I was talking about princesses with my 7-year-old daughter the other day, and the discussion turned to the idea of princesses who need to be rescued (Cinderella, for example, or Sleeping Beauty) and princesses who don’t (Disney’s revamped Rapunzel, and Merida, the red-headed heroine of the newest Disney/Pixar movie, “Brave.”) As an example of Princesses who do the rescuing, I brought up Eowyn from “Return of the King,” the last book in the “Lord of the Ring” trilogy.

(You know, Eowyn… the princess who defied her father and rode into battle to defeat the embodiment of evil, who could not be killed by any man. “I am no man,” she declared as slayed the faceless demon.)

“So,” I told her, “next time someone says you can’t do something just because you’re a girl…”

“Mom,” she interrupted, rolling her eyes a tiny bit. “No one has ever told me that.”
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My mother-in-law sent this to me the other day, and the frugalista in my jumped for joy: It’s a list of clever, cheap ways to make life easier. I love finding out new ways to use the things I have lying around the house and easy ways to get more life out of the things I already have.

Did you know you could use a plastic drinking straw to hull strawberries? (Just push it through the bottom and out the top — the green part your kids hate will pop off.) I tried the trick for keeping a cut apple from browning this morning when I packed my daugher’s lunch, and it worked like a charm (with no sour taste from lemon juice or citric acid).

Here are my favorite tricks to try:
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The other day, I was sitting in a corner of my local community center’s lounge, trying to finish writing an article on deadline while my daughter was in her gymnastics class.

A mom and her daughter came in a few minutes after I’d settled myself into my work. She must have a child in the same gymnastics class as my daughter, because they’re there at the same time I am every week. And, every week, the same thing happens: She starts talking loudly, either to her older daughter or on her cell phone, while moving furniture around to create a space in which her daughter can do her homework. If there are books on the small table in the lounge, she dumps them on the floor with an exaggerated sigh, and then (loudly) tells her older daughter to start her homework. She glares at the two or three other people in the room if we look up from our books or our laptops. She goes through her daughter’s folder, reading comments from the teacher out loud and announcing each grade on each test.

Which made me think: There should really be a set of rules posted somewhere, for people who have to work in public.
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For years now — decades, really — I’ve challenged myself to make the most of my money. The ability to stretch a dollar or pinch a penny can mean the difference between feeling like we “have” and feeling like we “have not” when it comes to things like groceries and birthday presents for preschoolers’ parties; being the breadwinner makes the process easier in some instances (I know exactly how much money is coming in and going out) and harder in others (I know exactly how much money is coming in and going on).

I’ve found that, for my family, the most straight-forward and simple money-saving tricks work but, at some point, “just spend less money” or “cut out the things you don’t use” isn’t helpful advice. How do you spend less money when you’re spending it on essentials, like childcare when you work full time? What if you can’t cut out cable because you need to have high-speed internet access for your job?
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