It All Adds Up

/ Quirky Girl

Sixty dollars?!?

Are you freaking kidding me?

I’m starting to think I should’ve encouraged my kids to drop out in kindergarten when I had the chance.

You see, when my oldest son was in kindergarten, he took a swing at a fellow classmate on the playground…

For not getting a turn on a swing.

Oh, the irony.

The ensuing suspension was clearly a sign that we should’ve quit while we were ahead.

At any rate…

I (half) jokingly offered to buy this now high school-aged child of mine two middle school yearbooks for the price of one $60 high school yearbook.

Good deal, right?

He respectfully declined.

Apparently, more is not necessarily more.

School is expensive.

And everything is exponentially more expensive once you reach high school.

It’s not enough to own a single pair of Nikes.

A child must cram a minimum of two extra pairs of shoes into his backpack every day.

Just in case Converse or Vans suddenly become more popular 2/3 of the way through the school day.

OMG!

Look at those shoes!

They’re sooooo 2nd period!

Uh, yeah.

Okay.

What do you mean your phone is soooo outdated?

Since when is last year considered The Dark Ages?

And everything has a fee.

Activity fees.

PTO fees.

Booster Club fees.

(What exactly is it that we’re boosting?)

Even volunteering comes with a price tag.

Along with the obligatory background check, they now insist on taking your full set of fingerprints.

In exchange for a cheerful mug that boasts the numerous virtues of volunteering.

I’m still not convinced that was a good trade-off.

Clothes are expensive.

Books are expensive.

You need money for what?

More school pictures?

More broken earbuds?

More pencils?!?

Again?

What the…

Did you eat that last batch?

Speaking of eating…

Food.

Oh my goodness.

The amount of food growing kids require is beyond belief, especially with those never-ending growth spurts.

What do you mean there wasn’t enough food in your lunch today?

What did you think- it was all just one big snack?

My mountainous cart is always one bag of cheese puffs away from overflowing and toppling over whenever I go grocery shopping.

There seems to be some unspoken challenge in our household for attempting to eat $200 worth of groceries right out of the bags.

Bonus points if they can pull it off in under 24 hours.

When are you going shopping again?

Sigh.

I’m seeing stars as money fails to conveniently drop out of the sky.

(On a positive note, I have been saving money recently while tripling my wardrobe in the process. My boys and I are currently close enough in size that some of their shirts fit me quite nicely.)

Money, money, money.

Down the toilet.

Along with my sanity.

Fluuuuush!

~Happy Saturday, my friends! Have a safe and happy weekend!~

Oh, if only money rained from the sky...

Oh, if only money rained from the sky…

38 thoughts on “It All Adds Up”

    • Haha! The good news is the eye twitching does ease up… usually at night, in the brief moments of sleep you might manage to capture when you’ve exhausted yourself from all that hyperventilation. 😂

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  5. My mom STILL talks about the two to three year period in elementary school when apparently my feet didn’t grow – and she was thrilled she didn’t have to buy me new shoes. I’m not sure how the same shoes lasted that long, but apparently it was quite memorable to my mother 🙂 Now having a stepson – who even with us part time attempts to eat us out of house and home, amongst a million other expenses – I have wondered if he would stop growing too!

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    • I’m thinking that must be just a girl thing. I had years like that myself, where I really didn’t “need” any new clothes or shoes for lack of intense growth spurts. Boys, on the other hand, can barely make it through a school day without somehow managing to outgrow the clothes they wore to school that day. 😜

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  8. I think I would have been your dream child. While I did run up a nice food bill (What growing boy doesn’t?), my other needs were either simple or non-existent. I wore clothes until they’d fall off (No, I DON’T want to go school clothes shopping!), conveniently withheld any information about school photos and yearbooks from Mom, and didn’t have or want the latest anything (And STILL don’t!). Of course, since I had four younger sisters, my folks still went broke anyway…. but at least I wasn’t a drain on anyone’s livelihood!

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    • Oh, I can most definitely attest to the fact that food disappears disturbingly quick whenever boys are around. 😜

      There’s something to be said for not always rushing out to buy the newest edition of everything. Is the world really going to end if you’ve got only the second-newest version of that phone? Or last season’s hoodie? Probably not. 🙄

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  9. Ha ha ha! Great post. Wow, it’s pretty astounding how much $ is involved with having kids. I don’t remember things costing that much when I was going to school. (OMG did I just actually say that? I swore I wouldn’t talk like an adult when I was younger….) Have a great weekend!! Hope it’s fun and full of laughter. Blessings, Debbie ps – I went to a workshop today to build my coaching practice! It was awesome, for women entrepreneurs. And tomorrow, a spa appt. 🙂

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    • Ha! But it’s so true! We didn’t have yearbooks in kindergarten, or fancy electronic devices either, for that matter. The coolest electronic I had was a graphing calculator that I had bought myself during my senior year of high school. It was quite helpful with calculus, but it was even better once I figured out how to download Tetris to it. 😝

      Hope you enjoyed your spa day! Have a terrific week! 😊

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  12. OMG Angelica, don’t get me started with my kids, their school and the amount of $$$ that goes into it. Why do these schools need fees for everything?! And my kids want new clothes almost every month because they can’t see themselves wearing the same thing for the rest of the year. I told them to mix and match…be creative with your clothes, but got an “Are you crazy?!” look from them. Here I thought I was the only one feeling this way.

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    • If they’re not outgrowing everything in their closets in under five minutes, then every single thing in those closets will inevitably be beyond uncool two weeks later. It’s a lose-lose situation. But hey, it’s a fine excuse to go shopping again for the tenth time this month! 😜

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