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Thursday, June 01, 2006
Thursday Thirteen
- Buy generic. Mind you, it wasn't the quality of the goods I objected to; it was the horrifying embarrassment of being seen at the checkout with those dreadful black-and-white (or, very marginally less embarrassing, store-brand) packages in the cart. What if someone from school was there? Nowadays, especially since store brands have become really pretty good, there are very few purchases I make where name brand is a requirement. (Like Grape-Nuts.) For everything else I'm more than happy to plunk down less money (or... um... swipe my card for less money) for Best Yet or Western Family or Equate or Kirkland or whatever the store brand du jour happens to be.
- Use the clothesline. When I was a kid and teen I hated the smell. I hated the stiffness. I hated the stickers and the extra work but even if I wasn't out there in the stickers doing the extra work it was just another of those things on the Cool People Don't Do This list. (more of those coming). Now, I actually like the smell, and the stiff towels especially are wonderfully absorbent. Not to mention: a) the fact that using the dryer costs something like 80c a load, and at two or three loads a day that adds up and b) I am guaranteed alone time at the clothesline. Quiet, sunshiny alone time, yet I'm not being lazy or neglecting the family, I'm actually saving money and being virtuously hardworking and all that. Yay clothesline.
- Buy non-name-brand clothes. which goes along with
- Shop for clothes at discount stores. There was a place called Family Bargain Center when I was in junior high which was simultaneously a life-saver (because from a distance, the clothes looked stylish) and the bane of my existence (because up close, people who cared -- read "pretty much the entire student body of the junior high" -- could easily tell the difference). People who are twelve, thirteen, and fourteen are, I'm convinced, capable of immeasurable cruelty about the most asinine, stupid things. Asinine and stupid, yet this was really a big huge major deal for me, on a daily basis. I swore that if I had to work two jobs and whatever else it took, my children would never have to appear in public in clothes that would cause anyone to make fun of them. (You homeschool? But what about socialization?). Mercifully we are free of the slavery of peer opinion about clothes and as long as they're clean, comfortable, and not ridiculous, they're fine.
- Wear, or make my children wear, homemade clothes. See above, times about fifty zillion. At present, I don't have time to make everything for my kids (although in six weeks I will have my sewing room again and by golly I just might try ;), but I like to see them wearing things I've made, and they like wearing them.
- Accept hand-me-downs. Are you noticing a theme here? As I was hanging clothes the other day I was noticing that we had bought maybe five percent of the things my kids wear. The rest comes from friends and family who were kind enough to have children a few years before we had ours.
- Make my children go to church if they didn't want to. This actually hasn't come up yet, because it hasn't occurred to them to not want to go, and even if it did they know they can't stay home alone. However, as soon as it does come up, I'm pulling out Thing Number 8:
- Assume that children have inferior knowledge and/or wisdom. Because, um, they do, which is part of the reason you don't know this when you are one. Sorry, guys. We try to put it as nicely as we can, really. Twenty years from now, you'll get it.
- Tell my children that they'd understand something when they were older that made no sense at the time.
- Tell my children to do something without giving them a reason why. This needs a note: I do actually tell them why, and in retrospect most of the time my parents did too. Sometimes the reason doesn't seem satisfactory to them, as it didn't to me (see #8), but that's generally because they can't see all the sides of an issue. Like say the future side.
- Live in the country. For all my ramblings about my idyllic childhood riding horses and living miles from town (which I truly did enjoy almost all the time), there was a period in my early teens when I found it shameful and embarrassing and downright inconvenient. It didn't help that our house was in actual fact really kind of strange. OH how I longed to live in a normal new house with ordinary rooms that wasn't pink and green with red hook-and-loop carpet donated by a church that was replacing theirs, or loaded with sixty years of (human) pack-rat detritus. Currently, we live in town. It's a town of 2,000 people with no traffic lights and nothing open late and we live at the edge of it, but it is in fact a town and it's the most urban I've ever been. And we have been eagerly awaiting (for twelve years) the time when we would no longer live here.
- Be strict about my kids' friends. I learned the fallacy of this when I was sixteen and had a pretty serious (for me) rebellion and took up with some people of whom my parents strongly disapproved. All the bad stuff my parents said would happen did happen. Right now this is not so much of an issue, but as time goes on it's fully my plan to know whom my kids are with and be in touch (HORRORS) with their friends' parents. See #8.
- Be a religious fanatic. In other words, someone who took faith seriously and let it alter my life and decisions. Uh, whoops.
Comments
I think I could've written a lot of this. Some points:
1. No kidding. I won't buy generic mac n cheese. Or orange juice. There are some other things (can't think of them off hand) that aren't available as generic that I have to buy "national brand" but that about covers it. We also have a selection of store brands, depending on what store we are at this week. We also have several giant bottles of Kirkland ibuprofen.
3&4. Bought a lot of clothes at K-Mart as a kid. I suffered along with you. Now that K-Mart has gotten a bit trashy, at least around here, I have switched to Target clothes. It's funny, my husband and I were talking about clothes and such and figure that our parents, by making us wear non-trendy, non-name-brand clothes as kids, actually made us better people -- we don't care now, that's for sure and therefore don't waste money on those things. Plus we care a lot less about others' opinions than we might have otherwise.
5. Don't own a sewing machine or I'd make more stuff. Next time my dad drives out here I want him to bring my mom's old machine. She used to make us Halloween costumes on it, and I LOVED those costumes. Way better than store-bought.
The rest -- I'll have to cross that bridge when we get to having bigger kids. :) I am sort of bummed that we don't have anyone to GIVE us hand-me-downs. The people that we DO know with bigger kids are of the eBay variety. Grrr.
Posted by: mary at June 1, 2006 07:39 PM
BIG HUGE LAUGH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
:)
Posted by: molly at June 1, 2006 11:42 PM
Oh I remember FBC! Wow, we go so far back :) You know, you can get some really well made name brand clothing at thrift stores for like a dollar. lol. What is great about these days is that it is cool to wear cheap, thrift clothes. Target and Walmart are now THE places to shop and if you don't shop there, nobody cares (Or in the case I suffered, nobody will go up and check the tag on your shirt to see if it is a "valid" name brand) gag.
For the most part, I can't tell the difference or generic is better in the food department. I love Kroger brand (Which is Ralph's) good stuff.
My mother NEVER told me why. So basically I grew up feeling like I was doing a whole bunch of stuff I felt was wrong, without knowing why I was doing it. All I ever got was "Because I'm your mother and I said so." Not good. I vow now to always give my kids a reason. Unless we don't have time, and in which case I'll tell them later on if they haven't figured it out for themselves :)
As for #12: And I was supposed to be the bad one :)
Great T13! I wish I hadn't been too busy to put mine up!
Posted by: jenn at June 2, 2006 06:59 PM
I also swore I would never be late for things. My parents are the type that are forever 5-10 minutes late for everything, and as a kiddo I hated being late to arrive, or the last one to be picked up.
Now, I am annoyingly early. I am always the first to show up by 15 minutes. I routinely have to drive around for a while before parking and going in to appointments because I always leave with WAY too much time to spare. And it really rubs my folks the wrong way - When I say "Be there by 6:30," I really mean 6:15, and they hear 6:45.
Posted by: MamaGeph at June 4, 2006 12:06 PM
Rachel, I think I resolved all of these myself in my younger days, when I knew so much less but yet was convinced I was so much smarter. Now, I've turned around on almost all of them, counting what I used to think of as deficiences or sell-outs as cherished treasures. Things like living in the country and being a religious "fanatic."
The only ones I still don't do are:
#2, only because it's so easy to use the washer (but I think air-dried clothes smell heavenly),
#5, because if I made my children clothes they would look like survivors of a highway accident, and
#11, because when I was younger and snootier and prices were lower we bought in a neighborhood and now can't affoord to move. However, there are open fields on two sides of us, one growing corn in season, so we're sort of on the border of the countryside.
Posted by: Muley at June 5, 2006 08:03 PM
