This is quite belated, but I really enjoyed putting together my photo essay for 2020, so I decided it was time to do another year in review with pics.
You will see that several of these are professional-quality photos, if I do say so myself, and several look like I have never held a camera before. Most are somewhere in between. And I feel like that is a perfect representation of our life last year.
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The cost of medical care is always hot topic and I don’t like money being taboo, so I figured I would share the expenses we incurred having Baby T.
(Related: read about how we got ready for Baby J for under $350.)
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Every foster parent hears this comment at some point, often from very well-meaning acquaintances:
“I’ve totally thought about being a foster parent too!… But I’d get too attached and the kid might leave.”
*Massive internal sigh.*
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Well, four months somehow blew right by me since my last post. Not a strong start to the year with my goal of writing at least once a month, but here we are.
Full disclosure: our family life has been a hot mess – sometimes in a fun and energizing way, other times in a depressing and exhausting way. I offer the following as honest examples of what we’ve been wrestling with. All of this has gone down since the last time I posted (and this is far from a comprehensive list):
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Inspired by a lovely photo essay from my world-traveling bestie, I decided it would make me feel slightly less bummed about the poop fest that was this past year if I assembled something similar for myself.
In an effort to make this a positive venture, I have omitted photos of me at my office sweating in uncomfortable PPE, me wearing the same pair of stretchy pants day and night for weeks on end, and me crying in the garage with the lights off. But you can rest assured that all those things did happen, because this was 2020.
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After tracking our spending down the penny in 2018, I gave myself a break so we could focus on paying off my student debts, getting our business debt well under control, and finishing our first investment build.
(We still rely on the magic of the the non-budget when it comes to managing our spending.)
However, it’s still very important to me that we’re honest with ourselves about where our money’s going.
With December widely regarded as the most expensive month on the calendar, tracking our spending in detail this month seemed like a good call. With these numbers, we can do some quick comparisons to 2018 to get an idea what we spent in all of 2019 as well as solidify our financial goals for 2020.
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We’ve been backpacking with our now-teenager since he was 9 years old. And I’m talking about real wilderness backpacking in rugged terrain and extreme temperatures where you carry everything you need to survive, not “I did some walking in Europe with a backpack on” backpacking.
I put in 6 years of backpacking as a teenager myself back in the day, followed by an additional 13 years of backpacking as an adult (pre-munchkins). So hopefully that establishes me as reasonably qualified to dispense advice in this area.
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Remember that post I wrote about how we’re not selling everything to see the world? I admit that our plans for next summer sound a lot like we’re doing just that. But we’re not – we promise.
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We were able to score the following flights for super cheap this summer (with first class tickets roundtrip on the PHX-SEA portion):
In case you can’t see that image, our summer will include flights between FLG, PHX, ORD, YVR, and SEA – basically a giant triangle around the U.S. mainland with a little taste of British Columbia thrown in.
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