I’m not really exaggerating. At least in our line of work, we are always on the look out for the next job or another job. It’s true that in a better economy work comes to us more often than not and we don’t have to actively search, but when we are in an economically tough time, as now, we are always searching and pursuing job leads and frequently still scrabbling at the end of the day. So why do we stay self-employed? That’s a question that I’ve thought a lot about recently. It ends up that there are many reasons.
The biggest one is that we are both stubborn and independent. The truth is that we like to have more control over our finances, schedules and, ultimately, our futures than we did when both or one of us was an employee. There is also a trade-off because we have more responsibility than were we to clock in and out each day and for the time being, we lack health insurance. My husband is an excellent worker and very skilled in his trade, but not a good employee. He detested the shop politics that were constantly disrupting his many workplaces. Good workers are frequently not rewarded, but people who know how to stick with the right people are, not matter what their skill or productivity level. Being self-employed has allowed him to put his high skill to use to the maximum benefit for our family. He is able to work directly with our customers and our customers truly appreciate his talents. He is happier and less stressed. He has frequently told me that he would rather work 60 hours per week or more for himself than 40 hours per week for an employer. When my husband is happier and less stressed, the whole family runs better. I think that is true of both parents in a two parent family though the typical idea is only that when the wife is happy the family is happy. I have more responsibility than when I was only a housewife, because I am the bookkeeper and help look for jobs. I don’t mind, because it’s not too time-consuming of a job and I feel like I’m contributing to our family income.
As a homeschooling family, we already have control over much of our schedule, being self-employed is the other element that puts our schedule mostly in our hands. Due to technology and the dynamics of our business, we don’t have to be present in our shop or office during regular business hours at all times. We can work when we need to get things done. That means that many, if not most, mornings, my husband is able to linger over coffee with me and we can spend time in conversation and business tasks. We could never do this when he was an employee, unless I was willing to get up around 5:00am. When we want to go on a road-trip, we can schedule it around our jobs and not around his boss’s schedule. If we want to go to an outing, say a museum, on a weekday to beat the crowds, we do. This is not to say that we have complete freedom with our schedule; he has missed quite a few group camping trips during our busy season because he couldn’t take time away from scheduled jobs. If he has a job that is due, he has to work until it’s done. Even if that means working late into the night, or rarely, working all night. (Make hay when the sun is shining, right?)
Another reason is our finances. Though we have greater stress over them, we also have greater control. When my husband was employed, he was at the top pay rate in his line of work. That didn’t quite cut it for a family on one income and it was important to us that I be able to stay at home with our children after our second child was born. (Before that we just didn’t see a way to swing it on one income.) He has much greater earning ability being self-employed. Especially during these economic times I re-think our strategy and I always come to the conclusion that we are doing the right thing. It’s not only self-employed people worrying about finances right now. It’s a whole lot of people everywhere. Being employed by a company certainly doesn’t guarantee work and a paycheck.
Self-employment certainly isn’t for everyone, but it’s working for us. It’s also working for millions of other Americans. I don’t know if we will always stay self-employed, but I have a feeling that as long as we are able to make a living doing it this way we won’t go back to being an employee full-time or permanently. I’m so proud of my husband for having the drive and the ability to go out and constantly represent us and our business and sell our work, because if it were up to me to do that, we’d be really broke. I’m also proud of his skill and hard-work. Because he has greater earning potential, the burden of financially supporting us ultimately falls on his shoulders as does the physical work. I’m thankful that his willingness to go out and work hard affords me the opportunity to stay home and mother our children and make our house a home.
Pencil & Notebook Holder
Homemade gifts, with some skill and care, can be thoughtful and economical gifts to give. I know that when I am making a gift for someone, not only do I put thought into the materials that I choose and personalize it for the recipient, but I also think about the recipient much of the time that I am making it. I think that some of this care and affection stays with the gift, as silly as that may sound. If you are on a tight budget, as many of us are right now, making a gift can allow you to give a nicer gift than you may be able to purchase.
Inside of notebook & pencil holder
This particular gift was for a 6 year old boy. I. choose the outer fabric for him and then I helped her find a coordinating inside fabric. We just stumbled upon the inside fabric, and I should have taken a better picture, but the inside fabric has a kind of written story on it with words like “space cadet” and “rocket” highlighted, which went nicely with the aircraft theme. The green was a nice coordinating color, too. We found it when we had just about given up on finding an inside fabric and were going to go to another store, when we decided to look in one last fat quarters basket one more time.
The great thing about this pattern is that you can use fat quarters for the front and inside and I used a piece of old jeans for the pocket, but you could use many types of leftover fabric, even the same one that you used on the front, because there is enough leftover from the front cover fat quarter that you could use it for the pocket. The difficulty with this pattern is that it is written using centimeters, so I had to convert it to inches and it doesn’t always come out to a round or even 1/8″ measure, so there was some fudging and guessing here and there and it was lucky that all the slim pockets ended up fitting pencils! Some were a tight squeeze! It was a quick project to do. If I hadn’t had interruptions and other responsibilities, and I had a dedicated sewing area (not the dining room table) I could have probably whipped it out in 1 1/4 – 1 1/2 hours.
Sadly, my 2009 food preserving season is drawing to an end. There were things that I never got around to doing. I dried no herbs this fall. We still have lots of mint from last year and I could have used some oregano (or is it marjoram?), but my plants were damaged by our puppy so I couldn’t harvest enough to dry. I didn’t get my hands on any free or cheap pears and apples, so we will have to be content with the few jars of vanilla pears (though they are very tasty, they didn’t fly off the shelf like I had imagined they would) and the few frozen jars of applesauce from last year. I didn’t get any tomatillo salsa done; our local u-pick farm didn’t have tomatillos this year.
There were other things that I did improve over last year. I canned more tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, because I was rationing those by late spring. I made more pickles, this time I made my family’s favorite instead of the canned dill pickles that I made last year. I finally got around to drying some bell peppers, which turned out well. I found a salsa that my family really enjoys, so I canned a lot of it. We dried plums, which we got for free. I also made some elderberry syrup from berries that a friend gave to me.
In addition to canning and dehydrating, we froze between 25 and 30 pounds of strawberries and blueberries (each), totaling 50 to 60 pounds of frozen berries and 9 pounds of green beans.
Here’s an inventory of what we’ve got in the pantry and refrigerator:
- 16 quarts garlic refrigerator dills
- 2 quarts dilly beans
- 1 quart, 2 pints dried zucchini
- 1 1/2 pints dried bell pepper
- 9 pints, 4 half pints strawberry jam
- 5 pints cherry preserves
- half pint rose petal jam
- 6 pints, half pint blueberry jam
- 3 1/2 half pints plum jam
- 3 quarts dried cherries
- 1 1/2 quarts prunes
- 20 quarts, 5 pints diced tomatoes
- 2 quarts, 8 pints, 5 half pints cayenne salsa
- 4 quarts, 8 pints, 2 half pints seasoned tomato sauce
- 8 pints, 12 half pints plain tomato sauce
- 3 bottles (maybe 20 oz?), half pint elderberry syrup
I am proud of my efforts this year and hope to add more things next year!
What have some of you been putting up?
We used reusable, cloth baby wipes on my last two girls. I didn’t have a lot of money and hadn’t ever seen a tutorial for wipes, so I ended up purchasing single ply, serged-edged flannel wipes, which served us very well and have even made it into our family wipe basket after going through two babies! Which is to say that flannel wipes are not only softer than paper wipes, but very durable and long-lasting. The single-ply, serged wipes are certainly functional, but they aren’t much to look at, which is why I’ve made two -ply, top-stitched wipes for the last two baby showers that I’ve attended. Both of my friends planned on cloth diapering, which makes this gift very appropriate, but even if a family isn’t cloth diapering, having extra wipes on hand is always practical. Babies and kids seem to always need something wiped. Making wipes is very economical, too. I’ve seen beautiful wipes on Etsy, running from $10-18 for 10-12 wipes. I think that’s a fair price if you are purchasing them, because they do require work to make them, but if you have the time, basic sewing skills, a machine and fabric, why not save some money, personalize them and do them yourself?
I use two yards of fabric for each side, because I use two different designs for visual interest. If you plan on using the same design, get four yards of fabric. This yields 40 wipes, which are 7 1/2″ x 7 1/2″ finished size. New flannel goes for about $5.99/yard at a local chain fabric store in town, and less than that if you have a coupon. You could even purchase some old flannel receiving blankets or sheets at a thrift store (or you may have some on hand) and re-purpose them.
Start by cutting 8″ squares of flannel, you should get around 40 from each of your 2 yard lengths or 80 from four yards. This job is easily accomplished with a cutting mat, a clear quilting ruler/quilting cutting guide thingy and a rotary cutter. When you have your 80 squares, pin them together with the right sides facing each other, wrong sides out.
Pinned wipes
Next, sew a straight stitch around the edge, with a 1/4″ seam allowance. I use a pretty long stitch, since I will be top-stitching.
Stitched wipes
Important: Leave an opening of approximately 4″, so that you can stick your hand in there to turn them right side out in the next step. Like this:
Leave an opening
When you have sewn all your squares together and you now have 40 wipes, you will need to turn them all right side out. Stick your hand in there and turn them out and then use a smaller object, like a chopstick, to push the corners all the way out.
Turned wipes
Next, press the wipes so that everything is nice and flat in preparation for top-stitching. Make sure to press 1/4″ inside the wipe on each edge of the opening so that the it looks like one square with flush edges, like this:
Pressed wipes
Press the whole stack. They will be much flatter and neater looking now:
Stack of pressed wipes
The final step is top-stitching, to add a more finished-looking touch and to also sew your opening closed. I usually do it about 1/8″ away from the edge. I’ve used both a straight-stitch and a zig-zag stitch. This batch used a zig-zag. If you’ve got a fancier machine than I do and you have decorative designs, feel free to use those. I’ve seen a nice looking set of wipes with a decorative vine stitch.
Finished wipes
For a wipe solution, I always mixed up in my empty wipe warmer (though an empty wipes tube would work, too), 1 to 1 1/2″ of hot water, a few drops of Dr. Bronners liquid soap, a few drops of olive or almond oil and one or two drops of essential oils (I always used either lavender or chamomile or a mixture of the two, because they are safe for babies’ delicate skin). When I mixed that up with my fingers, I’d add a stack of wipes and then an extra water if it was necessary to moisten all the wipes, but the initial water usually worked, or I poured out any excess liquid. This full wipe warmer of wipes would last for 4 or 5 days with no mildew issues. There are commercial wipe concentrate solutions out there, but, again, why pay more for something that is easy and economical to make at home.
After having used these for many years, I wouldn’t ever use disposable wipes again. These are so much prettier, softer, and more fragrant than disposables, not to mention they are more environmentally friendly and if that weren’t enough, they don’t tear and they clean up messes far better than disposables.
I’m an organized person, in my head. I know where my things are, when they are due if they are borrowed, how much money we have, where my family members should be and when. I’m really not the best housekeeper, however, and this has translated into a disorganized home that has progressively worsened. With the arrival of fall and the anticipation that we will be spending more time inside and the need to have more free time since my children are getting older and they need more focused time from me, I decided that we needed to go through and get a handle on our mess. Since my kids are getting older, they are more able to help, so it’s more of a collaborative effort than trying to surreptitiously sneak their unused items into the Goodwill pile while they entertain themselves with a DVD or Mister Rogers’ episode. Another lucky thing is that my husband had to work out of town for almost a week, so we were free of the constraints of our typical (albeit loose) routine and we could leave a big project unfinished overnight with no worries of accidental displacement.
We worked on every space upstairs and our main living areas and I went through my closet. We donated two hatchback loads of items to Goodwill, and threw away or recycled things that were beyond use. We got rid of the baby toys and rearranged some areas for more practical use and to reflect different uses that have evolved as my children have grown and changed. The dress-up clothes have moved out of our living room and now have a home in the girls’ playroom. The books are blessedly all in one place. Even though my kitchen and the basement haven’t been touched yet and my office was only minimally touched, my house is the most organized that it’s been for a very long time. Since everybody is clear on where everything goes now, even new homes for object, clean-up has been much easier. The biggest challenge that I have had is constant reminders for the girls to put things away after they are done using them. This is something that we have not been very good at in the past since things didn’t really have absolute places they should go. I can see the net gain in time with more organization and I am looking forward to the potential that this presents. What shall we do with all this time? All the clear expanses of desk and tables? I know that we won’t have any trouble filling the new free time.
Next on my list of things to tackle is trying to get dinner on the table much earlier to free up more of our evenings and get everyone into bed earlier than we have been doing in a while.
Yesterday as we were picking sauce tomatoes at one of our local u-pick farms, my two younger ones had to go to the bathroom and as they ran off to the porta-potty, they yelled something that, as I thought about it for a minute, made me realize something that I already knew, but hadn’t fully formed into a conscious thought before. They hollered, “Don’t let anyone steal our bucket.” As if the couple ladies in their seventies who we saw earlier in the fields were planning on taking their pickings the minute they left! But, this statement made me think about the fact that they didn’t care about the actual plastic, five gallon bucket. They cared that they had put time and care into picking it’s contents. To them, these brilliant, warm and shiny tomatoes were treasure. They were fruits that they had to crouch down and look for, feel that they were ripe and then pull them off and deposit them into the bucket without damaging them. And it became clear to me what a gift it is to my girls that they head out with me to u-pick fields all summer and early fall, head to our milk farm weekly and visit some of our meat before it becomes dinner. To them food isn’t a substance that appears in our pantry, via the grocery store. They are well aware that food is not so easily gotten. Somebody works to pick it and package it, even if it isn’t us.
My kids aren’t angels and they don’t savor each bite of food, dutifully clean their plates with thoughts of the waste that could be if they throw some out or make sure to serve only what they will eat at each meal. They do, however, have a sound knowledge that food is precious to some degree. That it was raised and slaughtered by someone; it was grown and harvested and packed by someone and then it is cooked by someone. That if it isn’t raised, harvested and prepared with care and concern, that it is likely not as healthy and even tastes less real. They have the knowledge that good food costs more, either in time or in money. M. especially, frequently comments on the price of food and what you are getting in return. As we drive by fast food restaurants, she has commented, “How can they sell a burrito with real beef for $.99?” That is a good question.
I’m so glad that the way we are choosing to live and eat is becoming deeply ingrained in my children. I hope that they will continue with this train of thought as they mature and start their own lives in the future. Right now, M. wants to be a farmer, and possibly operate a small restaurant. I. wants to be the next Alice Waters and operate a restaurant. If they actually did that, I would be so proud of them. Good farmers and purveyors of high quality, nutritious food are our future. If they choose a different path, that is fine with me, too. I want them to imagine the things they can do and then accomplish what they set out to do and ultimately be happy. I think that part of being happy is being healthy and I hope to encourage that as much as possible.
Some of my earliest memories include going to the library. We have always been a library-going family and I have many fond memories of the various libraries I’ve frequented during my lifetime. Some are very vague memories of specific children’s sections along with child-sized furniture and some are clear memories. The library that I spent many of my formative years at was housed in a very cool, old building. You had to mount stone steps to get inside and then you had to descend to the basement to get to the children’s section. But the children’s section was wonderful because it had a huge climbing structure that was formed from cubes of pipe (or similar) with huge pillows on the bottom for cozying in and reading. The whole basement was dedicated to children’s books and pleasure; it even had a fish tank. On the main floor, there were huge oak card catalogs. No computerized systems yet. You had to pull out the drawer, rifle through the cards and then head off to look for your book. This library was determined to be too costly to maintain, being housed in such an old building, so the city gutted and remodeled the old Sears building and opened a sparkly new library, which, of course, lacked the charm of the old one. The new one was easier to navigate and since it was in a former department store, it was all open. You could look from one side of the library, way over to the other side. Not too long after it opened, we moved to another place, a much larger city.
During my teen years, I spent lots of time at a specific branch of our city library system. I fondly remember searching computer archives for references and magazine articles with mention of The Cure. Remember the old days when information wasn’t available at your fingertips all the time? If you wanted to see a picture of Robert Smith, you had to work for it. You couldnt’ just Google him and then look at the available images. No Wikipedia. Just a basic search program and teenage determination.
These days we go to the library even more frequently that I did growing up. We take advantage of more programs and I would venture to say that more programs are offered by most libraries than 20 years ago. I still read a lot; that’s never changed, but most of our library usage is for the girls. We always have more than 50 items out at a time. We read for pleasure, for homeschool assignments, check out DVD’s, audio books and sometimes just drop in to hang out and play on the computer. My two younger children have been regular story-time attendees and though we took a long break from that, with J. getting older, I’ve made a commitment to get there weekly again, though it means getting out of the house before 10:00, which is difficult for us.
We have saved so much money using our library and though we live in a small-ish community, we are part of a regional library system, so we can borrow materials from any library in the system with 18 participating. The library is paid for using tax dollars, and to my knowledge, much of it comes from city property taxes. However, if we lived out of the city limits and had to pay the $60/year fee, I would do it in a heartbeat, because we save hundreds of dollars and gain much more than monetary value.
The strangest thing is that many people forget that they have such a wonderful resource available to them! I’ve talked to quite a few people who have said things like, “Oh, the library. I haven’t ever used my local library” or “I forgot about the library, I never go there. I should see if they have that book.” And this comes from educated, literate people. They’re reading things; they’re just purchasing them. So, if you haven’t checked out your local library, plan a visit soon. It might make reading easier on your pocket book and you may be pleasantly surprised by what you find there!
I’ve had long, rambling ideas going through my head for a while and though I intended to post about them, I don’t think I will be able to organize the detail that I have in my head into a readable post.
The gist of it is this: we are all human; the more we try to compartmentalize parts of ourselves and categorize our likes/dislikes/beliefs/habits rather than treating each other as whole packages, the more we isolate ourselves and each other and place divisions that can become insurmountable. If we ever expect to find common ground with each other, we can’t allow those differences to define us.
Anybody can feel that they are different from others, that they don’t really fit in, but if you are looking for reasons for why you don’t fit in then you may ignore reasons why you do. And we all want to fit in to a degree, to share interactions, conversation, meals, experiences with other people. I’m not talking about conforming here; I relish myself fairly nonconformist. I’m talking the human experience of being connected with another person.
I have many things in common with my general group of real life friends, but there are things we don’t share. As a good and relevant example, I’m a Christian. Not the kind that typically comes to mind when many people think of “Christians”. I’m not a Bible-thumping, prostheletizing, fundamentalist kind. I live my faith in a quiet manner and try to follow the ideals and morals that represent my faith. Though I fail at times, I still earnestly try. Though most of my friends don’t share my beliefs, may in fact be on the opposite side of the spectrum in some cases, I’m quite sure that they don’t think of me or refer to me as their Christian friend, because they accept me as a whole. I don’t define myself by one aspect of my life. I don’t identify my friends as vegetarians or omnivores, fat or thin, parents of multiple children or single children, old or young, liberal or conservative, home, private or public schooling, good cooks or bad cooks, immigrant or natural born US citizen, funny or serious. Do I notice these? Of course, but only so far as they combine into a unique package: a person I care about. I don’t compartmentalize my friend’s attributes because they are not modular, they are all pieces of a whole that fit intricately together. If you remove that characteristic and examine it alone, you lose the nuances that exist when it is taken with the rest of their quirks, preferences, values and choices.
As long as we continue to try to group people into neat little columns of pros and cons or checklists of preferences, then we lose the richness of experiencing each other fully and seeing that we are more alike than we are different. And we diminish our ability to treat each other with compassion and understanding and meet on common ground.
Very eclectically, to be honest. You may remember that I wasn’t able to devote financial resources into making any more raised beds or purchasing vegetable starts, however I did some barters and got tomato, peppers, broccoli, and eggplant starts. Later I found some sad looking organic Roma tomato starts for $.25/plant. With some volunteer cherry and pear tomatoes and Swiss chards and a rogue kale plant along with some pickling cucumbers, squash and beans that I direct sowed, we are actually getting things out of the mostly neglected garden area.
I’ve been harvesting pickling cucumbers for weeks and have made 8 quarts of garlic dills so far, we get a cup or two of cherry tomatoes every other day and many summer squash, though I haven’t counted so I don’t know exactly how many. The day before last I harvested our first full sized ripe tomato and yesterday I harvested the first eggplant that I’ve ever grown! All my previous eggplant growing attempts have been total fails. Not even a fruit, just the beautiful purple blossoms. And I still have some more on the plants. Soon, I will have many ripe full sized tomato including a variety I’ve never tried, Green Zebra and I’ll also have some bell peppers and rattlesnake beans are flowering setting small pods now! On top of all that, I’ve got many, many green tomatoes on my bargain Roma plants. They settled in and are doing very well.
Not bad at all for the meager effort that we’ve put in. I really should get my stuff together on time, because if we can get this out of our garden with minimal effort, we could get great amounts out of a garden that was well-planned and regularly maintained!
The end of a friendship came about this week in a most painful way. I received a hurtful, juvenile letter full of illogical and imagined wrongs. This relationship was crumbling for a while and we both held on despite the fact that there were tensions simmering under the surface for too long. It’s no mystery why some people hang onto relationships like these. Because separation is always painful and there is always good in the other person that will be missed. But sometimes there’s too much drama, too much crazy, a chasm in opinions that can never be bridged and too much past resentment to fully forget.
I learned some important lessons from this. The main thing is that I am appreciative for my true friends and family. People who accept me fully, whether I agree with them or not and who are there for me when I hurt and are there for me when we are all sharing hearty belly laughs together. I treasure people with whom I can share my whole life with, including my children.
A second thing that I learned is that I will be very wary of becoming close friends with someone who is mentally ill. When one’s brain is affected by chemical imbalance, sometimes there’s no way to avoid a bad situation, one in which truth becomes twisted and logic is simply not present. Paranoia is not an easy thing to work around, believe me when I say this. I have compassion for the mentally ill, but I don’t have a desire to bring a person with mental illness into a close relationship with me and my family.
When the sting of hateful words has subsided and the comfort of friends and laughter has helped lift my spirits, I can see how much less carefully I will have to tread in conversations and online interactions and feel how a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I can see that this painful severance was actually a good thing. A blessing in disguise.
