On our way!

My husband (let's just call him P-daddy) and I have been slowly slowly completing all the training and paperwork to become foster parents, and eventually adoptive parents. We've taken much longer than we had originally planned to get this going, but since we were doing it at the same time as we were moving to a new state, and thus transferring car registration and insurance, drivers' licenses, etc, plus I was in my first year at a new job, we didn't stress and took our time. As of this week, we think that everything has been submitted (okay, one more piece of paperwork that I'm going to drop off on Monday), we had our homestudy done, and we are hoping to be licensed in the next couple of weeks.

As we begin our foster care journey, we thought it would be good to start a blog that details how we are doing this, especially how we will do this on essentially a one-person income. And, it's mine, not my husband's :-) I'm a full-time prof at a local university, and he works the market, but from home. So he's the stay-at-home dad, and his income gets rolled back into (hopefully) creating whatever we'll need down the road, while we try to use only my income for our present needs.

While we are a one-income family, this fits us well, as we are both dedicated to living pretty simple lives, being comfortable, but not necessarily luxurious. I'm always looking for great deals and ways to make a dollar go a little further, and we are attempting to find more ways to reduce-reuse-recycle and be a little more environmentally friendly. This is an attitude that we also want to foster in our kids (foster, adoptive, birth, or whatever) - take care of your resources. That's what frugality is all about! Wikipedia says that frugality is "the practice of acquiring goods and services in a restrained manner, and resourcefully using already owned economic goods and services, to achieve a longer term goal." So, we are not only fostering frugally, but fostering frugality in the kids that will come through our home for the next x number of years.

Join us if you can for the ups, the downs, the cheap, the worth it, and the fun along the way!