Being teachers with one and a quarter incomes between us, not to mention five young kids, pretty much means everything in life feels expensive while actual expensive purchases “just for us” are totally out of the question. While I sometimes daydream of what it would be like to be not skating by month to month, I’m equally grateful for the life and home we have and the fact that I’ve been able to stay home with our babies all these years. This is Wilson’s last year before starting Kindergarten and while I don’t know what life with five kids in full-time school holds for me and my work, I do wonder if some shifts are on the horizon for me that might ease some of that financial strain. 

All that said, we’ve still dropped some pretty pennies in this lifetime, one chunk on an experience via overseas travel and another chunk on an investment in our home via the form of a good old-fashioned, gray-hair-inducing, renovation project.

2008 was our first big spender moment when we decided to postpone a house project in our first home (redoing the front porch and steps which we eventually did before selling it a few years later) to spend three weeks traveling with fellow Doane alumni in Africa instead. I was lucky enough to get an entire semester doing that in college and the experience profoundly shaped my life. Being able to then share two of those same locations, Kenya and Tanzania, with Ben, and experience a new one, Rwanda, together profoundly shaped our marriage and was an excellent adventure to take prior to starting our family in 2009. 

While we did multiple safari drives and nature walks throughout our 2008 trip, the most costly ($500.00 per person) but also the most amazing was hiking up into Volcanoes National Park to seek (and, lucky us, find!) mountain gorillas in their natural habitat. The awe of observing and following them for a brief bit of time stays with me. It takes no effort to recall the gorgeous male silverback we saw snacking away on rainforest foliage or the mama with a baby clinging to her (foreshadowing much?!) as she ambled about the trees and sloped terrain. I remain forever grateful that we took that trip and spent our money on the travel and activities that helped open our eyes to new places and people while also learning more about each other and how to travel/work together as a team early on in our marriage. 

We needed that team mindset 10 years later when we embarked on a home remodel in 2018 after discovering that we couldn’t find any houses locally that were big/nice/affordable enough for our large family; this left us in the “stay-and-make-it-work-for-us” position of hiring contractors, busting down walls, and riding the roller coaster of all that comes with renovating an old house over the next 18+ months (COVID life did not help our wrapping up of the whole process but instead slowed us down even more as we tried to navigate pandemic life + having people in our house to finish projects). 

Turns out, a stay-at-home adventure can be much, much more expensive than one that takes you over an ocean, as we found out when extra “To do”s popped up along the way, like needing to tear out an extra shower/replace subflooring and then, oh yeah, ripping out and replacing our entire Hastings-classic (i.e. extra long) driveway and pouring all new concrete to protect our newly remodeled basement from water seepage. Concrete, it just so happens, is not cheap. Nor is putting in a bunch of new wiring and all new plumbing which we also did, but once you start, you can’t just stop unless you want to keep living out of your living room with no kitchen for the rest of your life instead just 9 awful weeks (with five little Littles) like we did. 

But now our house is gorgeous and functional and our driveway is so smooth, the kids can all ride bikes and scooters on it all the live-long day (which they do; Mama, too!). And even though we’ll be paying for it for many days (years) to come, this investment also feels worth it because our big family can really use darn near every square inch of our house now for living and being a family together which is of course the best adventure of all. 

*Post 18/52.