My Frugally Green Journey – Learning to Live Frugally

Kaelyn in a Fuzzi Bunz cloth diaper at 3 months

A few weeks ago I started sharing the story of my journey toward living green and living frugally.  Last time I told you about where my hubby and I started from, and the changes that began when I became pregnant, and then continued after the birth of our beautiful daughter, and I had switched to using homemade and green cleaners, and using cloth diapers on her.

One thing that I didn’t talk about in the previous post, but have been thinking about the last few weeks as I’ve thought more about my story and my journey, was that when I was pregnant I decided that I really wanted to have a natural birth. I was blessed to give birth naturally to Kaelyn, and it was one of the most amazing and empowering experiences as a woman and a mother; it gave me strength and courage to tackle natural parenting in many other areas. And now I’m pretty passionate about encouraging other mamas to have natural births as well.

I also committed to breastfeeding Kaelyn, and I know sometimes this is a hard topic for some women, but I really believe that breastfeeding is one of the most frugal, natural and green parenting decisions you can make.  Beginning my parenting journey with a natural birth and breastfeeding were other steps that started me on this journey toward a more natural lifestyle.

So, we were a happy little family of three, cherishing the time we had together as a family because my hubby worked long hours at a car dealership.  As I mentioned before, we had begun to make a few changes in our lives, but overall, still did not really have either a frugal, or a green, mentality.

Then in January of 2008, when our daughter was just 2 1/2 months old, my husband was suddenly let go from his job, and was unemployed for 3 months. Looking back now, we know that it was a blessing in disguise, but at the time it was really shocking and a big blow to us as a family, emotionally and financially.

We clung to God during that time, even though we didn’t understand what was happening.  We believed that He had a better plan for us and that he would provide for us.  When my husband finally found a new job, one that he loves and is a much better situation and fit for him than his old job, we were excited.  But because his salary was less than half of what he had been making before, we knew we were going to need to make major changes financially.

I dove in to learning how to live as frugally as we could. I read blogs and websites about frugal living and started trying to play the coupon game.  But there were some aspects of the frugal living mentality that just didn’t sit well with me.  As we also learned to buy things used, reuse and re-purpose, and save resources, like energy and raw materials, in order to save money, I began to realize that many things that were good for our budget were also good for the planet.

God really worked in our lives during this time to cause us to see that they way we were living before was not how He wanted us to live.  He began to really change our hearts and our minds towards a new way of living.

What were the first steps you took on your journey to living green and living frugally?  Were there certain events in your life that lead you in that direction?

Coming next week:  Combining living frugally with living green and deciding to start blogging about living “frugally green”.

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