I’d like to say a positive word here about cheap hobbies, and hobbies that make you money. I think they’re the best way to spend your time. There is a lot of joy in this world out for the taking, and most of it costs little to no money.

When I say hobbies that make you money, I mean things like knitting or crafting- but only if you use the item and make it for less than it costs to buy (in which case you’re saving money), or if you sell your completed crafts on web sites like Etsy. I paint and knit and am probably going to start making silk scarves and shawls to sell, so that my hobby that makes money. If you loved tinkering on cars, you could probably do well taking a class at a local community college or getting ASE certified in your spare time. A friend of mine went from being the most miserable person I knew to one of the happier by simply following his childhood dream and becoming a paramedic. He now volunteers on the weekends doing what he loves while keeping his day job, but he’s gotten several job offers from it and could easily make his paramedic work a second job.

One of my hobbies is my hair, and as far as hobbies go, it’s very cheap. When I am spending extravagantly on my hair, I might spent $20.00 a month. I think my top spending for my hair since I started growing it long was still less than $50.00, and that was the month I got all my flexi-8’s, which will probably last my natural life as I haven’t lost any yet, and they’re sturdy enough that when I got my happy concussion in the car accident by slamming my head with flexi-8, it didn’t suffer at all.

Joy is very important, and having fun is important too. If you’re just frugal and you have no fun, you’re probably going to try to go for the short-term entertainment. Short term amusement does little to bring a deeper sense of fulfillment or joy into your life, however. Getting your finances in order, while important, is a means to an end. If you mistake it for an end, when you get there you might feel like all your hard work and effort was for nothing. You might feel like you SHOULD be happy, but you just feel… hollow. Don’t neglect yourself to reach financial freedom. You can still increase the amount of genuine pleasure and joy in your life, by reducing the amount of time, money and effort you spend on things that don’t actually make you happy.

Here is a short and incomplete list of some cheap hobbies that might bring you a lot of satisfaction.

1. Hiking on local trails. Google will show you what’s available. Spending the weekend camping in the woods, or even taking a day hike and picnicking can be inexpensive and really fun.
2. Building something that’s just slightly outside your current range of skill. If you want to combine this with helping others, you can join habitat for humanity and work on houses.
3. Learning to do something you didn’t think you could do.
4. Repairing or fixing something that someone else had gotten rid of
5. Going somewhere and drawing pictures of people in a sketchbook. By the way, for you single folks, this is a great way to get a date.
6. Training for a sporting event like a local run, triathlon, or something that floats your boat.
7. Babysitting a friends kids, or doing something fun and unexpected with yours. Kids are hilarious.
8. Learn something that you can apply in your life.
9. Watching a course on iTunes U
10. Build a blimp, robot, or rocket in your back yard with instructions you found on Instructabless.
11. Watch the movies you always meant to get around to, or the books you always meant to read.
12. Learn to cook something you can’t currently cook.
13. Make a picture based treasure hunt, get your friends together, and send everyone off with a digital camera.
14. Host a potluck with friends you wish you saw more often.
15. Write handwritten letters to people you love that live far away.

Learning things, doing things, and going out in nature are all cheap, can be done with a friend, and can be deeply fulfilling. Connecting with people is way more fun than collecting things. Just remember that there is a multi billion dollar campaign out there that is trying to convince you that you need to spend money to be happy. That’s a lie- figure out what fills you up! For me, I’ve found a lot of unexpected pleasure in learning to keep my house nicely and clean (let’s just say that finding out I liked to clean more than I liked going to movies or spending money was a shock), and learning to bake. I love learning new things, and there really is a lot of fun in deciding to make a special meal, going grocery shopping for fresh ingredients, and cooking it for someone you care about. Throw in a couple of taper candles and a CD of snazzy music and you’ve got a date night. Throw in a cake and you’ve got a birthday party or a celebration. If cooking isn’t your thing, find another skill you can learn and go out and do it.

Saving money is good, getting out of debt is crucial, but never forget that it’s a means to an end. If you are making yourself miserable with your sacrifices, find something that won’t detract from your goals that makes you happy and do it. Life is too short, too beautiful, and too interesting to spend time bored

After reading all the fantastic blogs about doing your daughters hair I felt the need to feel pretty and be pampered myself. I have a few types of face mask left from helping a friend move, and a few face masks from various sales I’ve picked up, so I did two. Hubs noticed a difference, and my face feels better.

I have very dry skin and very sticky face-oil, so what little oil my skin makes does not get pushed onto the surface, like with regular skin, but rather sticks on the inside of the pores and gets dark. On my nose, that goes so far as to create blackheads, and elsewhere I’ve just been getting coarser and coarser pores, which blows. I know the cheap answer to that (aspirin face masks) but ran out of Aspirin a while ago, and when I ask Hubs to get some he keeps returning with ibuprofen, which doesn’t cut it.

To clear your skin up, take one to five of the cheapest aspirin you can get (you want the coating to be thin) and put a few drops of hot water on them. After they start to crumble, you can mix it with aloe gel (it will get watery) and apply it to your face. The gel will form a sticky mask and the aspirin won’t fall off. If you don’t have/like aloe (which I ALWAYS have on hand- between the amount of cooking I do and how easily I get sunburned, I need it regularly) , some people swear by honey but I find it maddeningly itchy.

Wash your face with a flannel washcloth and warm to hot water. Aspirin is acetylsalicylic acid. Salicylic acid it the ingredient in all the expensive anti acne face goop, it’s a great exfoliant and makes your skin silky soft.

Another cheap treat is to pour some powdered milk into a bathtub with a couple of hand fulls of aspirin tablets. The aspirin and the lactic acid in the milk exfoliate your skin gently, and the natural fat in the milk stops this process from drying your skin out way too much. Soak for as long as you can take it, and then rub yourself all over with a scratchy washcloth. Rinse in a shower and cover yourself with a thin layer of oil- olive oil will work, but I prefer jojoba or grape seed oil. Put a little extra oil on your feet and put on socks and  your feet will be lovely that evening. This makes your skin incredibly soft and lush and wonderful, and the last time I did this Hubs kept chasing me around the house to pet me. This was cute at first but after two days I started to get annoyed!

Anyway, those are my favorite cheapy little indulgences that really seem to make a huge difference on my dry, easily irritated skin. A little splash of oil wiped over damp skin is waaay cheaper than the expensive non-scented, anti allergenic lotions I can find (half of which STILL make my skin break out or do something horrible). I think, combined, everything ends up costing less than .20 for this little luxury, which helps me not feel deprived and then spend on something stupid like… um, clay based face masks on sale.

It looks like things are moving forward nicely for B and the Kiddo to move in with us. This puts me in a little bit of an interesting situation.

I’m legally Boy Kiddo’s stepmom, but due to incredibly painful and convoluted custody issues, he does not actually know this, nor will he until this summer. We are still in contact with him, but irregularly and it’s frustrating and heartbreaking, on everyone’s side. Boy Kiddo also has a Mom already, and I have no idea what the hell the Male Child will call me- I’m not his aunt, which is my usual name with kids, but if anything involving the word Mom or Mommy comes out of his mouth involving me, his bio mom will flip her gasket.

Girl Kiddo has a relationship with her bio mom, even though B has custody. She visits her bio mom every other weekend. I almost cried when B asked me to co-parent his daughter because frankly, that means a hell of a lot more coming from him than most proposals I have seen. The Girl Child and I get along fantastically and well before I’d even met her I was thinking of her as my kid.

To clarify a bit: I called several of my friends mothers Mom when growing up, and one of them I’m still close too and call Mom regularly. To me, being a mother has jack and shit to do with biology, and it’s all about being there, kissing boo boos, making sure homework is done, cooking, sewing, and putting money away in college funds for the kids. It’s about thining about what’s best for them now, figuring out how to bring about their talents, supporting their intersts, and using your adult perspective to try to smooth the path they want to walk on. It’s about providing for them now, but also providing for their future. As soon as I started thinking about science summer camps and baseball for the boy child, and enrichment activities for the girl child, I became their parent. They became my kid. Boy child is my son and girl child is my daughter.

I won’t be called anything like, oh this is my Dad’s new wife, or this is my Dad’s girlfriend. Both of those focus on the relationship between me and their fathers, which quite frankly has nothing to do with them. While that’s a connection we share, it’s not the primary one. I’m sure as hell not going to be giving up delicious Mojitos to put money in the college fund of a kid who just happens to have sprung from my current shag partners loins. I’m not going to give up sleep or worry about caring for a child who’s just a non-primary partners kid. Sure, I can be friends with the kid and help out from time to time, but that’s not the same thing as being a parent at all.

So, when trying to define a parent-child type relationship what do they call me? I’m going to leave it up to them. If they want to call me Mom that’s fine with me, and I hope it does not cause drama with my partners ex’s.

The trick is given my warped decidedly unconventional feelings about what makes a family, I don’t see any problems with a kid having 6 moms, or none. Love is what makes a family, the decision to come together and reach for goals together, and the people you choose to have as your family are just as much your family as the people you meet who happen to share genetic material with.

I’m so excited to start this new part of my life. I’m looking forward to finding out what sort of name the kids come up with for me. I just hope that it does not cause a problem.