Category: Simple Living

Life moves fast, so we try to slow things down as much as possible. Read about how we keep a minimal, paired-down, slow approach to parenting, activities, and money.

Semi-Minimalist Home: Updated

Years ago, I published pictures of what I called our semi-minimalist home in New Hampshire. Minimalism isn’t a contest and there is no right way to undertake it, but I hesitated to call myself a full-one minimalist because I don’t believe I have gotten to the place where I eschew material items enough to warrant the full title.

Still, we practice a reduced aesthetic in our family, and while we still consume too many material goods, we regularly reflect upon and rid ourselves of extraneous belongings in order to make our home calmer and more inviting.

I gave you a tour, four and a half years ago now (wow!), of our New Hampshire home, and I thought you might be interested in seeing how we’ve organized our North Carolina home. It has taken a lot to get our home pared down, as it is a full one thousand square feet smaller than our previous home, but luckily it has more bedrooms, so we have been able to create spaces for everyone in the family (and for Mr. ThreeYear’s office!) and to make our home work. And we’re trying valiantly not to move into a bigger home, given that we would probably have to spend double to find a larger home in this crazy market.

Our home was built in 1999, so it is a bit of an older home, but it has been a great home in a solid location for three years now.

First, here is our living room.

Continue reading “Semi-Minimalist Home: Updated”

February Musings

Do you ever get that feeling of existential dread that runs down your belly and into your legs, leaving everything numb? I’m having that now. I think it’s anxiety-related, due to me not being at work during the middle of the day (because I wasn’t scheduled for any classes) and feeling guilty about it.

Aren’t humans weird? I have no reason to feel guilty, no reason to feel bad. It’s all in my head but I can’t shake it. I know this, but the feelings remain.

Seems like every winter about this time I write a post about how much I hate winter. It isn’t just lip service. My body chemistry changes in the winter and I wrestle, in a real way, with depression. Luckily mine is seasonal and usually dissipates right around the time that Spring begins, something that occurs much earlier in NC than it did in NH. So I know this is a temporary feeling.

It still makes me question everything, every year. It makes me cranky and short-tempered. It makes me want to drop all responsibilities and move to a tropical island.

Every single year, I tell myself I need to book a vacation in February.

And every single year, I do not do it. My current excuse is that I don’t have any time off in February. While this is true, there is a long weekend or two during the month, and I could probably get away with taking enough days off to fashion a week-get-away.

Why don’t I?

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Holiday Gift-Giving Guide

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Wow, the holiday season is upon us. Every year, it sneaks up on me, regrettably. I know I need to up my planning game, and maybe start thinking about Christmas gifts earlier than, say, December 1st. This is never more so than this year, since I’ve been working full time and haven’t been planning ahead very well.

If you’re like me and need some last minute Christmas gifts, I thought I’d republish my gift-giving guide from last year. Yes, all the gifts are the same as last year, but they were great options then and they are now! Everything is under $20, to boot! So take a peak, and cross everyone off your list. 🙂

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Wanna Be More Frugal? Try Under-scheduling.

I hope that this post isn’t head-smacker obvious in its conclusions, but I had an epiphany of sorts yesterday at my kids’ swim practice.

First of all, I’m not super frugal but I’m always trying to get better at spending, because it’s my Achilles’s heel, my Kryptonite.

Second of all, I believe very much in a simplified schedule. This year, I don’t have a full-time (or even part-time job), so my schedule has been very bare, on purpose. That’s been nice. We’ve enjoyed a blessedly busy-free schedule for the entire school year. It’s very much in keeping with our location independent lifestyle. We’ve made last-minute decisions to have a beach weekend or travel to see a relative several times, even skipping a day of school if we needed to.

However, this week, I’ve had a taste of what an over-scheduled life might feel like. The kids have only had one activity each for most of the year, but as of two weeks ago, they both tried out for and made swim team. We have practice every evening.

During the day, after I get the kids on the bus, I’ve been running, writing, applying for jobs, and quickly tidying the house. Then, I run off to help my sister with her new baby, so she can work her Etsy business. After that, I drive back home, pick up the boys on the bus, get them changed, take one to swim practice, come home, eat, then take the other to swim practice.

I’ve had one week of this, not an entire school year, like many parents. But already I’m feeling the effects.

Yesterday, I ordered groceries from our grocery service (which continues to be a major, huge, wonderful help in my life that helps me spend less on groceries despite its cost). After putting them away, I realized that I hadn’t taken inventory of the food we currently had in the house. Because our week had been so busy, and we’d eaten out once during the week, we had a lot more food left over than usual.

Continue reading “Wanna Be More Frugal? Try Under-scheduling.”

What I Learned After a Month of Digital Minimalism

In late March, I read Cal Newport’s insightful new book, Digital Minimalism (affiliate link). In it, he proposed a digital fast–that is, a time period of at least thirty days where you would dramatically curtail your social media usage and steeply curb the amount of time you spent on electronics devices.

He proposed setting strict boundaries for yourself around your electronics usage, such as only checking email once per day, and taking a break from all social media for the month.

The idea, he said, was to interrupt your social media usage patterns to get a better idea of how and how much you were using social media and to break the mindless usage.

At the same time, he recommended cultivating some new activities for your leisure time, something he found to be critical as you broke the hold of your social media on your life.

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Enough

I’ve been thinking about enough lately. In this country, enough has become a concept that’s almost unpatriotic. Saying you have enough implies you’re satisfied. It implies you’re not endlessly striving for more, better, faster, perfection.

I’ve spent the last week on Spring Break. I meant to blog, had packed the laptop, but left it at home. Rather than type into my phone I said, “it’s time for a break” and let myself have a vacation for a week.

Taking a week off of anything, even a hobby, is something it’s becoming harder and harder for us to do. Mr. ThreeYear took a week off of work for the first time in a long time, but still checked in to his email daily. “We’re expected to,” he explained.

Enough has been allusive this year, a year of transition for my family. The house needs so much, I’m not working, we have a new dog, we live in a new town. Mr. ThreeYear endlessly searches for just one more device (used, on FB Marketplace) that will make the house a home. I’ve been searching for the perfect curtains, bedspreads, toilet seats, patio furniture.

And yet, we live in a place where the excess bothers me, daily. I drive along perfectly manicured streets, watch as landscape crews dig up large, beautiful cherry blossom trees in the median and replant smaller, beautiful cherry blossom trees. I see people replace perfect, new late-model SUVs with perfect-er, newer late model SUVs. Our across-the-street neighbors now have more cars in their driveway than they do people in their home.

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A Year of Good Money: A Digital Fast

What does a digital fast have to do with getting better at money? I think it might be quite a lot, actually.

This year, my family is focusing on making better spending decisions. To that end, we’re (I’m) engaging in twelve eleven (I forgot in March) money experiments designed to help us reexamine our spending patterns and hopefully, get better at them. I’m calling this A Year of Good Money.

In February, I took on a no-spending challenge, my Frugal February challenge, and we spent less than we had in a year. The crazy part was, I was the only one in my family engaged in the challenge. I set rules for myself, which were that I would spend nothing outside of groceries, gas, and bills, but I wouldn’t involve my family members in the challenge, since Mr. ThreeYear was traveling a lot and I didn’t want to make things harder on him, and I didn’t want to stop the boys from their activities.

I think the experiment showed me how programmed I am to spend money. Sadly, in March, I went back to my old ways, and spent more than ever, as some commenters predicted. To be completely effective, it’s clear that I’ll need to engage in a no-spend period that’s longer than a month, because I did delay spending for a month, rather than stop spending in a certain category at all. Here are all of my thoughts on what I learned during the month.

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Why Simplifying is So Hard

Ahh, simplicity. So simple, yet so illusive.

The simplicity paradigm, of course, is that the less we have, do, and schedule, the better off we are. Less really is more.

Nowadays this truism is something like common knowledge. Our lives are inundated with so much stimulation, consumer goods, and social media that we somehow know we’re due for a step back. To borrow Joshua Becker’s quote, “Busy is the new Fine.” When I ask a friend how she’s doing, of course I’m going to hear how crazy busy she is with her kiddos. I might hear, “Fine. Busy!” But that word is usually thrown in somewhere. Badge of honor in our modern world.

I don’t say that to people (more on that below), but I know what she means. Just scrolling through my feed and reading seven articles on different important topics leaves me feeling stuffed. Can you relate?

Back in the ’90s, when I was growing up, and busy was not yet the new fine, I was busy. I share genetics with a father we affectionately call The Renaissance Man. He is always learning something new, going on a trip, picking up a new hobby. I, too, wanted to experience everything.I was a child who wanted to sign up for every after school activity. In high school, I was going to be the editor of the yearbook and the drum major of the band, amongst myriad other activities, until my parents called fowl.

In the ’90s, with cheap plastic goods beginning to flood in from Asia, our homes were filled with stuff. Kids got toys outside of Christmas and birthdays. I had a lot of toys. So many that I would fill my piggy toy chest to overflowing, and still have only started cleaning up my toys. The beginning of our over-consumption and over-scheduled lives didn’t start overnight.

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Are You the 1%?

I’ve been thinking a lot about the dumb luck of being born in one of the world’s wealthiest countries. It reminded me of this post, which is one of my favorites. Every once in a while, I find it really helpful to go drone-like and fly up above my privileged circumstances to reflect on how fortunate I and my family really are. Videos like the one below help me to take a few minutes to put things in perspective. 

Last night, my son asked me to replay a video I’d shown him last year.  It’s called If the World Were 100 People. Maybe you’ve seen it. One of my professors in my Master’s course introduced me to the video last Spring.

If you’ve got two and a half minutes, it’s a great watch.

The company that developed the video, GOOD Magazine, used research from the Central Intelligence Agency’s World Factbook to give us an idea of what our world would look like if its almost 7.5 billion inhabitants were reduced to a mere 100 people. 100 is a number we can wrap our brains around fairly easily. We all know 100 people. We’re probably friends with 100 people. Continue reading “Are You the 1%?”

Combatting the Mid-Winter Blues

Hello everyone in the midst of winter! It’s February here in North Carolina, and though the ground isn’t covered in four feet of snow, I’m still battling the same seasonal affective disorder as years past, thanks to the endless rain and lack of sun. So, in honor of this auspicious time of year, I thought I’d republish a reminder of things I’ve done in the past to get through the very hardest parts of the winter. 

If you’re in the thick of bleak midwinter (and possibly staring down several more weeks or months of frigid temps, snow, and ice), hang in there! I know how you feel!

Midwinter is always the time of year that gets to me in New England. We’re in the thick of the cold and snow and, despite being teased with some 50-degree days recently, we’ve been staring down -4 for the past week. A blizzard with 18 inches of snow is coming tomorrow.

This time of year causes certain problems.

One, I find it almost impossible to drag myself out of bed for a run if the temps are below 15 degrees F (if that sounds horrible to you, believe me, it does to me too). I do not take running lightly. It is critical to my being tolerable to the rest of the human race, so imagine how fun I am to be around in the winter. Two, Spring feels forever away. And I need the hope of Spring.

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