The fellow student that split the intership with Mike graduated with his masters degree and left to pursue other jobs, leaving Mike open to be hired full time. He was offered a salary position, which we gladly took and in January moved to Brigham City to be closer to work so Mike didn't have to travel the canyon in the winter.
I loved the small town but only had a few options for shopping. We lived across the street from the Walmart there so I did most of my shopping there. There were times though that Smith's had some fairly decent prices, I would just watch the ads. We were doing great getting by on a new salary (a lot more than we were making). It was a sad day for me when I went to the health department and turned in my WIC packet because we didn't qualify anymore, but I new that now we didn't have to rely on government programs to get by we could do things for ourselves. So at the same time I was excited.
Then one day about the time my twins were 8 or 9 months old I had the overwhelming feeling that someone missing. I was such a strange and scary thought that someone wasn't there. I mentioned this to Mike and he said that maybe we needed to try for another child. I thought ok, we can start and have another a year from now. Well, Heavenly Father had other plans. By the next month I was pregnant again. I kind of scared and excited me all at the same time. I was going to have 4 kids under the age of 4. What were we doing? It obviously wasn't our choice, there was a greater power in charge of this that new I would be fine with this.
We decided that we needed to start looking for a home. We knew we could afford a mortgage now because of the new job and pay raise. We started looking for homes with 4 bedrooms so we had space for everyone and everything. I never realized how hard it was giong to be to find something. We found a home that was a twin home (connected to another home by the garage), which was on HOA property with no fences. We liked that the house was pretty much brand new and not that old, so we put an offer on it. There were a few things that we didn't like about it, like the bedrooms we split, two upstairs, two down, we couldn't have half our children downstairs, they were too little. And the fact there was no fence around our property, I couldn't just let the kids go outside and play when they wanted. We decided to back out of that one and keep looking. I was so frustrated thinking that we might never find what we want. I decided to start looking at homes that had 3 bedrooms with unfinished basements that we could add rooms to.
We found a house with a big backyard, all fenced in, with fruit trees, a garden area, sand box, and sprinkling system. There were 3 bedrooms all upstairs with a big family room and unfinished basement. It even had a walking cold storage. We were so excited and moved in as soon as we could. Little did we know that homeownership would cost more than the monthly mortgage.
We moved in when I was about 4 months pregnant. The ward was great and immediately Mike was given a calling. The bishop took pity on me and wouldn't let me have a calling being pregnant and having three other small children. Things were going well until Thanksgiving of that year. I woke Thanksgiving morning excited to spend time with my family. My parents were down from Idaho and we were going to spend time with them. It was quite fortunate that they were here with us, because I started bleeding that morning and called the hospital just for them to tell me to come in and be monitored. My parents were more than happy to stay with the kids.
Mike and I went down to the hopital and they monitored and checked me to see what was going on. I was only 29 weeks along and was in preterm labor. With my history from the last pregnancy they gave me something to stop contractions and got labor to stop. They did some kind of swipe test that determines if you will deliver in the next 2 weeks and it came back positive. They sent me home and said that my doctor would call me the next day but that I needed to take it easy. We went for Thanksgiving dinner with my mom's family and came home. It was nice to get away but I knew I needed to take it easy.
The next day my doctor called and said he wanted me to be on bed rest until further notice. I didn't know what to do. I had three small children that needed my help all the time. The oldest could help with some things, but he couldn't put the other two down for naps or feed them. I knew immediately I had to humble myself and ask for help, which is something I have a very hard with. I called the Relief Society president and told her what was going on. She made sure that I had women from the ward here each day to play with the kids and get them down for their naps. These women were such a blessing to me. I don't know what we would have done without them.
I was on bed rest and couldn't go out shopping and enjoy being out of the house, it quite depressing for me. Four weeks before my due date I couldn't lay at home anymore and I decided I needed to go shopping. So we went to Sam's Club where I got one of the motorized carts to go around the store, I was very embarrased, but couldn't do much walking. That was our shopping. Mike went to the store when we needed things, but most things were bought from Sam's in bulk. I don't remember much about what we spent at this time, but we were paying for insurance now and doctor's appointments were getting billed to us, which was a complete eye opener since we had never seen a bill before for our other children.
Our 4th boy was born 3 weeks early. Healthy and happy and was soon to be an important part of our family. We don't know what we would do without him.
When our youngest was about 6 months I felt like our budget was so tight with all the things we were trying to pay for, I felt like I needed to try to contribute where I could. Mike didn't really like the idea of me working and said that we really didn't need the extra money. I made the excuse that I just needed something for me. I decided to start selling Mary Kay cosmetics. I was the only girl at home and wanted some pink around. I wanted this to become a good source of income so bought the $2000 worth of inventory and started selling it. After a while I didn't feel like I was getting anywhere paying things, including my inventory, off. Mike said we could figure out how to work it into the bills and I decided to stop selling it a couple years later.
During that time, we decided we needed to finish the basement to allow our oldest to have his own room and also to provide me with an office to work in. We added two bedrooms to the basement and thankfully we did a lot of the work ourselves with the help of my dad.
After I decided to stop selling Mary Kay and just keep the discount fo myself and friends and family I new we still needed to save money but I didn't know how. Each year when we got a bonus from work we would add about $50 into our grocery budget because it just didn't seem to be going as far as we needed it to. It was around that time the a friend from church was telling me about coupon shopping. One of the other wards was having a class to teach you about it and said I should go with her. I went and got so excited when she had a display of items that only cost her around $2. I got so excited and signed up to get the multiple papers. I found a big zippered binder and bought the baseball card sheet holders. Every week I spend about an hour sorting the like coupons and cut them out and file them in this binder and then I would go to the store with this huge binder and see what deals I could find.
Most of my great deals I found at Albertsons, which is a store I swore I would shop at because they too expensive. Most of the things I was finding for good deals though were cereal, box meals, cake mixes and junk food that I knew we shouldn't eat. I didn't find household items all that often for sale. I did find toothpaste and toothbrushes for about 25 cents, so I was stocked on those, but not much else. I wasn't spending any less than I was before I started using coupons but I was getting more. I did this for about a year until Albertsons went out of business and I thought I wouldn't find as good of deals anywere else. I cancelled the papers and just started shopping at Walmart for almost everything, buying one thing at a time because groceries were so expensive.
We got to the point where we were going to up our monthly budget to $700 just so we could get the things we needed as well as food storage items. I still had a pretty stock up from doing coupons like cereal and toothpaste, so I thought we would be ok to buy things here and there. Then my stock up items started running out and I had to start paying full price for toothpaste. I can't believe how much toothpasts costs. It's rediculous!
To be continued...
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