Shifting Priorities

Piggy-backing yesterday's post, I wanted to discuss how priorities and goals change in different seasons of our life.

The Back-story
When my husband and I were first married, we were both students, both working part-time. Just before our second anniversary, I finished my bachelor's degree approximately one month before our first child was born, and quit working when I was about 6 months pregnant. We had decided very early on in our marriage that I would be a SAHM when children joined our family. This put a lot of stress on my husband as the sole bread-winner, while he was still in school. He started working 30 hours per week, while still attending school part-time. Finances were still very tight though. When our second child made a surprise appearance almost exactly a year after her sister, the budget became stretched very thin. It was my job as SAHM to find a way to make the budget work.

When our first daughter was born, we were gifted a year's supply of diapers from a grandparent. That year's supply ran out the same time our second was born, and suddenly we had to pay for two kids in diapers. After a few months of that financial stress, I decided to try cloth diapers. With our limited funds, I could not afford fancy diapers, but after discussions with some friends, I was able to start us off with a cheap supply of cloth diapers. With the money I was now saving by not buying disposable diapers, I started slowly buying fabric and putting my sewing skills to work by making fancier diapers. By the time our third daughter was born 19 months after our second, I had a good supply of cloth diapers, and all three girls were cloth diapered full-time. Cloth diapering continued full-time even when our twins were born. I already had a good supply of diapers, and they were still in fairly good condition, even after going through 2-3 kids. I did have to sew a few extra diapers, since I hadn't originally made enough of the smaller sizes to accommodate 2 kids in the same size together.

The Shift
When the twins were a year old, things started to change. My husband was now nearing the end of his Master's degree, and he had a well-paying full-time internship. Our boys were much bigger than our tiny girls had been, and some of the larger diapers seemed to shrink a bit over time. The largest sizes I had made, which fit my oldest when she was 3, were now very snug on my one year old twins. I told my husband it was time to make some larger diapers, and I started preparing to source the material.

One night my husband was quietly listening to me ramble on about diaper fabric when he interrupted me. "Do you have time for that now?" he asked. This confused me a bit, so he elaborated. He explained that when we started with the cloth diapers, we were desperately trying to find a way to make our tight budget work. At the time, our finances were tighter than the demands on my time. Now, however, our finances were still snug, but the demands on my time were much greater. I no longer had two small children who napped consistently while I sewed... I had 5 small children, one of which I was teaching to read, and two of which no longer napped. He suggested that I find a way to fit disposable diapers into our budget again. We discussed our options and decided that it would be a better use of my time to cook from scratch more to save some money on our dining out budget, and then spend money on the bigger disposable diapers we would need for the twins.

Let it Go
Sometimes our priorities shift like this. It's not a bad thing. Life goes on. We should not live in the past, but rather learn from the past and recognize that the present is different. Just because we once thought it would be cool to own all 10 seasons of Friends on DVD, doesn't mean we have to hang onto them when we realize we don't want our children watching them and they don't fit in the DVD binders and the only other option is to put them in storage.

It's okay to let things go in favor of extra mental and physical space.