Questions and Answers

On my last Frugal Friday Tracy posed a question:

You always accomplish so much and save so much money. Were you like this back in the day when you worked outside the home?

I thought about this for quite a while.  I've had several incarnations as a working mom...Was I productive and frugal as well in those periods? 

I had several part time positions, none of which were of particularly long duration and honestly I must say that I never noticed a substantial change in either income, debt reduction, or increase in my ability to be productive in those short forays.  When my two oldest were 9 and 5 I returned to the work world in a full time position.  My productivity at home fell way off and we didn't improve our financial lives either.

I was working full time as a single parent when I met Chance.  Homekeeping was low on my list of priorities a that time due to the combination of the aftermath of a car accident and a newborn. I had routine visits from a mystery housekeeping fairy.  I think Mama and Granny came down a time or two and I've reason to suspect the neighbors might have chipped in and hired a housekeeper to help out (it was the sort of neighborhood where doors were left unlocked and not unheard of to have such kindnesses visited up on you).  Chance helped me to establish some good habits like doing a load of laundry every single day (instead of my five or six loads on Saturday routine), and he introduced all of our kids to the chore list which was another huge help.

When Kay was about nine months old it was necessary to leave my job due to emotional burnout.  In the intervening nine months I honed my frugal homemaking skills a great deal and introduced a lot of money saving ways to my husband and family.  When I returned to work for the next three years it was that combination of frugality (though not as stringent) and the family keeping home that helped keep my productivity at home high.

Lisa asked:  Would you share your lasagna recipe with the cream cheese or is it already on your recipe blog?
There's truly no recipe to it.  I just make up a pan of lasagna and add bits of cream cheese broken off the block between layers along with the shredded mozzarella, romano cheese and dibs of cottage cheese.