs would go and do a reccy and decide if it was worth us all getting out. We probably all got out at half of them, and the other half I trusted Hubs' judgement. And he was so well behaved in and out of the car. A very proud day for us :-)

So, what did we score? Well. We got 2 lovely, pine tall boys for $50 each, complete with slidey drawers!! I assured Hubs that this was an absolute steal, though he wasn't as convinced. I plan to use these in the kids' rooms, and use the dodgy flat-pack ones that are currently in there for the crafty stuff. We also picked up a tent for $75 that retails for $500 new. It's a few years old but has only been used a few times and looks like new. Very excited about that too. We should probably go camping some time!

I sent Hubs back to pick up the second tall boy and check out a garage sale that started at 12noon (weird!!) and he rang me from there, very excited, as he had found a work bench and a bunch of tools. So he brought that home and has left again to pick up the other tall boy and the tent. We also picked up random crafty stuff, a wooden train for Chanbe, and some kids camping chairs (for FREE!!)

Lucky we are getting paid this week!! I plan to do lots of reorganising around the house in the next week or so, and hopefully have the rest of our stuff unpacked and sorted by next weekend. The only things we are still missing are a cot and some bookshelves, so I'm afraid the 5 boxes of books will remain packed at this stage. But we are getting there!

Oh, and we might actually get some gardening done at some stage as well......

*I wouldn't mind so much, except we have had outstanding maintenance requests since we moved in, 2 months ago, and have had to deal with 4 different agents from the same place because of staff turnover, and have had to resubmit the requests each time, as they have gotten "lost". So yeah, my feelings about how renters get treated by certain real estate agents hasn't changed.

Posted by Renae at 2:42 PM Comments

Posted by Renae at 4:37 PM Comments