Now that's cheap... er, Thrifty!

Last week, my son had his girlfriend over for dinner. I had made my "famous" tortellinis. Halfway through the first bite, her face turned beet red and she squealed, "Oh my god! I need a napkin!" My sons face turned equally red when I handed her... a bandanna.

She looked at me like I was crazy and my husband simply said, "We use cloth napkins at our house." She looked relieved and said, "Oh! I thought it was a bandanna!"
"Well, that's just what they look like." He said. I could just see my son thinking, "GAWD, my parents are cheap!"

I use bandannas for pretty much anything that they could be used for. They're 100% cotton, they only cost a dollar each, and they're cute! I use them as headbands when I exercise, ear warmers when I'm jogging, hankies, napkins, scarves, hair protectors when I'm cleaning, doggy attire, barbie dresses, dolly diapers, paper towels, and a lot of other random things. The point is, we try to limit our "paper" usage as much as possible and look for items with longevity that can not only be washed and reused, but versatile. Petty much everything at my house can and is used for more than one purpose. And when we find that we need something, we usually look around the house to see if there is something we already have that can be repurposed or serve a dual function.

For instance, a few weeks back, we bought an old (probably from the 70's) indoor grill at a yard sale. It looks nothing like a grill you would find in stores today, in fact, I can't even find a picture of one similar online. It's a rectangular metal frame which holds a metal drip pan, and you insert a cooking element into the side of it. It has a rack that sits over the top, and as a bonus, it came with a rotisserie getup with a motor, a spit and two supports. So, for that two dollars, we got an indoor grill, a rotisserie, and the drip pan doubles as a pancake and biscuit server on Sundays, the rack doubles as a baking rack, and the spit of the rotisserie is our new fire place poker. Ok, so call me ghetto. Call me cheap. I prefer creatively thrifty. But every dollar I save on an item I can get by without, is a dollar I can spend on more important things... and less "things" means less clutter, and minimizing our paper usage saves trees and spares landfills. So I'm happy to be cheap, even if my kids sometimes wish I wasn't.