Missing Grad School?!

Okay, not really missing it so much as having a full heart with the memories of simpler days and especially of lessons learned while we were in grad school.  Apparently I've reflected on these feelings before (thanks blog-memory) but the last post was 4 years ago and while everything I wrote then still holds true today, I think I'll add a few more grad school reflections. 

Grad school taught us really hard things that we maybe somehow could have learned in another way but, for us, we developed skills in grad school that have served us over and over again in 'real life', including- 

-The ability to set a goal, stay laser focused on it and watch it with satisfaction as it comes to fruition.  

-The ability to sacrifice now for something that we want even more in the future.  This one gets a bit harder as we get older, because there are always experiences and adventures and clubs and lessons that we want to participate in. Some of these things we can only do now, and some of these things we will enjoy more as a family now than we will in the future (think trying to take a bunch of teenagers to meet Mickey and Donald for the first time or trying to hike or zipline or snorkel in the ocean as 70 year olds.  That could be tricky). 

-The ability to buckle down and make do with what you have rather than always trying to attain everything.  I'm thinking about the bright orange bathroom in our grad school rental house.  We hated it, but we couldn't do anything about it so we just didn't worry about it.  Here, in our 'forever house' we have a mudroom/laundry room that could use a pretty serious glow-up.  Our basement is half finished.  The front office/music room causes my blood pressure to rise. We could do something about all of it, or we could not, but the choice is ours.  There is peace that comes with the kinds of limited options that we had in grad school. 

-The habits that we made when we were 'poor starving college students'.  Occasionally I still lean on the discipline I had to develop we were extra limited by what we could afford at the grocery store, and recently I found myself wondering what life would be like if I had never in my life had to put items back because they didn't fit in the budget, or if I just had to have the nicest, newest (fill in the blank here), no matter the financial cost. How stressful would life be if we had a massive pile of debt because we never learned how to tell ourselves 'no'. I'm grateful that grad school taught us how to tell ourselves no. 

-Better is an option.  Grad school taught us that we don't have to be resigned to our lot in life and call it good.  We can strive, learn, grown, stretch, expand and make more out of our lives if we are willing to do the work. That is the essence of the American dream, but it has become a reality for us.  With the help of grad school, we have learned what Heavenly Father's plan is for our potential and we have made a really great life with it.  There is a lot to be grateful for there. 

Summer Fun- Party of 14

Our second visitors for the summer were the Baileys, who were kind enough to squeeze a few days out of their family vacation to spend time with us in Iowa!  

Best of all, the kids all remembered each other perfectly from the time we spent together at their house over our spring break.  

So we all just picked up where we left off with lots of games and lots of fun!

.

 Juliet tried so hard to earn Laney's love!

 The boys went right back to their board game marathon.

 Matthew gave Laney a good dose of love, too!

And eventually she warmed up to him!

 Poor Neil, not so much.  Laney had zero interest in making friends with him, but he didn't give up!

 

 There were yard games and night games with the kids and even later night board games with the adults, 

  and I think we talked about going to the pool or the beach or the playground, 

 but at the end of the day we all just wanted the same thing- 

 to catch up and enjoy each other's company!

And snuggle the pup, of course. 

 Did I say this at spring break?  Adam is surely not going to be taller than Isaac for long!

  This pictures warms my heart and cracks me up- 14 smiling faces and one dog that couldn't stop giving Neil the side eye. 

  Until next time sweet friends!  Thank you for making our summer extra memorable!

Could've... Should've... Would've

(circa 2004, at our first apartment with an entertainment budget that allowed us to go on free bike rides for dates)

Of all of the financial choices we have made together in our married years, we've felt good about most of them.

Deciding to quit my job and become a stay at home mom after Leah was born?  Excellent choice.

Jason forgoing the lucrative opportunity to become a high school science teacher in favor of continuing higher education?

The decision to not buy a house in Indiana?  Good choice- we weren't there for very long and we did not have any extra income to put toward home ownership.

The decision to buy a house as soon as we moved to Iowa?  Good choice since our mortgage on our 4 bedroom/3 bath house is the same amount as the rent on our two bedroom/2 bathroom apartment was.

But before all of that was the decision to take out student loans... and that one is a mixed bowl full of emotions that we've been combating for 14 years now.  Did we really need all of that money?  What exactly did we do with all of it?

But one way or another, that chapter of our family history is closed.  As of today, we are officially student loan - and all other debts, too- FREE!!!  Free at last!  Free at last!

During our graduate school years we let our loans sit, deferred and haunting our future.  We knew we had years and years of income ahead of us to tackle them.  And once we graduated, tackle them we did.  For the last five years, every bonus, tax refund or windfall of money has been in some part, used to pay down our student loans.

Extra money at the end of the month?  Student loans.

Paid less for a bill than we budgeted? Student loans.

Every few months I skimmed the interest off of our savings account and applied it to student loans.

After paying off my loan in 2016 we set the goal to be completely debt free (except our mortgage) by 2020.  It has a nice ring to it.  Debt freeeeee by Twenty-Twentyyyyyyy.

Still, tackling the $64,878 worth of debt that we accrued in our early twenties to earn three of our four degrees seemed like quite the mountain to climb.

But as the months and years went by 2020 started to seem not soon enough.  So we pushed a whole lot harder and today we finally- finally!- reached our goal.

And yes, we had four babies and started saving for their futures and bought a house and took a trip to Puerto Rico and a vacation to Disney World and a Disney cruise and paid off our minivan before we reached this goal.  Because living life doesn't always equate to simply paying down student debt.  We've been living along the way.

Sure, we could've, should've, would've done it all differently.  But we didn't.  We did it this way.

And now it's done! Goodbye past, hello future!

We absolutely would not be where we are in life today if we hadn't taken out those loans.  There's no questions about that.  And I'll always wonder what we could have done differently to set our financial lives down a straighter path.  But the lessons we learned and the growing we had to do along the way, leaning on each other and figuring everything out on our own?  I wouldn't trade that for all the debt in the world.

And yes, Jason and I celebrated with a dinner date- and a buy-one-get-one-free coupon that brought our celebratory total to $8.

Those hard earned old student life habits aren't going anywhere!

2 of 4

A few months ago I challenged myself to drastically reduce our grocery bill for the month in favor of making a bonus payment to part 2 of 4 of our final student loan.  I listed off some of the meals we would be eating- black bean soup and quesadillas, tuna cakes with carrots, and minestrone soup to those who were wondering.

Jason commented, "This sounds an awful lot like graduate school."

To which I replied, "Well, we're using the money saved to help pay off our student loans, so it basically is like graduate school all over again!"

And that's the trick of student loans (or any debt, really).  You spend the money once but you have to keep paying for it for a really, really long time.  Sure, we could continue to drag out the payments for the next 30 years, but I've felt very strongly that we need to get these darn loans nipped in the bud once and for all.  And Jason has been kind enough to agree.  Even if it means eating rice and beans once in a while.

And I actually like black bean soup, so there!

Bonus update- we paid off 2 of 4 last month in celebration of Jason not losing his job.  Numbers 3 and 4 are set to be obliterated in the next two or three months, and then we'll be debt free (except the mortgage, aka, the next mountain to climb)! 

We've taken a winding road to get there, and of course there are only 1,200 things I'd do differently if we could do it all over again.  Oh, the lessons we've learned along the way.  Hindsight is a crystal clear 20/20, but that's the beauty of growing old, I suppose.  You gain wisdom along the way.  Oh, how I hope that our babies will be smart enough to learn from our life lessons. 

Look at Noah!  He looks smarter than his parents already.

The Worst Birthday Ever

Jason had a birthday last week, and by the end of the day we both declared with 100% confidence that it was the worst birthday either of us had ever had.

About two years ago we started hearing talk of Jason's company Dow merging with Pioneer.  We've spent the last year contemplating and preparing for the potential of having to move, getting laid off, getting demoted, getting stuck in a horrible job... but never knowing exactly when the fate would befall us.

Enter Jason's birthday.

There had been plenty of reassurance about Jason's position in the new company (he is quite amazing at what he does, after all), but the facts were all laid bare on his birthday.

So instead of celebrating by taking the day off and doing all of the fun things I had planned, he headed to work to find out what would become of the program he has spent the last five years developing.

And I sat at home, waiting for updates.

The first one came quickly-  "They're closing the site."

And the next one not long after-  "They're calling everyone in one by one.  People are getting fired."

And then- "I'm going to be the corn breeder at Dallas Center."  (Exactly what we were expecting, and more on that later.)

"They're done talking to everyone."  Five people out of thirteen were fired and were sent home, 20 days before Christmas.

Needless to say, it was a very somber birthday.

But still, birthdays aren't just about the realities about grown up life, they're about celebrating the ones we love.  So we celebrated.  We went out to dinner with the kids and enjoyed Leah's first 5th grade band concert and had ice cream and the ugliest cherry chocolate cake ever, which Jason called a perfect representation of the day. 

All the while the phone calls and emails kept coming with news from other stations throughout the company.  When the dust finally settled a few days later, we realized that Jason is one of two breeders in the company that was not fired/told to move/severely alter his commute.  Miraculously, the changes in Jason's job will not affect our family at all. 

He still has all of the same benefits (we were half-expecting him to lose his company car, but most likely not the phone, computers, credit cards, or retirement package in the merger.  He kept it all.) and we are still on the same original promotion track as before. 

He literally heads west and drives 32 minutes now instead of the 29 minutes north that he has driven for the last four years.

As the shock of the news from his coworkers wore off, we were really able to see how blessed we have been.  The first thing Jason's boss's boss said to him when they sat down together was, "Well, I don't know who you've impressed, but you were at the top of the list of people to keep happy in the merger."  And that feels good.  Jason is really good at what he does, and it's nice to be noticed (and not fired!) for it. 

We've been holding our breath and our pennies for the last two years as we've been waiting for this day to come, and now that it's come and gone, we have a new chapter of life to look forward to.  So we celebrated.  We paid off our car and knocked out another student loan.  We continued the conversation of what if Iowa is actually home for good?  That was not the plan when we moved here, but that is definitely becoming the reality.  And for now, we couldn't be happier about it.

So happy birthday to Jason, who didn't get fired!  He's so resilient and hardworking and quite likable.  He's optimistic and energetic and incredibly smart, and he takes care of our family in ways that we used to only dream about.

The kids love fun and games Daddy.  He makes everything better, from racing to put laundry away to steamroller across the living room floor.  Their favorite part of Daddy's birthday is helping him solve the clues about where I hid his presents.

It was not a birthday we'll soon forget, that's for sure, but it's definitely one we're glad to have behind us!

1 out of 4

For the sake of accountability and remembering, I have to note that we paid off another student loan today.  This one felt even less exciting than the last one we paid off.  But still, we keep chipping away at the iceberg of past decisions.

It's usually when the loans get into the last $1,500 or so that I can't take it anymore and just pay the darn thing off.

Our final loan is actually four loans consolidated into one lender, but we pay different interest on each one, so we keep it divided into four loans to make each bite seem a bit more manageable.

And as of today, one out of the remaining four is no longer.  Hooray!

It's funny (sad? encouraging?) when I talk to friends that have student debt in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.  We never had anywhere close to that kind of debt.

And it's slightly deflating when I talk to friends that never had any student debt, thanks always to the parents or grandparents or scholarships that paid their tuition for them.  But I've already shared my feelings about that.

Neither of those groups of people is us.  We're us, and we've got our own debt and our own story and our own reasons for accumulating it and our own reasons for paying it off at the rate we are.

And we celebrate the milestones along the way and keep plugging along!

Another One Bites The Dust

This one seems a bit more anti-climactic than the last one I blogged about a quick six months ago, but it still bears recording that we just paid off another one of those ugly student loans!

This time it feels slightly less exciting because it means that the only monster left ahead of us is the really, really nasty one, but hey!  Our debt snowball is rolling faster, we've got another student loan crossed off the list and that feels pretty amazing.

Also, I'd like to repeat all of the sentiments that I shared the last time around- I know it was worth all that the student loans afforded us, but man, I sure wish we had never needed to take them out in the first place!  But since we did, and since we're knocking them out as quickly as we can, we might as well celebrate each small victory along the way.

That little chart up there has been hanging in our closet for a year now- it's a snapshot of our top five financial goals for the year.  Time to update it again!

The Slow Drip

Today's post has been 12 years in the making.

Actually 16.

And a half.

Because on this day- October 8, 2004- six months after I graduated from college and when we had been married for a whopping 5 months exactly, my students loans dispersed and it was officially time to start chipping away at the student debt mountain that I had borrowed to get my Bachelors of Science degree.

$100 a month.

And that was it.

$100 a month for the LAST 12 YEARS.

And at a 0.75% interest rate, there wasn't much of a rush to eliminate it.

Especially during graduate school, when there wasn't usually more than $100 a month to dedicate to it.

And since graduate school, when it was too familiar to really do much about.  There have always been lots of other ways to spend any extra money that could have gone toward paying it off early.

It became the slow drip that never really hurt, but it was always there.

Until today.

Because today I finally paid that ugly debt off!

Which is super exciting because it means that the debt snowball is officially in motion.  It's amazing that Jason earned his BS, MS, and PhD and yet we took out not nearly as much student loans as he could have.  Still more than we would have preferred, but not nearly as much as it could have been.  And while we've taking care of that slow drip for 12 years, we've only been paying on Jason's loans since six months after he graduated- a mere three years ago.

But the glorious news is now we can take that money and throw it toward his loans, one of which is about to be paid off as well.  And then that money plus my loan money will go toward his debt mountain, and (if everything goes according to plan) we'll be student-debt free in less than THREE years!

Just five years before Leah starts college.

Holy smokes.  It's a vicious cycle.

One I'd love to break.

Kids, since I'm writing this entire blog in the hopes that some day you'll learn something from the life your parents have lived, let me explain a few things here.

1. My dad has several college degrees.  I believe that most of them were paid for by the Army.

2. My mom went to college but didn't get a degree.  She's been busy doing other awesome things ever since.

3. Jason's dad didn't get a college degree.

4. Jason's mom graduated after I did, around the same time Jason did.  We were there.  It was amazing!

But college is a fairly young idea in our heritage.  It surprises me to type that out because in addition to Jason and me, every single one of my brothers, sisters, sisters-in-law and brothers-in-law (15 altogether!) have a college degree of one kind or another.  15!  That's a HUGE amount of higher education completed by some of the most amazing people I know.  And that love of learning was planted in us by our parents, whether they completed their college education or not.  We are a family that loves learning!

Our children will go to college too.  That isn't really a question in America anymore, is it?  We talk about college all the time in our house.  Just this week the kids accompanied me to a slightly run down part of town to give food to someone that did not have access to any food.  At all.  And on the way home we talked about what kinds of life choices people make that keep them from having the kind of life they should. Going to college is a huge one!

And here's another thing.  Even though I don't use my college degree professionally (at this point), the experiences and education I gained in my four years of school were worth more than any dollar amount I could ever put on it.  I grew up in college.  I learned amazing things, met wonderful people, learned how to live on my own.  I met Jason in college!  It's hard to imagine which of those things I would have accomplished had I stayed at home in Virginia, then moved with my parents to Arkansas, although they did end up in Utah after that, thankfully they never really offered me a place after graduation anyway.  I drove to BYU-Idaho- it was still Ricks College back then- the day after I graduate from high school.  I launched!  And I'm so grateful to my parents for that.  The most important things all worked out just the way they were supposed to, and college was a huge vehicle for all of it.

Yes, I have spent many a day loathing my student loans over the last 12 years.  But I still wouldn't trade the experiences gained while I was accruing them for anything.

So it's with a happy, grateful heart that I can finally announce that the slow drip has finally shut off.  Thanking it for all that it gave me, never comparing myself to those that never had to deal with student loans in the first place, and saying good riddance to it for good!

Getaway

I may not have given into peer pressure much in my teenage years (most of my dumb choices were all my own) but as an adult, if a dear friend suggests that I do something incredibly fun and spontaneous and memorable, no matter how illogical it may seem, you can bet we'll be doing it!

And that's how we found ourselves six hours from home, on the sandy shores of Silver Beach in St. Joseph, Michigan last Saturday morning.  I have happy memories of playing in the Great Lakes as a child, and we've always enjoyed our beach days on the west side of Lake Michigan.  But I'd say this trip was the best experience we've had on the lake so far!

From the time the shadows were in front of us,

until the shadows stretched out long behind us, 

we spent the day battling waves, building sand castles, and soaking up the late summer sun.  Some of us in the water-

and some of us hiding out under a towel on Mommy's lap. 

Emma split her time between the water and the sand, and espeically loved jumping the waves while we held hands.  There were some pretty impressive waves rolling in that nearly knocked all of us over. 

Leah won the prize for most waves conquered- 

she spent way more time in the water than in the sand. 

Adam was happy going back and forth- thoroughly covering himself with sand from head to foot, then washing himself clean in the water, then heading back to the beach to do it all over again.  

And, of course, we spent as much time as we possibly could catching up with our dear graduate school friends.  It's been nearly two years since we all met up for Thanksgiving in Nauvoo, and we were long overdue for another get-together of six adults and our (almost!) fifteen kids.

Especially with these two ladies- they inspire me and encourage me and help me know I'm not even close to being alone in all of the craziness of motherhood, marriage and life.

  I could have sat for several more hours catching up with them.  

And I was especially grateful that Jason was willing to take the trip with us.  I could have made the drive by myself, but it was much nicer having him (and his company car!) along for the ride.  He always puts up with my harebrained schemes.  Especially the ones that are this fun!

Post Graduate School

*****This is a compilation of several blog drafts I discovered recently that I wrote over the last 3 years.  They encompass our shift from student life to real life.  Graduate school was such a blessed, simple time of our lives, and while I'd rather not go back, there are things about it that I surely miss, and great life's lessons we've learned along the way.*****

I miss Jason riding the bus. He was always home at 10 after or 40 after, no way around it.  It was simple and predictable.

I miss getting a tax refund that was big enough to fund Christmas and float us through the rest of the year. 

I miss that place that sold funnel cake French fries. 

I miss the incredibly well defined goal that we were all working toward- graduate!!!  Life is more complex now. 

I miss the perks of being 'poor'.  A hot dog dinner provided by the school of agriculture was the highlight of the week. A pack of coupons appeared in our mailbox one day for free milk, eggs, juice and more.  It fed our family for what felt like a long time.  

I miss having no choice but to turn a blind eye to the fires that we're raging around us- the ripped up furniture, the holey shoes, the car maintenance.  Now we have the means to take care of those fires, just not all at once.  There is no more blind eye.

*****

When we were in graduate school I wrote this note to my future self.  And I think about it often.  I thought about it the other day when Emma, Noah and I made our way over to the bakery to pick up our traditional shopping-with-Mommy donut.  When we were in graduate school we never, and I mean never picked up a donut because donuts cost money. We picked up the free cookie that usually tasted like pressed sawdust and then we moved on.

I thought about the note when I reached for a treat from my stash of chocolate.  I racked my brain for the location of my stash in graduate school and I realized- I didn't have a stash in Indiana.  I couldn't afford it.  I didn't want to afford it as much as I wanted to afford healthy food, which we can purchase easily now, just occasionally choose not to.

I thought about it when Jason told me he'd be working from 7 AM to 9 PM today.  An 8 to 5 job has never really been in our plan, but these long days of planting remind me of the years we spent putting every spare minute into research.

I thought about the note as I have continued to spring clean my way through our house.  Somehow, now that we have more, I want less.  It also comes from the fact that we are done having babies, so we don't have to store baby gear anymore, but in general I look around our bigger house and wonder how we accumulated so much stuff along the way.  It's hard to manage so much stuff, so I'm always looking to get rid of the things that we don't love and use.

We gave our trampoline away this week.  What's left of it after last summer's adventure, anyway.  I told my future self that we would get a trampoline, and we did.  And it wasn't a huge deal to give it away.  I hope we get another one some day, but for now we're happy with the swingset that we purchased this year.

*****

I miss graduate school life.  I don't know if it was less money, less uncertainty, less choices or less complications, but somehow life was simpler back then.   Just graduate.

*****

I love reading money blogs, frugal living blogs, and debt-free living blogs.  They are inspiring and kind of depressing.  There is always so much more to a story than what you read online.  I often wonder what people see when they look at our life- the house, the vacations, the children.  There is no way to see the whole story.  So here are a few glimpses.

We pay 10% of our income to our church.  We believe in the blessings of Malachi, and we have surely seen those blessings in our life.  We made the decision to pay an honest 10% tithing in the first month of our marriage, and we have never missed a month.  It was a decision that we made once, and we have been blessed over and over again because of it.

Having said that, our meager student income 10% was a lot smaller than our 10% is now.  We still pay it with a glad heart, but it has become a number that is quite a noticeable line in our budget.  And that right there is one of the blessings of tithing.

We don't get financial help from our parents.  We get moral support, strong testimonies, genuine concern, love unbounded, spoiled at Christmas and birthdays, baby-sitters for trips to Puerto Rico, a fantastic place to visit in the summer or the winter, once-in-a-lifetime trips aboard the Disney Dream, and more, but we don't get financial help from our parents.  We are still paying our own way through college, paying on our own mortgage, paying on our own car, and paying for our own vacations.  There is a great amount of pride that comes with doing those things for yourself.  I've discovered that many people get a "leg up" in the financial department from their parents.  We do not come from wealthy families, (and that is not to say that we ever went without) but the blessings of growing up in our families outweigh any financial blessings that might have come.

I often think about what goals and hopes we have for our children.  I think one of the greatest ways we can ensure that our children have a better life than we have (the true American dream, right?) is to help them not be shackled down with the chains of student debt.  Leah will start college in ten short years.  That doesn't seem like that much time for us to prepare for a way to help her through college.

I am a stay-at-home mom.  We live on one income.  We lived on one (very small) income when we were graduate students.  Even when I was working full time and Jason was finishing his undergraduate degree, we lived on one income and put the other (student employee-sized) one in the bank.  Then we started our family, I began to stay at home, and Jason continued to go to school.  We have been official "wage earning, tax paying" citizens for less than two years.  That isn't much time to create a financial legacy for ourselves, but I still tend to forget that when I wonder why we've only come as far as we have in the last 11 years.  (Which is actually pretty darn far, but imagine if we had already been college graduates when we met instead of the marginally directionless 22- and 23- year old that we were.)

A dear friend once asked me tongue-in-cheek if surely life wasn't so much more perfect once you graduated.  And the answer is yes!  Life is better, money is better, and the choices are greater.  Gone are the days when we had no choice but to turn a blind eye to the check engine light or the bare cupboards.  Now there are choices aplenty, and we have worked hard to to get to this point of choices in our life.  There is something equally exciting and depressing about trying to decide if we'd rather landscape the yard or finish the basement, pay down student debt or increase our emergency savings fund.  We get to dream about what once-in-a-lifetime trip we'll take our children on, and what our life will look like in 30 years when Jason's career is winding down.  We're grown up, making our own grown up choices with our own grown up money, and mostly, we're loving it.  It's not all sunshine and roses, but there sure is a lot of fun that can come with the privileges that we've earned.  And we did it all ourselves.

I just hope we can help our kids do it, too.  Because when we sacrifice and make hard choices now, the payoff for later can be so great!

*****

Apparently Jason and I are weird because we don't have cable TV.  We never have, but maybe someday we will.  Neither of us feel like it's a missing staple in our lives.

There are a ton of things we'd like to do to our house that are completely non-essential.  Crown molding, finish the basement, pour a patio, furnish the music room, decorate the kids rooms.

And we want to travel.  Trips to all parts of the country are bouncing around my head all the time.

And I'd always like to save more.  And beef up our food storage.  And pay off our student loans.  There are so many ways to spend all of the money we've got, plus more.  It's an annoying truth of adulthood, and I'm always grateful that we are able to live well within our means, especially on one income.  Even if it does mean turning a blind eye to some of the awesome things our neighbors/friends/family have and do.

Once in awhile I dream about living another version of my life.  In a loft downtown, or on property out in the country.  Jason dreams about living in another country.  Either way, we've lived here for over two years and I'm getting the itch to pack up and move.  So I am rearranging the furniture and purging the closets instead.

And I actually do love it here in Iowa.  We're not really in a rush to move, but we're not fully committing our hearts to life here either.  I don't love that, but there is no change in sight.  Between me moving every two to three years growing up and Jason living in the same house practically his whole life, we aren't great at settling in for just a few years.  But we're trying!

My Idea Of A Good Time

Near the end of summer I started really looking forward to back-to-school for one main reason- a chance to take control of my house again!  Maybe I'm the only one with this problem, and I know have mentioned this before, but I am truly amazed at how much stuff we have lurking in corners and crevices throughout our house.  At a glance our house looks almost too sparsely filled, but it's the stuff that we do have sitting around that has been driving me crazy- the cross-shoulder diaper backpack that I always kept for Jason just in case he needed a more manly one than mine for the many outings that he takes with our newborn babies (not!), or last season's clothes that the kids have grown out of yet again that need to be sorted into save, donate, and trash piles.  It's the coloring book basket full of crumpled papers and completed coloring books or the overflowing toy boxes or the game cupboard that just needs some sorting and organizing.  It's the dusty cookbooks and the extra flower vases and the basement... oh how I love to hate the basement.  Fantastic for keeping things out of sight, out of mind, but terrible for giving those forgotten messes a breeding ground.

So I've been spending a good chunk of Mr. Noah's naps lately sorting, organizing, and altogether purging wherever I can.  And I've realized a few things.

Lesson Number One- being poor, starving graduate students teaches you to save everything you think you might need ever again.  Just in case.  Because chances are, the minute you get rid of it, you're going to need it and won't have the money in this month's stipend to replace it.  I'm slowly getting over that as I realize that I don't have to keep ugly stained shirts or dirty old shoes if they have lived a good life and are ready to meet their final resting place.  I can replace them.  The money is there to replace the things that need to be replaced.  That wasn't always the case in graduate school (remember how many months we lived with the check engine light on in the car?).  That lesson was a good one to learn, though, and I'm eternally grateful that we had so many years of learning it- it's stuck with us pretty good and even now we have to give ourselves permission and a serious pep talk to buy the things that we need.

Lesson Number Two- so much of the clutter that we keep in our home is baby clutter, and it's going to be rendered completely useless once we close the childbearing chapter of our lives.  The bassinet that is packed away again, the mobile, the bumbo, the swing, the tubs upon tubs upon tubs of baby clothes that I just can't get rid of in the event that IF we have another baby and IF it's a boy/girl and IF he/she is born in the same season as one of his/her older siblings- I'm hanging onto all of it just a bit longer.  And it amazes me to realize that in less time than I've owned any of it, I will no longer have any use for any of it.  Just like that I will have the freedom to get rid of it all.  And then I don't mind keeping that stuff around quite so much.

Lesson Number Three- Keeping stuff around that is broken/stained/too big/too small/useless/annoying to store/brings up a bad memory is just keeping me that much further from the peaceful, purposeful feeling that I want our home to have.  That stuff needs to go.

Lesson Number Four- One man's trash is another man's treasure.  I've had a delightful and interesting time watching people willingly pay for some of the "junk" that we've been keeping around.  And I've been able to teach my kids that their unloved stuff is worth money that can be used (or saved) for new interests.  The basement has been a hotter mess than it's been all summer.  The other day Emma looked around and said as much.  When I asked her why she said, "Dere's just been so many birthdays and Christmases."  And that's exactly right.  We've been blessed with so much over the years with more than we could ever really use and love, and I've truly enjoyed passing some of those blessings along to the women's shelter, the local clothing for the needy organization, the library, the Goodwill, and even other families.  The kids are starting to understand that they can bless other people's lives, too.

Lesson Number Five- Toys are part of the problem, but they aren't the whole problem.  I have realized that outgrown clothes for four small people make up a huge portion of the mess in our basement.  And that is my responsibility.  Same with crafting supplies, paperwork, and holiday decorations. All up to me.  So if it gets taken care of, great.  If not, I can feel good knowing that I was probably doing something more enriching or essential in the meantime.

Lesson Number Six- Saving toys to pass down to younger kids is great, but it doesn't really cut it come Christmas and birthdays.  They all have their own interests, and I don't think Emma would be thrilled to receive Leah's old nappy-haired Barbies, no matter how well accessorized they are.

Lesson Number Seven- Clearing out the old makes room for the new and it helps us recognize what is most important.  I've been exchanging a lot of my time lately for what I hope is a more peaceful and pleasant home, as well as more time to enjoy what we do have rather than just organize and sort what we no longer want or need.

Lesson Number Eight- My kids will always, always, always be more excited about the box than they are with the toy.

My method for cleaning out the basement has been to pull up one box of stuff at a time, set it out for the kids to sort through, take note of what they're thrilled with and what they could care less about and sort accordingly.  The other day I brought up a box that they quickly emptied and then had a ball playing pirates in search of buried treasure.

Lesson Number Nine- Kids just don't nearly as much stuff as I originally thought they did.  When Leah was little I thought she had to have every Fisher-Price toy in the baby aisle.  Watching Noah I can see that no toy can compare with the joy of unplugging nightlights, emptying drawers and opening cupboards.  Add in a tickle or a snuggle and a crawling chase and I've got the happiest baby on the block.  No toys required.

One day we bought a coconut and had a blast smashing it to pieces.  Again, no toys required.  

Lesson Number Ten- Money spent on experiences, books, crafts, and Legos are worth their weight in gold.  Adam told me that his three most special possessions are his books, his Legos, and Coconut, his beloved piggy bank that Grandma sent him from Hawaii.

There will always be room for books in our house!

As for experiences, of all the Christmases I was blessed with growing up, the one that stands out the most to me is the year my parents took us to Hawaii.  I was 13.  I remember the trip clearly, and I remember my presents- a bottle of Sunflowers perfume and a Celine Dion CD.  I think the lack of volume in the gifts made the ones I did receive all the more special.  Or maybe it was the fact that we were on our way to paradise!

Lesson Number Eleven- Having a baby to nurse and cuddle makes sorting and organizing and purging completely unimportant.  That explains why I have done such a great job of it over the last 11 months.  And that's okay.

And now that the house is a bit less stuffed, I'm starting to look forward to the upcoming holidays.  Not because I want to get more stuff, but because I can go into them with a sense of peace and gratitude about what we have, what we love, and what we know we can do without.