Embracing our Tiny House

Ever since we found out baby R was a boy, we've been thinking about real estate.

We own a 650-ish square foot two-bedroom condo in North Cambridge (and about 40 of those sq ft are unheated enclosed porch). Our approximate plan when we bought the place two and a half years ago was that if our hoped-for second child was a girl, the kids would share a room indefinitely, and if that second kid was a boy, they could share a room for at least 8 years or so, at which point we'd likely be able to afford more space for separate bedrooms.

When we were shopping for our home, we made the conscious decision to give up space in order to live in close proximity to work, transit, and our religious community. While we certainly still stand by that choice, I'd be lying if I said that having two kids in this space doesn't make me fantasize about that affordable 3 or 4 bedroom place in the burbs sometimes.

After we found out R was a boy, we started to think through what it would really take for us to get more space, even if it was many years down the line. We'd love to share a two-family house with Angela's mom (who currently lives at 15 min walk away in Davis Square) and we started to think maybe we could get more space sooner if we pooled resources with her. Then we took a sobering tour of single and multi-family home prices in our neighborhood and realized that even 8 years hence, that's probably a pipe dream. More space would almost definitely mean a move out of our beloved little corner of Cambridge.

As we imagined years strapped to such an outsize mortgage, our tiny very affordable place started to look nicer and nicer. We crunched some numbers and realized we'd have some hope of paying this place off sooner than later, not as soon as 5 years, but well before the end of our 30 year mortgage. We're desperately in love with our neighborhood and shudder at the thought of living somewhere else. The financial freedom and community that we'd get from staying put started to seem like a nicer idea than more space.

We're beginning to believe that 650 square feet is actually enough (after all, 1200 square feet is enough for 12). If instead of saving money towards more space, we put some money into making this space really work for a family of four, perhaps making a more efficient and streamlined kitchen, opening up and insulating our porch to have more useable work area, and dividing the space that currently houses two bedrooms into three small ones (you don't actually need much space to sleep, after all), we really could stay here. It's not firm yet, but a plan is being hatched. Just like living without a car has made our lives richer in ways we didn't expect, continuing to live with less space, even as our kids grow, might open up new kinds of freedom. This feels like the kind of thing that is right up our alley.

(as part of our plan hatching we'll be attending a design workshop by Jay Shafer of the Tumbleweed Tiny House Company in May. We can't wait.)

Not shopping with kids

One huge advantage of our carfree lifestyle is that we don't shop very much. I believe being without a car means fewer shopping trips, but I don't have any research to back me up. If you've seen any, please leave a comment! I did find a study today that shows shopping trips are the most underestimated category of car trips -- a household's number of actual shopping trips in a car exceeded the number planned by 200%. So people do drive to stores to shop even when they weren't planning on it. I think this happens less for carfree households. Fewer stores are accessible to me, and I'm unlikely to go to a shopping center as a form of recreation. My daily commute takes me by fewer stores, so I'm less likely to stop and shop on impulse.

This filters down to our kids. We very rarely shop with our 3 year old, H. The baby is more likely to shop with one of us, since we are more likely to run errands on a day when one of us is at home with him, but H almost never sees the inside of a store. We grocery shop by bike every two weeks, and the bike is heavy enough on it's own -- I'd never bike H to the store as well. She's probably in a grocery store once every couple of months. We don't shop for entertainment, which keeps us out of toy stores and gazingus pin stores for the most part (though not completely). H's most frequent shopping excursion is to the liquor store (or "the wine store" as she calls it) because her daycare is right next to the liquor store and she and I stop on Fridays for a bottle of shabbat wine for grown-ups. Plus, the men working at that store are absolute sweethearts who love to talk to H and ogle the baby.

The other day I had some urgent errands to run, so I went into the natural health store and the grocery store with H. She wanted pretty much everything in both stores. She asked several times if she could buy something, and each time I said a clear "no." But I realized that if we were stores together more often, she'd be asking more often, and then one time I'd decide to say "yes." That in turn would mean that she'd ask me more often, and we'd be in a vicious cycle that leads to the gimmies.

And just so you know, I really do think this is only an accidental result of our carfree/mostly-TV-free lifestyle that we've avoided the gimmies thus far. We rarely go out to eat as a family, but when we do, H gets a chocolate milk. Why? Because she asks for it and we want our restaurant outing to go smoothly. Before baby R was born, H and I used to take occasional trips to Whole Foods during which we'd get her a drink and a cup of soup. Guess what she now demands on our rare trips to Whole Foods? Guess what I often get for her?

Most parents cannot stand up without fail to a young child's demands for stuff. And saying "yes" to demands for stuff is like trying to hack off a hydra-head. Each time you say "Yes" you are causing ten more future asks, each of which increases your chance of another "yes" which in turn will lead to more asks. I am grateful that because we rarely find ourselves in stores and don't have a TV, the most annoying "stuff" requests my daughter makes are for chocolate milk at restaurants and checking a DVD out of the library. I hope this trend continues, but I know that as our kids get older, they will be exposed to more stuff and that means they'll want more stuff. We've probably only put off the battles of consumerism in our children for a little while. In the years ahead we'll be teaching our kids about money, including spending, saving, and giving, as well as how advertisers and businesses try to separate us from our money. Some would say we should already be starting that process. For now, however, a big piece of our educational strategy is simply not learning to shop.

In Praise of Car-Light Families

Occasionally, we worry that people get the wrong idea about us. I know that some readers out there probably think that we are environmental extremists, going to absurd lengths for our carfree cause. But to be honest, we're fairly lazy people. Well, lazy might be taking things too far, but as parents of a three-and-a-half-year-old and an eight-month-old, we don't tend to take on a lot of extra tasks. It's all we can really do to keep our laundry moving along, keep the dishes washed, and keep food in the pantry. We don't do stuff that's hard. But for us at this point in our lives, being carfree is actually much easier than having a car. We never worry about parking, we don't have to dig the car out of the snow, and we don't have extra bills to pay each month. We don't spend time stuck in traffic or driving from home to daycare to work and back to daycare and home again. We see our lives as easy and the lives of car-owners as impossibly difficult.

However, we have set up our lives so that being carfree is the easiest choice and not everyone has the ability or the desire to live in the kind of compact, public-transportation-rich city that allows even families with young children to get by without a car. If we lived even slightly farther out of town, say in Arlington, or Newton, I know we would have at least one car because our lives as parents would be too difficult to manage without one. So for the moment, I'd really like to sing the praises of all of you car-light families out there.

There are many families living in suburbia and small towns that make do with just one car. For instance, Four on a Quarter has a set a goal of using just 4,000 car miles per year in Orlando, Florida, which is a much harder challenge than living carfree in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Still, they find that their efforts at biking add substantially to their lives. Lex and Lena of Totally Smitten Mama live car-light in western Massachusetts and decided to give up on their dream of farm-life in favor of being less dependent on a car. Suburban Bike Mama rediscovered her love of biking in Newton, MA.

What we have in common with many of these car-light families is a drive to take things just one step further. In our neighborhood, every family we can think of has just one car. Parking is at a premium and public transportation and biking are both good options, so it is easy and cost-efficient for families to live with just one car. We've taken that one step further.

But if you live in an area where you look around, and nearly every family has two cars, or possibly even more, ditching the car completely might be a real stretch unless you are willing to do more drastic things like moving, finding a job closer to home, or committing to hard core all-weather biking. But reducing to one car might well be quite do-able with some minor restructuring, and still permit you to reap many of the benefits that we extol here at Car Free With Kids: money in your pocket, better health, less time wasted behind the wheel, and a stronger sense of community.

So, if what we do here seems a little bit crazy or impossible, it might be where you live. But that doesn't mean you can't get some of the very same benefits in your own community. Look around you, see what "normal" is where you live, and try to drive less than that. You'll see the most benefits once you can reduce car use enough to truly offload a car. That's what gets you the most payoff both financially and in terms of life simplicity, but if that seems like too much, start with parking the second car all weekend, commuting by bus one day a week, or running errands by bike. Even these smaller steps will make your life nicer, and possibly even motivate you to take bigger steps.

Carfree Roundup

Here are some recent posts and stories that caught our eye:

Totcycle >> Is Family Cycling Safe? One dad's take on the safety (or not) of biking with kids. We couldn't agree more.

Most Civilized Conveyance >> Homecoming InkandPen and Dave joined the ranks of the car free with kids when they welcomed Jasper to their family in late November. Check out some great pics of their pedicab ride home from the birth center and send them some good wishes. Stay tuned for what promises to be a great baby bike set-up on their Yuba cargo bike.

Vermont Public Radio >> Winter Bike Commuting Check out this radio program on commuting by bike in the winter in Vermont.

Four on a Quarter >> Does it wear off? Angie writes about how a shift to traveling primarily by bike has improved her quality of life (and that driving less doesn't feel like deprivation). Also, take note, this family is going super car-light in ORLANDO, one of those places that everyone says that driving less, let alone primarily biking, is "impossible." We're cheering them on!

Gifts for City Dwellers and Other Small-Space Folks

Over the years, our friends and family have had to get used to our unique needs around gifts. We love generosity and connecting with loved ones, but with four of us sharing 660 square feet, we don't have a lot of room to spare. Now that we're on the other side of Hanukkah, I've been thinking about what nice gifts we've gotten this year and what kinds of gifts work well for people in small spaces. So what do you get the family who can't really fit your gift into their home?

• Consumables. Some of our favorite gifts are things that get used up. Nice coffees and teas, gourmet food, wine, toilet paper. Kidding about that last one. Lots of items other than food will still get used up -- crafting supplies, Hanukkah candles, art supplies for kids, fancy paper for letter-writing.
  
• Memberships and Activities. Museum memberships are great because they are wallet-sized, can be used any time, and work for the whole family. Movie tickets or restaurant gift certificates can also be good. Doing something together with a gift-giver is wonderful.
• Services. Massage, spa treatments, and manicures can all be good choices for the right person.
• Magazines. We love to read, but don't have room for many books. Magazine subscriptions give us something to read and they can be used afterward for art projects by kids.
• Music tends to be very compact and it's a wonderful thing to share with others. I love getting mixed CDs.
• Something really needed. If you want to get something more substantial for someone on your list, you can always find out if there is some larger item they really need. That way you won't be giving them something extra they will have to find space for. These kind of gifts are often best when the recipeint really can be specific about exactly what they want so that you don't end up getting them something that doesn't quite work.
• Small toys for kids. For kids, stick with small toys that have lots of potential in imaginative play. Small building toys, puppets, playsets with animals and people.
• Small useful items. Everyone needs socks. Kids always need clothes. Cloth napkins and dishtowels are useful for most everyone. Hats, gloves, and scarves are generally welcomed by those of us in cold climates.

Need still more ideas? Check out Bus Chick's list and some links for having a simple holiday at Rowdy Kittens.

These are the people in your neighborhood

It was a beautiful New England fall day yesterday. Lots of folks were out and about in our neighborhood, and by the end of the day, I was reflecting on the riches living locally has brought to our life.

We started the day at shabbat services, a 20 minute walk from our place, where we reluctantly turned down a spontaneous lunch invitation from some friends, also walking distance from shul, because H and I had plans to have time together, just the two of us. After services, while we were out, H and I ran into a neighbor family we haven't seen in a little while and got to catch up a bit. Later that afternoon, after we were back home, a great friend of H's from daycare (the daycare that's about 5 blocks away) and her mom just dropped by to see if maybe H wanted to play. The neighbor whisked both kids off to the park while Angela and I finished getting ready for our outing that night. I then went to pick up H at the park, touched base with H's daycare friend and her dad, and ran into yet another family we know well and caught up with them a bit, letting them know if they wanted to hang out tomorrow they should touch base with Angela. H and I then walked along the bike path over to grandma's house in Davis square, running into two more families we know along the way, one family from the park, and one of Angela's co-workers and her daughter, who we know both from Angela's work, and from the fact that her daughter's daycare plays at the same park as our daughter's daycare, so our kids see each other several times a week. After dropping H off with her Grandma for their weekly sleepover (we know, we're spoiled), I waited in the square, listening to some great music for a few minutes while Angela got baby R settled with a sitter. When she caught up with me we hopped on the bus to a friend's wedding (which was delightful). This is a friend I met several years ago at grad school, and then we ended up on the same train home one day, and realized we lived in the same neighborhood.

Choosing to live with our work, daycare and religious community located right here in our neighborhood, choices we made because we didn't want to own a car, and choices that were not always easy to make, has provided such a rich sense of community. As we go about our days, we have so many opportunities to connect with friends from the many overlapping spheres of our life, simply by doing what we were going to do anyway. Some of the folks we ran into yesterday are close friends, the kind you really can call on in an emergency. Some are just friendly acquaintances. But even the less intimate connections, when they are so frequent, and so effortless to make, contribute to a deep sense of community and place. On our walk from the bus coming home from the wedding, I couldn't help but think that Mr. Rogers got it right.

Carseats for the Carfree

Do you really need a carseat for your kid if you don't have a car? Even carfree families need to drive or ride in a car sometimes, in a rental car on vacation, a cab to the airport, or carpooling with friends. Our kids are in cars enough (mostly during out-of-town trips) that it makes sense to have seats for both of them. But which seat is the right one? This is a difficult question to answer. Most of the available carseat information addresses seat safety under the assumption that the seat will be installed permanently in one car, ideally by the police or at the fire station by someone trained in safe installation. Unfortunately, that information doesn't help parents who need to carry the seat around to carshares or taxis (lighter is better), install both quickly and correctly (fancy or confusing straps? Not going to happen) and will need a seat to fit in many kinds of cars. Throw in the prospect of shelling out tons of cash for a seat that gets used just a few times a year, and it gets very frustrating.

Kids, who are legally required to be restrained until 4'9" and 80 pounds in MA, will need multiple seats before they can ride with seatbelts alone. Our approach has been to borrow an appropriate infant seat and then, once H grew out of that one, purchase a relatively light, cheap, and relatively easy-to-install convertible seat that works both rear and forward facing. We purchased an Evenflo Titan which has served it's purpose reasonably well. However, this seat has some drawbacks, the most obvious being that its shoulder strap height rear-facing does not accommodate a child until anywhere close to the AAP recommended two years of age, and suffers a similar shoulder strap height problem forward facing.

In consultation with some smart parent friends, we have tracked down some great suggestions for carseats for the carfree.

If you are expecting an infant, the Combi Coccoro (reviewed here) might serve you well. It is very light, installs without a base (convenient for folks doing more frequent installs and removals), and even though it truly is an infant seat, it also fits kids up to 40 pounds with a fairly high height limit. Even better, even though it is a light and simple seat, it has a relatively high rear-facing weight limit of 33 pounds, and word is that the shoulder straps are positioned high enough that you actually can get close to that weight (unlike our seat, which even though it has a weight limit of 30 pounds rear facing, didn't have nearly enough shoulder strap height to make that a reality) . That won't get all kids to age two rear facing, but it will get many of them there. This seat is pricey at about $160, but it takes the place of both an infant seat and a convertible toddler seat, so if you were planning to buy both anyway, this might be the way to go.

The height/weight limits on the Coccoro should serve you until your child is big enough for the RideSafer Travel Vest (beware the obnoxious music on this link), which positions regular seatbelts to secure a child from 30-60 pounds. When there is no shoulder strap on the seatbelt, this vest needs to be additionally secured with a tether, and not all cars and cabs have tethers, but virtually all will have either a tether or a shoulder belt available. This is a new version of this vest, and the low-end of the size limit has been reduced to 30 pounds, 34 inches & three years old (used to be 35 pounds). This is a very good thing, because the range has now dropped to where many kids can ride with this vest straight out of a low-end convertible carseat like our Evenflo. In fact, that's just what H will be doing as soon as we place our order. We have word from a New York friend with the older version of this vest that installation works well, their 4 y.o. is happy to wear the vest, and that most cabs there actually have a top tether. Note also that there is a larger size for a child up to 80 pounds, though I'm guessing a 7 or 8 year old might resist wearing the vest. I'm guessing we'll switch to a backless booster when H grows out of the vest.

Another good find for an older child might be the SafeGuard Go Hybrid (reviewed here). The Go Hybrid is a forward facing seat that folds up when not in use, making it a good choice for families where a seat spends much more time in storage than in a car. It isn't nearly as compact as the travel vest, but it does have a much lower starting weight of 22 pounds. It also has a nice high 60 pound weight limit in the five point harness, which is something that carseat enthusiasts love as a safety feature, and can go up to 100 pounds as a backless booster. Thus, as soon as your child can sit forward facing, this seat should see them all the way through their carseat years. One word of warning though on this seat: it must be used with a top tether, which not all cars have, and even when they do have them, the tether attachment can be hard to find (every car is different). If you frequently ride in older cars, or don't know in advance what kind of car you'll be riding in, this might be a significant drawback.

Another option out there that might be nice for the carfree, particularly if you do a lot of air travel, or have a long walk to your carshare, might be the Sit 'n' Stroll, which is both a stroller and a fairly standard convertible carseat. However, those wheels make the Sit & Stroll heavy, so unless you really will be using it frequently as a stroller, it might not quite be worth the hefty price tag ($250) or the extra weight getting in/out of the car. Another feature of the Sit 'n' Stroll, unlike either the Go Hybrid or the Travel Vest, is that is is FAA approved for air travel.

Please let us know if you have experience with any of these seats, or what your solution has been to the carseat problem. We have friends with these seats, but haven't used them ourselves so we can't vouch for them specifically. However, we will be getting the travel vest soon, and will absolutely report back once we've given it a try.

I'd like to thank many friends who provided information & experience for this post, and have clearly done their carseat homework: CCB, Party B, Estelle (who tipped us off to the Coccoro), Shelli (a carfree NY mom and big fan of the Sit n' Stroll and Travel Vest), and Jen (who pointed us to the Go Hybrid). Thank you!