Monday Q&A | An oil-changing bet, plus parenting and personalities

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

So, my husband is not too frugal, but he believes he is (this is amusing to me!). I talk about your blog all the time to him and in one of his rebuttals (explaining how frugal he really is) he bet me that you or Mr. Frugal does not change the oil in your vehicles, that you take it somewhere to have it done. Sorry for the long story, but do you (or Mr. Frugal) change your own oil?

-Ashley

You win here (sorry, Mr. Ashley!). Mr. FG faithfully does all his own oil changes and has ever since I met him. We do have a mechanic that we use for maintenance that’s really involved or requires equipment we don’t own, but oil changes definitely don’t fall into that category!

And while we would also send our vehicles off to our mechanic for an involved sort of problem, we try to fix stuff ourselves if we can. We replaced a broken door handle on our van last year and saved ourselves $230, and when our A/F sensors went bad (we have an odd California emissions system so our van has A/F sensors instead of oxygen sensors), Mr. FG replaced them with the expert help of my dad.

I think you can get some pretty good deals on oil changes at a shop, but Mr. FG mainly changes our oil himself because he wants to make sure it’s done right and that the correct oil is used. So for him, the time is well-spent.

I’d love to hear more about how you and Mr. FG discipline your children. Have different children required different approaches? I am also interested in the personality differences between your four kids.

-Senga

This answer got kind of long, so I divided it into two sections.

Parenting

Our four kids are definitely each different and unique, and so we do parent them all a little bit differently.

However, there are some overriding principles that govern our parenting with all four of them. With all of our kids, we try to:

–be consistent

–give correction and consequences patiently, not in anger

–be humble (specifically by letting our kids know that we struggle with sin just like they do…we’re in this together!)

-remind them of the love of God, the grace God has for us, and that because of Jesus, God has nothing but love for us (which means that God is not an angry ogre who loves us when we’re good but hates us when we sin. His love for us is constant, even when we’re in sin, and our goal is to have our parental love mirror that.).

-restore the parent/child relationship promptly. After forgiveness has been asked for and given, the offense is water under the bridge and things go back to normal (though of course the consequence still stands).

Now, Mr. FG and I are full of flaws ourselves and so we don’t apply the above-mentioned principles anywhere near perfectly. But, there’s forgiveness for that and grace to keep trying. 🙂

I’d also add that when our children are young, our main focus is on teaching them to obey promptly and cheerfully. As they get older, of course, things get more complicated and nuanced, but with our older two, having that foundation of obedience has been hugely helpful (Sonia and Zoe aren’t quite as skilled at that whole obedience thing yet!). Joshua and Lisey can both be trusted to do what we ask them to do, and so the parenting we do with the two of them is usually more about character-related things (remembering to promote peace in the family, thinking of others first, being responsible for their chores/schoolwork, learning to be humble, extending grace to others, etc). And hopefully as our kids get older and older, we’ll be able to step back more and more so that the transition from child to adult is gradual (I obviously haven’t parented any teenagers yet, though, and I’m sure that I will possess far more wisdom on that subject in about 15 years!).

(Please note that I’m explaining how we parent and that I’m not offering advice about how everyone else should parent. Just in case that wasn’t clear.)

Personalities

As far as personality differences go…if I had to sum it up, I’d do it thusly (and I’m mostly listing their good traits because I don’t think it would be nice to trot out their faults here!).

Joshua is smart, sensitive, talkative, and very, very into nature and the animal kingdom in particular.

Lisey is quiet, dependable, thoughtful, and very self-disciplined. She hasn’t taken a personality test before, but if I had to guess, I’d say her personality is almost exactly the same as mine except that she’s more introverted (I’m an ENFJ, if you’re curious). Out of all 4 kids, she’s the closest to being a mini-me.

Sonia is, well, Sonia (and if you knew her, you’d know what I mean!). She’s small in stature but makes up for it in personality. She is simultaneously charming and exhausting, and she gives (and wants to receive) countless hugs every day. She’d sort of like to be in charge of everyone and everything and has even been know to holler, “Silence!” at her siblings, as though they are her loyal subjects. 😉

Zoe is enthusiastic, affectionate, and it turns out that she’s pretty smart too (she basically learned how to read just from watching me teach Sonia. Yay!). She’s kind of easy to upset, but most of the time she’s perky. And the stuff she says and does cracks us up on a regular basis.

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Usually I answer 3 questions in a Q&A post, but that last one is equivalent to two, I think! If I added another one, you’d probably be too exhausted to read it. More to come next Monday!

Today’s 365 post: My Lisey-Bean