Becoming Domestic

Almost two years ago to the week we did the simple sums which led us to believe that we could leave our London home and move to idyllic rural surroundings nearer to our families in Bristol, have me be a full-time mum instead of working full-time in a City investment bank and still be no worse off at the end of each month. As I was earning a handsome City salary at the time we had surely done our maths wrong to come up with the radical idea that we could manage without my income. It appeared to be a ridiculous notion.

We were, however in April 2006, spending a small fortune (and generally more each month than our combined net income) on two full time day nursery places for our three year old twins, on the mortgage for our three bedroomed terraced house, on a twice weekly cleaner, on monthly tube passes, on daily Pret a Manger sandwiches, on smart clothing, on dry cleaning, on Marks and Spencer ready meals, frequent take away meals and trips to restaurants (with associated babysitting and taxi fare costs thrown in), on beauty treatments, on foreign holidays, on Christmas and birthdays and on all the ad-hoc daily spending on random items we didn’t particularly need but made us feel momentarily satisfied. It didn’t feel like we had a luxurious existence. It seemed normal. We were, we realised, working hard to pay for a lifestyle we had outgrown and no longer desired.

Within just a few days we were both pretty sure that we had the option of ‘downshifting’, a term which we’d not come across before this revelation but had been coined in the US.

The house we owned in East London was rented out to four individual young professional tennants, a friend was hired as a trustworthy property manager, I was granted 13 weeks unpaid parental leave for both kids which amounted to a 6 month sabatical from the bank in which I’d worked for six years, Darren said goodbye to his partner in the London internet software agency he’d built up from scratch, started a new venture similar to the previous and we found a lovely four bedroomed unfurnished Victorian house to rent in Worcestershire surrounded by fields. We began our downshifting adventure which essentially meant living within our means by setting budgets and sticking to them

The theory was that if we hated rural life, if Darren’s new business didn’t thrive, if I wasn’t keen on being a full-time mother and homemaker (another American phrase we became familer with during our brief period of research) we could move back to London, I could resume employment at JPMorgan and life would continue much as it had been before.

We still live in the rented Worcestershire home (and have planted a willow den for the children and have a huge vegetable garden in operation), the web development business Bealers created is successful enough to have local offices, four full time employees and myself working as a very part-time, homeworking bookeeper/office manager and has plenty of satisfied clients. The London house was sold last Autumn and our new baby daughter was born at the beginning of this year. We remain delighted and amazed that we were able to downshift in the way that we did.

It was a very nice surprise to find out that this humble blog at time of writing comes up 5th in the list on Google when people search on the word ‘Downshifting‘. With that in mind I’ve thought about how people can set about downshifting without having to quit their jobs or homes and move out to isolated countryside to raise livestock, make yoghurt and cheese from their own goat’s milk. By doing a small downshift a large amount of simplification can happen and that in itself can lead to huge satisfaction.

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April 27th, 2008 | Category: Downshifting | Comments (1)

http://www.downshiftingweek.com/

I nearly missed it AGAIN! But once again clicked on Tracey Smith’s wonderful site just in time. Lots of great tips and links for those interested in simplifying life.

April 23rd, 2008 | Category: Downshifting | Leave a comment

I was a bit shocked to see that we had overspent by £175 on our Housekeeping account but it is not yet the end of the month. My initial reaction was to be cross with myself for not keeping on top of the spending, for not sticking to the budget and for not doing things like menu planning. I also assumed that the overspend was due in part to the fact we have had lots of friends and family come to stay recently and on these occasions we tend to cook some special meals and have more beer and wine than we do when are at home alone and had eaten out several times.

I chatted to Bealers about our overspend expecting him to be annoyed but in fact he wasn’t and instead he mentioned the fact that a friend of ours had written about rising food costs

When I read her blog post & comments from others where recent increases in food prices had been noticed by individuals but downplayed by the media I realised that our overspend was not a one off as I scanned our grocery receipts and looked for where the obvious luxuries had increased the food bill but couldn’t actually find any.

If food and other household essentials are to take a bigger part of our monthly income we decided to take the following action steps to ensure that we are still able to live within our means and not nibble away at our savings.

1. Be stricter with our weekly food shop and prepare meal plans in advance
2. Cook simple, low cost meals (shepherd’s pie, vegetable pasta sauces, risotto, omlettes, soups) instead of fancy meals with exotic ingredients (Thai vegetable green curry, pizzas with pepperoni & mozerella)
3. Use online grocery shopping as less tempted by ‘off list’ things and can also tally up the total before getting to the checkout
4. Eat less meat (especially as we buy organic meat which is more expensive than tasteless factory farmed meat) and buy fewer gluten-free cakey treats
5. Buy zero pre-prepared food. Hard as we buy very little but do usually have veggie sausages etc in the freezer
6. Use the food in the freezer, cupboards at the end of the month instead of buying more food (eg. use the bread machine to use the packets of bread flour instead of buying loaves costing £1.10)
7. Have an emptier fridge so we can see at a glance what it contains rather than having things going off at the back
8. Buy fewer convenience foods for the children (don’t buy many anyway but had got into the habit of buying small juice cartons for lunch boxes but the kids take a bottle of water to school anyway)
9. Buy in bulk for things we use a lot of where possible (eg. potatoes, carrots, beer, meat) at the beginning of the month having worked out approximatly how much we’ll need and try to use no more (just like people used to do in days gone by according to Mrs Beeton’s book of household management)
10. Plant and grow plenty of vegetables we use a lot of or ones that can be used for lots of different recipes (eg. tomatoes, potatoes, carrots, parsnips)
11. Explore the ‘Value’ range at the supermarket - already buy Value butter and this week discovered that the kids don’t care about the Value bourbons in the biscuit tin or the Value fromage frais in the packed lunches.

April 23rd, 2008 | Category: Budgeting and Finances, Food, Frugal living | Comments (2)

Luckily for my purse and our bank balance we don’t live near to any shops apart from the butcher, the bakery, a small grocery shop and a few charity shops (full of old ladies’ things mainly). When we lived in East London and I worked in the City I found that the majority of my spare time was spent idly wandering around the shops with no real purpose.

I often came home with plenty of so-called bargains as we lived near to cheap shops like Primark, Matalan, Woolworths, Superdrug, Tesco and Poundland and for about five minutes I would feel great. Over time the house became full of stuff. I had several gift drawers stuffed full of things that could be given away as presents, every cupboard was full and so were all the shelves and the loft and cellar too. The things I bought cost little per item but over time the amount spent was almost certainly huge (especially as the idle purchasing had started when I was a young teenager with pocket money frittering tendancies). Buying everything cheap and new ensured that somewhere in the world factories manufacturing these good were profiting from my spending and that the goods had been shipped around the planet using unnecessary energy. More often than not the new things were broken and therefore discarded shortly after they arrived in our lives and so filled up a tiny bit more of the world’s landfill with non-biodegradable junk.

Recently (about 18 months ago) I’ve been consciously de-junking our lives a little at a time (and still the house is very far from being stark or empty). I’ve taken loads of boxes of books to our local library where they either add them to their collection or sell them for cash, loads of clothes and linens to my favourite charity shop (worth noting that I only found out last week that they will happily take bags of unsellable clothes (ripped, stained, old underwear, threadbare towels, unfashionable things) if they are in a bag marked ‘Rags’. They can sell these for money to another purchaser. We’ve freecycled larger items and sold just a few on eBay and I’ve used most of the things in the gifts stash as gifts for people.

The fantastic feeling each time I get rid of further unwanted things from our lives is very similar to the buzz of previous years after another shopping spree. It feels fantastic to be liberated of things that are neither useful nor give any pleasure due to their aesthetics. For items I have a irrational reluctance to part with I stash them away into a trunk and then several months later I am able to prove to myself that I have lived happily without it and had actually forgotten that it existed at all.

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April 20th, 2008 | Category: Being Green, Budgeting and Finances, Frugal living | Leave a comment

Happy now… 

Our little baby daughter is now 12 weeks old but for the first 10 weeks of her life she has been in obvious discomfort/pain. She has cried an awful lot especially when put down on her back for nappy changes, naps, in the car seat. She has also suffered with what appears to be highly acidic regurgitation of small amounts of digested milk. The only time she was not crying would be the first half an hour of the day when in fact she was a very alert and incredibly smiley little thing.

Apart from be worried about her and defend her when my husband nicknamed her The Bad Baby I was pretty sure there was nothing much I could do for her as when I took her to the GP they checked her ears, throat and temperature and declared that she was fine. She was gaining weight at a very good rate, being breastfed we knew there were no allergies to cows milk causing her pain and I just hoped she would turn a corner as she grew, became more sturdy and upright and her stomach became more mature.

Every nap time was taken in my blessed sling which she was constantly carried in as there was no way I could leave her crying on her back to do even the smallest household chore. If I stopped moving for even an instant she would wake up with a start and the crying would resume. Unlike my previous babies she did not nod off instantly in the car but if she did she would only stay asleep while we were moving and traffic lights caused her to wake up howling again.

I felt so so sorry for her. My mum was concerned for her as she remembered my brother being in a similar state when he was an infant and she claimed it (a) broke her heart and (b) held him back developmentally as instead of people cooing and interacting with a baby who is crying so much they are just in their own world of distress.

I chanced upon a leaflet at the local baby weighing clinic for a local osteopath which mentioned the benefits of treating ‘unsettled’ babies with cranial osteopathy as traumas from the pregnancy or birth can leave some babies with constant chronic pain such as headaches, stomach disorders, and can even hinder them from establishing breastfeeding if their little jaw bones haven’t popped back into the position they were designed to be in.

As a complete and utter sceptic but having reached the end of my wits having listened to my poor poor baby scream in my ear for so many hours each day especially when a bit of milky sick came up I made an appointment and trundled her down to the osteopath clinic. More »

April 18th, 2008 | Category: Baby and Pregnancy, Being Green, Family Health | Comments (4)

This is obviously one of every parent’s worst living-nightmares. I can make myself cry just by thinking about this happening.

A fortnight ago I went to meet my ninety four year old Grandma off the train from Weymouth in Bristol Temple Meads train station which is pretty big with thirteen platforms. Prior to our previous rendez-vous in October I had reminded her of the policy for her to stay put if she alighted from the train and I wasn’t there to meet her. This time I had forgotten to reinforce this and due to a mix up of late trains arriving at wrong platforms I was waiting on platform 11 with a pre-booked wheelchair and friendly station staff to push her while she got off the train at platform 8 and wanderered off and out of the train station trying to find me (she actually ended up in a taxi but luckily we fouond her before she whizzed off into rainy Bristol).

It made me think that I hadn’t told my kids recently of my personal preferred procedures to follow if they ever get seperated from us or the people looking after them.

• They are to stand still the minute they realise we are not with them & to know we will be looking for them the minute we realise they are not with us
• They are to shout our name (not ‘Mummy’) as everyone is called mummy.
• I am not embarrased to shout their names loudly the minute they might be lost (very easy when they are small in a shop full of people and rails of clothes). Usually I very quickly hear a ‘Yeah?’ when I call them.
• They are not to go with anyone who tells them they can help find their mummy. They are to say ‘No, I’m not allowed to go anywhere with strangers. My mummy/daddy will find me her.’
• If they see me over the other side of the road they are not to cross but to wait for me to see them. It will help if they shout and wave.
• I do have a couple of wrist bands with my mobile phone number on but since we left London I haven’t used them

I generally am on full red-alert whenever I’m out of the house with my children and constantly ask them to hold the trolley/pram, or my hand and if they aren’t I’m always looking to see where they are and telling them to stay with me as I can’t look after them if they aren’t close. It’s well worth the effort and peace of mind

March 29th, 2008 | Category: Good Parenting | Comments (6)

• Rice flakes
• Millet flakes
• Toasted coconut flakes
• Raisins
• Mixed nuts (brazil, hazelnuts, almonds, walnuts)
• Sunflower seeds
• Pumpkin seeds
• Chopped dried apricots
• Chopped dried dates

Mix together & enjoy with milk!

March 29th, 2008 | Category: Food, Gluten free living, Recipes | Leave a comment

I am six weeks into using the washable nappies we were given for our new baby. I do love using them as they give me a really high sense of satisfaction - especially when reloading the wicker basket with a pleasing pile of freshly laundered OneLife nappies and fluffy pink washable fleece bottom wipes. I don’t find the extra laundry a problem. I hardly notice it as I always have a number of white things needing washing most days anyway as the baby is a fairly sicky one.

If for some reason I do get through the 16 or so shaped nappies without getting them washed and dried I do have a number of ‘emergency nappies’ ready to go as well as my trusty OneLife nappies - these consist of a pile of terry squares (small but I wish I’d bought the larger size) and a whole load of all-in-one nappies which are a fine fit for the baby but harder to launder/dry with all their layers of padding and creases where yucky stuff can stay unoticed by the washing machine.

The only trouble is that I’m not so sure about how one gets through the night without a sodden baby by morning time without having to wake up and change them halfway through the night… I do add a booster but this seems to make very little difference. If my tiny bladdered baby is always soaking by morning time how on earth do green parents of bigger babies manage?

As it is much nicer snuggling up to a dry baby than a wet one in the morning I’ve recently started experimented with putting the babe in a little disposable nappy as I dress her for bed from the packet we bought to take to hospital when she was born.. The morning wetness with the washable nappies doesn’t seem to bother her but as she is in my bed lying on my sheets it does bother me!

March 9th, 2008 | Category: Baby and Pregnancy, Being Green | Comments (6)

[This post is for the girls...Blokes - look away now as not much here in this post for you other than persuading your women to use these two fabulous new products]

The Mooncup Menstrual Cup - An Innovative Alternative to Tampons

I can’t remember how I discovered the Mooncup I think it was reading a post on the ever-wonderful www.mumsnet.com/Talk/ forum. An environmentally friendly way of dealing with monthly menstrual periods which happy users were saying were better (cleaner, needing to be changed less frequently and more comfortable to wear) than any of the disposable sanitary protection products on the market? It sounded too good to be true so I read up on the manufacturer’s website and very shortly afterwards bought one (for about £15 I think).

The claims were absolutely spot on. One small silicon egg-cup shaped product is used in place of a tampon and collects the fluid. The fluid is then tipped away down the toilet and the Mooncup resinserted. It can be washed in water and between periods it has its own discreet little unbleached cotton bag with pretty pink ribbon to store in. No more shelves of bulky sanitary protection or being bamboozled by the bewildering array of choice in the ‘feminine hygiene’ aisle at the supermarket. No more spending good money on disposables products which clog up landfill every month of your reproductive years (how much does that add up to?!) More »

March 2nd, 2008 | Category: Baby and Pregnancy, Being Green, Family Health, Womens Issues | Comments (4)