Monday Q&A-Drinks and Vacation Accomodations

I am curious what you give your kids to drink?? We make Iced-T from scratch and Lemonade, which is time consuming. So, we use mixes (which is the cheapest way out in the form of drinks) but the containers are not recyclable. Water is of course the best, but kids don’t always want water. Giving them OJ is so expensive! I call it liquid gold. I feel bad telling them that we have to water it down and ration, but 6-7 dollars per container is outrageous! What are your thoughts?
–Jennifer

Back when I first started my blog, I wrote a post about saving money on beverages. You might find the info there to be helpful, though it’s not specifically kid-related.

In a nutshell, here’s how we handle our kids’ beverages:

My kids drink a small amount of OJ from frozen concentrate for breakfast, yogurt smoothies at lunch, and water pretty much every other time. We also have a 2-liter of soda with our pizza every Friday night. Water probably comprises about 90% of their beverage intake.

My kids would certainly love to drink lemonade, tea, soda, and juice all the time, but most beverages besides water are nutritionally empty and full of sugar. Those types of drinks are not something I want them to have all the time, so if they were to ask me for them on a regular basis, I would just say no (my children rarely ask, though, because they know what I will say!).

I think that it’s so important to get my kids in the habit of drinking plain water when they are thirsty. Though none of them were super enthusiastic about water when they first started drinking from a cup, all four of them happily drink it every day now.

Of course, having my kids drink mostly water saves me money too, but my main motivation for doing this is their health.

If you’ve been giving your children sugared drinks on a regular basis, I wouldn’t suggest giving them up cold-turkey. Maybe you could establish a rule that they can only have a sweet drink with meals and water in between. Once they get used to that, you could cut back to having a sweet drink with just breakfast and lunch, or something like that.

I don’t think you should feel at all bad about incorporating this change into your lifestyle, and I don’t think that you should worry dreadfully about not fulfilling your children’s desires for sweet drinks. You are the parent and you know what is best for them. Someday when they’re adults, they’ll thank you for it, I promise! I’m so, so grateful that my parents got me into the habit of drinking water when I was very young.

I’ll hop off of my soapbox in a minute, but I just wanted to add that an advantage of limiting sweet beverages is that they are that much more special when you do have them. If you drink soda every day, it’s not that exciting. However, if you only get sweet drinks every now and then, you appreciate them much more.

(in the above photo, Joshua is drinking caffeinated soda, which we let him have on vacation. Normally we have a pretty unbudging no-caffeine policy and a limited-soda policy, so he thought he’d nearly died and gone to heaven!)

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Marianna sent me this question while we were away.

Since you and your family are enjoying a vacation…… what are some of your budget tips for accommodations?

On Thursday I plan to do a post about saving for vacations, but I’ll go ahead and answer this question now.

The main way we save on accommodations is by vacationing off-season. The beach-front condos we stay in usually run over $1000/week in the summertime but when we go, the prices are down around $550/week. That’s a huge savings! We get the same condo the summertime people do but pay about half price.

Obviously this technique won’t work terribly well if you have children in school, but since we homeschool, we can easily take our vacation whenever we want. Several families at the beach with us this year had just pulled their children out of public school for the week, though, so I suppose you this is something you could consider even if you don’t homeschool.

We also save by bringing our own linens. Our rental realty company charges over $75/week for sheets and towels (and you don’t get a lot of either of those). Paying that much for sheets and towels makes little to no sense to me. For that price I could practically buy new linens and I’d much rather have that $75 to spend on fun activities at the beach!

To cut down on the amount we have to bring, we have our kids’ beach towels double as their bath towels, and we bring their sleeping bags instead of sheets (we just throw them on top of the beds).

In addition to bringing our own linens, we do our own departure cleaning. This involves vacuuming, cleaning out the fridge, wiping down the bathrooms, and cleaning the glass coffee table that every single condo seems to have (incidentally, why anyone wants a glass table is beyond me. They definitely don’t work well with children!). My husband and I both pitch it to get it done, and it really doesn’t take that much time.

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If you’ve got some helpful advice to add for Jennifer or Marianna, please leave a comment!