A Frugal Girls Fail

This is a pre-Tessie post. Pre-Blake and Ellie. Hell, even pre-being a grown up in a way.

I was married and had moved into the house that my hubby had built with his own two hands, which, as fate would have it, was right next door to my best friend and her husband.

We thought were so grown up. So married. So ready to have kids. So going to have the perfect houses, cars and lives. So everything that comes with twenty-one year olds getting married.

In other words, so delusional.

But I digress. When my best friend struggled to conceive a baby which eventually led to adoption, I was there cheering her on. And when the day finally came that she brought her daughter home, I was so thrilled for her.

I also may have made a few "prank" phone calls to her house that summer when the breeze was just right and I could hear her baby crying through the open windows. Something along the lines of, "Can't you shut that kid up" then hanging up the phone and laughing at my own hilarity comes to mind but who really remembers the minutia from so many years ago?

It was also around this time that my bestie and I concocted the brilliant plan of becoming the best housewives, and for her, mother, in the world because we had decided together, without the hubbies even being made privy to it, that we needed to tighten the old purse straps. Stop trying to keep up with the Joneses (which was really each other), live within our means, become the frugal girls we knew in our hearts we were destined to be. How happy we would make our hubbies! How proud would they be to tell other men of their frugal little wives when other's cried out in distress at their wive's frivolous spending habits. The plan had no downside! What could go wrong?

The day the bubblegum pink stroller arrived it was as if the angels had descended from Heaven and were singing especially for us. There even seemed to be a special glow surrounding that fabulous pink stroller. It was probably God smiling down in all His infinite Glory and letting us know how awesome that  stroller was and how awesome my friend was for not falling into the trap of buying a quality expensive item like the Emmaljunga carriages all the other women were wasting their money on for their babies. No sir. She was a good wife. A frugal wife. And her little baby would do just fine in a stroller that cost three hundred dollars less than those fancy schmancy ones.

This isn't the exact one but imagine some swivel wheels on it and it's pretty dang close


We decided to take the little bundle of joy in the bubblegum pink stroller out for a nice walk. It was a gorgeous spring day and we were in high spirits as we set off from the driveway of my house.

We got about fifteen feet when something seemed a bit amiss with the stroller. It wasn't going straight.  It kept wanting to veer off to the left. We reasoned that it was because those cheesy small, plastic wheels could not get good traction on the bumpy, gravelly road.

We went about another ten feet when I realized the problem was not the tires. Well it was, but one that could be very easily and quickly remedied. You just had to push down on the tire lock so they would stay straight and not swivel all around thus making pushing the stroller an act of total frustration and anguish.

I did not tell the bestie of my discovery. No...I let her struggle with that stroller for about another fifty feet before I became alarmed that she might actually flip the baby out of it. By this point she had the stroller facing in the opposite direction of the wheels so that it was sort of crab walking sideways as she tried with all her strength not to let it slip off into the ditch. And she might have been swearing. And sweating. Profusely on both counts.

For my part, I was laughing like a loon. We are talking hysterical, bend-over-hold-your-knees-and-cry kind of laughter. Until one wheel started to lurch off into said ditch and I thought for a split second, "I may have let this go on a little too long for my own amusement."

I quickly grabbed the stroller and bent down and locked in the wheels. She was overjoyed and I was pretty much her hero until I confessed that I had discovered that little secret trick a ways back. To her credit, she let me continue walking with them and even laughed herself once she stopped being mad at me.

She stuck with that piece of shit longer than any person could reasonably be expected. The stroller too. *badumbum*

The pretty, forest green Emmaljunga carriage arrived about a month later.

The hubbies were none the wiser at our failed attempts at being frugal.