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Saturday, October 8, 2016

Improving Life Through the Power of Habit

Photo by Jenny Livingston
I believe whomever thinks having a second child is easier than the first must have been specifically referring to the raising of the second child, not life in general. I would whole heartedly agree that my son has been a lot easier to manage (aside from him being a better sleeper and his personality being a more easy-going overall than his sister), my husband and I are more confident and experienced parents. Thankfully, I haven't had any of the middle of the night, punching my pillow in frustration episodes with my son that I experience in the first year with my daughter. Whether that's because of my improved parenting abilities or his personality, I really don't know. Either way, I am grateful for the improved sanity this time around.

However, this second time around has been a lot harder in other respects. Yes, I have been getting more sleep, but I get far less "me" time. If one kid is sleeping or otherwise entertaining themselves, the other one is in need of attention. There is no down time throughout my day. With my husband's demanding main job combined with a side hustle, I am often left with daycare drop-off and pick-up (until recently I also had my son with me at the office), and sometimes even getting both kids to bed. On top of that, I do the majority of the domestic chores, although we do pay someone to clean our house twice a month, including most of the cooking, laundry, and yard work. I am not trying to insinuate that my husband is irresponsible, he works very hard at his day job and side hustle, but I am trying to illustrate why I don't get any time to myself. By the time both kids are down for the night, I pump my remaining milk so my breasts don't feel like they are going to explode in the morning, and I eat a snack (because, well, breast feeding). By then it's about time for bed so I can get up early and start the whole routine over again.

With my son joining his sister at daycare and my childcare costs ballooning, I have been exhaustedly wondering if there is another way. I spend the months leading up to the birth of my son and much of my maternity leave nesting hard. And while I'm always fairly frugal and don't turn up my nose at hand-me-downs or Craigslist items, I feel there is always room for improvement when it comes to spending and saving. A bonus to all of the health benefits of breast feeding is that it carves out some reading time for me (I am so grateful to be raising my kids in a time after e-readers were invented so that I can read one-handed and in the dark), so I've been going down a rabbit hole researching ways to streamline our finances and our life. This includes reading about what many would call "extreme" lifestyles of the likes of Bea Johnson, the Zero Waste Home expert and Mr. Money Mustache, famous for retiring young by saving over 50% of his salary.

But the more I read, the more I find that I am at odds with myself. On the one hand, I yearn for the simpler life, modeling a small carbon footprint and frugality that lets us focus on travel and activism. On the other, I want to plop down $50k to add a bonus room to our house and fix up our yards. My initial reaction to reading about these lifestyles are that the people who lead them must have extreme discipline to be able to save so much money or reduce their household waste for a year to a single jar. And it does take discipline, but not the every day is a struggle with themselves kind of discipline, but the discipline to decide what their goals are and then create habits that allow them to reach their goals. It takes discipline to change a habit, but once it's formed and fully integrated into your life it becomes a routine and no longer a struggle. You can run on autopilot.

An example of this is when I decided to walk my dog (a puppy at the time) every day to help her behavior and improve both our health. It took me a little bit of time to settle into a specific route and amount of time, but now we have our set route that covers about 2 miles and takes roughly 40 minutes. On the rare occasion something prevents us from taking our walk, we both miss it and my dog drives me crazy for the rest of the day with her excess energy.

So what exactly do I want to change about my life? What old habits do I want to break and what new habits do I want to create?

In the short term I want to reduce my expenses to cover the additional cost of my son's childcare expenses, but I also want to teach my kids about conservation in the process. So, what habits can I change to achieve that? Keep in mind, it can't just be me. None of this works if my husband is not onboard or I risk his bad habits cancelling out any new good habits I form. I have to choose my battles wisely. For instance, while I love the idea of cloth diapers and we were able to make them work when my daughter was a baby until her daycare would no longer allow them, this time around they just haven't been feasible. Beyond my husband and I both being over scraping poop into the toilet (which just gets more and more disgusting the older they get), my son has consistently leaked out of every brand I have tried with him. And honestly, as busy as I am currently, I just cannot handle the extra laundry at this point. My environmentalist heart (and my wallet) breaks little bit every time I though a disposable diaper in the trash, but "you can only do what you can do." This is one of those lofty goals I just have to let go.

My first step, therefore, is coming up with a list of goals for changing my family's habits. These are still a work in progress and perhaps a bit unrealistic, but this is where I'm at:

Short Term Goals:

  1. Reduce expenditures in categories we can easily cut down on (gifts, restaurants, clothing, etc.). When a gift is truly necessary, try for experience gifts or books. This will not only reduce our expenses, but also help model anti-consumerism for our kids. Break our Amazon Prime habit! I have already unsubscribed to all non-essential email and catalog lists, which has the added benefit of cutting down considerably the amount of time it takes me to check my email.
  2. Streamline our lives. By this I mean, try to reduce the amount of stuff we have to take care of both physical possessions as well as social responsibilities. We need to truly analyze everything we do each day and decide if it's a worthwhile action or if it can be eliminated. This one is going to be hardest on my husband because he hates telling people no, but I know he has already been trying to work on this one. We have often fantasized about moving somewhere new where we don't have family and friends in order to reduce our commitments as well as our expenses (there is a very high cost of living where we currently reside), but for now I think that might be chucking the baby out with the bathwater. 
  3. Start a vegetable garden. I grew up gardening with my father and have always loved it, but a combination of gophers, a long drought and two pregnancies have lead to the current sad shape of our yards. So, I am start with a few galvanized troughs (we already have two in our garage I could put to use) on our patio to at least get a small garden going, even if we can't afford a complete yard transformation yet. And as my daughter is both a picky eater and obsessed with watering our (mostly dead) plants, even the weeds, I secretly dream that if we start a small vegetable garden she will be more interested in trying new foods if she has grown them herself. Since she loves to help me make salad but won't even try it herself, this may be wishful thinking on my part, but growing our own food will be good for the budget even if it doesn't turn my daughter into a foodie. 
  4. Post to this blog on a regular basis. Even though writing has always been my dream, I have struggled to set aside the time to regularly to work on it. Whether it is posting to this blog (I have a whole list of half-finished posts waiting for me) or working on my many fiction ideas, I seem to always work in fits and starts. I want to create a habit for myself to sit down and write routinely.
Long Term Goals:
  1. Save enough to be financially independent. By this I mean have enough passive income so that we no longer need to work and can focus on what we are truly passionate about. For me, this would be having the ability to focus on my writing instead of working full-time while raising two kids. Of course, with the steep cost of childcare, we may not be able to make much headway for 5 more years when both kids are in school, but I am hopeful that we can make at least some progress in the mean time. I want to model for our kids how to set goals and work towards them so they learn perseverance instead of feeling entitled to having their dreams handed to them.
  2. Publish my first book. I don't think this one requires any explanation.
  3. Fix up our outdoor spaces. We have a useless front lawn and a dead, gopher hole riddled back lawn. Throw in a roof that will need to be replaced soon, a driveway being pushed up by tree roots and rough stucco siding that is a spider haven, you start to get the picture of the tall order the outside of our house is. I would love to replace our crumbling driveway with some beautiful pavers, our front lawn with a mixture of drought tolerant and edible landscaping while actually having a nice back lawn for the dog and kids to run around on. Some raised vegetable beds and a nice patio for dining and lounging would round out my ideal backyard. Add in a new roof and resurfaced stucco and all of this equals A LOT of dough.
  4. Build a bonus room? This goal has been turning into a bit of a question mark for me. It has always been my dream since we bought our little house that we would one day build a bonus room off the back to act as an office/guest room/extra family space, but lately I've been wondering if we streamline our stuff enough can this drop off the list all together. I used to think our kids would need to share a room because we couldn't possibly give up our office/guest room, but then the thought of kids waking each other up at night brought us around to the idea that maybe we could go without and we made it work.
That's it for now. What are your goals for improving your life? Let me know in the comments section.

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