poor kids are the best kids

I seriously love co-authoring. I do. It rocks.

Today, I’m rocking this post with Carrie (bio below). We talk most everyday. About whatever. Recently we have been talking about being poor. I am currently incredibly poor. And have been for the past year.

I also grew up slightly poor. We weren’t living in a cardboard box or anything, but we were poor enough that we thought garage saleing in the summer was back to school shopping.

Co-author: I grew up in a cardboard box. Or something very similar. Double-wide trailer, ie two single wide trailers of different lengths pieced together by my father, which had no insulation and only one fire place to heat the entire place. Garage saleing to us was top-of-the-line. We were more accustomed to the land-fill version of school shopping. I like to think of my childhood and family as "resourceful" as opposed to "poor".

So this post is really going to be in honor of my awesome parents (mainly my mother)(and Carries entire family who are still living the dream) who taught me (us)that you are able to do so much with so little.
Here are a few examples:
1. I got my brother’s old Nike high tops in elementary school. And wore them everyday.
2. My brother’s favorite pants were Gloria Vanderbilt corduroy pants my mom got from Value Land.
3. My aunt made 90% of my wardrobe growing up (it was totally awesome clothes)
4. Goolosh was the primary dinner in our house. It’s essentially chili mac.
5. My Halloween costumes each year were basically whatever Joe was the year before. (bum, pirate, robber, etc)
6. I drove a Dodge Dakota Sport in high school. The driver’s side door would fall off if you opened it, so I had to crawl in on the passenger side every day. Eventually the brake cable broke when I came careening down a hill. Oh, how I miss that truck.
7. We considered an 8 hour road trip to PA to visit relatives a vacation. (Which I loved…don’t get me wrong, those are some of my fondest memories)
8. I am convinced my mom dressed Alli and I alike when we were younger because she got a discount on the outfits if she bought more than one.
9. We would buy slightly damaged clothing so we could haggle the price down. We got really good at that.
10. We played outside ALL THE TIME. We got incredibly creative at making games up. One of our favorite was jumping off the second story porch onto the hill beside it. If you jumped far enough, the fall was only a few feet. If you didn’t, the fall was about 7 feet.
11. I would collect cans for gas money. (Can’t do that in Wyoming…which blows)
12. I used to break into my college’s cafeteria and steal food.
13. The best thing in the world when I was younger was our ‘special days’. My parents would rotate months. Each week, one kid would get to go with them after church and do a special thing. It could be to see a movie, or go out to your favorite restaurant, or go to the park and hang out. But you got to choose each time. The limit was about $5 bucks. It was so much fun! And pretty cheap. My parents were geniuses.

Carrie: While these are all very great and many of them apply to my family as well, I would like to focus on the resourcefulness of being poor and give you some examples from my childhood and family.
1. It was never unusual to eat leftovers from a cool-whip or country crock container.
2. We were taught to use, rinse, reuse..with paper plates of course. Oh and baggies.
3. It wasn't uncommon to mending all holes in our socks, matching or not.
4. For fun we would save all the dish soap and shampoo bottles for squirt guns in the summer, and of course garbage bags for slip-n-slides.
5. Anytime we were at the deli or convenient store we would stuff our pockets with free condiments so we could have salt, pepper, ketchup, mayo etc.
6. Not having a gas gauge on your car so you have to slam on the brakes and be really quiet to hear the gas sloshing around in the take to determine how much was left.
7. My family also recycles cans religiously. So religiously that my grandma to this day will pull over on the highway if she sees something shiny.
8. My entire life my real dad has kept a piggy bank welded to the hood of his car as a hood ornament. Once a month he will empty it and buy himself something real nice.
9. Not only did we have to reduce, reuse, and recycle but we had to be resourceful in other ways. For example, we used to thaw the pipes that ran inside our trailer with blow dryers. We also used to walk the mall and pick up change throughout.
10. Fortunately for me, I have been able to carry this resourcefulness on into my adult life. For instance I learned very quickly what a Plasma Bank was and how much they would pay me, and how to hit the one that marked my finger second to the one that did not. Although I have a permanent track mark on my arm it was well worth it.
11. I could go on and on and on, however, Andrea told me to keep it brief (oops), so for my final thought many of us poor folk grew up thinking that if you added water to the ketchup bottle it would taste more like McDonald's ketchup. I remember the day in college when I finally figured out that this was a lie.

So all you people out there that didn't grow up poor. Be jealous.

Co-Author Bio: Carrie Shaw, Punk princess, Kick ass Lawyer, lover of weiners (dogs), pez dispensers and shopping online.