Saving and Splurging II

I am not going to lie. I have had some lonely moments in our new financial situation.

Andy's salary is pretty decent. It's only a little below "the number" that I always felt he needed to reach in order for me to stay at home comfortably. Yet I look around and see other single-income families doing home projects, going on vacation, shopping, and I wonder how they are doing it when I didn't even feel like I could buy the $2 nail polish I wanted from Target the other day. It kind of hurts sometimes. Overall I am a lot happier now and would not trade this experience, but still. I wish I could do it at less of a sacrifice, especially when I look around and feel like it's only me, or when I think about the fact that I spent seven years building that career and then just yanked the plug on it.

We'd sat down with a financial guy a few months ago and told him that, after deducting the cost of day care and the money we never saw, we were left with $X.00 of my salary that we needed to cut from our lives. He told us that we needed to go into it realistically and not expect to be able to cut it all immediately. Expect to spend more than we take in the first year, and try to keep that to a controlled number. Start by reducing, not outright cutting. Go out to eat once a month instead of four times. Expect the first year to be the hardest, and then adjust more and more each year.

Today was so gorgeous out, and all I wanted to do was go to Pure Taqueria in downtown Duluth and have a margarita. Andy assured me we could go out for dinner every now and then. I didn't think he knew what he was talking about at that moment, but I decided to go with it anyway. Then I said, "hey, why don't we just go get an appetizer and a drink, and then eat a cheap dinner at home?" We decided that sounded like a plan, and while I was eating my cheese dip and sipping my (one) margarita, I decided this was our new eating-out plan. This was all I needed out of my restaurant experience to feel normal. It was a small victory.

Although I love the Internet and Facebook and all the ways that I can keep in touch with people I would never be in touch with otherwise, I think it does tend to get my priorities out of whack. Let's face it - we want to portray an image, as do others, so it brings "keeping up with the Joneses" to a whole new level, especially when some are more than happy to let you know their lot in life. I'm not in the house I want to be in, and I can't spend my days shopping or vacationing, but I've got everything I need right here in this little bubble - all day every day! I just wish I could break myself free from the external pressures that get me down. If it weren't for the constant comparison of my situation to those of others, I think I'd be so much more content in that regard.

In other news, I think I want to save all my blog posts to my computer and then delete my history. I have come across a couple somewhat thought-provoking blogs about publicizing your children's lives. They made the same point, which is that our children aren't really given the choice as to whether or not their parents blog about them. Meanwhile, we get all up in arms about our own privacy.

I'm well aware that everything you put on the Internet stays on the Internet for all of time, but I've never been overly concerned. I get that what I put online and subsequently delete will still be retrievable 20 years from now, but who's REALLY going to be jumping through hoops to dredge up a 20-year-old deleted blog of mine that they probably didn't know existed in the first place? I'm not that much of an alarmist about it all. I try to keep my Internet life PG and not engage in parental overshare, but really my activity is a needle in a haystack, where the needle is microscopic and the haystack is planet-sized.

Still, I'm putting my kids' lives up for friends, acquaintances, and anyone else who inadvertently stumbles across my blog to see, and I want to be a better steward of their privacy. I need to delete the blogs and then tackle Facebook somehow. I may delete most of my photo history. I'll still share, of course, but maybe I'll delete stuff after time. I'm not radical on this, but I just think I can do better, and those blogs were good food for thought.