Parents did. Grandparents had to. GGP were farmers, so they both definitely worked, though i don't know that it'd be considered 2 incomes. GGM did work early on, but i was before kids and marriage.

Oh, I know they work hard. That's why i'm complaining here and not go them! :D my original thought when signing the girls up, was that we'd start our own troop here if they liked it. I didn't really want to do that withou trying it first or seeing how it worked. Plans have changed and we're having a baby instead. ;)

$200 extra rent a month is $2400 for the year. How much are you paying for the home? If it's more than $2400, you're not coming out ahead for the year. If it's less, you still have to take into account repair costs. Since this is a temporary situation (things with dh up in the air, no job yet, ect) it might be a better idea to bank that $ and use it for the extra rent until you know where your life is headed.

Oh, I wish! That's my one complaint. (It must vary by troop) Our troop requires selling a certain amount per girl or you pay it. And all their fundraisers have been party style MLMs. So the girls aren't even the ones doing the fundraising. I hate MLMs in general, now I'm stuck hitting up my family and friends or paying another chunk of change. DH jokes that I should've known better than to pick an activity on the rich side of town. lol

My girls are in AHG this year. I'm impressed with the program and it's just what we were looking for. It's more GSy than GS. :) More like Boy Scouts. They have had martial arts and shooting and archery, things we never did in GS. They do have religious stuff mixed in, too. Which is probably unneccessary. (they go to church, co-op, bible in hs, they probably don't need another devotional.) But the program is great. The closest one to us in a bit too far, so I've already decided we're not doing it next year. But I wish we could.

I said invite and don't care. Usually it's good enough. Not company clean, but oh well. When we're sick or in the midst of pregnancy, I'd be thoroughly embarrassed. But, hopefully anyone just stopping by would be close enough to just be real with. It is what it is, so I would choose not to let it bother me.

Yeah, I thought it'd be more interesting than it was. Lawn chairs are out? Isn't a camp chair just a different version of a lawn chair? We did get rid of the coffee table, though. LR is much roomier without it.

:lol: isn't this so true! We have no doubt why children started being called kids. Our toddler's main goal in life is to get as high as she can and eat anything she sees!

I don't know, Faith. I know low income people who have been on assistance longer than 4 years and they haven't been cut off. Food stamps and such. And our public transportation isn't much compared to Other cities, but if you live within the bus boundries, it's quite sufficient. We could live eithout a car if we had to. It wouldn't be fun and it would limit the things we do in the outer suburbs. But we could do it. One of the reasons we do well with only one car is dh's ability to take the bus to work. I can't imagine sustaining a family on $10/hour. But I'm not sure it's as bleak as you make it sound. And We live in a lower income area where at least 3-4 houses on each block are abandoned and gutted and/or burnt out and our house is worth about the same as our van. (totalled, if you consider needed repairs) So i have no illusion that things are sunshine and roses. Eta- actually, you're pretty rural, aren't you? Maybe that plays into our different perspectives. The amount of cheap/free things available here is astounding. They hand our free lunches all summer long, gloves and coats in the fall, school suplkrs, including backpacks at the end of summer, ect. I know that's not enought o survive, but there iss help out there.

Oh, I wish the girls' AHG would do this. They keep having fundraisers for everyones' overpriced MLM business. I hate going to parties, I don't want to peddle your junk for a fundraiser, either!

Ok, so the Radian is the narrowest. Are there others that are narrow, but perhaps not as narrow, or is the Radian just in a class by itself? Any other options?

Right now, the 1yo is still in the carrier/car seat. She's very petite, so she's taken awhile to outgrow it. (though she is starting to get too lon for it) We were given a used Evenflo something or other, but it's huge! So i need to buy somehing, anyway. The 7yo is in a graco highback booster. She'll be 8 by the time baby is here, but I think she'll still be short enough that she should stay in the booster. I had been thinking it'd be easiest ti stick the older 3 in the back, but dh pointed out that they'd never stop touching each other (playing or fightig) packed in there so tight. So, we're thinking of putting 1yo in the middle back with the girls and ds and the baby in the middle. So this is mostly about comfort and not the puzzle. And safety, since we stay properly behind our seat belt when we're confortable there.

Those of you fitting lots of carseats into a car, what is the most narrow? With #5 we're going to be packing in and I'd like to find something compact for #4. Thanks.

The hugging/touching: cut it off (twist out of it, shrug it off) "oh, I don't hug any men but my fiance :) " You can have boundries within male/female relationships withou there being interest. You can tell him you're not comfortable just because. It doesn't have to assume he's interested.

I had l ice once as a child. I don't remember feeling them. I'm going to say no, since I didn't know they were there when my mom found them. Several times as a teen/collegiate I thought i had them and did a treatment. Once i treated a few times, certain I felt them and they weren't going away, and my hair started to fall out. That stuff is harsh and I do think you can think your feeling them when it's just irritation. If your hairdresser didn't see any and you've already shampooed, try to forget about it and just trust that things are ok.

Love: -that I can stack them (small laundry room- this is really nice) -that I can was blankets and sleeping bags without going to the laundromat -the dryer is amazing and dries things in 20 minutes. (this has nothig to do witht the washer. We had the washer and an old dryer for 2 yrs) Hate: -that I have to leave the door open or we have (worse) mold issues - that it's so high-tech. Some little thing goes wrong and we can just finage it or fix it ourselves. It's way too high-maintainance. I should not have to work this hard for my clothes-slave. -You can't start it in the middle of a cycle. So it the laundry tub gets clogged and the clothes are still really wet, you have to do a complete rinse/spin cycle that's about 25 min long. I don't need to rinse again. Just spin the water out! - I think my clothes got cleaner in the old machine.

We had the Kirby salesman come back when we were first married. The salesman was actually really nice, but when she called her boss to find out a trade in value and he wanted to talk to me, things really went downhill. He criticized me for not wanting to buy until I talked to dh. "surely he doesn't consult you whenever you buy tools." No, but he better if he's spending $2,000 on one! After his bully tactics didn't work, he said stuff like j was wasting their time leading them on and didn't really intend to buy in the first place. (right, now for sure I will, just to prove you werong about me! :lol: ) he also tried the mLM sceme, "don't you want to help this nice girl mee her goal so that she can get a scholarship. (why aren't you paying her directly instead of making her jump through hoops for a scholarship?) the deception turned me off from the start. (they presented themselves as a carpet cleanig company. I figured I'd get my one room and listed to a shpiel for the rest of the house. Disn't expect a carpet salesman to clean one pathway in my bedrroom, leaving the rest to now look like carp.) Even as naive as I was at that time the whole thing turned me off completely. I loved that vacuum and we had an antique kirby at the time that had been passed through dh's family for at least 50 yrs, so I knew they were quality. But even if we had the $, no way aas I buying it from him! I did get one a couple years later when our antique finally died. And i got it for less than $200 on ebay. :D

Aand, since we're in our 12th year living in. A house that we planned to stay in less than 5, I would not buy a house that I could not bear long term.

Since you only plan on staying a short time, you need to consider resale value, also. You will have a more limited market than if you had an actual 3br

I don't have any, but I should. I lost a paycheck when I was in college and was too embarassed to have them issue me a new one. It's not on the list, thiugh, so either someone stole it or BK decided to keep the funds. It was a few hundred, which would be nice, but isn't life changing.

:iagree: I don't know that the Bible specifically gives an exact moment. But it does talk about God giving the womb life and being known by God even when on the inside.

Save your reciepts and show him where your $ is going. He doesn't understand what it takes to run the house. That doesn't make him evil; my dh didn't understand at first, either. You need to sjow him, so that he will understand. Eon't beat yourself up for not making budget. Your budget is unrealistic.

$17K tax return?! Dang! Would he be willing to take a few exemptions and get a $10K return instead? My dh likes a return, also. He knows he's not good at saving. So even if he's loaning the gov't his money interest free, he figures at least he knows he's saving something. Last year, with the new baby, out return was $12K. He adjusted that and we still got $7K this year. You can live off of 75/yr. but if you're used to 125, than now we know why you're struggling. Adjust what needs to be adjusted. And up that food budget! We spend $400 every 2 weeks just on things you buy at the grocery store. (food, diapers, tp) $125/wk for your family is going to be hard!

Piggyback question, dis any of you find it useful to do the distance learning videos?

If you had a homebirth, how did your pediatrician handle it? I love our ped. She's friendly and knows her stuff. But she is more mainstream. She tolerates our off-the-path choices, though I know she'd prefer we choose differently. I winder what her reaction would be if we went with this choice.