Half Time!

So it's been about 6 months into our life experiment! Yay, half-way done with the year. And June just flew by. It was a busy month and I can't believe we're wading into the deeper end of July. My workload increased so we hired a part-time nanny, which just makes me feel old saying that. It doesn't seem that long ago that I was the babysitter.

Our baby turn ONE YEAR OLD!! Unbelievable. I feel like we *just* had a newborn, and now we have a toddler. Well, a pseudo-toddler since he refuses to do any unaided toddling. We had an awesome birthday party with awesome friends and family. We asked on the invitation for people to consider bringing imperishables for the local food pantry instead of presents. (Poor baby- but he doesn't know any better yet!) He still got quite a few gifts, but our food pantry donation idea was a success! This was our little way to force some of our rules on friends and family, who apparently like to watch us do it, but don't like to participate in general.

To review the last 6 months, I think we've stuck to our rules pretty well. I will admit I may have wandered too close to the dollar bins at Target (they sing a siren song to me...) and we have on occasion bent a rule to fit in something we needed. Grill cover? Sure, that's "something for the upkeep of the house." New dog bed? Well, where the heck do you find a decent used one?? Gross. Storage containers? I did look online. No luck! And how else do I store all the baby clothes? I won't even begin on the amount of new stuff bought to rebuild our deck (again, upkeep of the house, right?). And we totally went off our rule book for our trip to Japan. So maybe we could have done better, but we could have done a heck of a lot worse. We have not purchased new clothes, new books, new movies, new home decor, etc. We have borrowed, found, fixed, and bought used a lot of things that last year we would have bought new. So half-way through I say not too shabby! I just need to be prepared for 6 more months.