OMG Daycare (Or, experiments in budgeting and cash)

While I was aware that daycare would be expensive, and having a baby would cost money and all, it really did not completely sink in until I started looking at daycare options a few months before the little mister man arrived. Realizing that there was going to be a new $700 line item in our (nonexistent in that we don’t really have a careful one) monthly budget is a major kick in the pants to get this mess under control to avoid disaster! (If your daycare costs way, way more than that, please don’t hate me. If it costs way, way less, please don’t tell me.)

As I was prattling on to Olivemom about this and what I was planning on doing, she suggested it might be a good blog topic…another tangentially related flavor of our “simple green clinical trials.” So here it is! Assuming I don’t completely crash and burn and declare it’s all hopeless, Olivemom might even come along for the ride in a few months!

Envelope System: I picked up on this from the thrifty-mommy-blog world, but apparently it is quite popular all around and a big part of this financial guru I’d never heard of before‘s plan (Handy detailed overviews here, here and here!). The idea is simple – identify your monthly budget, and use only cash (in categories where it is reasonable to do so, like groceries, gas, personal care, household items, entertainment). Put those amounts in an envelope at the beginning of the month, and that’s what you’ve got. This will be a big change for us, as for several years we have used credit cards like cash for basically everything (the points! the POINTS!!!). And while I do love my cashback bonus, I don’t love how easy this makes it to lose track of what you are spending.

Sinking Funds Strategy: The other thing I’m planning to do is start a separate account for quarterly and annual expenses.  I calculated out the monthly cost for them all and will move that set amount into a separate account every month instead of just being somewhat surprised when the bill arrives and assuming we just have enough sitting in our checking account to cover it. SimpleMom has a great description of her method for this!

General Budget Overhaul: A central part of both of the above items is just doing a general budget review and overhaul. What on earth are we spending all our money on? We have REALLY been digging into it – not just the typical big categories, but really fishing through the file cabinet to make sure we’re capturing ALL the quarterly, annual and periodic expenses and factoring those into our monthly budget. Along the way, we have even identified a couple to easily cut back on. Whee!

A warning, though – this can be a pain in the butt as you finally make yourself do things like get new quotes on car insurance for the first time in ten years and downgrade your AAA membership and call such-and-such company to claim the $3 a month discount you’ve been eligible for the past year but just never bothered to call about. I wouldn’t know anything about that, as obviously I would never procrastinate in such a fashion.

While this all seems a bit overwhelming (so far in a good, fired-up-to-dominate-this way), I am hopeful it will end up helping us commit to living more simply (nothing like having a finite amount of cash in an envelope to help us not buy crap we don’t need and think hard about purchases!) and hopefully help free up some money to even spend more on things we care about, give, and save.

Does anyone else use cash-only or the sinking funds method? Any tips’n'tricks, experiences, or inspiring tales out there? I am thinking it will probably take a few months of tinkering both on the amounts and the method.

Change is not simple.

The end of last week was a bit discouraging for me. I ran into simultaneous setbacks with THREE of my homemade endeavors. Combined with a particularly crazy week of trying to balance work and family (and a child who took all her naps at the sitter’s, giving Mommy no personal time whatsoever), I was feeling rather hopeless about everything. It reminded me that while a lot of this stuff seems and sounds like it should be so easy, it’s just really freaking hard, in the middle of everything else life requires, to change habits and replace systems that have been working for you just fine for years.

And I know, you’re all dying to hear what went wrong for me this time (and bask in the schadenfreude!). Here’s my list of complaints:

1. My dishwasher detergent is not nearly as effective as I’d like it to be–and it’s going to need to work really well if I want to stop my bad habit of pre-washing dishes.
2. I don’t know what happened, but after over a month of uneventful, generally successful use, my baking soda shampoo just started SUCKING. Seriously, we’re talking hair coated with I-don’t-know-what and just greasy and dirty-feeling immediately after every shower.
3. And to top it all off, under my baking soda toothpaste regime, my gums started bleeding. Awesome.

Now, I am pretty certain each of these things has a pretty easy fix–or at least a clear next step. For instance, I know I need to get washing soda for the dishwasher to replace the baking soda. As for the shampoo, I think I just need to tinker with my baking soda amounts and washing frequency–as well as add in some weekly deep conditioning treatments or alternative washes. And regarding my teeth, I KNOW my problem is that I was brushing way too hard–I’ve always struggled with that anyway, and somehow between my excitement at making my teeth feel REALLY clean and my desire to compensate for the lack of suds with more elbow grease, I totally stressed out my poor little gums.

But really, who can manage all this tinkering at once while also keeping the house running and showing up for work in a semi-timely fashion? My plan of attack is to go back and take them one by one again. I’ll start with the dishwasher, then the teeth, and save the shampoo for last since that’s clearly going to be the most difficult (and cause the most stress because if it’s 8:30 and you should have left the house 15 minutes ago and your husband is now also late to work and your hair is still a greasy mess, you’re basically screwed).

My point here is not to discourage you from trying these things yourself, but just to remind us that it’s not always completely forward progress and not every change works for everyone. But that doesn’t mean I should feel discouraged about the overall project. Some changes turn out to be as simple as they look! Other changes will have to wait until I have the time and energy to make them really work for me. But that’s okay! I’m still headed (slowly) in the right direction, and that’s really enough! (Really!)

What I Done Learnt About Saving Water Growin Up

Olivemom’s recent comment about saving water got me thinking about the topic and my approach to it. Okay, so, while I won’t advocate sharing bathwater (Yes, my family did this growing up. No, I am not lying. I got to go first, so it didn’t bother me!), I will say that conserving water is kind of ingrained into my psyche. We don’t have, say, poop-composting toilets, but I do make a conscious effort in our household to conserve water.

I apologize if these seem really obvious – a few weeks ago I was reading this book, which I ordered thinking it might have some useful tips. Um, not so much, since about 80% of the book was things I already do. Which is definitely more of a statement about how basic the topics in the book were than my environmental superstar-status, that’s for sure. But it made me realize also that maybe some of the things I do aren’t actually second nature to everyone! Here are my general day-to-day water-saving rules, in no particular order.

Only wash stuff that is actually dirty. For example, I typically wash our bath towels only every maybe 4-5ish days. Hey, we’re clean when we use them, right??

Only wash people that are actually dirty. That includes fairly regularly skipping a day showering for me (or only taking a super-quick one), and only giving baby a bath every few days.

Only flush when necessary. Yes, we let pee marinate around here when it’s just us. Just gotta make sure all the toilets are flushed before, say, going away for the weekend! Or guests arrive.

Install water-efficient toilets. This was not as big a pain or as expensive as I thought it would be. Plus, sparkly new toilet! We installed one ourselves, and we are total DIY noobs. Same goes for low-flow faucet aerators. These are two changes that can make a BIG difference, especially if you’ve got old toilets that use something like 6 gallons a flush. The new efficient ones use 1.6.

Only run the washer and dishwasher when they are actually full (of really dirty things!). And on a related note…

Don’t pre-rinse/pre-wash your dishes. I am still breaking myself of this habit, since we’ve only had a dishwasher for a few years and I just didn’t believe for a long time that you really can put your dishes in there DIRTY and it will CLEAN them. It will. I promise.

Turn off the shower at points like while you’re washing your hair. Free pass on this one if you keep your house super-cold overnight in the winter, though!

Take shorter showers by not doing things like shaving your legs in the shower.

My bad water habit is still taking baths. I love a hot bath, people. I’m limiting it to one a week now, though (and I figure the occasional skipped shower helps make up for it)! And I’d also like to look into getting rain barrels.

I feel like most of the things I do are more just efforts to not waste water than explicit efforts to save water. Nothing I do is very impressive or really saves all that much, I think they just reflect the way I think about water – a limited resource to be conserved, not something that just magically appeared out of the pipes and could be treated as limitless. That really just comes from growing up in a house with an old well we were constantly expecting could go dry any summer (it finally did, but not until just a few years ago!). It’s expensive to have people with giant trucks and equipment come tear up your yard to drill a new well. And even worse to have people with giant trucks and even more equipment come tear up your yard to put in a new septic system, both prospects that strike fear into my paranoid heart!

Who knew sleeping babies were so complicated??

As the mom of a seven-week old, I’m suddenly remembering and finding new meaning in a line from Olivemom’s “About the Author” blurb for this blog:

It took all of a week and a half of my newborn’s life for me to conclude that the powers that be are conspiring to take all of the simple, organic fun out of raising a baby. Pay attention to this! Keep track of that! Worry and fret about every little blip that falls somewhere outside the norm OR ELSE!

Oh do I ever understand this now! It’s kind of alarming how much time I spend fretting over this or that, and if I dare to indulge with some reading of baby books or internet-meanderings, then we are in serious trouble. This is often made worse if I’ve recently caught any episodes of Supernanny.

Other than my paralyzing obsession with SIDS risk factors, I think the worst thing so far is the damn sleep books. As I face down the last weeks of maternity leave and ponder what life will be like when I am once again expected to bathe and dress myself and perform job-like duties on a daily basis, I started to get a bit anxious about schedules and sleeping through the night and so decided to take a peek at a few of the hand-me-down baby sleep books we had. Bad idea!

While there are occasional useful nuggets in them, from what I can tell, the main points from all of them could be summed up in maybe five universal bullet points. But instead each one is like 250 pages of “omg you’re doing everything wrong and are headed for complete and total disaster!” And “the only way your baby will ever sleep through the night is if you do this long, confusing list of things exactly right, and if you haven’t started doing them by now, you are in DEEP SHIZZLE, out of which you will never be able to dig yourself and which will not end until your child is 15.”

Oh, and they often disagree with each other, so not only is there this endless overwhelming flood of instructions coming at you, it’s an endless overwhelming flood of contradictory instructions. Awesome! And everyone you see is also asking if he is sleeping through the night, thus forcing you to say NO while feeling like clearly he SHOULD be if everyone is ASKING about it, sheesh.

With my highly limited seven weeks of experience, here’s the list of things I’ve been able to suss out as being for reals (much influenced by Olivemom’s sensitive talking-me-down from baby-sleep-book-induced-franticness):

1. All babies are different, so any of what’s in any baby book or milestone schedule may or may not exactly apply to your baby.
2. For most babies, it’s pretty hard to screw things up SO badly that you really have an irreversible sleep monster on your hands.

I’ll be intrigued to come back to these thoughts six months from now. We’ll see if I’m staggering into the nursery ten times a night to feed him/put his pacifier back in his mouth/rock him to sleep/sing him to sleep, or God knows what other potentially terrible habits we may currently be instilling. In the meantime, I plan to take some lessons from my husband’s laid-back “eh, chill out, he’s happy, we’re happy, it’ll be fine” attitude and try to keep doing what is making sense for us, in our family. Fingers crossed!

Recovery from Slow Death by Rubber Duck

I’ve finally gotten around to reading this book recommended by Olivemom awhile back (indeed, the book that kind of kicked off our chemical-reducing adventures!) and it was a good, if scary, read. The big schtick of the book is that the authors attempted to reduce/control and subsequently increase the levels of many chemicals in their own bodies through planned exposure. In most cases, the results were pretty striking, showing that everyday exposure to particular chemicals was quickly and significantly reflected in their blood and urine tests. Early on I was seized by the intense desire to sell our house, buy a few acres of land as far away from civilization as possible, and live as subsistence-farming off-the-grid hermits. That said, there is overall an optimistic tone to the book – that it is entirely possible to reduce our exposure to these things, pervasive as they are (on a pessimistic day, I can still find it all sort of fruitless, but hey, I’m being glass-half-full here).

Anyhoo, in thinking about that, and thinking through the list of things I’ve slowly been replacing and eliminating from our household over the last few months, I was kind of inspired too. It really isn’t THAT hard to do without or find substitutes for many chemical-y personal care and household products, especially if you just sort of hack away at it slowly. And conveniently, eliminating some things entirely or replacing others with cheap products like witch hazel, peroxide, baking soda, Borax, vinegar, and plain ol’ basic soap has helped me feel less stingy about occasionally forking over more for the better versions of the products that don’t have simple alternatives or that I just can’t part with.

While it’s easy to still get caught up in being petrified that even my organic beans are probably packaged in a BPA-lined can (so are all canned sodas too, BTW. Apparently pretty much everything in a can is. Awesome! Canned beans are such a staple of our diet I’m considering starting to buy organic dried beans, cooking them in bulk and freezing them. I will feel seriously hardcore if I manage to do that!), and all the new-ish furniture and carpeting in our house has been emitting toxic fumes that surely made their way down the new little one’s umbilical cord (ugh, I find all the statistics about how even newborns have all these chemicals in their bodies already the most depressing), it’s still not hopeless! As we work on big changes to end the use of some of these chemicals – the removal of BPA from baby bottles and items is a great example – we can work in smaller ways in our own households.

So, that’s just a little “chin up, tiger!” to us all! It’s not totally impossible to eliminate a lot of products from our lives, and it doesn’t always have to cost an arm and a leg to do it. In fact, it may well save some money.

Ask me again tomorrow and I’ll probably be incredibly depressed and pessimistic, but for today – yay baby steps!

Thou Shalt Have a Giant Baby Car

Does adding one infant to our lives REALLY require that we upgrade from a midsize sedan to a Chevy Tahoe?

I’m curious about this phenomenon. My normal car is a compact, so I get that a really small car would feel cramped for the typical car-dependent suburban-ish lifestyle. But does it really require a ginormous SUV? I’ve noticed this trend among family and friends: one baby = omg we need a family car. Family car = giant SUV. Typical SUV mileage for models like Explorers, Suburbans, etc is in the 14-16 city/19-21 highway range.

From a simple-green perspective, this just seems very, very unnecessary to me (and I’m not even all that crunchy!). What has me brewing on this is that Mr. Larms wants a truck something FIERCE. No, he is not a farmer or contractor. His response to my concern that it would be a serious pain in the butt to have one vehicle that couldn’t hold the carseat was to half-seriously suggest that he get a BIGGER truck with second row seating.  Well, gee. Why didn’t I think of that?!?

The thought that we could end up one of these giant-car families with a unnecessary-truck-drivin’-dad and SUV-drivin’-mom – because I’d been thinking my next vehicle (since both are coming up on needing replacement in the not-too-distant future) might be like a small SUV crossover type deal, to be our family car – strikes terror into my heart. I’d be so guilt-ridden I’m sure my next car would end up being a moped. Okay, probably more like a Prius.

I’m sad to say that my first gut reaction to the thought of me having another small-ish car was “Wah! I need something BIGGER. I’m a MOM. Gots a BABY to tote!”

But then I got to thinking, well, why not? Would it really kill me to be a baby-hauling suburban-ish mom with a small-ish/midsize sedan? Do we really take so many lengthy car trips that a smaller family car would just be the end of the world? Nope. It would be just fine, and since we are already used to driving smaller cars and not gigantic tanks, would not be much of a change.

Maybe this is just a general complaint about how slowly even my own attitudes are to change, how slowly we adjust to new norms even when I’m putting effort into thinking more about things like this. All the progress we have seen in the last few years, the reduction in the popularity of monster SUVs (although mostly replaced with still-not-hugely-efficient smaller ones), expansion of hybrid vehicles, etc. isn’t even beginning to REALLY challenge the actual core issue that a huge swath of the country is completely and utterly car-dependent. Notice that my conundrum wasn’t about going down to one car, or no cars, it is just a question of how grossly fuel-inefficient the two cars we have will be.

I think part of the whole “simple green” thing for me is trying to think through wants vs. needs, especially perceived needs vs. real needs. Maybe maybe we’d feel less pressure to scrimp on other things if we didn’t “need” a huge family vehicle – both more expensive to buy AND operate. Shopping encourages us to focus on the little deal – 2-liters of Coke on sale for 99 cents! Such-and-such unnecessary cleaning product is 50 cents off this week! – but I think all too often we (myself definitely included) ignore many of the much bigger things draining our family budgets.

Talk about rambling! I’m still torn about the car plans. Any rants or raves about recent models or thoughts about how much a new family really needs a substantially bigger vehicle from more experienced parents would be much appreciated!

Welcome!

Sorry I went MIA after Earth Day last week! Hubby was out of town so the little lady and I were on our own. We kept busy and had a ton of fun, but it didn’t leave much time for blogging about my ideals.

Assuming the few new readers we have didn’t abandon us due to the weekend dry spell, I was thinking this would be a good time to give you an official little welcome and help you get the lay of the land around here–both in terms of what we’re about and the projects we’ve got our hands in at the moment.

For starters, this blog is NOT meant to be a place where you must be uber-green or go home. Larms and I are but mere, very imperfect humans who decided we’d like to do the little things where we can to make our families healthier and our carbon footprints smaller.

Funny thing about a blog with a theme, though–after a few months of posts on or related to one topic, you sort of sound like you’re obsessed and your readers start to imagine that you flush your toilets only once a month and turn on the poop-powered generator just between 5-7 each night. NOT SO! I want to make it clear that while sure, this blog has pushed us to be greener than we would otherwise simply because we have to try things ourselves in order to write about them, we are far from paragons of greenness. Also, just because we have officially recommended a strategy and/or tried it on for size does NOT mean we stick with it 100% of the time–or even 50% of the time.

Our goal is to do what we can, when we can, without killing ourselves, and we hope that’s the approach you’ll take. As my husband always says when I’m loudly despairing that I haven’t gone running in over two weeks so WHAT is even the POINT of going now when I only have twenty minutes anyway: “Something is better than nothing.” And damnit, the man is right. If every family in America just did those few little somethings when they could, it would take us a giant step in the right direction.

My point is, we want this blog to be a safe space where you can browse for the two or three ideas that will fit your lifestyle most easily and question/comment on any topic freely without worrying that its writers are judging you for your lack of commitment to the green cause. Larms and I get really excited about the assignments we give ourselves (the overachieving, eager-to-please 4th graders in us never quite left the building, okay?), but we do not expect the same of our readers by any stretch! If you come away looking at just one commonly accepted notion from a slightly different perspective, or willing to try out just one crazy idea of ours, then we’ve more than done our job!

That said, here is a quick rundown of ongoing projects:

1) Chemical-free living! As conventional cleaning and beauty products in our homes run out, we are trying to replace them with non-toxic alternatives. You can go straight to the master list, or you can browse through the individual posts. Coming up over the next week — the first of my baking soda shampoo exploits, a research project on toothpaste, and a romp through the land of non-disposable (and non-toxic-shock-syndrome-causing) feminine hygiene products. I know. You’re on the edge of your seat.

2) Rock out with your wonk out! In order to expand our general green knowledge and challenge even the conventional notions of what actually is “environmentally-friendly” we’re taking a once-each-month in-depth look at some product or process out there to help you figure out which green choices truly “matter” and to what degree. This way we’re all armed with more knowledge when weighing the pros and cons of going green in a particular area of our lives. Last month was the first installment and we examined organic cotton. This month’s topic is local vs. organic produce and is coming up by the end of this week!

3) Climate change! The above-mentioned project spurred one of my more mischievous readers to challenge me to solve the entire global climate crisis. Oh, if only. But it did make me think about the fact that it is important for us to understand what is really at stake here and how all those little choices I mentioned earlier really ARE going to matter for what kind of world we leave for future generations of first-world citizens (that would be our kids’ kids) and actually DO matter RIGHT NOW for third-world citizens (that would be the 3 billion or so people who live on $2.50 or less per day and are already feeling the effects of climate change through devastating droughts, flooding, and famines–isn’t it great? They get none of the advantages of progress but are left to foot the bill for the rest of us!). Hence, I’m slowly creating my own personal course in the global economics of climate change. Feel free to follow along if that’s your thing.

And heck, I might as well announce the new project I cooked up over the weekend while helping my child climb the FOUR STORIES of steps in our house for the 5th time in 30 minutes. Leaves you lots of thinkin’ time. Lots.

4) Pennsylvania primaries! They are just around the corner, and since most of our current readers live in the state I thought it would be fun to take a quick look at the green records of the candidates for senate and governor. And yes, I said fun.

So there you have it. We hope you’ll visit often and start to feel at home!

So many projects, so little time…

If you’ll recall, we are already in the midst of one long-term ongoing-research project, and I do promise that the first report (examining the environmental differences between organic and “regular” cotton products) will be coming out sometime this month.

In the meantime, however, I got an idea for a SECOND long-term ongoing-research project from our blog’s new co-author, Larms. Because she is a far more alert reader than I, she forwarded me this great post (from a blog that is already doing the simple and green thing but, you know, far more officially and professionally), about going shampoo- and conditioner-free in favor of all natural cleaning agents (namely: baking soda and vinegar). It reminded me of how the last time I went to buy soap for the little Olive, I found myself standing in the aisle for a good twenty minutes obsessively combing labels, desperately seeking SOMETHING that didn’t sound like it would give her breast cancer by the age of 30. It also got us both thinking about how it would be really nice to rid our homes entirely of all those unnecessary and quietly insidious chemical products. Because really, if I don’t want to use it on my child, why am I using it on myself?

And then, as if the universe were signaling its agreement, this morning on Radio Times I caught the guys who wrote this book:

Blowing my mind. And confirming all my worst fears that just because the FDA or EPA has approved something and it’s in every household in America does not necessarily mean it won’t kill me. Eventually. (As an aside, while I am tempted daily to get REALLY angry about this, I soothe myself by remembering that the only reason we’re all living long enough to worry about the illnesses that all these chemicals are causing is because the same science that allows chemical companies to pump us with toxins has also essentially eradicated infectious diseases in the Western world. Given a choice, I would probably rather die of thyroid cancer at 70 than smallpox at 10, thank you very much. Finding comfort in this fact, however, does not mean that I shouldn’t do the small things available to me to reduce my family’s exposure to all this junk.)

Of course, to undertake a chemical purge like this all at once would be impractical and overwhelming, as well as completely wasteful of the products currently residing in our homes. For instance, although I recently learned that antibacterial hand soap is bad, bad, bad, I still have a giant container of it that a friend donated to me, and it doesn’t seem like it would be much better for the earth and its inhabitants to just dump it all down the drain at once to get rid of it, nor to throw it and its plastic container straight into a landfill. And obviously, an approach like that would be a colossal waste of money to boot.

So instead, we’ll go bit-by-bit. As Larms and I use up the old, not-so-chemically-safe products in our households, we will seek to replace them with chemical-free alternatives that work just as well as their chemically-inclined cousins and share with you the choices we find out there and whether they give us results. I’ll admit, I’m guessing we’ll discover that 75% of the products we currently use can be chucked in favor of baking soda, or vinegar, or baking soda and vinegar. But we’ll try to offer some other options, too, because really, I can’t imagine that dumping vinegar on the head day in and day out is going to fulfill the average mom’s need to feel pampered now and again…

Coming up later this week: A quick report from each of us on products we already use that would pass the chemical-free test. And please, in the meantime, feel free to point us in any non-chemical directions you’ve found that work for your family! We will note them duly and study them carefully when the time comes!

My Secondhand Baby

No, I didn’t actually pick her up at the consignment shop. But pretty much everything else in her life was passed down to her!

We can look high and low for sustainable products made locally without too much radioactive runoff (and trust me, we will be doing plenty of that here in the next few months!), but the simple fact is that one of the best ways to protect the environment is simply not to buy anything. Ever. Or at least as infrequently as possible. (Btw, this blog is not about how to get us out of a recession–obviously not spending money is highly counter-productive in that sense.)

The great thing (environmentally speaking) about babies is that their needs are few (though we are often told otherwise), and their stages of development fly by extremely fast! Thus most of the products they DO need can be reused, as the average child will not, in most cases, be sleeping in her crib for the 20 years or so that it might take for said crib to deteriorate to an unsafe level of sturdiness.

For my own baby shower, I decided it would be great to try to get as many people to lend, pass down, or buy that baby equipment used as I could. I made a sad little GeoCities webpage (that’s right, kickin’ it 1997-style) that served as my secondhand registry. For the most part, people adhered to it. And many of them were really happy to have a sanctioned way to get rid of the extra baby stuff in their house they were sick of storing and/or wondering what to do with. Guilt-free re-gifting ahoy!

My self-made approach was time-consuming, however, as well as sort of clunky, as I asked guests to email my husband when they got something so that he could remove it from the list. Or tell me to remove it since he’s not-so-quick on the technological uptake.

Well, how handy that a talented friend of mine (with more programming skills than either me or my husband) got so inspired by this idea that he decided to create a website that would do the job for future moms-to-be. It works just like a typical registry–except that you’re using it to request items that were already purchased long ago and now are out there waiting to find their way to you! Brilliant. And oh, so earth-friendly.

Check it out here: www.mysecondhandbaby.com and then go tell your pregnant momma-friends!

Pets are not simple.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, you, that young(ish) couple who just moved in together, or got engaged, or are on your honeymoon. You’re thinking, “Let’s get a dog/cat/teacup pig! It will be so fun/cuddly/awesome!”

If this is you, and, from time to time, conversations in your household ALSO include, “I can’t wait until we can start making lots and lots of babies!”, I would ask you, nay, PLEAD with you, to hold off on getting that dog/cat/teacup pig until AFTER you make the babies. Or at the very least one of those babies.

At that point, if you still really, REALLY want a pet in addition to the baby, by all means go for it. You have my blessing. But if you discover that you are already having enough trouble finding time to sleep/clean the house/take a shower (really, you can insert just about any basic human activity here) once you have said child, you will be glad you heeded my advice and now do not also have to try to squeeze in walking the dog/brushing the cat/doing whatever someone does with a teacup pig.

I feel better having gotten that off my chest. Now, does anyone want to adopt two adorable cats who never, EVER scratch the furniture, track litter all over the house, sit on your face when you’re trying to sleep, or knock glasses off the counter tops?