Cheerfully Living With Less: Kristen from The Frugal Girl

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hart Hunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and forty six, which is airing in mid mid to late April of twenty twenty two. Sarah is going to be interviewing Kristen of the Frugal Girl blog, as we are very excited to have her on the program, talking all things frugality and cheerfully living on less, which is her tagline. We have both been reading her blog forever or I we write Sarah, yes, although I'm guessing that I've found her through you, so I must have been reading you for longer. Well, I'm still trying to remember how I found you. I probably commented on your blog. Maybe that's probably how you found me. Maybe I don't know. It's an interesting question. We'll have to trace that back. I don't think you randomly found me. I think I commented and then you wrote back, and I was like, oh, how cool, and you probably clicked through my link and were like, ooh, who is Babymerson. No, well, maybe that's how it hated. I don't really quite remember how it transpired. But yeah, Sarah and I have been blogging forever, and Kristin has been as well. I remember I found her when I wrote a personal finance book. People may not know that about me, but I wrote a book called All the Money in the World that came out in twenty twelve, and in the course of writing that, I entered the world of frugal bloggers. There turns out to be a lot of them. Kristin is the only one I really still read every day. Basically, she does post four or five times a week and lots of great segments, like she does Thankful Thursdays. She was doing food Waste Fridays for a while. She does What I Spent, What I Ate five Frugal Things, and her listener, I mean, her readers are just also incredibly generous in the comments as well. She has cultivated quite a community of people who want to encourage each other on their money saving wealth building journeys, which is great because there's a lot of people out there who seem to view Internet comments sections as where they can bring out their worst impulses, creating a cesspool of humanity. So if you're ever feeling like the Internet is a cesspool of humanity, you should have it over to the comment section on the Frugal Girl and your faith will be restored. It is a lovely blog. You know, there's so few like honest blogs anymore, and hers is like she could have sold out, like she could have easily taken a million sponsorships and things, but she didn't. And I love that about her blog. It's very real. It's like never reads like a commercial. I just I really love it. It's like one of those like honest, straightforward, this is my life, these are lessons, these are you know, some beautiful things I noticed, this is what I cooked this week, et cetera. So shout out to her, as you will hear more from her. She really balances that out so well. So we were going to share a few of our other favorite blogs that are along that vein because I feel like it's dwindling, its dwindling genre, so sad. Which which ones are are you reading these days? Yeah? So I still love lag liv I will like instantly click on anything she writes to find out what's going on. I think because she doesn't post as much anymore, it makes every post all the more precious. Stay tuned. You may be hearing from her on a podcast that you enjoy, such as this one in the future. And by the way, she was already a guest, so stay tuned. Let me yes, yes, grateful Kay, I enjoy not a wasted word. Who is an anonymous blog but she's a teacher in San Francisco, So just a unique perspective that I enjoy. And something remarkable which is written by an academic writer who's a professor. And I've recently discovered, through the help of my own readers, a blogger who goes by Harry times just five children, just like Laura, and she's an academic and people have suggested that she would make a great guest here as well, so we may feature her in the future. I'll have to check that out. Yeah, I want to give us a shout out. Some of the people who comment on our blogs who have blogs themselves. Please check out Lisa of Lisa's Yarns, Elizabeth Frost. That's Elizabeth with an s that her blog is her name. Grateful Quay also one who posts on our blogs. We love to see that people are blogging. I hardly encourage people to try it. It's kind of a fun hobby. Certainly. That's why we've both stuck with it all this time. I mean, Sarah, I've been incredibly impressed with that. There's just not that many people who stick with the blogs who have and I put in quote marks here, but real jobs, like jobs that are not other jobs. There's a thing that would be you know, you're just building your platform like me right, Like I'm blogging because it's part of my platform building that you know, people will come and listen to my podcasts and read my books and things like that, or hire me to speak, whereas you know, you have another job that's that's totally separate from it, and so I know you also blog as you like blogging. I like to tell yeah, I want to stuck with it. No, I mean, of course, yeah, yeah, I mean you can tell that on people's websites when somebody has just told them you need to do at least one post a week, and they're like grumpily posting once a week. Like I'm not grumpily posting, I'm happily posting. But yeah, it'd be great to see more bloggers who do have more traditional yes and feel share. Feel free to share in our show notes if you have other favorites that we didn't mention that we should check out. I do think it is dwindling a bit, and partly it's because people treat social media as I know, a lot of people post what they would have posted on a blog on Instagram, for instance, you know, the photo and then the caption is sort of a longer take on life and what's going on right now. And I get it because people are more likely to come across you in that context versus your own website. But on the other hand, it's like, then Instagram has it like Instagram could disappear, they could change their algorithm, they could do like all that stuff and just be gone. I mean, you're creating a lot of stuff that you just don't have any real control over. Yeah, and I've actually oddly felt more comfortable being more real on my blog even though it's public, compared to when I was previously posting on Instagram. And I'm not sure why that's the case. I think it's because I feel like people who go to my blog have purposely like typed in, like the shoebox dot com, like they want to read what I have to say, whereas Instagram like God knows why someone might be seeing my post, and so it just feels less intimate to me. Yeah. Well, Kristin has blogging down to a science. She is incredibly genuine, like I said, not the overly commercially stuff, cheerfully living on less and we know her life has not been easy, but the fact that she is so cheerful and dedicated to her gratitude practices just really speaks to her character and I think that's why we are so drawn to her. So make sure everyone reads her blog. And here's our interview with Sarah interviewing Kristin of The Frugal Girl. I am so excited today to introduce Kristin, who blogs at The Frugal Girl, which happens to be a blog that I have read for years and years, so I am particularly excited to have Kristin on and get to know her better through the microphone and as a real person. So Kristen, tell our listeners a little bit about your site, your blog, and how you became the Frugal Girl. I'm so excited to be here. I started The Frugal Girl back in two thousand and eight, when blogging was not very common. I have been a money saving person my whole life, but despite all my many saving efforts, I still struggled with wasting food. And I felt kind of embarrassed about that, given that I'm such a frugal person. And one day it occurred to me, maybe I should tell the whole world about how much food I waste and then I might be motivated. So I started a blog, but the longest you are out was Confessions of a Recovering food Waste start out blogspot dot com, which is kind of embarrassing now. So I blogged there for a couple of months, and I decided I really liked this blogging thing, but maybe the food waste topic was a little bit too narrow. So I decided to start The Frugal Girl, and then I rolled the food waste thing into the Frugal Girl, and I have been writing there ever since. I love it. And that's so interesting because I've always been particularly strugg with I didn't realize that was the roots of the Frugal Girl. But I've always, as we'll talk about, appreciated the what I spent, what we ate, your freezer cleanouts, all of that. So that makes total sense that that was the root. And what year was this that you started blogging? That was in two thousand and eight, So I'm kind of a dinosaur in the blogging world. We are not quite as much as me, but almost almost very close. No, when did you start? I actually started my blog in two thousand and four and it has the most of it. Also, well, this is not my interview, so we won't go into details. It also had an embarrassing name. Okay, So back to you. You started blogging and you tried it. You were at the time. Take us back, like what was your family life like, and like, how did it feel to fit in blogging with the rest of everything you were doing. Yeah, so at the time, I had four young kids. My youngest was two and my oldest was probably eight. I was homeschooling them. I was teaching piano lessons out of my house at the time, so it was kind of a busy time of life. But the thing about blogging is that it is so flexible. So I would write posts during my youngest child's nap times. I would write posts early in the morning after my husband went to work, because it can be done in bits and snippets throughout the day. It's just I have found it to be such a great job to work around my children's schedules and my husband's work schedule. It's just the flexibility is you can't top it. And your blog just to so readers know, it's definitely achieved some pretty widespread success. I mean the number of readers that you have as well is like the different paths of life that your readers walk along is so fascinating to me, and I imagine that's been incredibly gratifying. Can you talk a little bit about some of the most popular features on your blog. I know I mentioned a couple of them, but you know, what are some of your favorite things to write about and the most popular things like that get the most audience response. Sure, once a week I do Frugal Things, which was actually inspired by my bee who blogs up the non consumer advocate. So I just share five things that I've done that week to say money, and they're usually not anything earthshaking, which is why I think people like them because they're just every day things like I mended something, or I got a sale on something, or I saved something from the trash by eating it instead of throwing it away, So those are very popular. Also, my readers share their own in the comments, and I think that's part of why it's popular, because people like to read what other people are doing to save money. And it's also motivating for my readers to share what they've been doing because they get encouragement and feedback from other readers, and so the community aspect of it, I think is why those are so popular. That I've been doing just since the start of the pandemic is on Thursdays, I do something called Thankful Thursdays. And I started this because in the pandemic, life was just feeling hard for everybody. Everybody all over the world was struggling at the same time, and I felt like I needed to have a weekly practice of hunting for things that are good because in the midst of hard things, there are always mercies there's always good things to be found too. So I started writing a list every Thursday of things I could think to be thankful for, and I invited my readers to join in. And even though things have changed with the pandemic, I pulled my readers and they all said, please keep doing these I really need it. So it's been nice to see how other people have been working this thankfulness practice into their lives along with me. So it's good for me and it's good for my readers. And it's another one of those things that really encourages community. It's not just me writing things and people reading them. It's other people writing things too, and I'm reading. So I love the community aspect. And the positivity with the thankful Thursdays is definitely a thread that I have noticed woven throughout your blog in general. Do you have like a life philosophy? I don't know. You seem like an incredibly optimistic person even when things are tough. How did you come about that? Because it's really impressive, and it's just it's definitely like a constant when I've read you that stands out to me over time. I don't know when I started having this sort of attitude about life. My mom would tell you when I was a little kid, I was fussy and crappy, which is sort of hard to believe now, But at some point something switched. I don't know if I can't pin it on one thing in particular, but for a long time I've just been struck by the fact that what you think about and what you focus on makes such a difference in how you feel. So you can choose to focus on what's negative, which I don't even think you have to choose to focus on what's negative, right, because we really are programmed as humans to find the things that are negative. We notice them, we notice danger, we notice things they're upsetting to us. So if we do nothing, that is what we will know, not by default. So if you want to change how you view life, then you have to be proactive about it, because you're not just going to automatically notice the good things that are in your life. So I don't know why it is that I realize this, but I understand that you have to be intentional about it if you don't want to just be down in the dumps about all the things that are going wrong. I love it, and there's definitely a connection between being satisfied with what you have and frugality. Can you talk about that a little bit? Oh yes, yes, for sure. I think that's how I got started talking about gratefulness and contentment on my blog, really as it ties in to frugality, because I realize that if you cannot be content with what you have at the moment, even if it's not very much, then you will also not be able to be content if your financial circumstances changed, because contentment is a state of your heart, it's not something your circumstances. Because all of us can think of people who have everything in the world you can imagine wanting, and they still are not happy because, as they say, wherever you go, there you are. So if you have a discontented heart, that will be there no matter what your circumstances are. But if you can cultivate contentment and gratefulness, then you can be just as happy on a little as you can on a lot. And I think there's such freedom in that because then your state of mind is not so tied to your circumstances, and a lot of times your circumstances are out of your control, so I figure you might as well have a contented attitude about whatever is going on. I love that so much. Okay, even though I'm going out of order, I would like you to go back and talk a little bit more about what I spent what we eat, because I am obsessed with that column. Talk about how, like specifically, what you do with that and how maybe it's informed choices over the years, and then also a little bit about your challenges you've done to clean out the various parts of your freezer. Oh yes, So I've done menu posts for most of my blogging years, but maybe all about five or six years ago, I kind of switch things up, so instead of posting my menu plan for the coming week, I post it in reverse, so at the end of the week, I post what we actually ate. The main reason I did this is that I feel like menu plan posts can be a little bit aspirational, Like it's easy to write down all these lofty goals for what you're going to cook and what your family's going to eat, but sometimes those plans go awry, and so I thought it would be helpful for people to see what actually happens, because I could write down, you know, we're going to eat a salad every night, where something virtuous like that, and it might not happen, or it's easy for me to plan to cook every night, but then sometimes we end up getting takeout. And so I felt like it serves people better if I am more honest about what's going on rather than posting something sort of pie in the sky and aspirational. I think it's super useful, and it's interesting to see how trends change, like when your kids have had more activities and they're doing more social things, and how those natural, you know, variations are going to change how a family dinner might look. So that's really cool. And then what about your freezer clean out? And I think we will have to link to when you did this, because I found this such a fascinating concept. I've never tried to do it myself. I would really like to do it, and you did it like with style, I guess I tried. Yeah, so freezers can be really helpful when you're trying to fight food waste, but if you're not careful about managing your freezer, then the freezer can just be a pit stop on the way to the trash. You can throw things in there and then forget about them until they really are trash. So I have a chest freezer, which I adore, but things can get kind of lost in there, and I wanted to defrost it a couple of years ago. So I decided we were just going to eat everything in the freezer. But that's too overwhelming to do all at once. So I would take just one section of the freezer per week, and then I would take a picture of the things that were there, and then over the week I would try to incorporate those things into my meals, and then at the end of the week, I would report and say, okay, I use these five things, and then I've got a couple more left here, and over enough weeks I did eventually empty out my whole freezer. It was a big accomplishment when that finally happened. I mean, it was impressive because you had some exotic things and they're like, I don't even remember that many specifics, although I do think you made a lot of butternut squash rolls, but yeah, you were like, all right, I have a million sprinkles, Well we're going to make a cookie decorating day, and like, you know, you found like that one thing that you could possibly do with it, and You're like, you know what, we might eat a little repetitively this week, but the freezer is going to get empty. And I just thought that was so such a different way of looking at things, and I don't know, I loved it. Sometimes people do freezer challenges and they make a rule that they can't buy anything else until they use up the things in the freezer, and I just think there's no reason to torture yourself that way. So whenever I do fridge or freezer clean outs, I give myself permission to buy whatever I need to make the freezer contents into a palatable meal, Like, there's no point in suffering unnecessarily. Yeah, that seems like a little bit beyond what I would be up for, So that makes sense. Okay, we are going to take a quick ad break and we will be right back. Okay, we are back. So I want to pivot a little bit and talk a little bit about homeschooling. So that's something I'm interested in. You know, how you made the choice to do that, and also how it's really changed over the years from having really really young kids did then much older kids in like high school and college level classes. Yeah, I actually was homeschooled myself back in the eighties when homeschooling was super weird, so I knew that I wanted to homeschool my kids from the start. So it really wasn't a very hard decision for me. And because I was homeschooled myself, I had such a good idea of how things work in the homeschool world. It wasn't as overwhelming a decision as I think it is for first generation homeschoolers. So yeah, when I first started blogging, I had a couple of kids that were school age, and then for a lot of my blog I have had all four kids that I was homeschooling at one time, So that was that was pretty intense for a couple of years there. But you know, everything comes to an end. I have my older who are graduated now, and then Sonya, my eighteen year old, she will graduate this spring, and then Zoe, my youngest, she will graduate next spring. So I've been homeschooling since two thousand and that stage of my life is coming to an end now. Wow, And it must be incredibly different now than it was, let's say, ten years ago. Does it take up a lot less of your time and involvement. Is it more on autopilot or is there still a lot that you feel like you have to manage actively? Oh? Yeah, for sure. The younger years of homeschooling are a much more intense time, especially if you have a couple of kids who don't know how to read yet, because then they really can't work independently. So yes, much more labor intensive when they are younger. Once they know how to read and they can do some more independent work, then the work for me became so much less. So their subjects have gotten harder as they've gotten older, Like correcting kindergarten or first grade math is not as hard as correcting algebra two lessons, but still it's less hands on time. So yeah, I would say in a lot of ways, it does get easier as they get older. Okay, well, that's good to know. You just made the decision to go back to school yourself, and I can imagine only having your kids being a bit older allowed you to have the bandwidth. So can you talk a little bit about that choice, like what motivated you, what it's been like to make that big pivot a little bit later in life. And most people are used to being students yeah, I definitely would not have been able to do this when all four of my kids were great school age. There would not have been space for me to be a student too. So I got married young and I had my kids young, and one day I realized, I'm only going to be forty five when my youngest kid graduates from high school. And I had always thought, oh, if I had a second lifetime, it would be fun to be a laboring delivery nurse, because I felt so blessed by the laboring delivery nurses when I had my kids, And when I realized, wait, I am kind of going to have a second life after my youngest graduates from high school. Usually there's a lot of life left after your forty five. And two thousand and nine, my sister in law had a stillbirth and I was there to help her to take pictures, and I helped her through her labor and delivery, and that really made me start to think, you know, if I could do this for a family member, I probably could do this for other people too. So that's my drive. I would like to become a nurse and use the time that I have after my nest empties to be able to do something that's meaningful in the world. So right now, I'm just doing prerequisites and I'll join the nursing program after my youngest graduates from high school. You say, just doing the prerequisites, but you should not have a just in there, because I am watching what you're doing and it looks like a lot like you are a forty something year old person taking anatomy and like chemistry and all that. What has it been like to do that? And do you think that the fact that you homeschooled has helped because you still have familiarity on certain subjects that you otherwise would have left behind decades ago. What's a little nervous going back because I hadn't been in college since nineteen ninety seven, and when I went back to school, almost all of my classmates are young people like I could be their mom. They're the ages of my kids. And at first I kind of wondered, am I too old to remember all of these things? But it's been okay. I'm keeping up with my younger classmates. The first class I took, Sonia and I actually took biology together. She said, well, we should take a class together, So we did biology and I'm working through anatomy and physiology. So I'm so thankful that my forty something year old brain is able to keep up with all my young classmates. I think, you know, maybe my memory is not as good as it was when I was twenty years old, but I think that there are some advantages to being an older student, like that I know myself better and I know how I learn better. My prefrontal cortex is fully developed, so I can probably make some better decisions about time management and study techniques and such. So yeah, overall, I would say it's been a very good experience. Plus I'm choosing to be there. I think sometimes when you go to college right after high school, you're just like, well, this is the next chapter of life, and now I will go to college and then I will get a job. But for me, I'm doing this because I really want to and because I made this career decision when I was older. It's a really I'm doing it out of a desire. This is something that I'm really interested, something I really want to do, so I'm motivated. I think that is so cool. It does not surprise me at all that you're forty something year old Breen because is doing well. Because Yeah, it's so interesting. We might have like certain differences in like working memory or like reaction time, but we're so much wiser. We are going to figure out so many more creative workarounds. We have different experiences. You as a homeschool teacher know all about like different ways of learning and can apply that knowledge. And what you said about the prefrontal cortex is so true. I even think back to like med school and I'm like, hmm, I wonder if I could do it better now? Probably, I mean, who knows. Maybe, Yeah, that's super super interesting. I will say I had I had some like co students and who were older, and they usually did amazing. They were usually like the best students because they were the most serious, the most single minded, and I think there's like a wiseness that comes out of it. Oh, I know what I was going to share. I heard a Freakonomics MD episode recently that talked about how, now this was specific to doctors, not nurses specifically, but they measured performance in terms of like patient outcomes by age, and they were surprised. They were expecting it to kind of be like, I don't know, like a like an upside on U shaped curve where you have some peak maybe mid career, and then it falls. They actually found that the doctor's performances improved like almost literally until they were almost like seventy and then they did decline a bit. But like, wow, we have the capacity to learn and grow, probably a lot farther into our lifespans than we maybe gave our ourselves credit for. And there's something you said for experience, which you absolutely have more than some of your twenty year old classmates. So I think, yes, so cool that you did that. I do wonder if the homeschooling has helped me, because I've been swimming in education since two thousand and four, and so you know, I'm completely not overwhelmed by like the math that we have to do in our classes, and some of my fellow classmates are feeling a little overwhelmed by it. But you know, I've been not just a student of math, but I've been teaching math all of these years, and so I feel like I can handle whatever they throw my way. I love it. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I mean most I haven't looked at those when I'm already shocked. Like my oldest child is in fourth grade, I'm like awaiting the year when I'm having trouble helping her with homework and I feel like it's sooner than I want to admit to myself. But since you would have done it the whole way, there was never that moment because you're like, well, I'm still doing this and it's still working out. So yes, exactly, if I had to jump in in algebra two out of the blue, that would have been a problem. But I started with my kids in kindergarten then I've just been gradual ever since. So yeah, that's much easier than trying to jump in at a later date. So I guess the lesson to those of us who aren't homeschooling is keep involved in your kids homework. Don't expect to just jump in tenth grade or you're really going to have trouble. Make sure you kind of know what they're doing in third grade, and just for sure follow the pathway a little bit. Oh that's so interesting. So going back to school as an adult has worked out for you, How do you are you able to balance it well with your parenting at homeschooling and blogging? Now? Are are there new challenges with having all these plates in the air to some degree. Yes, what I find about parenting older kids, especially girls, maybe it's true if you have a bunch of boys, maybe not. But a lot of the parenting that you do is listening, listening to their troubles, empathizing, being there for them. And that's something that can be done at many different times of the day, in many different ways. And so it's a little bit more flexible type of parenting than it is when they're three years old and they need you for specific things at specific times, and so yeah, I feel like I am still able to be there and listen and help them do their troubles. My twenty one year old, she has me listed in her phone as mom Help, like that's what my name is in her phone. So I'm assuming she feels like I will be there for her when she needs some help with something. And since they're older, you know, they are more self sufficient, and they all think it's awesome that I'm going back to school. Yes, mom, go get it. We're so proud of you. And sometimes they help me with my flash cards for things. And because schooling is somewhat flexible too, because I mean, obviously I can't be there for them when I'm in class, but doing homework is flexible, and blogging is flexible, so I can drop what I'm doing if one of them is having a crisis with their friends or something, and I can help them work through it and then do my work some other times. So I'm very lucky that the work that I do is so flexible. And it's partly flexible, probably because you manage it well, because if you left things to the last minute, they would become far less flexible. But you, as a parent know that you have to build in that buffer because you can't be like, well, clearly, I'll have time to do this Wednesday night, because some kid might have some need at that time. So I think, yes, I think you're give yourself credit. You're probably creating your flexibility to some extent. Yes, And when you have older kids, some of the time you spend taking care of them is like taking them to appointment and then waiting for them while they're there, taking them to an activity and waiting for them while they're there. And so because blogging or homework can be done flexibly, I just make sure I use those bits of time for something. So we had to go to a class the other day, and I have three hours to kill, so I just went to Panera and I brought my school books with me and I did a whole bunch of craaming for my exam that way. So I think there's always, at least in my life so far, there's always been little bits of time that I can take advantage ob if I know what I need to do. And in frugal Girl fashion, you used up a gift card that have been languishing in I'm a loyal reader. I love that. I was like, oh, a dollar thirty seven. Good job. That's a very good deal for three and a half hours of study time. I figured, yes, I love that. Well. We always share a love of the week on our podcast, and it can be absolutely anything. It can be a concrete thing, a book, a movie, the type of weather, it can be anything. And I will give you a minute to think of yours while I share mine, which is going to be very basic and silly. But I'm very obsessed with Spindrift right now. Like I just found out that Costco sells it in very large boxes and apparently they go on sale, and that would probably be more ru and buying it at full price at Costco but it's still better than buying it somewhere else, for you're only getting a few of them, and I just love it. It's better to me than like Lacroix, which is my old love. It just tastes more like a treat, but it only has one gram of carbohydrate and four calories from lime juice, so it's awesome. I love it. I have never tried spin drift. I've tried the oldie version and I've had some of the La Croix ones, but I've never tried spin drifts. So maybe I will need to say that my love of the week that is probably going for walks in the woods. There's some trails near here that I was just discovered in the woods, and I love going out there in the mornings and exploring seeing the green come out because it's springtime now, and to seeing how the woods change every week. It's really great. And I don't know. I wouldn't say that I'm hardcore introvert, but there definitely is a part of me that likes my quiet time, and I love mornings and I like being outside. So an early morning walk by myself in the woods it just really HiT's a lot of my favorite things all in one. I love it, and you share pictures sometimes and it does look very peaceful. And I personally enjoy seeing all the different seasons because I don't get to experience them, so I can get them vicariously through your site. Oh yes, yes, that's true. I do love this switch of seasons that we have here in the mid Atlantic. Just about the time you think you can't take one more day of hot weather, then it's cool, and just about the time you think you can't take one more great cold winter day, it starts to be spring. So yeah, I love the switch of things here. Oh it sounds so lovely. I kind of miss it. Well, tell our listeners where they can find you and read all about your adventures, as I and Laura I believe, have been doing for many years. Yes, so the main place you can find me is at my blog, which is called the Frugal Girl, and I'm also on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram, and in all of those places I am just the Frugal Girl, so I'm really easy to find. You did really well shortening your URL from the really long one. You must have been quick to get the Frugal Girl, So that's awesome that you did that well. There wasn't much competition for URLs back then, so I don't even remember the process of coming up with the name for my blog. I don't think I thought about it for very long. But it was better than my first effort, for sure. I love it. Well, Thank you so much for coming on, Kristin. This was so much fun. Thank you so much for having me. All Right, we are back. That was such a lovely conversation. I want to hang out with Kristin again in real life maybe. So we are back with an interesting question. Oh my gosh, it's a long question. Do you want to try to summarize or do you want me to? You can go for it. You're a good summarizer. Okay, I'll try to summarize. So this listener says that she was sharing a conundrum with her husband, who said, you should really ask Laura Vandercam. So here we are. I think she wants to ask Sarah too, because that's why it's coming in down the blog. But after having her first child, she went back to work. She found both of us and she thought it was empowering and incur urging her travel heavy job. It wasn't something she wanted to do so much travel, but she negotiated her way out of that and still got a promotion. She continued all of her extracurriculars like exercise, volunteering at church, book club, lots of quality time with her kids, so she was, you know, very much, we can have the best of both worlds. Fast forward a few years. She welcomed a second child in October. She just went back to work this spring and is struggling a lot. The first week she thought for sure she would quit. It got a little better, but now she's accepting that she is in survival mode, and she says, can I still have it all with two sweet boys instead of one? And bringing this up to my therapist, she says, in a hushed tone from the pump room. The other day, she's explaining that she really doesn't want to be home full time, but the therapist said so matter of factly that maybe she can't have it all, and she used the word heartbreaking. Our listener has been thinking so much about accepting she can't have it all anymore. In some ways, it's liberating, perhaps so, but it also feels defeatist. So she says, I don't know what to do. The margins of my days with kids feel too small to squeeze in quality time, especially when I'm breastfeeding. I haven't jogged in weeks. I can't go to the gym at lunch anymore. I'm too tired to read. I'm logging into work after the kids go down, can't catch up with sleep with the baby oup half the night. So do I try to do I just throw in the towel, or what do I do? So hard? This is a very hard stage for you. I'm sort of annoyed that. I think both of us are a little sad that she made such a prescriptive almost statement. I yeah, therapist, Yes, the therapist. I mean, even though she didn't tell you what to do, she was kind of like, well, your dream may not be possible, which I mean, to some extent is certainly true. There is no what is all of it anyway? Right? Like you can't do fifteen sports and also stay home and homeschool your children and also work as a corporate lawyer, and also you know what I mean, there is a limit. We had Oliver Berkman just a couple weeks ago, and there are only four thousand weeks in your year in which in your life, which to which yeah, that'd be good, and which to do these things. So it's true, I mean, we can't do everything, but you know, it all has taken on a different meaning in our society these days. So for her to say that, to some extent, I feel like what she was saying is, well, you can't enjoy a happy life and work and have babies. Or maybe that's just how I'm interpreting it and how you interpreted it. And to that, I say, this is a phase. This is a really hard time. The pumping months are, in my opinion, some of the very hardest parts of working motherhood, the worst parts. And just because things are very, very difficult to balance right now doesn't mean quote unquote the towel needs to be through. I mean you mentioned that. It might mean that you want to figure out some temporary you know, there's no one right way. Perhaps you do want to see if you can dial it down a certain percentage for the next few months, just because you're struggling so much and you are not getting asleep, Perhaps you could hire more help with the baby, like whether it's somebody to stay overnight with them, or you know, to get a little bit more free time because you mentioned not being able to work out, and I know that can affect my mental health, so figuring out how to fit that in could be important. And you know you can certainly trouble shoot these things, but nothing has to be all or nothing. And you also don't need to make decisions now in this incredibly tough time about like what you want work to look like as a parent for the rest of your life, because it's going to look so so so different in like just a few years, I mean even months, because you said even eight month olds, you may not be pumping in four months. So I guess I would just give you some encouragement that, like, you can allow some fluidity, but to really try to let go of the all or nothing thinking and the concept of it all in the first place, because it's kind of a silly trope to be Yeah, I mean, I would respectfully tell the therapist that this person should know better than to make broad pronouncements like that. I mean, the first months back at work are hard. Babies are hard, especially if they are not only children. But you know that's true for say it home moms too. It's not like it's easy for them and One of my pocket phrases is don't draw too broad a conclusion, And I think that is especially true with rough patches like pumping and being back at work. You don't have to decide that no one can have it all. Like that doesn't have to be your decision, Like you don't have to look at all these points of evidence and decide ergo, no one can have it all. What you can decide is that the next few months are not going to be the easiest of your life. I think that's a conclusion you could draw. But that's not an overly broad conclusion. That's just saying, up, the next few months not gonna be that easy interesting, Okay, But you know, guess what, I have a great career and a beautiful growing family and things will get more sustainable soon. Pumping takes a lot of time, so it might help to simply look at what is doable now with that commitment you are making. And so, no, maybe you're not running every day on your lunch break, So what can you find three times during the week to exercise. I maintain anything that happens three times a week is a habit. So maybe you run on each of the weekend days and do one thing during the week, like evening or one day before work or one lunch. You know, you pump a little less. I don't know what do you want to do, but you know, just you could. You could do that, and then you're you're still exercising. Read for five minutes in a time on your kindle app while you're pumping or nursing. If you get through fifteen minutes of reading a day, that way great. Like, you know, that's exciting. I know from my own personal experience. When my youngest turns two, that time just takes on a new dimension because there's more space for for things like reading. I think she also needs to not get herself worked up on the spending one on one time quality time with each of the kids. Like the baby doesn't care the baby as long as you're like keeping them comfortable and fed, that's great. Your older child is probably a little bit more aware of it. But then that's a great opportunity for you to hand the baby over to someone else, be that your you know, your husband, friend, your you know caregiver, your parents, whatever, anyone who can help you, and then spend just a little bit of time with your older child. You know it doesn't have to be long, but like, you know, we're going to read a book together for ten minutes, or we'll build something with legos for ten minutes, and just entering the world for their little bit can make it a lot smoother. So you know, I said, I'm sure she's doing a great job. If you wouldn't like staying home, then don't make a decision to do that when everything is at its hardest. And hey, you know, maybe each kid has a little less time with mom, but they'll be buddies with each other. That's certainly how I feel with five kids. I hope sometimes they're more buddies than others, but hopefully that will be better as they get older. And I'm oh, she wrote back. She wrote back, Yes, yes, I was just going to say one more thing, which because she mentioned exercise, and because she's eight months in right or maybe six I think she had a five months maternity leave and then it's like one months back in. Okay. I mean, unless you really really need exercise from a mental health standpoint, it might be freeing for you to just be like I will start exercising when I stop pumping, because that these occupy the same chunk of time and you are going to substitute it for the other. Yeah, exactly, and nothing will be You know, this is me who, like I would have had a hard time accepting that, but like myself now is like, oh my god, that would have been a smart idea because you could get more sleep and like you can get your fitness back later. And as I've told myself previously, like you're not training for the Olympics anyway, so like, who cares. So I'll just throw that out there. I'm giving you permission to be lazy from an exercise standpoint for the next six months. Yeah. And she wrote back, and she said she liked that pocket phrase of don't draw too broad a conclusion, refanming that she might not feel in balance in this season, but that this season won't last forever. Feels obvious, but also felt out of reach. She said, per your email, I ran both weekend days, so that's great. So she got in some exercise and is trying something out where she reads for twenty minutes after the kids go down before she does anything else, like so before she gets too tired to read, so that she's getting that in. She says that packing lunches or work emails or hanging out with her husband can happen after she clocks that twenty minutes of me time. So that's great. I love that she's doing that. And she also I had mentioned that she felt like she wasn't spending enough time with her kids, and I said, you just spent five months round the clock with your kids. I forgot that. I mentioned that in my response, and she said, you're right. I clocked in a ridiculous amount of time with both kiddos over the maternity leave. So let's give ourselves some credit for that. If that now feels a little bit more stretched. You were also just sort of paying into that account quite a bit over the past six months or so. So she liked that, and that's great. I'm glad that that was helpful to her. So anyone else in that rough patch of life shout out to you going through it, recognized that it is tough. It is very tough to be back at work, especially after subsequent children, as you're dealing with the older ones as well. But it will get better, it will get easier, and it's good not to make too broad a conclusion when maybe you just need to get through the next few months and figure out what you can do to make life sustainable. Well, this has been best of both worlds. Sarah interviewed Kristen of The Frugal Girl. That was a great interview. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.