Being Thrifty

Some might call it being cheap, but I like to think of it as being thrifty or smart. I hate spending money on things that are what I perceive to be a rip-off. Here are a couple of examples of how I have saved some of our hard-earned money.

Making my own baby food. This is super easy and everyone should at least give it a try. It hardly takes any time at all and you don't have to be a good cook to do it. Store bought baby food costs around 60 cents per jar. I can make approximately 20 jars by buying 5 apples or pears or a bag of frozen peas or a squash. Plus I know what has gone into my baby's mouth - no preservatives, food coloring, or anything else. Just the fruit or veggie and some water. I either microwave or steam the food and then puree it in our knock-off Magic Bullet with a little water. Then I use these trays from Fresh Baby to freeze the baby food in cubes and put them in freezer bags. Each meal I take a few cubes out and zap them in the microwave for a minute.

You probably also know that I use cloth diapers. Vegas Baby is almost 6 months old and we have bought a total of four packs of disposable diapers. Those are only used when he goes to daycare because they won't use cloth diapers there. It is really easy and not a lot of extra work since you don't have to hang or fold the diapers when they come out of the dryer.

I am also somewhat careful of the baby stuff that I purchase. There is so much out there that you really don't need so a lot of the time we would wait until we knew it would be something we would use before we made the purchase. For example, we didn't buy a swing until we knew Vegas Baby liked to be swung around. And we used hand-me-down toys, jumper, and walker. One thing that I could not get myself to buy was a Boppy pillow. Those things are $40 for the pillow and cover. I found one at Hobby Lobby for $15 and I used a 40% off coupon from the internet. Then for the cover I bought a handmade one from a stay-at-home mom on Etsy for around $12 which included shipping (about the same price as the ones in the store). It was a savings of almost $20, plus I was able to buy the cover from a person rather than a corporation. And it is really cute!