Our most recent road trip took us through Colorado. While we splurged on a few unique activities, our pockets aren’t bottomless. Thankfully, Denver came through as a great place to explore without breaking the bank. I hope you find some of these suggestions and reviews to be helpful!
Looking to spend a day in Ft. Worth without spending a lot of cash? Here are a three places that have no entry fees and only minimal (if any) cost for parking:
1. 
Ft. Worth Stockyards: This National Historic District boasts quaint brick streets and classic Western-style storefronts that make for a fun stroll, though the highlight of this stop is the small, staged cattle drive that happens twice a day. Watch the cowboys herd their charges down the road and follow them back to the corral, where you can walk a long catwalk to admire them from above. There’s also a Visitor’s Center to poke around and a pretty neat little local history museum where, for a modest fee, you can view everything from cowboy accoutrements to a cursed wedding dress to a lightbulb that’s been working for 100 years, all in two jam-packed rooms. (The kids enjoyed doing the scavenger hunt that they offered!) If you don’t mind spending a bit more money, there are restaurants and shops for you to peruse. While parking in the huge, on-site lot costs a few dollars, there’s some street parking on the hill overlooking the paid parking where you can snag a free spot.
2. 
Ft. Worth Water Gardens: You’ll have to shell out a few quarters for street parking if you want to visit the Water Gardens, but it’s worth a stop. This park is separated into different regions, and the kids had a blast exploring them all. There’s a quiet, sunken pool area with water trickling down the walls and trees all around, a mountain-like area made of big concrete blocks, a sunken waterfall area where you can climb down on giant stepping stones, and a secluded area with a quiet pool full of small fountains. The one drawback here is that there’s little shade and the entire park is paved; it was warm on the spring day when we went, but I’d imagine that it’s miserable in the heat of summer.
3. Bureau of Engraving and Printing: If you’ve ever wondered how our nation’s paper money gets made, this is one of two places (the other being DC) where you can see it happening. Both the parking and the tour here are free. The tour begins with a video, after which you are given headsets and prompted to follow the numbered pathway while listening to a guide explain what you’re seeing. My 7-year-old found it unbearably boring, since there’s not much action (just machines making repetitive motions and people sitting around supervising). The attached museum had some interesting exhibits, however–especially upstairs, where they had stories about crazy money-recovery scenarios they’ve faced. Overall, though, this tour is best for older kids and adults. (No photos are allowed here, so you’ll just have to trust that we saw it.)
Since so many people have stopped by to check out my post on 12 Vision Therapy Exercises You Can Do at Home, I thought it might be helpful for me to post a handful more for those who need them. As I mentioned in the previous blog post, we learned that our youngest child was in need of vision therapy, but the cost was not affordable. Immediately after learning this, I ran into a friend who happened to have a binder full of vision therapy exercises given to her for her OT work in a poor South African school. None of the pages of exercises have any publication information or copyright information, so I think I’m safe in rephrasing and sharing their content.
Mr. Pookie reads a story from The House at Pooh Corner.
We chose 2-3 exercises to do daily for a week, and then we switched to new exercises. After about 10 weeks, Pookie spontaneously started reading. We continued the vision therapy exercises for around six months before we petered out. That was about a year ago. His reading skills continued to improve steadily since then. At this point, Pookie can fluently read material like Winnie the Pooh, and he started telling me about the content of War of the Worlds this morning. He still prefers picture books, but that might simply be his age. If we see a need, we can always do more vision exercises in the future.
We were also told that our son had not integrated a bunch of primitive reflexes. Since I was trying to cover any possible deficit, I also added one primitive reflex integration exercise to our routine for each week. (A YouTube search will give you examples.) I have no idea if these had any impact, but I thought I’d mention that we did some of these exercises, as well.
Please let me know if you have any questions–or success stories! I’d love to help other parents stuck in a similarly stressful situation. Continue reading
If you read my last blog post, you know that we found out that our youngest needed vision therapy, but the price tag was beyond what we could afford. Immediately after that revelation, I took my kids to gymnastics, where a former-OT friend informed me that she had been given a whole binder full of vision therapy exercises during her time working in a low-income school in South Africa.
We’ve now been doing vision exercises about 3-4 times a week for 9 weeks, and little Pookie has gone from only sounding out single, large words written in magnets or on the white board to eagerly reading Biscuit books for bedtime. (In case you missed the last post, he’s been able to sound out single words in this manner for more than a year, but he just wasn’t making any progress.) While correlation does not necessarily equal causation, I figured it can’t hurt to share some of what we’ve done with other parents who might find themselves in a similar situation.
*Update: We continued doing exercises for about 6 months. Pookie continued to make steady reading progress during and after, and can now (two years post-vision-therapy) read fluently well above grade level.*
Continue reading
A while back, I had the brilliant idea of crafting responsibility charts for my kids. I was getting frustrated with doing little tasks that my children could easily do for themselves—putting their dirty clothes down the laundry chute at the end of the day, for example, or cleaning up the cascade of books in front of the bookcase. A responsibility chart sounded like a brilliant solution to my woes.
After doing some pricing and finding nothing to meet my specific needs or price point (uber cheap!), I hunted around online for ideas. I settled on this one from Spoonful.com—in part because it used materials that I already happened to have around the house, and in part because it didn’t have any markers or magnets that could mysteriously disappear, rendering the chart useless. 
My kids are young, so I made their responsibilities minimal. Every day they need to put their jammies under their pillows when they get dressed, clear their dishes after every meal, clean up their toys and books at the end of the day, and put their dirty laundry down the chute. Mommy’s problems were solved…or so I thought.
The first three days were great. The kids were so pumped about their charts that they remembered all their responsibilities, gleefully sliding that straw from “To Do” to “Done!” On days four and five, they would remind each other about their responsibilities…and Mommy would occasionally need to point to the charts when neither big kid seemed to remember.
On day six, the realization struck. Those responsibility charts? They’re really for Mommy. After all, I SHOULD have been reminding them to clean up after themselves all along. Isn’t that my job as a Mom? To teach them the skills they’ll need as they grow and to help them develop into responsible human beings? At barely-five and almost-four, my kids aren’t always going to behave responsibly. They’re going to jump on the couch, forget to say “thank you”, paint their little brother’s hair, try to hog all the train tracks… But that’s where I come in. At the beginning, my guidance has to be perpetual; gradually, I can step back and let them take the lead, nudging them when they forget or fail.
Here’s the thing about being a Mom: it’s endless. I think that’s both the most rewarding and the most daunting part of it. If I start slacking off in my vigilance, neglecting to remind them to be polite or clean up after themselves, then they start to slip. If the good habits aren’t perpetually reinforced, they seem less important. So those responsibility charts? The kids never touch them anymore. But that’s okay; they’ve served their purpose for Mommy.
Our basement is home to a sixteen-year-old relic of a water heater. The beast was inefficient when it was purchased (I think the “your model” indicator on the Energy Star label is in the “so inefficient you may as well go out back and boil your water over your fire pit” realm); it now treats us to the auditory equivalent of a Fourth of July fireworks display every time we deign to use a bit of hot water. Before we find ourselves shivering in the shower because our friendly beast has quit working, we thought we’d look into finding a replacement.
I called our plumber. “All the newer models are energy efficient,” he proclaimed. “It doesn’t matter what one you choose.”
I called our local plumbing supply store. “You really pay a premium for that extra efficiency,” the man on the phone declared. “Most people just stick with the standard model.”
I did some research.
First off, it took me a while to find what I wanted: a cost vs. efficiency breakdown. I finally ran across it here. Unfortunately, their chart didn’t go quite as high as I’d hoped—but my elementary math skills stood me in good stead. I noticed a pattern: for each .04 increase in efficiency rating, you save $11 per year. That savings gets multiplied by 13, the average life span of a water heater. So here’s what I figured out (hopefully accurately):
.53 = their “standard” water heater
.65 = our local plumbing supply store’s standard model.
.90 = our local plumbing supply store’s high-efficiency model.
See that? Our old water heater’s rating was as far to the right on the efficiency line as this one is to the left. Hooray for energy savings!
.95 = our local plumbing supply store’s ultra-high-efficiency model.
The plumber will install the standard .65 water heater for $825. He’ll install the efficient .90 water heater for $1200. That’s a $375 cost increase for a savings of $893.75. The ultra-high-efficiency water heater is $1700 installed, which is a cost increase of $500 for only $178.75 additional savings. Can you guess which water heater I ordered?
Bonus Update: I waited until we got the new .90-rated beauty so I could include a picture. At today’s visit, the plumber said our water heater was such an easy install that he’s knocking $100 off the price, and oh-by-the-way the utility company has a $150 rebate for efficient water heaters like ours. So make that a $125 cost increase for nearly $900 savings. Wa-hoo!
Once upon a time, someone gave us some paint. It was a set of those little plastic pots, the ones that come all linked together with flip-down lids so you can re-use the paint. My kids, unfortunately, felt honor-bound to use all the paint in one crafty session. Even if they hadn’t been so determined, their paint-use skills would have dictated that future projects would involve only slightly-varying shades of gray, since they dip and re-dip their paint brushes with no thought to color preservation.
While this paint did not last us long, it sure was a big hit. I took a trip to Michael’s to see if I could find something more preschool-friendly. No luck. No luck at JoAnne, either. Rather than simply repeating our past folly and going through paint like it’s going out of style, I decided to get creative with wooden paint-mixing sticks, milk caps, and some hot glue. Here’s the result:
My 2.5 year old’s painting station post-craft time
I then purchased a bulk pack of tempera paint (much cheaper!), which I dole in small measure into my makeshift paint trays. After the kids are done making a mess, I rinse ‘em off and store them for next time. My sister-in-law, hearing about my project, decided that her disposable contact lens containers would be even better paint wells, so she used those—brilliant! (If only I still bothered to wear contacts!) At any rate, our milk lids are colorful and they do the job, allowing us to paint multiple times and still maintain color integrity.
On a side note, using Daddy’s old t-shirts for smocks has worked pretty well for us as long as we pull up our sleeves and make sure the extra section of neck-hole hangs to the back. (Now if only I could get my daughter to stop painting her face…)
What creative ways have you saved money on kid supplies or adapted to your kids’ needs?
Last night, after having listened to a friend’s tales of financial woe, ‘Love and I got to talking about folks and finances—specifically, our observations about the households people are raised in and the adults that emerge. Here’s what we observed:
The happy medium seems not to come from income level, but from treatment of money. As long as you project confidence in your ability to provide, emphasize responsible spending, and find occasional ways to treat your children—not often enough that they come to expect it, or it loses its potency, and never at the expense of financial stability—children will, hopefully, learn to handle money well.
What do you think? Do your experiences reflect what we’ve noticed about the people we know, or do you have a different theory?
If piggy bank care is any indication of future financial responsibility, them we’re in for a doozy of a ride with our oldest two.
Both kids enjoy playing with their piggy banks, an activity I only allow if they’ve found or been given a new coin to add. Peatie carries his from place to place, dumping and replacing his coins, blithely unaware of the many that he is dropping along the way. Goober, meanwhile, stays in one spot to play with her money. She is aware of the location of each and every one of her coins, and if one falls, she drops down on all fours until she finds it. She is also aware of the location of each of her brother’s coins; each time one falls, she waits until he is out of the way and then quietly adds it to her own collection. On the worst day, Peatie was lamenting that he had just three pennies left; today I only had to return $.97 to his pig to even things out.
As my kids get older, I’ve begun to wonder how to help them learn to be financially responsible. When I was young, my parents faithfully presented me with a dollar each week. I put $.10 into the Tootsie Roll bank that held my tithe money, sent $.65 to the bank with my dad, and had $.25 left for spending—which I swiftly blew through with a trip to the candy counter at The Custard Shoppe.
Though these early lessons taught me the importance of setting aside my tithe money before I considered my spending desires, I think I learned more financial responsibility as a teenager.
For a long time, my mother lamented that a trip to the store with me in tow was simply a recipe for a long list of “I want.” At some point I ran across something—an article? a TV show?—that talked about giving kids a clothing allowance so they could buy what they really wanted and have a known spending limit. I proposed this to my mom, who discussed with my dad and determined that they would give me a clothing allowance. This proved to be a distinct eye-opener. When I had to consider that buying a much-desired new sweater would mean that I couldn’t afford much-needed new jeans for another month or two, my needs and wants were clarified. I might admire something in the store, but I recognized that not everything was a wise use of my money, and I prioritized my spending.
The other element of my upbringing that I found especially helpful was my dad’s credit card policy. When we kids learned to drive, we were issued a credit card for gas purchases. We were expected to save any receipts we generated and present them to him. In college, the credit card was intended to be used at our discretion. We were to save all receipts, create a spreadsheet of our expenses indicating whether they were items that fell into his monthly allowance for our expenses or things for which we’d need to repay him, and submit both the receipts and spreadsheet to him each month. This system gave me practice at tracking my expenses and crafting a basic budget for myself covering more than just clothing. Due to my dad’s system, I am actually better at keeping track of my expenses on credit cards than I am with cash; I use credit almost exclusively, paying the bill in full each month and reaping the reward money as a bonus for my daily expenditures.
So when do you need to start educating kids about money? We already discuss the fact that Daddy goes to work to earn money to pay for the things we buy from the store, and my kids will ask if things are on a good sale this week, so we’re starting with some basics. When is a good age to take the next step?
It’s been long enough that I have no idea when I began to get an allowance (and neither do my parents). When I was little, a buck was a decent allowance—enough to tithe and save and still be able to afford a few pieces of candy each week. How much is appropriate now? I’ve read the suggestion of a dollar a week for each year of life, but I can’t think where I’d come up with a couple hundred dollars from my budget (never mind that the amount will be over $500 in just a few years).
What do you do to help your kids learn about money? And how do you make sure the lesson of financial responsibility hits home without passing on a sort of scarcity obsession?
Periodically, I go on a statistics binge. I record how many servings I actually get out of a box of Goldfish crackers (their estimated serving size is about what I give out for a large-ish snack), how many servings I can get out of an average-sized bag of grapes (I average about nine), and even how long a bar of soap lasts in the shower (Irish Spring lasts us about two weeks).
A while back, before I had a time-consuming infant, I experimented with making my own laundry soap. Being not-so-adventurous (and also not having a gigantic bucket handy), I opted to make the dry variety. I found it agonizingly slow and blistering to grate the necessary laundry bar soap (Zote was by far worse than Fels-Naptha); after making three batches, I began wondering if it was worth all the effort.
An internet search for cost estimates of homemade dry laundry soap have it pegged (most often) between $.05 and $.07 per load. Having made my own a few times, I did a cost-estimate and found that (depending whether I could find Fels-Naptha or was stuck with Zote), my cost was about the same as those folks online. While name-brand detergents are generally pretty pricey, I could get a generic jug of 100-load laundry soap for $5.00 on sale—just as cheap as the homemade stuff. Since I was at the near-bursting point of pregnancy when my homemade soap ran out, I bought the stuff from the store.
But after I got the stuff home, curiosity got the best of me. I plunked a sheet of paper and a pen on top of my washer, and I started slapping down a hash mark for each load of laundry I did with that liquid soap, just as I had done with my homemade powder.
Now here I must pause to confess that I am cheaper than all get-out: if my washer is chock-full of stained baby gear, I fill my HE washer’s soap dispenser to the “Normal” line. If that baby is just running sheets or is slightly less than super-full, I fill the dispenser to a titch below the “Normal” line. Yep, I’m that cheap.
This detail makes what I’m about to say all the more remarkable. I bought a jug of laundry detergent labeled “100 loads”. If there were enough light in my laundry room, I would now be able to see the bottom of that jug, though it’s not quite gone yet. So far I have done 49 loads of laundry. (Remember, I’m not even filling the cup to the “Normal” line.) That puts my total cost per load much closer to $.10 rather than the anticipated $.05.
Now comes my agony. If I recall correctly, it took me at least a half-hour to grate the bar of laundry soap into usable form. I have a food processor, but since I use that to prep baby food (or will again soon) I don’t want it all soap-coated. So. How much wallet-savings is my time worth?
butmostlymommy 