An Offer...

Yesterday, after much thought and wiggling of numbers, P-Daddy and I sent off an offer on The Property! We idealized it, based on what would work best for us, and we realize we'll have to do some negotiating, but the offer is in. To celebrate, here's a picture of the main house (the property itself extends quite a bit behind and to the side):

The current renters of the house call it The Treehouse - a name that you can see is quite fitting and which I'll likely be adopting!

Making my mornings work better

On our vacation in Guatemala, it was easy to get up early, especially at our lovely hotel in Panajachel.

Awakening to the sound of birds chirping and a view like that, what's not to love about mornings. Of course, it didn't hurt that we were an hour earlier than our home time zone either. Still, we were regularly waking up before 6am, feeling rested and relaxed and ready to start the day.

Now that we are home, mornings are much much harder! I'm not ready for the school year to begin, and I really just want to burrow down into my blankets and sleep a few more hours. Lucky for me, Crystal over at Money Saving Mom is starting a new challenge this week that fits my current situation to a T. It's called Make the Most of your Mornings: a 3-Week Challenge from MoneySavingMom.com.

It promises to be a great challenge, and I'm determined to successfully complete it and end up with a more effective morning routine. Today's challenge is to determine a realistic bedtime, which then allows for a non-exhausted morning. I've decided that mine will be 10pm. This realistically allows me to get up between 5 and 6 am, and still get 7-8 hours of sleep a night.

Our second task for the day is to determine 5 tasks that we need to complete the night before in order to relieve some of the morning stress. Here are mine:

1) Prepare clothes for the next day
2) Make the next day’s to-do list
3) Prep the next day’s lunch
4) Ready my school bag
5) Leave my computer and phone charging

We'll see how it goes, but for now, I've at least got a good start on this first real day of the challenge!

Reducing our waste

Last Saturday P-Daddy got up early to take out the trash and made the comment that we've only been sending out trash once a week lately. The trash runs twice, but for the last couple months, we rarely have a full bag by the second pick-up. Being the skeptic that I am, I wondered if it was just that he was not emptying all the trash cans. But no, all are in good shape. Huh. We have apparently been slowly working our way further into a lifestyle of reduce~reuse~recycle, and we finally have some evidence of it!

Since I view such a step as crucial to making an international move, especially to a developing country, I've been thinking about this a lot. While I may amend my reasoning in the future, I currently think there are 5 things we are doing that are helping us along this path.

1) First, we try not to waste food. P-Daddy is especially diligent in this area, much more so than I am. He is adamant about ensuring that leftovers get eaten rather than getting tossed. No worries, this doesn't mean that we are eating things slightly on the edge of questionability - we just are making great efforts to consume what we have before we buy or prepare more. Eating down the pantry in July really helped with this.

2) We compost when we can. I keep a bag in the freezer for vegetables pieces that can be used for veggie stock, but the rest goes into our compost bin rather than into our trash can. At some point in the future I will make my own composter, but for now, we have one that we bought from Woot, and we really like it. See that mutant spider-looking thing behind the incredibly cute kid? That's our composter (and our kiddo). I love that it's round and we can easily mix up the contents when we need to.

3) We strive for natural foods over processed ones. Not only does this reduce waste, it also reduces cost. We can buy many of our staples from the bulk bins, and fruits and veggies, especially the ones we get in our veggie co-op, have very little packaging. Because we seldom buy individually packaged processed treats, that type of waste is not a big contributor to our waste bin.

4) We rarely use disposables like foil and sandwich bags. Instead, we tend to pack into reusable plastic containers that we can bring home and wash. This does mean that we do more dishes - any suggestions on reducing waste while also reducing water usage would be greatly appreciated ;-)

5) We reuse and recycle whenever we can. Our trash can rarely has anything plastic, cardboard, or glass in it. When we get rid of those things, they go directly into our recycling bin. However, we are trying more and more to reuse those items when possible. Lately, I've been on a hunt for craft projects for Pooh or the house that reuse common household items. Hopefully I'll have some later posts about some of those, but for now, I'm collecting ideas on pinterest.

As we plan more and more for our move, not only do we want to be good stewards of the earth, but we want to reduce our costs, and we want to have a sustainable lifestyle. By learning now to reduce~reuse~recycle, we are well on our way to all of those things!

Organization Shmorganization

I admit it, I'm an organization junkie. I love baskets and bins and shelves and all kinds of things that provide a specific place to put certain things. The problem is that I don't always have time to get to the original organization, so things pile up and pile up and the bins, baskets, and shelves are more of a problem than a help. That's what has been happening with my linen closet.

Before I go further, I'll note that we have linens in many places around the house, but mostly that's because I couldn't find room in the already overflowing - and pretty small - linen closet. Recently, I found a great deal on a bathroom shelf, and that allowed me to move many of our towels out of the hall linen closet and into the bathroom itself.

Notice that that shelf goes over the toilet tank, and uses virtually no floor space. P-Daddy and I both love building UP and filling wall space rather than trying to find available floor space when there's really none to be found. So this shelf was a great find, an excellent price (Ross, $15), and was super easy to assemble. It's not hugely sturdy, but unless our three-year-old decides to try out his monkey climbing skills, I think it will hold up just fine. It's really only there to hold towels and washcloths, clearing out a good part of my overflowing linen closet.

Having moved the towels, I had a big empty shelf in the linen closet and several totally crowded and disorganized shelves. I emptied everything out and refilled the cabinet methodically. It feels so good to know what's actually in there! Cleaning rags, curtains, and wipes are all on the top shelf, with tablecloths just below them.

When I got to the sheets, I made some tough decisions. First, I decided that only one extra set of sheets per bed was going back in the cabinet. One set for our bed, one for the twin bed, and one for the toddler bed (Pooh alternates between the last 2). Second, I decided to try the pillowcase method. Typically when I change the sheets, I waste a lot of time sorting through and finding matching pieces. In order to make that easier, I folded each set, and then put the set into one of the matching pillowcases. Beautiful! And no more digging through the whole pile for matching pieces. We still have a few extra pillowcases that have no sheets, but all of us love extra pillows, so we need those anyway. They fit nicely, along with an extra mattress pad, right alongside the sheets.

After doing all that, I was feeling like Super Organized Mom, so I continued on to the kitchen and another set of shelves that were getting out of hand. After removal, cleaning, and re-organization, we are left with this:

Both of the bottom two shelves have been conveniently divided into two separate shelves through the use of breakfast trays. The bottom one holds a smorgasbord of teas, with a variety of tea and coffee cups underneath. You may have noticed the fire extinguisher and first aid kit as well - helpful in every kitchen, but an absolute requirement for foster parents, so there they stay. The tray on the second shelf up holds baking supplies, with water bottles to the side and plastic and glass containers underneath. It's not perfect, but it's so much better than what it looked like before!

How we saved money in Guatemala

Going on vacation is typically a pricy endeavor! Our recent trip to Guatemala was no exception, but we worked hard to keep our expenses down. Here are five ways that we saved money without compromising the quality of our vacation.

1) We combined business and pleasure. While we really needed a vacation and wanted to go to Guatemala to check out The Property, we specifically scheduled our trip at a time when a conference was happening that I wanted to attend anyway. By doing that, part of our expenses, including my plane ticket and part of my transportation expenses within the country, were covered by my research funds at work. Clearly, nothing was covered for P-Daddy or for the days that were vacation days before the conference began, but during the conference, all my expenses were covered, including my shuttles and airfare. I could have opted to make two separate trips, but that would have meant a lot more time and money. By combining business and pleasure, I saved a little of both.

2) We stayed in mid-range hotels. Guatemala has lots of cheap hotels, including many for as little as $10 a night. We could have stayed in those places and saved even more, but that would have somewhat compromised quality, since we would have been worried about comfort, cleanliness, and security. Not to mention bedbugs. So instead of going backpacker cheap, we stayed in nice mid-range hotels that were about $40 a night. And for that, we got a view like this, with a quiet garden and a lovely room.

3) We ate local. Especially in Pana, where we spent most of our vacation days, there are a ton of restaurants that cater to tourists, at tourist prices. These include Italian restaurants, fondue restaurants, steak restaurants, and even a Mayan~Vietnamese fusion place. But we can get most of that food anywhere, so we instead spent much of our time at local comedores (okay, we did make sure we tried the fusion place!). One day, we had this fantastic local dish known as chicken pepian. With rice, tortillas, and a wonderful strawberry banana refresco, it was an excellent meal at a price that even a cheapskate like me can love!

4) We walked instead of rode. The easiest way to get around Pana is in a tuk-tuk. For Q5 (about 80 cents US), you can go pretty much anywhere in town that you might want to go. But walking from one end of town to the other only takes about 15-20 minutes, so we avoided the tuk-tuks and instead got a little exercise. That was better for our health as well as our wallets.

5) We used a Schwab debit card. Guatemala is not a good place to travel with travelers checks. In order to cash them, one must go to the bank, wait in numerous lines, and waste several hours of time just to get a little cash. But it's also not a good place to carry a lot of cash, so this process has to be done multiple times. Wasting that much time is just not for me - using an ATM machine is much quicker and easier. In the past, I've just used my Wells Fargo bank ATM card, but they don't refund the fees that the local bank charges, plus they charge me $5 every time I use a non-Wells Fargo ATM machine (and there are none in Guatemala, so I get charged for every withdrawal. But earlier this summer, I read this awesome post about the best travel checkcard ever. P-Daddy used to work for Schwab, so he already had an account, and I insisted suggested that getting an ATM card would be a great idea for this trip. We used it for all our withdrawals, with no trouble at all, no extra fees charged, and all our ATM fees reimbursed. Thanks Rich at UnwireMe.com for a great travel tip!

I'm linking up to Frugal Friday at Life as Mom for this post - head on over there to see even more ways to save money, whether you are headed for an expat life or not!

Home!

Well, we are home, and with mixed feelings about that. P-Daddy and I both had a great time in Guatemala! We had a couple days of hanging out with old friends.

And then a few days of just relaxing on our own. Our hotel had great gardens and waking up to birds chirping and a gorgeous view made this part of our trip really great!

We also got to check out The Property. You'll hear lots more on that later!

All that was followed by several days at a Mayan language conference, which was both informative and interesting. This took place in Patzun, which is a small Mayan town totally off the beaten path. Market day was very cool there!

We ended the trip with a few hours wandering around Antigua, enjoying some good food and excellent company.

Despite a great trip, the reunion between Pooh and P-Daddy was a sight to behold. It was so great to see our little Sweet-Pea again - we both really missed him!

24 hours!

That's right - in 24 hours we'll be landing in Guatemala City!


© Photographer Antonio Harrison | Agency: Dreamstime.com

I have no idea what our internet situation will be like, so posting may be sporadic or even non-existent. But I'll take lots of pics and share it all once we are home :-)

Meanwhile, I've got a ton to do, so I'm off to...

- spend time with Pooh
- get cash for the trip
- try out the new ATM card
- mail some letters
- mail a few other things
- buy a few travel snacks
- find a few other items we need
- relax!