The Mom Crowd

At a recent dinner party I attended the husbands were lovingly razzing us Stay at Homes Moms, because we only call them at work to see if we can spend fifteen bucks at Target. One husband wondered out loud how a mom who “stays home” could use so much gas in one week. The wives and I retorted that they should be thankful for having such low maintenance wives and how in the big picture we barely spend money.

One mom and I realized that we don’t even wash our face with proper face wash, because we are so cheap. So this got me thinking about what other things make us frugal mamas.

Here are 10 signs that you might be a Frugal Mama:

1. You wear the same three pair of blue jeans over and over.

2. You love the little red stickers at Target.

3. You buy Easter and Christmas dresses for the next year on clearance the year before.

4. You check the Baby+Kids section of Craigslist everyday looking for deals.

5. You are up early on Saturday mornings hitting the sales in front yards.

6. You talk yourself out of buying the items you picked up while standing in the checkout line.

7. You brag about what you saved in coupons and sales after every trip to the grocery store.

8. You haven’t had a hair cut in six months.

9. You love the challenge of coming in under budget.

10. You don’t buy toys, because you wait for family and friends to buy them for you.

What makes you a Frugal Mama?

- photo courtesy of iChris.

This has been going around lately on blogs & such, and I couldn’t resist sharing it here.

Have you seen this?  What are your feelings after reading it?

As you can see The Mom Crowd has a new design! We are still in the process of tweaking it a bit.

I am super thankful for Cicily at August Afternoon Designs! She did a FANTASTIC job incorporating everything I wanted in the design. My husband and I put together the old blue design ourselves and it is great to have a professional to clean up our amateur work and make something gorgeous.

I would also like to thank, Daniel, my wonderful husband who is the genius behind Grow Development. He took Cicily’s design and made it reality. Not to mention he also upgraded my prehistoric version of WordPress.

Thank you Cicily and Daniel!!

I hope you all like our new layout!

I had a great time enjoying my maternity leave from The Mom Crowd. Thank you so much for all the guest bloggers that filled in for myself, McKenna, Dawn, and Amelia while we either having a baby, going on vacation, or going to Eastern Europe to bring home a new adopted member of the family!

I LOVE hearing labor and delivery stories and I thought I would share how my second delivery went in my first post back. I love how having a blog forces me to write out my story. I know years from now I am going to be glad I wrote this story.

Roman’s Birth Story

I woke up March 3rd at 5:41 a.m. with my first contraction. I was already dilated to 3 cm and the baby was in -1 station before my labor began. The day before my lower back hurt really bad, but I still went walking with my friend Barb around an outdoor mall here in San Antonio to help induce my labor. Looks like walking worked!

For the first hour my contractions were every 10 minutes apart. I woke up my husband after the first hour and he began to time them. I am super thankful that my 22-month-old daughter had Mother’s Day Out (MDO) that day and my husband managed to get her there on time. We also made arrangements for other people to take care of her the rest of the day after MDO. I laid in bed all morning watching t.v. in between contractions.

(more…)

In August 2008, our three year old son, Andrew, was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. For weeks he had been drinking tons of water, urinating much more than he was taking in and was eating everything in sight. We knew something was going on and when we got his diagnosis we weren’t really sure what we were up against.

The first week was awful. Andrew spent the first day after diagnosis in the ICU because his blood sugar had been so high for so long that he was in Diabetic Ketoacidosis and had to be stabilized. (Diabetic Ketoacidosis occurs when the body cannot break down glucose for energy and in turn starts to burn fat. Ketones are an acid that results from this fat breakdown and an accumulation of these acids in the body can be dangerous and at times deadly.) The following three days in the hospital were spent learning how to care for him once we got home. We learned how to check his blood sugar levels, how to draw up and inject his insulin, how to calculate how much insulin he needs and to recognize danger signs of lows and highs.

We did not get much support from those in our lives we had hoped and thought would be there for us. I realized that a lot of it was due to the fact that people just didn’t understand what we were really dealing with. So, in my attempt to educate people in order to prevent someone else feeling what we felt, I compiled this list of things I wish everyone knew about Type 1 Diabetes.

1. Type 1 Diabetes is an autoimmune disease in which the body attacks and destroys all of the cells in the pancreas that produce insulin. No one knows for sure what exactly triggers this autoimmune response, but it is currently not anything that can be prevented and is NOT caused by poor eating, lack of exercise or bad parenting.

2. INSULIN IS NOT A CURE!!! There is currently no proven cure for Type 1 Diabetes. Unlike Type 2 Diabetes (the more commonly discussed type), eating better and exercising won’t reverse it.

3. People with Type 1Diabetes will be dependent on insulin for their entire lives and must take it to survive.

4. Monitoring blood sugar levels is a must! Some people check their children’s blood sugar levels 10 or more times a day.

5. Exercise can cause high blood sugars or low blood sugars – and lows can happen up to 12 hours after exercise.

6. Children with Type 1 Diabetes CAN have things with sugar! In fact, they, like everyone else, need sugars to produce energy. While foods with rapid acting sugars like juice, candy and frostings are to be used sparingly, they can still be had.

7. Parents of children with diabetes NEED other people in their lives to learn how to monitor and care for their children in case there is an emergency or in the rare event they actually have a date night!

Please take the last thing to heart and when you hear of a family affected by Type 1 Diabetes don’t hesitate to ask questions and if possible learn the basics to help. The parents will love you and appreciate you more than you’ll ever know!!!