And the homestudy has been submitted!

Earlier this week, we turned in the very last bit of paperwork we still had pending for our foster care license. Yesterday, Kristen, who did our homestudy, emailed to let us know that it had been submitted to our agency. This means that we should be completely ready, and will be licensed ASAP! yay - we are so excited!

Sadness already...

So our contact at the foster placement agency called this morning - I thought at first it was to let me know we were still missing something, but then she told me she was really calling to let us know that she is leaving the agency! Oh no! We've really enjoyed working with her, and we've had very little dealings with anyone else, so we are hoping this will not slow us down any. Hopefully, things will move seamlessly from one person to another...I'll keep you posted!

I love my Swagbucks!

One way that we've been slowly earning money to use toward larger purchases is using Swagbucks as our search engine. Over the last however long it's been since I signed up, I've earned enough points to get several things free or close to, including 2 huge boxes of Splenda, my mom's 70th birthday gift (this rooster doorbell), part of my dad's gps, and my latest: a carseat for our new fosterkid!

On SwagBucks, I typically always 'buy' a $5 Amazon card whenever I've earned enough SwagBucks (I average about 2 of these a month, with no effort at all other than using Swagbucks as my search engine). I had enough credit in Amazon cards to buy this brand-new carseat, and only pay $10! Shipping was free, because the order was over their $25 minimum, and we thought it was an excellent deal. Granted, we did not get the best one possible, but the reviews were decent, and we have not figured out why we should spend several hundred dollars on a Britax if a Cosco will do the job (no, we are not being unconcerned about child safety, just trying to make the best use of our resources - we have not been convinced that the higher-priced ones are really going to keep the baby safer if we are using them correctly).

Anyway, I highly recommend SwagBucks as an easy way to earn a few extra $ with little effort (but I'll caution you about using the special offers to try to earn extras - they are notorious for not paying out and you may spend a lot of time and effort for no reward whatsoever - take it from me, I learned from experience!). Just click the link below and sign up, and I recommend downloading the toolbar to make searching even easier.

Enjoy! And go get some SwagBucks!!

Stocking up...

One thing we've started doing is stocking up on things that we know we'll need as we start our foster care journey. We've started collecting clothes, thanks mostly to my awesome sisters Beth and Darrell, and we've started buying diapers. So far, CVS has been the place for this - we got a couple packs of Huggies at about $3.99 each a few weeks ago ($8.99 - $3 Q, plus $2 ECB back), which we thought was a pretty great deal. But then this week I got Huggies for only $1.49 a pack! Only one pack, but they'd been clearanced to $4.49 and I happened to have ONE (and only one) $3 Q left, so I used it, and got them super cheap. I also got the following items, mostly on clearance:

a 3-pack of wipes for $1.72
a bottle of baby powder ($0.75)
2 packs of q-tips ($0.99 each)
a bottle of shampoo (free with CVS Q)
2 packs of candy/gum ($0.33 after CVS Q)

All told, I spent $0.00 out of pocket (OOP) since I had some ECB's to use up. I didn't get any ECB's back, but I thought since we needed everything, it was worth getting all of it anyway. Besides, I did a survey for CVS and got a $5 ECB for it, so I'm still ahead of the game ;-)

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!