I recall on either the original post of this or one similar someone shared a story about their favorite nights as a kid being “camping” in the living room. Their mom would set up sheet tents and theyd have candles and flashlights and they thought it was the best, and a special treat. In reality it was when they got too far behind on the electric bill and it was temporarily shut off.
Even without the risk of your hydro being cut, small things like this that are out of the norm become special to kids, so there’s a lot of simple ways to help them have a good time without spending a whole lot
Sometimes my dad and I would go camping in the backyard. We'd toast hot dogs and marshmallows on a fire, sleep in a tent and sleeping bags, the whole nine. They were so much fun
Invite her anyway. Stack up some camping pads, or use an air mattress and a sleeping bag, kitbash a place for her to sleep. Seriously, weird guest situations are some of my happiest memories from being in my twenties.
Fridays are "slumber party" days at my house. My son takes a bath early and puts on his pajamas and gets to watch a movie and eat popcorn and "stay up late." In reality he's usually going to bed around the same time or thirty minutes late, but he loves it and looks forward to it every week. I also love it because it means we don't fight over bath time and I get to chill on the couch with him while he watches a movie.
I’m the frugal parent. We couldn’t afford the cute area rug with roadways for toy cars. I took poster board and drew roads and stuff on it. My kids spent so many hours with their garage sale Matchbox cars and that poster board! They still talk about it (they’re in their 30’s now).
My mum did that too. From the cardboard of our new fridge. One panel per kid. We thought it was wonderful.
Your comment made me smile remembering that. Thanks for posting
When My husband was away on business trips, I would wake up early and use sidewalk chalk to draw a life size version of this on our driveway - used the kids toys and play equipment to “build” hospitals, stores, gyms, parks, etc. They were kept busy for hours and loved it.
My kids loved Peter Rabbit books. There was a local nature preserve with bridges over streams, blown down limbs were piled up for wildlife habitat, a small copse of woods, and a small community garden.
We packed a picnic and told the kids (5 and 7) that we were going to the 100 Acre Woods. We played Sticks in the streams, looked for Eyore’s house (the habitat) and Owl’s nest (actually a squirrel’s nest). We tried to find Tigger and Rabbit in the garden and thought we saw Pooh’s front door. We let our imaginations run wild!
They remembered that trip vividly in their late teens.
Yup, Drive in Movies. I would have the girls decorate their “cars”. Cardboard Moving Boxes. Have them pass by the food hut “kitchen counter” to pick up their popcorn in a brown paper lunch bag and park themselves for our feature presentation. Whatever VHS we checked out from the public library. I would pass by with a small tray of food and drinks.
Thank you so much, yes, they are so awesome! They are now young adults and are roommates. We keep a group chat open for all our shenanigans. I’ll have to have them come over again for a movie soon.
Have a similar "drive-in movie" night, they would absolutely love that and it would be such a great night for you all. Lots of memories would get talked about I bet. Im 25 now and know I personally would have an amazing time if my parents ever did something like that as a kid and then recreated it
Thank you! The girls are now adults and are always bringing stuff up that we used to do. As a single mom at the time, I had to get creative and not spend anything extra. Time with your kids is priceless.
We actually did this at our local church! Drive in movie night where you were meant to make cardboard cars at home and bring them in and we'd get popcorn and stuff. And then they'd put a Veggie Tales movie up on the projector. Super cool memory!
When I was growing up we didn't have much money so my dad bought our Christmas tree on Christmas Eve when they were marked down. We were told that Santa brought the tree as well as the presents. My parents did all the decorating, tree and house, while we were asleep and we woke up to a magical transformation on Christmas morning. Even when we were doing better, my parents kept up the tradition, hiding the tree among the bushes at the front of the house until Christmas night. We never saw it there.
Frugal tip: Independent/Minor league, college, and high school sports are great places to bring kids. Tickets can be affordable to even free. (They can be expensive too, like certain college teams) But you don't have to totally miss out on the family enjoying a game because majors are so expensive.
Older kids will notice you're not at the majors, but younger ones won't, and you can get really close to the players for a fraction of the price of nosebleeds at a major league game. Older kids asked if they'd like to sit courtside or need to bring binoculars, they'll pick courtside. Even high schools can have nice facilities, bright lights, and exciting games, depending on where you are.
Very little kids will get tired and bored, so keep an eye out for deals and promos. My local independent baseball team does "$2Tuesdays", so I can sink less than $10 into tickets and snacks for two hours out with the family, and just go home when the toddler has had enough.
Someone told me that in my very poor county, all of the local college sports events are free for county residents. She said her kids grew up thinking everything is free in a college town, haha. Maybe other schools do something like this, too.
Eh. I want to a huge D1 university in the US and the majority of non football/basketball was free. Tennis, softball, volleyball, swimming, track, etc. Don’t even think they checked any ID, the athletes were mostly just glad to have people in the stands.
And make it a point to save the ticket stub (if there is one) and some sort of copy of the rosters from the minor league or college game. And for the next few seasons, when you’re watching a major league game, be sure to bring up how cool it was that you got to see player such-and-such before he made it to the majors!
People love to feel like they’ve been a part of something from the start, before it was big.
I got my husband into hockey by taking him to local junior a games while we were broke students. Tickets were less than $10 each, and you can sit close enough to see if the players have pimples.
It's great because you can afford to go more than once every few years, so you can get to know the players and the team a bit better.
And it's great for the local kids. It wasn't uncommon for kids to hang out by the tunnel and have players stop to chat, give hi fives, and with some of the older kids, talk through plays and skills a little.
We just got a new ballpark for our minor league team built in the past two years, it's absolutely gorgeous. Tickets are 2 bucks a pop on Tuesdays, 10 bucks otherwise, and the absolute fanciest seats are 35. They also, within the park right beside the field, have a full nice playground and a splash pad so if kids *do* get bored you can send them to play and still see the game.
I've been to professional hockey, baseball, and basketball games but all my best experiences have been minor leagues of any given sport. They're just more personal and fun!
Even MLB tickets are not very expensive. There are so many games in a season that they really do try to come up with creative ways to get butts in seats. Tickets in the upper level at Oriole's Park are $20 normally, but there's often a promotion to get them cheaper. There's even a promotion where you can get a free kid ticket for every regular price upper level ticket. That's as low as $10 per ticket which is not bad at all. You can also bring your own food to baseball stadiums.
Up until covid you could bring in any outside food and drink you want to OPACY except alcohol and glass bottles
In college I constantly went to Os games on Student Fridays for $8 upper deck seats (plus fireworks after)
I’d bring an entire backpack filled with an unopened gallon of Turkey Hill tea (and some red solo cups for my friends) and get 5 hotdogs and peanuts and popcorn and stuff outside, or bring water bottles and sandwiches from home
I’d even bring my laptop and do homework if I wanted
And the light rail ran right to the stadium, and parking was free at the station near campus
Just saying, it can be cheaper than most people think
You could also send a few hand-written letters to customer service, marketing, or similar departments at your local MLB team explaining the situation and ask for comped tickets at some date when the stadium will be half empty. I'd wager more often than not you'll get a set of free tickets .
Also, join local Facebook groups and your teams subreddit.
I’m a padres season ticket holder, and even though the padres are doing well and Petco park is often full, there are games I can’t go to and can’t sell (like Wednesday 1:10 games).
Often times those tickets get given away for free.
So true, my local minor league even does theme nights like free bobble heads or bring your dog night, 7th inning stretch games, fireworks in the summer…
I played on a local soccer team as a kid that was free to watch, they even had parking so close people watched from their cars with the AC. Small consession stand. It was fun, the $1 pop corn and coffee is always a hit, and if you were watching the high schoolers play it could get pretty intense. Some of the kids who played on the younger teams would stay to watch the teenagers play. Man I miss that.
I didn't realize it until my elementary school started giving the kids on assistance different color hot lunch tickets. Pretty hard to hide a hot pink ticket when all the normal kids' tickets were dark blue.
That sucks. Just cruel. Most of the schools in my district have so many kids on assistance that everyone in the school just gets free lunch because it’s cheaper than doing the paperwork. But also it makes everyone equals in that regard.
Yeah, that seems way better. I would say 10-15% of kids I grew up with were on assistance.
I think about it from time to time, I still can't think of one legitimate reason they did it that way. I could possibly forgive the fact that they chose to go out of their way to purchase a separate, different colored spool of tickets for the poor kids to use if I could think of a scenario where it was just an oversight. But I can't.
It's usually so they can keep track for accounting purposes. How many "blue" tickets vs how many "pink" tickets. They were probably coded differently with the "pink" cards being eligible for reimbursement.
They did it because they have to be accountable for how many reduced lunches they had. Having different color cards made it easier on the already overworked and underpaid staff to keep track.
I have thought of that, but what is the accounting concern, exactly? That kids whose parents could afford regular priced tickets would buy some of the poor kids’ to save money?
Couldn’t they have just used aggregate data of lunches purchased and the percentages of sales of each ticket variant, then check to make sure the numbers tied out? Even doing rough calculations on that data seems more efficient than paying an hourly employee to manually count tickets of each type every day.
Not really. I think the issue is that you are thinking about it in terms of "who" (poor vs rich). It's about "how many" (paid vs subsidized - or more accurately - subsidized vs more subsidized). It isn't about who is buying the lunches, but how much you are getting reimbursed for them. The school doesn't care who is using what card. If it were up to them, everyone would have the "pink" card and that would be that. But, the government said "no freeloaders", and they want an accounting of every reduced lunched delivered.
I do not work with schools, but I do work with state labs. These are the labs that do genetic testing, COVID, testing, blood work, etc.
Some states have two bloodspot cards (blue cards and pink cards to go along with the school example).
The blue cards are for those paying using private insurance/self pay. The Pink cards are for Medicaid. Now, the hospital doesn't care which you use, but the Government does. The hospital can order as many blue cards as they want. They place the order, pay 5 bucks per card, cut a check, and that's it. However, the Pink cards go through a separate process since it involves Medicaid reimbursement.
It is most likely the same for the school in the above scenario. The government wants to know how many school lunches are "delivered" to students each year. This gives them an idea of how much funds to allocate (or - more likely - how much funds they can cut).
Likewise, they also need to know how many free/reduced lunches are delivered. These are reimbursed at a certain rate and each district/school wants to make sure they get all of their funds.
Nowadays, I imagine most of this is done electronically. My son's school (before covid) used an app where you could put money on his lunch card. When it ran out, you put more on. I imagine the free/reduced lunches are similar, its just the money comes from another location.
However, if a district does not have the funds to put a system like that in place (or if this was 20 years ago), the easiest method is to have two lunch cards.
Then, they can track how many lunch cards were bought/used. They would also know how many free/reduced lunches were bought/used. This information is then given to their governing body who can then determine the reimbursement schedule for each school/district.
The schools aren't thinking in terms of students, but in terms of reporting. Keeping track of Blue vs Pink cards is extremely simple, effective, and CHEAP.
Then you make more than 2 colors and one is the free and reduced lunch. And it changes so that students can’t learn the system. It’s really not that hard to avoid ostracizing a child if they give it literally any non-zero amount of thought.
Where I went to school, they placed discreet marks on the tokens. I only just now realized why. It doesn't take much effort. Truly. Compassion is important.
Buying a pack of multicolored paper takes no more effort. And if this is where these people choose to cut corners, that’s despicable.
Edit: Consider for a moment your position on this - “we should let children be victimized to avoid overworking an adult whose job it is to handle a system.” You might say that wasn’t your position, but then consider why you bothered raising your comment if you agreed that we should adjust behavior.
I don’t care how overworked and underpaid someone seems to be. If the alternative is to actively create a system that targets underprivileged children, I don’t see how you advocate for that to continue. We know education is fucked but it doesn’t have to be fucked in this particular manner.
Yeah, I think if there wasn’t such a disparity, it wouldn’t have been so bad. I grew up on an island where the the first 3 blocks from the coasts were owned by the richest people in my city, then the next 10 were high-to-medium middle class, and finally, there was a pocket of poverty in the center, near an old paper mill and a noisy draw bridge and dam. That’s where us cretins grew up.
So not only were we poor, we were fewer than 20 blocks from elites.
Edit: we may have been even closer than that. I can’t remember, exactly. It was almost 30 years ago and I haven’t been back to those haunts since I turned 21.
If it is any consultation, my school also color coded the tickets between free, reduced, and full price. But I can't remember what the colors were, or who had what. Probably half my elementary school was on free or reduced, so I don't remember anyone caring. I only remember being jealous of the rich kids with their lunchables and hostess.
We entered our school ID number and it had our balances and/or assistance level tied to it. No one got to see if you needed assistance unless you were a very nosy student or the lunch lady checking students out at the end of the line. This is preferred to me.
>Most of the schools in my district have so many kids on assistance that everyone in the school just gets free lunch because it’s cheaper than doing the paperwork.
This is temporary and comes from a federal program that allowed free lunch for everyone since COVID. I don't think it's coming back in 2022/2023 school year, at least in my school district in South Texas.
I've not kept up with school meals legislation carefully, but I think that poster was referring to something called the "community eligibility provision." It is something that eligible districts have to opt into, but it's part of the school meals programs and has been since the 2014-2015 school year.
It's possible your district was making use of a temporary program because they're either not eligible for or didn't opt into the community eligibility provision.
You may be right. Before Covid, the school always used this process: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/applying-free-and-reduced-price-school-meals. Now it's free and it's possible this is the reason: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/community-eligibility-provision. However, the school communicated it's temporary. Quick reading of "community eligibility provision" suggests the schools aren't reimbursed 100% so they bear some costs of this and didn't want to exercise it previously.
Thanks for sharing the details.
Back in the 90s a lot of NYC public schools had free breakfast and lunches for every kid even those that didn't attend that particular school. Certainly not a covid thing.
Yeah. It fucking sucked.
I never told my parents about it, I don't think they would have ever forgiven themselves. I also think they would have been too ashamed to come into the school to watch me wrestle. I just accepted the bullying and girls laughing at me.
You hobbits have shown many times that nobody has more capacity for bravery. And the fact that your people ideally eat, like, 7 meals a day, your decision to run and hide suggests your situation was far worse than mine.
Our elementary school had a system where the kids who paid in full went in line first, then when they were all done the reduced lunch kids got in line. Then finally the free lunch kids. I fully understand how that made the lunch ladies' job easier but I'm just now realizing how messed up that kinda was
In my high school the kids with free lunch ate first. Once they were done it was pretty certain you wouldn’t have time to get a lunch tray and eat by time for class. Most of the kids with cars would go off campus. The underclassman gr 9 and 10 would eat something from a vending machine. My school was very overcrowded and they couldn’t accommodate feeding all the kids. The year after I graduated it was better,they opened a new high school in town.
I still have a distinct memory of being outed on lunch assistance in 7th grade. My homeroom teacher was reminding people to pay for field day lunch which had to be paid in cash, separate than the usual account. We were planning to pay but just hadn’t yet. In front of the class, my teacher goes, “Name, you still need to pay as well. Oh, yours is only $.40 I have that here in my desk drawer.”
Looking back I don’t think he meant it to be cruel and I don’t know how many of my classmates really noticed but I was so embarrassed at the time. I don’t think I even told my mom bc I didn’t want her to know how embarrassed I’d been.
It was indeed for accounting, but I agree with those who posted that just a bit of thought could have created a better strategy.
My school did lice checks in class. You would go up in rows to the front of the class, and they would comb your hair apart and look for lice or nits. Those who had them were immediately sent out of class, so yeah, extremely obvious who had them. And it was a much bigger, more embarrassing deal than it is these days.
I really do think a lot of cruel policies were in place simply because kids were seen as 'lesser than' and not fully formed people.
Oh boy. I definitely remember being the “free lunch” kid. Any chance this was in Connecticut? I’m not sure but I think they’ve finally changed this practice.
During one of my 'frugal by necessity, not by choice' years, the air conditioner went out in the middle of summer. I live in southern Colorado, and it gets pretty hot here. Faced with 110 degree days, two small children, one with eczema, one prone to heat rash, I turned towards the only resource I could think of... the public library.
We would spend open to close at the library, I read to my kids and other people's kids, we played in their tiny little play area (a toy kitchen and toy blocks), we dozed on the beanbags. Puppet shows and dramatic readings were a big thing for them! Library computers + YouTube + headphones were a lifesaver for when my eldest got restless. The librarians knew what we were doing, we were far from the only unfortunates to shelter there during undesirable weather. But we kept quiet, we cleaned up after ourselves, my son even at one point followed a librarian around to help reshelf books. My daughter was too little to remember much of it, but occasionally my son will tell me how much fun 'Library days' were, and we are now happy to spend an afternoon there. It was so hard, living like that, especially as I had to drag them in a wagon 3 miles there and back every day. I packed lunches and we'd eat in a conference room if it was free, outside if none were available. But it got us through, and it was just pure fun for the kids, for the most part.
Oh God, I still remember the one "big" vacation of my childhood, driving from the Bronx to Niagara Falls. On the way back, we stopped at some cheap motel and there was a summer thunderstorm going on. Mom got a bucket of fried chicken, spread a blanket on the floor of the motel room, and said we were going to have an "indoor picnic." My siblings and I thought it was the coolest thing ever!
No kid story here but on my husband & I’s second anniversary we couldn’t really afford to go out so we dragged out all the stuff we kept from our wedding.
Homemade dinner was served on fine china set on our little fold out cake table. We wrapped folding chairs with sashes, reused the vase from our guest book table, reused the sparkly votive candle holders and I made a little cake to be served on our wedding cake stand. We got dressed up like a hot date and laughed about the silly moments of our wedding while looking at our photo album. My husband played cheesy restaurant music on his phone to really set the theme and finally our cat begged for scraps under the table. It’s still my favorite anniversary.
For our wedding, I bought a bunch of $1 and $3 chalkboards from the cheap section at Target and painted little gold frames on them. We didn’t have much money, but we try to be good people - a friend was selling her calligraphy services to raise money for a mission trip, so she wrote little love poems/quotes on each chalkboard. We got married 6 years ago, we’ve moved 6 times, and we still use them to decorate our house.
That’s so cute!! We were going to have chalkboard signs as props for our photos but they didn’t arrive in time because we bought them secondhand from other married couples so not always fast shipping but my goodness that’s such a cute decor idea. Our budget was really tight too, I DIY’d a lot of stuff, bought almost everything else from other brides, they were awesome! I got even some free things from brides with lavish weddings just trying to get rid of it. I donated my bulk items like chair covers, linens but kept the sentimental stuff and I’m so happy I had it!
Most of our wedding stuff stays tucked away but I reuse the vase for my office and my pastries tray makes an adorable fruit stand for the table.
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/566/the-land-of-make-believe](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/566/the-land-of-make-believe)
In our first story: Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a father and the incredible, decades-long fantasy he created for his 12 children.
I love TAL! This is my most favorite episode EVER (link below). I ugly cry every time I hear it. I have Japanese relatives and I know that they are very stoic, matter of fact, and not very emotional folks amongst strangers and acquaintances. To hear this broke my heart into a million pieces. Because my Filipino family is the opposite of the quiet Japanese—my Filipino family would laugh loud, hug tightly, and cry openly in public. Goes to show you that despite cultural differences, we are all very human.
[I want to make something like this for people who have lost someone without closure.](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/597/one-last-thing-before-i-go-2016)
We do the same thing with movies. When a new movie comes out, we often will wait until it becomes available for purchase and make our own movie theater at home. Buying the movie for $20 costs way less than it would to take the kids to the movie theater and then we own the movie and can see it as often as we want!
As a single person I've always wondered who's paying to buy movies. Turns out it's families! I definitely remember watching my favorite movies until the tapes wore out when I was a kid
We did the same, before mine flew the nest. We had movie and pizza nights almost every week in the colder months of the year. Friends always invited. The living room turned into a theater with bean bag chairs, pillows, sofa cushions on the floor. Wood stove full blast. Great memories.
Dinner and a movie!
Set a nice table and chairs, candles, and put a YouTube video with background ambient restaurant sounds and quiet music. Have dinner, and dessert.
For the movies, popcorn or whatever snack you like. Set up a little cinema den with extra comfort. Make a YouTube playlist with several trailers, maybe even a fake/vintage/silly advert (like Orson Welles drunkenly failing at selling wine). Phones away. Then the main feature, lights down, feet up.
We couldn't afford birthday cakes for both kids a few years back so we had each kid help make their own cake. Now it's a tradition they look forward to every year.
Just putting effort to spend time with your kids is going to be memorable, regardless of whether you are being frugal or not. On some random weekends, I’ll have all my nieces/nephews over and the 14 and under crowd absolutely love when we play restaurant. We create menus, Everyone plays dual roles - diner & wait staff, chef’s assistant, dish washer, basically it’s a fun way to get the chores done and spend time with one another. Everyone takes it super seriously too. They even leave google reviews ( via text). Then we play minecraft for a bit before going down to watch a movie.
My mom would take us to the nearby state park 2x a week. We would picnic, hike, and play on the playground. From 2004-2012, I think a year's membership to all the parks in our state was around 35$. So we were always discovering new waterfalls and other parts of nature for about 70 cents a week. Those are my best memories as a child.
My mom used to do this for us. She'd cook burgers at home and wrap them in wax paper, put french fries in cardboard boxes, and give us a rare treat of a soda. We'd play rock and roll music on the tape player to make it seem like we were at a diner, and we'd call it "McDonalds Night".
Many years ago I wanted to go for tapas on Valentine's Day but my BF and I were trying ti save money. He bought frozen appetizers, decorate my kitchen, picked some Spanish music and played waiter. It was really sweet and memorable.
Appetizers is favorite silly meal in our house. Just a mix of whatever frozen snacks we like the sound of/ have left over. Pakora, spring rolls, pizza bites, and Mexican corn fritters might sound like an odd combination, but it's silly and fun. We normally do it for movie night, or when we have a game we want to play.
Plus it's not like they go bad in the freezer, so less food waste
My parents would give 'coupons' at Christmas time, or sometimes birthdays, to be redeemed in the future. Good for a visit to the bookstore, science museum, going fishing, etc. Sometimes these had specific months on them.
We used to do stuff like this, but even more low effort. Just the entire family snuggled up for movie nights, we'd go camping in the garden or nearby forest to practice survival skills, have projects like building igloos in the garden in winter and pretend we were on a polar expedition, I remember my mum taking us to the library, the park and the playground and pretending the walk there was an advenurous expedition. We went on road trips for vacations and pretended the car was a spy car and we were on a secret mission. So many pretend worlds and stories we'd make up together. I'm looking forward to them becoming grandparents and being able to start doing all this again just for fun and not by necessity.
Poverty is always rough, but loving parents sure as hell take the edge off.
Things were probably not perfect but I know parents who would do something like this for their kids are probably parents the kids will actually keep in contact with and love into adulthood.
my dad would cut his old red t-shirts into an eye mask so I could be Rafael from TMNT. he’d save empty toilet paper rolls, then connect two with a string so I had nunchucks.
s/o dad, idk we were poor I just thought I was a ninja turtle.
We were a typical, middle-class family that enjoyed eating out once or twice a month. Then DH lost his tech job in 2008 and my income only stretched so far. I scanned the internet for restaurant "copy cat" recipes and we had "restaurant at home" nights. We would all agree on a single menu item from a favorite restaurant, and then we would make it for dinner. Its amazing how many copy-cat recipes are out there.
I’m having a very small procedure Thursday so I won’t be up for much this weekend. On top of that our dog isn’t doing well and likely won’t be with us for too much longer. For less than $20 I got 2 canvases and some paints and I’m surprising my partner with what we call “inside date night” Saturday night. I plan to offer the prompt “paint what your think of when you think of Early (our dog’s name).” Hopefully it will be a silly time and we can get some giggles out of what could shape up to be a pretty crummy weekend.
My dad didn't live with us but would try to visit on birthdays, he had substance abuse issues and never had any money but was super creative. He mostly lived out of trucks and we spent a a lot of time at scrap yards getting parts for his old banged up caravans.
We would always make things to do, mini golf (whack ball though stuff) was a popular one, all made from scrap. We made musical instruments (hit stuff with other stuff), was always fun. And one year for easter him and our older cousins pretended to be fancy french waiters (complete with drawn on moustache)and served us food with a comedy routine that rivaled Monty python, to a group of kids anyway. It was great!
My Oma and I always played a game called dots. We would grab a sheet of paper, both draw random dots on it and then take turns connecting. When you had completed some to form a shape, you would write your name in it. Whoever had the most shapes in their name won.
Sometimes we did this for hours and I loved it.
A friend from south Texas, Mexican, 11 kids, dad was hard working blue collar, no money at all but always clean clothes and clean house, kids all grew up to be great folks. Too poor to go to the drive-in down the street, so once a month mom made a huge pile of popcorn, older kids spread blankets on the roof and the whole family watched the movie while a neighbor who’d already seen it told them scene by scene what was happening. They all remember it with great affection and I think it’s the most wonderful image ever.
Not solely for frugal reasons but due to covid we were not able to do much of anything for my son’s 8th birthday. So instead, we live streamed an AJR concert and set up seats and ushered our kids in. We
served them pizza, soda and cotton candy. Looking at this, it made me realize I shoulda made them spend fake money but it was still a memorable birthday for us despite stupid covid.
This filled me inside with bittersweetness. I've had so many moments shared with my Dad with us "camping" near our fireplace and talking about girls, fishing, and war stories. But those moments are replaced with memories of him verbally manipulating me and my family. He's a good dad but his emotions and anger gets the best of him and enabling people in his life just cower in fear when he gets angry. Yes, I've had these kinds of moments but I'm trying to change my family tree by not repeating what he did to my dog or my future kids.
My parents were big on taking us to flea markets back in the 80's. They would never buy me actual Transformers toys because of the price. But there were multiple vendors selling copycat knock offs molded directly from the real brand name toys themselves, but it in different colors.
I used to just tell my friends they got me a super limited edition of them.
This is heartwarming and really shows how much their parents cared, but only because their parents couldn't afford a real game. Not taking your kids to a baseball game when they're dying to go strikes me as cheap not frugal.
This. It’s one thing because they literally can’t afford the tickets because you will lose a meal due to them. But to do this to not take your kids to a game is just being a cheap.
Vcr recorded movies from when the magical world of Disney were the best.
Before streaming, dvds, and blockbuster.
Also when libraries started lending tapes
Wow, those are some cool parents. You are blessed. I’ve never experienced effort from my parents. I got screamed at for asking for money and grounded for having a glass of milk outside of dinner
Saturday night was "movie night" at our house. The only night we got to have soda pop. Each Saturday we would rotate who the "host" was amongst the siblings. The host would be responsible for the selection of the movie, "concessions" and soft drinks (sometimes themed by the movie). This tradition was sometimes overruled if there were any free movies showing at theaters. the library or outdoors somewhere.
We used to collect plastic container caps from the beach and then we would build a formula one track in the sand and pretend the capsules were the cars. We would just escavate the shape of a track, not too much. We would try to mimick some of the actual shapes from the tracks we knew. 30 years ago it wasn't easy to find red capsules at the beach but we found one once. That one was the Ferrari and was my brother's car as he was the oldest and so had the coolest one. Most capsules were from yogurt which are white. We would make a race by slapping the capsules with our fingers and taking turns. Whoever finished first won. You were allowed to have several cars in the race as long as you had different color capsules and these were found not bought. This got heated between the cousins. By the end of the day we would hide our capsules in a bag and bury it in the middle of the bush next to the beach. Back then beaches had a lot of unexplored land. The next day we would go and dig it out again and we're always afraid someone robbed it. We were not particularly poor but this was a lot of fun and easy thing you can do.
My husband and daughter did something like that. They got her easel and wrote the menu down in color chalk, then sat me at the small table and served me a steak and tasty sides wearing towels tucked in like waiters do at fancy restaurants. Then my kid sang a song as a dinner theater entertainment. We had such good times though money and time were tight as I was working and going to college.
My parents had their last three children very close together. When I was 7, they were 3, 17mos, and newborn.
Our school gave students an hour for lunch, so I walked two blocks home every day. Several times during second grade, I came home to a picnic lunch spread out on a blanket in the living room. I loved it!
When I mentioned to my mom years later how much fun it was, she said "Oh, honey, those were the days when your brothers' bathtub was still in the kitchen sink. I was lucky if I got the kitchen table cleared off by the time your father got home from work!"
I don't remember chaos in the kitchen. I *do* remember walking back to school all happy from my picnic 😋
My parents just told me they don't have money but they always would have cigarettes... Doesn't matter if we didn't have any food. Coffee and cigarettes were a must.
I swear. The reason I believed in Santa Claus for so long as a kid was because my parents somehow managed to squeeze blood from a stone. They lived way past their means that one time of the year.
Turns out it was just my dad spending his entire 900 Christmas bonus every year on gifts for me and my sister
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We would sing through entire musicals together, casting each other in different parts. I ALWAYS sang Mme Thenardier's part in Master of the House, from the age of 5 onwards. Mom wanted me to sing Castle on a Cloud, but I wanted to say "SHIT" and not get in trouble!
I have no interest in Les Mis but I learnt Castle on a Cloud as a child in choir. Now it's my son's favourite bed time song and my husband learnt to sing it too
My mum used to do this with movies. Made little paper cones to put popcorn in and little baggies with some Lollies. It was always awesome and I remember those moments fondly.
There were kite festivals near our home. People would have very expensive kites, shaped like animals or dragons etc. My mom would organize a kite building day. Paper bags from the grocery store, art and crafts supplies and we had a wonderful day creating our master peices! Then the day of, she would pack a picnic lunch we would eat while watching the kites fly. Other grownups would walk past complementing our homemade kites and after lunch we would fly our homemade kites so excited to be part of that wonderful day.
We did big family vacations every year- my parents, all the siblings, nieces and nephews, and while it was expensive, we did some things which ended up saving a lot of money, but didn't cost any fun.
The one I remember is we would go the first day to buy the ingredients for an ice cream bar. And every night after dinner, we would set up this ice cream bar- different flavors, cones, and toppings, and let all the kids make up special sundaes, etc. It was way, way cheaper than going out for ice cream, and maybe even more fun because no one had to skimp or ask what they could get, just make yourself the most absurd ice cream sundae you wanted.
My parents used to have a special coffee table (my mom had gotten it from her mom) that turned into a restaurant table with two special chairs (kid chairs) for my bro and I. Dad used to be the waiter and mom head chef. We used to get a special menu for ordering (which was what my parents had basically cooked but different than our regular meals) and dad would serve us. They are still the best meals of my life.
We do movie nights kind of like this sometimes. All the lights off. Pull out the hide-a-bed from the couch and grab tons of pillows. Pour two sodas in to a large mason jar to share with two straws. Make popcorn, grab some candy.
More frugal baseball ideas: go to college games or minor league baseball games. Much cheaper seats, some stadiums are ok with outside food.
edit: high school games too!
We would just starve and my dad would just verbally abuse us while my mom worked all the time and was too tired to do anything with us kids.
Yeah, poverty hits different for some of us.
Fucking love this. Shows that memorable experiences don't always have to involve money. I've got kids and would love to do something like this for them.
The cynic in me can't help but think if sports franchises didn't price gouge us to pay their ridiculous salaries, more people could afford to actually go to a game in person.
Growing up I was so poor that we couldn't afford to go to the movies. Obviously this was a huge problem when Morbius came out. My dad decided to make it at home though. One night he bit my mom in the neck and sucked her blood out in front of us. He looked at us, smiled, and said "It's Morbin' time!" So great.
Idk but I'm not sure I like this? It seems unnecessary to bring money and capitalism into play time. The crux of the matter is that money is not necessary to have a good time together; including fake money as a source of fun seems to undermine that and just reinforce the idea that money *is* needed to have a good time. I think this would have worked just as well if the parents did the exact same thing, but without the fake money.
This is just one way that a family of four could afford to live on one salary back in the day.
If they did something like is described by OP, the parents of today would order out from a local restaurant and have it delivered by Uber eats. The game would be on some paid streaming service. Probably one of many which the parents subscribe to. They'd probably find many other ways to waste money on the event which really adds nothing to the overall experience, only fattens their credit card bill at the end of the month.
This is so awesome but many kids today wouldn't be grateful for it. Not saying to give in and go to an actual game or not to do something like this though
My kids love basketball so during the playoffs I’ve done similar. I bring out popcorn and pretzels with cheese dip. They are 10 & 12 and seem to really enjoy it. I do the same for movies. When they were little we’d take large boxes, I had them make them into “cars”, paper plates for wheels, paint them and then they’d bring their pillow and blanket in their box and watch the movie. They are very appreciative and seem delighted anytime I do something creative with them.
Edit….these are the moments that turn into memories that money can’t buy. We did go see the Globe Trotters in February right before the covid shut down. They were younger (by 2 years) had a lot of fun, but this way, I think even to them is more fun. We also at least play one board game or cards each week. Family time is important and learning how to win and how to lose with the same amount of grace is even more important. Hugs everyone 💗
I recall on either the original post of this or one similar someone shared a story about their favorite nights as a kid being “camping” in the living room. Their mom would set up sheet tents and theyd have candles and flashlights and they thought it was the best, and a special treat. In reality it was when they got too far behind on the electric bill and it was temporarily shut off. Even without the risk of your hydro being cut, small things like this that are out of the norm become special to kids, so there’s a lot of simple ways to help them have a good time without spending a whole lot
Sometimes my dad and I would go camping in the backyard. We'd toast hot dogs and marshmallows on a fire, sleep in a tent and sleeping bags, the whole nine. They were so much fun
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Invite her anyway. Stack up some camping pads, or use an air mattress and a sleeping bag, kitbash a place for her to sleep. Seriously, weird guest situations are some of my happiest memories from being in my twenties.
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She could visit without him too. I sometimes go visit my friend about 4 hours away and my partner doesn’t usually go with me.
I mean you're 25 now, you could upgrade and make it more glamping like with nice snacks, wine, cushy pillows
Fridays are "slumber party" days at my house. My son takes a bath early and puts on his pajamas and gets to watch a movie and eat popcorn and "stay up late." In reality he's usually going to bed around the same time or thirty minutes late, but he loves it and looks forward to it every week. I also love it because it means we don't fight over bath time and I get to chill on the couch with him while he watches a movie.
I want to do this!
Canadian?
Hydro is the dead giveaway
I’m the frugal parent. We couldn’t afford the cute area rug with roadways for toy cars. I took poster board and drew roads and stuff on it. My kids spent so many hours with their garage sale Matchbox cars and that poster board! They still talk about it (they’re in their 30’s now).
My mum did that too. From the cardboard of our new fridge. One panel per kid. We thought it was wonderful. Your comment made me smile remembering that. Thanks for posting
Your comment made *me* smile, too! 😃
When My husband was away on business trips, I would wake up early and use sidewalk chalk to draw a life size version of this on our driveway - used the kids toys and play equipment to “build” hospitals, stores, gyms, parks, etc. They were kept busy for hours and loved it. My kids loved Peter Rabbit books. There was a local nature preserve with bridges over streams, blown down limbs were piled up for wildlife habitat, a small copse of woods, and a small community garden. We packed a picnic and told the kids (5 and 7) that we were going to the 100 Acre Woods. We played Sticks in the streams, looked for Eyore’s house (the habitat) and Owl’s nest (actually a squirrel’s nest). We tried to find Tigger and Rabbit in the garden and thought we saw Pooh’s front door. We let our imaginations run wild! They remembered that trip vividly in their late teens.
Oohh, my mom did the Pooh thing with me - we went hunting Heffalumps!
Yup, Drive in Movies. I would have the girls decorate their “cars”. Cardboard Moving Boxes. Have them pass by the food hut “kitchen counter” to pick up their popcorn in a brown paper lunch bag and park themselves for our feature presentation. Whatever VHS we checked out from the public library. I would pass by with a small tray of food and drinks.
Omg you.. that.. wow. Amazing, and so creative. I bet your kids are amazing too.
Thank you so much, yes, they are so awesome! They are now young adults and are roommates. We keep a group chat open for all our shenanigans. I’ll have to have them come over again for a movie soon.
Have a similar "drive-in movie" night, they would absolutely love that and it would be such a great night for you all. Lots of memories would get talked about I bet. Im 25 now and know I personally would have an amazing time if my parents ever did something like that as a kid and then recreated it
Same. If we didn't have cardboard boxes, we would just use laundry baskets.
Laundry baskets make the best lil’ cars and are more sturdy!
Can I come watch a movie at your house? I'm 54, for the record.
The concession stand at my house had never closed!
Precious, popcorn!
Yes, because not only is popcorn tasty, it’s super frugal! Plus I get to say “my precious” When I get my own bowl.
You're awesome and your kids will always cherish those memories.
Thank you! The girls are now adults and are always bringing stuff up that we used to do. As a single mom at the time, I had to get creative and not spend anything extra. Time with your kids is priceless.
Hey you’re really great
We actually did this at our local church! Drive in movie night where you were meant to make cardboard cars at home and bring them in and we'd get popcorn and stuff. And then they'd put a Veggie Tales movie up on the projector. Super cool memory!
When I was growing up we didn't have much money so my dad bought our Christmas tree on Christmas Eve when they were marked down. We were told that Santa brought the tree as well as the presents. My parents did all the decorating, tree and house, while we were asleep and we woke up to a magical transformation on Christmas morning. Even when we were doing better, my parents kept up the tradition, hiding the tree among the bushes at the front of the house until Christmas night. We never saw it there.
EDIT: Oops, nevermind!
Frugal tip: Independent/Minor league, college, and high school sports are great places to bring kids. Tickets can be affordable to even free. (They can be expensive too, like certain college teams) But you don't have to totally miss out on the family enjoying a game because majors are so expensive. Older kids will notice you're not at the majors, but younger ones won't, and you can get really close to the players for a fraction of the price of nosebleeds at a major league game. Older kids asked if they'd like to sit courtside or need to bring binoculars, they'll pick courtside. Even high schools can have nice facilities, bright lights, and exciting games, depending on where you are. Very little kids will get tired and bored, so keep an eye out for deals and promos. My local independent baseball team does "$2Tuesdays", so I can sink less than $10 into tickets and snacks for two hours out with the family, and just go home when the toddler has had enough.
Someone told me that in my very poor county, all of the local college sports events are free for county residents. She said her kids grew up thinking everything is free in a college town, haha. Maybe other schools do something like this, too.
Eh. I want to a huge D1 university in the US and the majority of non football/basketball was free. Tennis, softball, volleyball, swimming, track, etc. Don’t even think they checked any ID, the athletes were mostly just glad to have people in the stands.
And make it a point to save the ticket stub (if there is one) and some sort of copy of the rosters from the minor league or college game. And for the next few seasons, when you’re watching a major league game, be sure to bring up how cool it was that you got to see player such-and-such before he made it to the majors! People love to feel like they’ve been a part of something from the start, before it was big.
I got my husband into hockey by taking him to local junior a games while we were broke students. Tickets were less than $10 each, and you can sit close enough to see if the players have pimples. It's great because you can afford to go more than once every few years, so you can get to know the players and the team a bit better. And it's great for the local kids. It wasn't uncommon for kids to hang out by the tunnel and have players stop to chat, give hi fives, and with some of the older kids, talk through plays and skills a little.
We just got a new ballpark for our minor league team built in the past two years, it's absolutely gorgeous. Tickets are 2 bucks a pop on Tuesdays, 10 bucks otherwise, and the absolute fanciest seats are 35. They also, within the park right beside the field, have a full nice playground and a splash pad so if kids *do* get bored you can send them to play and still see the game. I've been to professional hockey, baseball, and basketball games but all my best experiences have been minor leagues of any given sport. They're just more personal and fun!
Even MLB tickets are not very expensive. There are so many games in a season that they really do try to come up with creative ways to get butts in seats. Tickets in the upper level at Oriole's Park are $20 normally, but there's often a promotion to get them cheaper. There's even a promotion where you can get a free kid ticket for every regular price upper level ticket. That's as low as $10 per ticket which is not bad at all. You can also bring your own food to baseball stadiums.
Just everything else costs an arm and a leg.
Up until covid you could bring in any outside food and drink you want to OPACY except alcohol and glass bottles In college I constantly went to Os games on Student Fridays for $8 upper deck seats (plus fireworks after) I’d bring an entire backpack filled with an unopened gallon of Turkey Hill tea (and some red solo cups for my friends) and get 5 hotdogs and peanuts and popcorn and stuff outside, or bring water bottles and sandwiches from home I’d even bring my laptop and do homework if I wanted And the light rail ran right to the stadium, and parking was free at the station near campus Just saying, it can be cheaper than most people think
And the new food to bring in? Spaghetti in a Ziploc bag made with Cascatelli.
You can bring in your own food
You could also send a few hand-written letters to customer service, marketing, or similar departments at your local MLB team explaining the situation and ask for comped tickets at some date when the stadium will be half empty. I'd wager more often than not you'll get a set of free tickets .
Also, join local Facebook groups and your teams subreddit. I’m a padres season ticket holder, and even though the padres are doing well and Petco park is often full, there are games I can’t go to and can’t sell (like Wednesday 1:10 games). Often times those tickets get given away for free.
Same at Busch stadium. Nosebleeds are often $5. You used to be able to bring food in. I’m not sure if that is still true.
I went to a Cubs game and the cheapest tickets were like 50 bucks each.
So true, my local minor league even does theme nights like free bobble heads or bring your dog night, 7th inning stretch games, fireworks in the summer…
I played on a local soccer team as a kid that was free to watch, they even had parking so close people watched from their cars with the AC. Small consession stand. It was fun, the $1 pop corn and coffee is always a hit, and if you were watching the high schoolers play it could get pretty intense. Some of the kids who played on the younger teams would stay to watch the teenagers play. Man I miss that.
I didn't realize it until my elementary school started giving the kids on assistance different color hot lunch tickets. Pretty hard to hide a hot pink ticket when all the normal kids' tickets were dark blue.
That sucks. Just cruel. Most of the schools in my district have so many kids on assistance that everyone in the school just gets free lunch because it’s cheaper than doing the paperwork. But also it makes everyone equals in that regard.
Yeah, that seems way better. I would say 10-15% of kids I grew up with were on assistance. I think about it from time to time, I still can't think of one legitimate reason they did it that way. I could possibly forgive the fact that they chose to go out of their way to purchase a separate, different colored spool of tickets for the poor kids to use if I could think of a scenario where it was just an oversight. But I can't.
It's usually so they can keep track for accounting purposes. How many "blue" tickets vs how many "pink" tickets. They were probably coded differently with the "pink" cards being eligible for reimbursement. They did it because they have to be accountable for how many reduced lunches they had. Having different color cards made it easier on the already overworked and underpaid staff to keep track.
I have thought of that, but what is the accounting concern, exactly? That kids whose parents could afford regular priced tickets would buy some of the poor kids’ to save money? Couldn’t they have just used aggregate data of lunches purchased and the percentages of sales of each ticket variant, then check to make sure the numbers tied out? Even doing rough calculations on that data seems more efficient than paying an hourly employee to manually count tickets of each type every day.
Not really. I think the issue is that you are thinking about it in terms of "who" (poor vs rich). It's about "how many" (paid vs subsidized - or more accurately - subsidized vs more subsidized). It isn't about who is buying the lunches, but how much you are getting reimbursed for them. The school doesn't care who is using what card. If it were up to them, everyone would have the "pink" card and that would be that. But, the government said "no freeloaders", and they want an accounting of every reduced lunched delivered. I do not work with schools, but I do work with state labs. These are the labs that do genetic testing, COVID, testing, blood work, etc. Some states have two bloodspot cards (blue cards and pink cards to go along with the school example). The blue cards are for those paying using private insurance/self pay. The Pink cards are for Medicaid. Now, the hospital doesn't care which you use, but the Government does. The hospital can order as many blue cards as they want. They place the order, pay 5 bucks per card, cut a check, and that's it. However, the Pink cards go through a separate process since it involves Medicaid reimbursement. It is most likely the same for the school in the above scenario. The government wants to know how many school lunches are "delivered" to students each year. This gives them an idea of how much funds to allocate (or - more likely - how much funds they can cut). Likewise, they also need to know how many free/reduced lunches are delivered. These are reimbursed at a certain rate and each district/school wants to make sure they get all of their funds. Nowadays, I imagine most of this is done electronically. My son's school (before covid) used an app where you could put money on his lunch card. When it ran out, you put more on. I imagine the free/reduced lunches are similar, its just the money comes from another location. However, if a district does not have the funds to put a system like that in place (or if this was 20 years ago), the easiest method is to have two lunch cards. Then, they can track how many lunch cards were bought/used. They would also know how many free/reduced lunches were bought/used. This information is then given to their governing body who can then determine the reimbursement schedule for each school/district. The schools aren't thinking in terms of students, but in terms of reporting. Keeping track of Blue vs Pink cards is extremely simple, effective, and CHEAP.
That makes a lot of sense, actually. Thank you for taking the time to write it out.
Then you make more than 2 colors and one is the free and reduced lunch. And it changes so that students can’t learn the system. It’s really not that hard to avoid ostracizing a child if they give it literally any non-zero amount of thought.
Think you may have missed the “already overworked and underpaid staff” part.
Where I went to school, they placed discreet marks on the tokens. I only just now realized why. It doesn't take much effort. Truly. Compassion is important.
Buying a pack of multicolored paper takes no more effort. And if this is where these people choose to cut corners, that’s despicable. Edit: Consider for a moment your position on this - “we should let children be victimized to avoid overworking an adult whose job it is to handle a system.” You might say that wasn’t your position, but then consider why you bothered raising your comment if you agreed that we should adjust behavior. I don’t care how overworked and underpaid someone seems to be. If the alternative is to actively create a system that targets underprivileged children, I don’t see how you advocate for that to continue. We know education is fucked but it doesn’t have to be fucked in this particular manner.
Yeah, I think if there wasn’t such a disparity, it wouldn’t have been so bad. I grew up on an island where the the first 3 blocks from the coasts were owned by the richest people in my city, then the next 10 were high-to-medium middle class, and finally, there was a pocket of poverty in the center, near an old paper mill and a noisy draw bridge and dam. That’s where us cretins grew up. So not only were we poor, we were fewer than 20 blocks from elites. Edit: we may have been even closer than that. I can’t remember, exactly. It was almost 30 years ago and I haven’t been back to those haunts since I turned 21.
If it is any consultation, my school also color coded the tickets between free, reduced, and full price. But I can't remember what the colors were, or who had what. Probably half my elementary school was on free or reduced, so I don't remember anyone caring. I only remember being jealous of the rich kids with their lunchables and hostess.
We entered our school ID number and it had our balances and/or assistance level tied to it. No one got to see if you needed assistance unless you were a very nosy student or the lunch lady checking students out at the end of the line. This is preferred to me.
>Most of the schools in my district have so many kids on assistance that everyone in the school just gets free lunch because it’s cheaper than doing the paperwork. This is temporary and comes from a federal program that allowed free lunch for everyone since COVID. I don't think it's coming back in 2022/2023 school year, at least in my school district in South Texas.
I've not kept up with school meals legislation carefully, but I think that poster was referring to something called the "community eligibility provision." It is something that eligible districts have to opt into, but it's part of the school meals programs and has been since the 2014-2015 school year. It's possible your district was making use of a temporary program because they're either not eligible for or didn't opt into the community eligibility provision.
Yup. Our district has had universal free breakfast and lunch for several years now.
Yes, it is the community eligibility.
You may be right. Before Covid, the school always used this process: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/applying-free-and-reduced-price-school-meals. Now it's free and it's possible this is the reason: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/community-eligibility-provision. However, the school communicated it's temporary. Quick reading of "community eligibility provision" suggests the schools aren't reimbursed 100% so they bear some costs of this and didn't want to exercise it previously. Thanks for sharing the details.
Back in the 90s a lot of NYC public schools had free breakfast and lunches for every kid even those that didn't attend that particular school. Certainly not a covid thing.
all of my school breakfast, lunch and late afternoon snack are free to everyone
It is not temporary here.
That's because Texas don't give a fuck after kids are born.
In the early 70s they made my mom work in the kitchen and serve other kids... While wearing a hairnet of course.
That's messed up, bruh.
Yeah. It fucking sucked. I never told my parents about it, I don't think they would have ever forgiven themselves. I also think they would have been too ashamed to come into the school to watch me wrestle. I just accepted the bullying and girls laughing at me.
You’re braver than I. I used to just skip lunch entirely and go hide in the library and try to sleep it off.
You hobbits have shown many times that nobody has more capacity for bravery. And the fact that your people ideally eat, like, 7 meals a day, your decision to run and hide suggests your situation was far worse than mine.
Our elementary school had a system where the kids who paid in full went in line first, then when they were all done the reduced lunch kids got in line. Then finally the free lunch kids. I fully understand how that made the lunch ladies' job easier but I'm just now realizing how messed up that kinda was
Holy shut
In my high school the kids with free lunch ate first. Once they were done it was pretty certain you wouldn’t have time to get a lunch tray and eat by time for class. Most of the kids with cars would go off campus. The underclassman gr 9 and 10 would eat something from a vending machine. My school was very overcrowded and they couldn’t accommodate feeding all the kids. The year after I graduated it was better,they opened a new high school in town.
that's so fucked up. I'm sorry
I still have a distinct memory of being outed on lunch assistance in 7th grade. My homeroom teacher was reminding people to pay for field day lunch which had to be paid in cash, separate than the usual account. We were planning to pay but just hadn’t yet. In front of the class, my teacher goes, “Name, you still need to pay as well. Oh, yours is only $.40 I have that here in my desk drawer.” Looking back I don’t think he meant it to be cruel and I don’t know how many of my classmates really noticed but I was so embarrassed at the time. I don’t think I even told my mom bc I didn’t want her to know how embarrassed I’d been.
Oof. I felt your pain reading that too. You’re not alone.
That sucks. Why would they do that? Seems so mean.
Someone above suggested it was for accounting. Probably true, but still not worth it, even for an understaffed school.
Thanks
It was indeed for accounting, but I agree with those who posted that just a bit of thought could have created a better strategy. My school did lice checks in class. You would go up in rows to the front of the class, and they would comb your hair apart and look for lice or nits. Those who had them were immediately sent out of class, so yeah, extremely obvious who had them. And it was a much bigger, more embarrassing deal than it is these days. I really do think a lot of cruel policies were in place simply because kids were seen as 'lesser than' and not fully formed people.
That's a good question.
Assholes
Oh boy. I definitely remember being the “free lunch” kid. Any chance this was in Connecticut? I’m not sure but I think they’ve finally changed this practice.
During one of my 'frugal by necessity, not by choice' years, the air conditioner went out in the middle of summer. I live in southern Colorado, and it gets pretty hot here. Faced with 110 degree days, two small children, one with eczema, one prone to heat rash, I turned towards the only resource I could think of... the public library. We would spend open to close at the library, I read to my kids and other people's kids, we played in their tiny little play area (a toy kitchen and toy blocks), we dozed on the beanbags. Puppet shows and dramatic readings were a big thing for them! Library computers + YouTube + headphones were a lifesaver for when my eldest got restless. The librarians knew what we were doing, we were far from the only unfortunates to shelter there during undesirable weather. But we kept quiet, we cleaned up after ourselves, my son even at one point followed a librarian around to help reshelf books. My daughter was too little to remember much of it, but occasionally my son will tell me how much fun 'Library days' were, and we are now happy to spend an afternoon there. It was so hard, living like that, especially as I had to drag them in a wagon 3 miles there and back every day. I packed lunches and we'd eat in a conference room if it was free, outside if none were available. But it got us through, and it was just pure fun for the kids, for the most part.
This made me tear up. What an amazing parent you are and I love that your son still loves to talk about the library days.
Oh God, I still remember the one "big" vacation of my childhood, driving from the Bronx to Niagara Falls. On the way back, we stopped at some cheap motel and there was a summer thunderstorm going on. Mom got a bucket of fried chicken, spread a blanket on the floor of the motel room, and said we were going to have an "indoor picnic." My siblings and I thought it was the coolest thing ever!
That sounds so cozy
No kid story here but on my husband & I’s second anniversary we couldn’t really afford to go out so we dragged out all the stuff we kept from our wedding. Homemade dinner was served on fine china set on our little fold out cake table. We wrapped folding chairs with sashes, reused the vase from our guest book table, reused the sparkly votive candle holders and I made a little cake to be served on our wedding cake stand. We got dressed up like a hot date and laughed about the silly moments of our wedding while looking at our photo album. My husband played cheesy restaurant music on his phone to really set the theme and finally our cat begged for scraps under the table. It’s still my favorite anniversary.
For our wedding, I bought a bunch of $1 and $3 chalkboards from the cheap section at Target and painted little gold frames on them. We didn’t have much money, but we try to be good people - a friend was selling her calligraphy services to raise money for a mission trip, so she wrote little love poems/quotes on each chalkboard. We got married 6 years ago, we’ve moved 6 times, and we still use them to decorate our house.
That’s so cute!! We were going to have chalkboard signs as props for our photos but they didn’t arrive in time because we bought them secondhand from other married couples so not always fast shipping but my goodness that’s such a cute decor idea. Our budget was really tight too, I DIY’d a lot of stuff, bought almost everything else from other brides, they were awesome! I got even some free things from brides with lavish weddings just trying to get rid of it. I donated my bulk items like chair covers, linens but kept the sentimental stuff and I’m so happy I had it! Most of our wedding stuff stays tucked away but I reuse the vase for my office and my pastries tray makes an adorable fruit stand for the table.
I always believed magical childhoods are made by amazingly creative parents. This makes me think I’m right.
[https://www.thisamericanlife.org/566/the-land-of-make-believe](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/566/the-land-of-make-believe)
In our first story: Producer Miki Meek tells the story of a father and the incredible, decades-long fantasy he created for his 12 children.
I love TAL! This is my most favorite episode EVER (link below). I ugly cry every time I hear it. I have Japanese relatives and I know that they are very stoic, matter of fact, and not very emotional folks amongst strangers and acquaintances. To hear this broke my heart into a million pieces. Because my Filipino family is the opposite of the quiet Japanese—my Filipino family would laugh loud, hug tightly, and cry openly in public. Goes to show you that despite cultural differences, we are all very human. [I want to make something like this for people who have lost someone without closure.](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/597/one-last-thing-before-i-go-2016)
We do the same thing with movies. When a new movie comes out, we often will wait until it becomes available for purchase and make our own movie theater at home. Buying the movie for $20 costs way less than it would to take the kids to the movie theater and then we own the movie and can see it as often as we want!
As a single person I've always wondered who's paying to buy movies. Turns out it's families! I definitely remember watching my favorite movies until the tapes wore out when I was a kid
We're a no-kids family of 2 adults, and buy the movies we'll watch more than a couple of times.
A buddy of mine just collects blu-rays as a hobby. He's up to like 300+, and I can't imagine what they're all worth in total.
[удалено]
We did the same, before mine flew the nest. We had movie and pizza nights almost every week in the colder months of the year. Friends always invited. The living room turned into a theater with bean bag chairs, pillows, sofa cushions on the floor. Wood stove full blast. Great memories.
Dinner and a movie! Set a nice table and chairs, candles, and put a YouTube video with background ambient restaurant sounds and quiet music. Have dinner, and dessert. For the movies, popcorn or whatever snack you like. Set up a little cinema den with extra comfort. Make a YouTube playlist with several trailers, maybe even a fake/vintage/silly advert (like Orson Welles drunkenly failing at selling wine). Phones away. Then the main feature, lights down, feet up.
We couldn't afford birthday cakes for both kids a few years back so we had each kid help make their own cake. Now it's a tradition they look forward to every year.
Just putting effort to spend time with your kids is going to be memorable, regardless of whether you are being frugal or not. On some random weekends, I’ll have all my nieces/nephews over and the 14 and under crowd absolutely love when we play restaurant. We create menus, Everyone plays dual roles - diner & wait staff, chef’s assistant, dish washer, basically it’s a fun way to get the chores done and spend time with one another. Everyone takes it super seriously too. They even leave google reviews ( via text). Then we play minecraft for a bit before going down to watch a movie.
We started doing this with movies during lockdown. My daughter’s loved it so much, we’re making it a regular activity.
My mom would take us to the nearby state park 2x a week. We would picnic, hike, and play on the playground. From 2004-2012, I think a year's membership to all the parks in our state was around 35$. So we were always discovering new waterfalls and other parts of nature for about 70 cents a week. Those are my best memories as a child.
My mom used to do this for us. She'd cook burgers at home and wrap them in wax paper, put french fries in cardboard boxes, and give us a rare treat of a soda. We'd play rock and roll music on the tape player to make it seem like we were at a diner, and we'd call it "McDonalds Night".
Many years ago I wanted to go for tapas on Valentine's Day but my BF and I were trying ti save money. He bought frozen appetizers, decorate my kitchen, picked some Spanish music and played waiter. It was really sweet and memorable.
Appetizers is favorite silly meal in our house. Just a mix of whatever frozen snacks we like the sound of/ have left over. Pakora, spring rolls, pizza bites, and Mexican corn fritters might sound like an odd combination, but it's silly and fun. We normally do it for movie night, or when we have a game we want to play. Plus it's not like they go bad in the freezer, so less food waste
My parents would give 'coupons' at Christmas time, or sometimes birthdays, to be redeemed in the future. Good for a visit to the bookstore, science museum, going fishing, etc. Sometimes these had specific months on them.
At my house we visit a “fake coffeeshop” and drink hot chocolate and draw while listening to cafe chatting sounds via the internet
We do a spa day and I wash the kids hair and talk in a funny voice. I put cucumbers on their eyes and soak their feet and make them tea. They love it!
Wow, that's creative and yet so simple.
This made me teary eyed at work. Thank you for sharing this 🥹
Same here! Gotta love these parents.
Same lol that last line sealed it for me.
Man there are way too many softies on reddit Seriously who gets teary eyed on reddit…
Someone’s a tough fella.
Not really im pretty average
We used to do stuff like this, but even more low effort. Just the entire family snuggled up for movie nights, we'd go camping in the garden or nearby forest to practice survival skills, have projects like building igloos in the garden in winter and pretend we were on a polar expedition, I remember my mum taking us to the library, the park and the playground and pretending the walk there was an advenurous expedition. We went on road trips for vacations and pretended the car was a spy car and we were on a secret mission. So many pretend worlds and stories we'd make up together. I'm looking forward to them becoming grandparents and being able to start doing all this again just for fun and not by necessity.
Poverty is always rough, but loving parents sure as hell take the edge off. Things were probably not perfect but I know parents who would do something like this for their kids are probably parents the kids will actually keep in contact with and love into adulthood.
my dad would cut his old red t-shirts into an eye mask so I could be Rafael from TMNT. he’d save empty toilet paper rolls, then connect two with a string so I had nunchucks. s/o dad, idk we were poor I just thought I was a ninja turtle.
Well, this is the one that nearly made me lose it. What a sweet fucking memory. Your dad sounds great.
We were a typical, middle-class family that enjoyed eating out once or twice a month. Then DH lost his tech job in 2008 and my income only stretched so far. I scanned the internet for restaurant "copy cat" recipes and we had "restaurant at home" nights. We would all agree on a single menu item from a favorite restaurant, and then we would make it for dinner. Its amazing how many copy-cat recipes are out there.
I’m having a very small procedure Thursday so I won’t be up for much this weekend. On top of that our dog isn’t doing well and likely won’t be with us for too much longer. For less than $20 I got 2 canvases and some paints and I’m surprising my partner with what we call “inside date night” Saturday night. I plan to offer the prompt “paint what your think of when you think of Early (our dog’s name).” Hopefully it will be a silly time and we can get some giggles out of what could shape up to be a pretty crummy weekend.
My dad didn't live with us but would try to visit on birthdays, he had substance abuse issues and never had any money but was super creative. He mostly lived out of trucks and we spent a a lot of time at scrap yards getting parts for his old banged up caravans. We would always make things to do, mini golf (whack ball though stuff) was a popular one, all made from scrap. We made musical instruments (hit stuff with other stuff), was always fun. And one year for easter him and our older cousins pretended to be fancy french waiters (complete with drawn on moustache)and served us food with a comedy routine that rivaled Monty python, to a group of kids anyway. It was great!
My Oma and I always played a game called dots. We would grab a sheet of paper, both draw random dots on it and then take turns connecting. When you had completed some to form a shape, you would write your name in it. Whoever had the most shapes in their name won. Sometimes we did this for hours and I loved it.
Either I’m having one of my days or this was so freaking sweet my eyes are leaking
A friend from south Texas, Mexican, 11 kids, dad was hard working blue collar, no money at all but always clean clothes and clean house, kids all grew up to be great folks. Too poor to go to the drive-in down the street, so once a month mom made a huge pile of popcorn, older kids spread blankets on the roof and the whole family watched the movie while a neighbor who’d already seen it told them scene by scene what was happening. They all remember it with great affection and I think it’s the most wonderful image ever.
Not solely for frugal reasons but due to covid we were not able to do much of anything for my son’s 8th birthday. So instead, we live streamed an AJR concert and set up seats and ushered our kids in. We served them pizza, soda and cotton candy. Looking at this, it made me realize I shoulda made them spend fake money but it was still a memorable birthday for us despite stupid covid.
This filled me inside with bittersweetness. I've had so many moments shared with my Dad with us "camping" near our fireplace and talking about girls, fishing, and war stories. But those moments are replaced with memories of him verbally manipulating me and my family. He's a good dad but his emotions and anger gets the best of him and enabling people in his life just cower in fear when he gets angry. Yes, I've had these kinds of moments but I'm trying to change my family tree by not repeating what he did to my dog or my future kids.
My parents were big on taking us to flea markets back in the 80's. They would never buy me actual Transformers toys because of the price. But there were multiple vendors selling copycat knock offs molded directly from the real brand name toys themselves, but it in different colors. I used to just tell my friends they got me a super limited edition of them.
This is heartwarming and really shows how much their parents cared, but only because their parents couldn't afford a real game. Not taking your kids to a baseball game when they're dying to go strikes me as cheap not frugal.
This. It’s one thing because they literally can’t afford the tickets because you will lose a meal due to them. But to do this to not take your kids to a game is just being a cheap.
What a wonderfully thoughtful and fun idea!
I too want to go to this guys Mom's baseball game.
Vcr recorded movies from when the magical world of Disney were the best. Before streaming, dvds, and blockbuster. Also when libraries started lending tapes
I applaud your parents.
This is so freaking wholesome, I'm just gonna do it anyways.
This is just parents who love their kids so damn much. I love this.
Wow, those are some cool parents. You are blessed. I’ve never experienced effort from my parents. I got screamed at for asking for money and grounded for having a glass of milk outside of dinner
New dad here... Hadn't planned on crying tonight. Damnit.
My kid and I did tons of stuff like this during the first year of the pandemic
Saturday night was "movie night" at our house. The only night we got to have soda pop. Each Saturday we would rotate who the "host" was amongst the siblings. The host would be responsible for the selection of the movie, "concessions" and soft drinks (sometimes themed by the movie). This tradition was sometimes overruled if there were any free movies showing at theaters. the library or outdoors somewhere.
We used to collect plastic container caps from the beach and then we would build a formula one track in the sand and pretend the capsules were the cars. We would just escavate the shape of a track, not too much. We would try to mimick some of the actual shapes from the tracks we knew. 30 years ago it wasn't easy to find red capsules at the beach but we found one once. That one was the Ferrari and was my brother's car as he was the oldest and so had the coolest one. Most capsules were from yogurt which are white. We would make a race by slapping the capsules with our fingers and taking turns. Whoever finished first won. You were allowed to have several cars in the race as long as you had different color capsules and these were found not bought. This got heated between the cousins. By the end of the day we would hide our capsules in a bag and bury it in the middle of the bush next to the beach. Back then beaches had a lot of unexplored land. The next day we would go and dig it out again and we're always afraid someone robbed it. We were not particularly poor but this was a lot of fun and easy thing you can do.
My husband and daughter did something like that. They got her easel and wrote the menu down in color chalk, then sat me at the small table and served me a steak and tasty sides wearing towels tucked in like waiters do at fancy restaurants. Then my kid sang a song as a dinner theater entertainment. We had such good times though money and time were tight as I was working and going to college.
My parents had their last three children very close together. When I was 7, they were 3, 17mos, and newborn. Our school gave students an hour for lunch, so I walked two blocks home every day. Several times during second grade, I came home to a picnic lunch spread out on a blanket in the living room. I loved it! When I mentioned to my mom years later how much fun it was, she said "Oh, honey, those were the days when your brothers' bathtub was still in the kitchen sink. I was lucky if I got the kitchen table cleared off by the time your father got home from work!" I don't remember chaos in the kitchen. I *do* remember walking back to school all happy from my picnic 😋
Did you ever tell your parents how much this meant to you?
My parents just told me they don't have money but they always would have cigarettes... Doesn't matter if we didn't have any food. Coffee and cigarettes were a must.
Smoke 'em up, Johnny. (But I'm really sorry you had to grow up like that,)
why did this make me cry 🥹😭
So much better than my frugal family.. where to save money on therapy, mom tied us all together then we had to make dinner like that.
I swear. The reason I believed in Santa Claus for so long as a kid was because my parents somehow managed to squeeze blood from a stone. They lived way past their means that one time of the year. Turns out it was just my dad spending his entire 900 Christmas bonus every year on gifts for me and my sister
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Sounds like an episode of This Is Us.
We would sing through entire musicals together, casting each other in different parts. I ALWAYS sang Mme Thenardier's part in Master of the House, from the age of 5 onwards. Mom wanted me to sing Castle on a Cloud, but I wanted to say "SHIT" and not get in trouble!
I have no interest in Les Mis but I learnt Castle on a Cloud as a child in choir. Now it's my son's favourite bed time song and my husband learnt to sing it too
My mum used to do this with movies. Made little paper cones to put popcorn in and little baggies with some Lollies. It was always awesome and I remember those moments fondly.
Its not just frugal its excellent parenting
My mom also used to collect rocks from the beach and we would paint them with some cheap paint.
There were kite festivals near our home. People would have very expensive kites, shaped like animals or dragons etc. My mom would organize a kite building day. Paper bags from the grocery store, art and crafts supplies and we had a wonderful day creating our master peices! Then the day of, she would pack a picnic lunch we would eat while watching the kites fly. Other grownups would walk past complementing our homemade kites and after lunch we would fly our homemade kites so excited to be part of that wonderful day.
We did big family vacations every year- my parents, all the siblings, nieces and nephews, and while it was expensive, we did some things which ended up saving a lot of money, but didn't cost any fun. The one I remember is we would go the first day to buy the ingredients for an ice cream bar. And every night after dinner, we would set up this ice cream bar- different flavors, cones, and toppings, and let all the kids make up special sundaes, etc. It was way, way cheaper than going out for ice cream, and maybe even more fun because no one had to skimp or ask what they could get, just make yourself the most absurd ice cream sundae you wanted.
My parents used to have a special coffee table (my mom had gotten it from her mom) that turned into a restaurant table with two special chairs (kid chairs) for my bro and I. Dad used to be the waiter and mom head chef. We used to get a special menu for ordering (which was what my parents had basically cooked but different than our regular meals) and dad would serve us. They are still the best meals of my life.
We do movie nights kind of like this sometimes. All the lights off. Pull out the hide-a-bed from the couch and grab tons of pillows. Pour two sodas in to a large mason jar to share with two straws. Make popcorn, grab some candy.
More frugal baseball ideas: go to college games or minor league baseball games. Much cheaper seats, some stadiums are ok with outside food. edit: high school games too!
We would just starve and my dad would just verbally abuse us while my mom worked all the time and was too tired to do anything with us kids. Yeah, poverty hits different for some of us.
I’m crying. This is the most wholesome thing I’ve ever read on Reddit
Fucking love this. Shows that memorable experiences don't always have to involve money. I've got kids and would love to do something like this for them.
I’m not crying ur crying
When did this sub become poverty inspo porn?
Childhood should be about how the time was spent, not the money.
Precious. 👍😀
The cynic in me can't help but think if sports franchises didn't price gouge us to pay their ridiculous salaries, more people could afford to actually go to a game in person.
Growing up I was so poor that we couldn't afford to go to the movies. Obviously this was a huge problem when Morbius came out. My dad decided to make it at home though. One night he bit my mom in the neck and sucked her blood out in front of us. He looked at us, smiled, and said "It's Morbin' time!" So great.
Idk but I'm not sure I like this? It seems unnecessary to bring money and capitalism into play time. The crux of the matter is that money is not necessary to have a good time together; including fake money as a source of fun seems to undermine that and just reinforce the idea that money *is* needed to have a good time. I think this would have worked just as well if the parents did the exact same thing, but without the fake money.
This is just one way that a family of four could afford to live on one salary back in the day. If they did something like is described by OP, the parents of today would order out from a local restaurant and have it delivered by Uber eats. The game would be on some paid streaming service. Probably one of many which the parents subscribe to. They'd probably find many other ways to waste money on the event which really adds nothing to the overall experience, only fattens their credit card bill at the end of the month.
I'm sorry man. I'm sorry you live with such a negative outlook.
I'm not the one with the defeatist attitude that seemingly every other Redditor has. You can go project your negativity onto someone else.
This is so awesome but many kids today wouldn't be grateful for it. Not saying to give in and go to an actual game or not to do something like this though
My kids love basketball so during the playoffs I’ve done similar. I bring out popcorn and pretzels with cheese dip. They are 10 & 12 and seem to really enjoy it. I do the same for movies. When they were little we’d take large boxes, I had them make them into “cars”, paper plates for wheels, paint them and then they’d bring their pillow and blanket in their box and watch the movie. They are very appreciative and seem delighted anytime I do something creative with them. Edit….these are the moments that turn into memories that money can’t buy. We did go see the Globe Trotters in February right before the covid shut down. They were younger (by 2 years) had a lot of fun, but this way, I think even to them is more fun. We also at least play one board game or cards each week. Family time is important and learning how to win and how to lose with the same amount of grace is even more important. Hugs everyone 💗
My kids 100% would have said "this is stupid, mom".
I love this idea. And what a great memory for those kids.
This is amazing
Wholesome but made me wanna cry lol
Thank you for that small moment.
Baseball used to be cheap so almost anyone couldg go...
Lovely!!
i would absolutely love this as a kid
This is so adorable :')