Love it or hate it, every parent eventually has to potty train their kids. We are currently on attempt #2 with Frugal Boy. For the first attempt, we read a book written by a professional trainer (parents pay her money to deal with it). The author encouraged parents to target the 20-30 month old window because the child is old enough to be capable, but young enough not to dig his/her heels in completely and be obstinate. We thought that Frugal Boy might have been ready at 20 months so we gave it a go. And the going kept going for two months before we finally admitted defeat. You can’t say we didn’t try!
Now that we are finished globe trotting for the time being, we decided it was time to give it another go. This time, we made some changes to our plan of attack. Mainly, we were going to bribe the heck out of Frugal Boy. The book author discourages bribing, but we tried her way and it didn’t work for us. We went to Dollar Tree and picked up $3 worth of incentives.
The first $1 was spent on a two pack of a “Count to 100” poster. This serves as our progress tracker slash game board. The next $1 was spent on a booklet of stickers. The last $1 was spent on prizes in the form of Paw Patrol temporary tattoos.
Each successful use of the potty earns 1 sticker to be placed on the chart/game board. A #2 is worth 2 stickers (hehehe). We arbitrarily draw red circles around some of the numbers and when Frugal Boy reaches one of those special numbers he gets a Paw Patrol tattoo.
He LOVES Paw Patrol and can name each one and its tagline. The pink dog is named Sky (or Skye? I don’t know the spelling). What matters is that he is motivated.
The tattoos wear off in a day or two, so he has to keep up with the program in order to keep his pals with him.
We are on day 4 and he is already up to 31 stickers (plus a handful at the babysitters). More importantly, he is self initiating! Woohoo. The book talked about the four steps of progress.
The kid is clueless and wets themselves
The child recognizes that they are wet after the fact
The child recognizes that they are wetting themselves right now
The child recognizes that they have to go potty before they wet themselves.
Eight months ago he was mostly at 1 and 2. Today he is at 3 and 4. I have yet to meet a kid that takes off their diaper and goes straight to potty trained on their own volition. It takes practice, nudging from parents, and time.
I like to think that our new program is to credit for his recent success. We modeled it after video games. There is a mechanic in games were beginner players are rewarded for doing simple, easy tasks. These early, ‘low hanging’, payoffs encourage the player to keep going. The payoffs get farther and farther apart and require more work. A good write up of all the psychological traps used in a ‘simple’ game such as Candy Crush can be found here.
Growing up as a kid, I rode my bicycle everywhere around town. It was my primary means of transportation between the ages of 6-18. Then I went off to university and a bike wasn’t needed to get around the 6 block campus. I met Shae and we moved to our current city. She grew up in the country and car culture so after our first 19 mile long bike ride she just about keeled over. In hindsight, maybe that wasn’t the best way to entice her into the world of cycling.
About a month ago, I tossed my $10 garage sale bike on the curb for scrappers to pick up. It was beyond saving and I hadn’t ridden it in over two years. I setup a craigslist alert for ‘bicycle’ to see if I couldn’t get a ‘new’ bike for cheap. The only listings that were getting posted were for $100+ bikes. I just wanted something cheap that I could zip around on.
Shae had better luck than me. She found and bought a used $170 bike child seat for just $20 off the classifieds. I eventually gave up and bought a new $80 Wally World special to get me back on the road.
Frugal Boy was beyond excited when he saw the child seat. He clearly remembered grandma taking him for rides last year at her house. He eagerly helped me install ‘his’ seat on my bike.
The neighbors had gifted us with a hand-me-down helmet from their youngest son.
Then we were all ready to go for a ride.
Once we were out in the country there were plenty of mulberry trees with ripe fruit. We made a short stop to pick some for a little afternoon snack.
Now that we’ve made that initial $100 investment, we can go to a lot more places that we used to have to drive to.
For instance, the library:
The pool:
The Children’s Museum:
and starting this Fall, the school!
I hope that starting Frugal Boy early will help foster a healthy lifestyle for years to come!
Shae, her sister (Auntie), Frugal Boy, and myself just returned from an 8 day trip to Costa Rica. We went horse back riding in the mountains, zip lined at 50 mph past a volcano, and forded a river in our 4×4. The frosting on the cake, we did it all for just $100! * Find out how at the end of this series.
* Auntie paid some of her share of the trip and that isn’t included in our Out of Pocket total.
A Primer of Costa Rica
Costa Rica is located in Central America, just north of Panama and south of Nicaragua. The capitol is San José and there is a second international airport located just west of the city of Liberia in the northwestern province of Guanacaste. An established republic, like the United States, Costa Rica is sparsely inhabited and has no standing army. Ticos, a colloquial term used to describe the citizens, have their own currency called colones. The USD -> CRC exchange rate was about 1:530. So one US dollar would get you about 530 Costa Rican colones. The official language is Spanish, although many Ticos have at least a transactional level of English proficiency. The country has a thriving ecotourism industry, exports about 1% of the total coffee production in the world market, and is an attractive place for international companies to set up shop.
Now that you have a working knowledge of Costa Rica, let’s go! Or as the Ticos would say, ¡Vamos!
Day 1 – Getting There
We chose to fly into Liberia airport, not the capitol, because it was closer to the activities that we wanted to do and it was slightly cheaper. Even so, flying from Chicago required about 7 hours of sitting on a plane. We had a layover in Houston that added some more time to our travel day. All-in-all, you can count on sacrificing an entire day just to getting there. Expense wise, tickets were about $500 per person round trip. Frugal Boy is over the cut off for ‘lap child’ so we had to pay for his very own seat.
He enjoyed watching Finding Nemo on the first flight, even without any sound.
Other large expenses that we budgeted for included a meal at the airport, approximately $45, parking for a week ($82), and checking one piece of luggage roundtrip ($50). We saved money by bringing our own snacks from home, packing as lightly as possible to avoid more baggage fees, and booking our airfare well in advance.
An unexpected expense on day 1 was a $10 taxi fare from the airport to our hotel upon arrival. We were expecting a complimentary shuttle to be available, but couldn’t find it and I was feeling extremely unwell at the time and didn’t want to deal with one more thing.
Day 2 – Hitting the Road of Adventure
The first goal of the day was to use the ATM in the lobby to get native colones. Our primary bank refunds ATM fees, and you usually get the best exchange rate by using an ATM instead of a money exchange. Shae withdrew 250,000 colones ($470.06). The second goal of the day was to pickup our rental car. I chose Dollar Rentals because they had some of the best pricing, were off airport (not subject to extra taxes), and had the most transparency about insurance and coverage on their website. The morning’s challenge however was in getting over to their rental office which was about 2 miles away. Both Auntie and I needed to go because we were both going to be drivers. I asked for a ride from the hotel shuttle, and they said they only went to the airport. I tried calling the rental office and no one picked up. Thankfully, I saw a Hertz representative and he agreed to drop us off because their offices were right next door to one another. Yay Hertz!
Once we got there, it was a very easy checkout process. I don’t think I’ve had a checkout be so easy before. I did have a moment of weakness and switched from bare insurance coverage to full coverage. It was $90 more for the week, but after spending a night curled up to the porcelain throne, I wasn’t ready to take any more risks on this trip. For $414.15 we had a 4 wheel drive SUV that comfortably seated all of us and our stuff.
Back at the hotel, we loaded up all of said stuff and remaining passengers and hit the road for the city of Liberia to the East. We made a quick stop to load up on groceries before traveling south on the Pan American highway #1.
I had read about a local swimming hole that was just off the highway called Catarata Llanos de Cortes.
It proved to be a wonderful stop and Frugal Boy was very excited to play in the water.
It was 2000 CRC to park, and we made a donation of another 1000 CRC to two nice abuelas at the entrance who were collecting money for something or another. Finding the local spots is a great way to see the country and save money. We visited several other waterfalls during this trip and they were aimed more at the tourists and our wallets felt that in a big way.
After we had our fill of swimming, we decided to try and find a place to eat lunch in the nearby town of Bagaces. Bagaces was not a tourist town, but I was on the hunt for a local eatery. As Auntie drove farther into town and clutched the steering wheel harder, I spotted the Bar Renur Restaurant with several people inside (always a good sign).
The three women behind the bar greeted us with typical Tico hospitality. They especially loved Frugal Boy and even turned on some cartoons for him to watch while we ate. They didn’t speak any English, but our Spanish has improved a bit from our January Mexico trip, so we were able to interact just fine. Auntie and Shae both ordered lunch, I was still feeling a bit nauseous from the previous day so I just snacked on a banana. The lunch bill was a very affordable 5800 CRC (about $5.50 a person). One thing that surprised Shae and myself were the Costa Rican prices. We had heard beforehand that Costa Rica was an expensive country to travel, but as we later learned first hand it really is on par with USA prices. Really getting off the tourist path and eating like a local was still a pricey meal in comparison to our Mexico trip. Costa Rica would not have much of a geographic arbitrage advantage for retirement purposes.
From lunch, we continued down highway 1 until our turnoff at Las Juntas so we could get to Monteverde in the mountains.
On the drive up into the mountains there was a pull off that had a great view of where we had come from. You can easily see the Nicoya gulf that connects up to the Pacific ocean.
Finally, the winding, bumpy mountain roads delivered us to Monteverde, our first destination of our week long trip.
Monteverde is world famous for being a cloud forest. The elevation was around 5200 ft, making it pleasantly cool, and true to its name, enveloped in clouds more often than not. The last bit of driving was up a very steep and rocky road.
And then we were at our first Airbnb rental house!
For $246 we had a two bedroom house all to ourselves for two nights just minutes away from some of the best attractions in the area. I have yet to have a bad experience with Airbnb. The hosts lived in a house on the same land and they had two energetic little boys that made Frugal Boy light up.
I knew beforehand that the woman host was an ex-pat from the Boston area, so we brought a jar of pure maple syrup as a gift. Of course we bought it at Aldi for $6.50. She was ecstatic to get it and told us that pure maple syrup cost around $40 locally for a similar sized container. We also found out that peanut butter was around $6.60 a pound in Costa Rica.
If you were planning on eating peanut butter in Costa Rica, you might want to bring it from home!
Here is one more photo of our rental house in Monteverde.
After settling in, our host helped us make a reservation for a guided night walk to try and see some of the wildlife. The major tourist draw of this area is the biodiversity.
Standing in the parking lot of the Curi Cancha biological reserve, Shae told Frugal Boy to take a picture. He happily obliged, camera need not apply.
I don’t have any good photos from our night walk. It was about 2 hours long and our guide Adrian tried to spot critters for us. We heard plenty of birds, frogs, and bugs. Highlights included seeing a giant tarantula, nectar drinking bats, a phosphorescent scorpion that shone under a black light, and a Keel-billed Toucan. The latter of which, I learned is an omnivore instead of a herbivore and is not very popular with other animals because it will eat their young.
It’s worth noting that because Costa Rica is so close to the equator, they have 12 hour days year around. That means that it is dark by 6pm. This combined with the switch to mountain time, really screwed up our internal clocks. Shae and I both learned that living near the equator, probably wasn’t for either of us. We like having sunlight in the evening (at least until 8).
With the tour concluded, we were hungry (even me!) and decided to follow the recommendation of our host for an Italian place (Tramonti’s) just down the driveway. We ordered a pizza (5000 CRC) para llevar and enjoyed it back at the house.
Yesterday for Mother’s Day, we loaded up in the car and drove to Blackhawk Springs Forest Preserve for a picnic lunch.
It was a nice sunny day and several other families had the same idea.
Frugal Boy enjoyed sharing Grandpa’s cupcake.
Grandpa was a good sport.
After eating a big lunch, we went for a hike. There are paved and grassy paths totaling over five miles in the preserve.
In a couple of months there will be a ton of blackberries along the trail. I saw a bunch of thorny canes just starting to set their fruit. For now though, we settled on picking some bouquets for mom.
Have you ever wondered how dandelions manage to carpet an entire area. Shae captured the process in slo-mo.
After we were finished spreading an invasive species, we found the jewel of the trail, a natural spring bubbling up from the ground. Frugal Boy got very excited and started pulling on my arm to go ‘swimming’. I indulged him and in the process gave his grandparents and aunties a show they probably weren’t expecting.
The water was very cold, but he still went back a second time before declaring all done.
Dried off and dressed, we finished up our little hike.
After some more time on the playground, we loaded back up in the car and drove a bit south to a seemingly out-of-place Buddhist temple. It was surrounded by corn fields and looked to be built on an old farm homestead.
A man came over and started to talk to us about the temple. Construction started in 2004 and lasted about 3 years. Everything has been done by volunteers. I was a bit surprised to see the sign on the door.
I had visited several temples in Taiwan on a college sponsored trip and they did not have that kind of restriction. From talking with the man, it seemed that this was more of a Thailand/Laos sect.
Frugal Boy liked the decorative dragons.
Leaving the temple behind, we drove to the other side of the forest preserve to look at the big pedestrian bridge.
I was impressed with the living room sized inflatable ‘raft’ that came cruising by.
Frugal Boy got a doggy bank for Easter and he loves to put money into it. He even has a couple of dollar bills from a card given to him.
I am pretty sure that he doesn’t understand money, or the fact that it can be traded for more practical 2 year old things. If he did understand, he’d probably be trying to get that deposited money back out, but that is a lesson for another day. Right now, Shae and I are content to start building a habit of putting money in a ‘safe’ place.
Another life skill that we have been working on is grocery shopping.
He is good at not running into things or people, but we are still working on the concept of “Yours and Not Yours” or “The Stores vs Ours”. Those red grapes are awfully tempting, and he would frequently try to dash up and grab a couple while we were busy. He also thought that a gallon of not-butter should be placed in the cart, along with a carton of eggs.
Yesterday we went to the Peoria Zoo, Riverfront Museum, and Children’s Playhouse. All of the Peoria museums were having a membership swap day, so it was free admittance if you had a membership at any of them. We used our Prairie Wildlife memberships to gain access.
It was a cold day and the indoor places were packed with people. So instead of eating shoulder to shoulder with the crowds we employed a travel trick and went where the people weren’t.
Packing a picnic lunch is always a good life skill to learn.
Speaking of food, Frugal Boy has started to associate running with a good thing. About a month ago, when his aunt visited, Shae and I took our morning run with the jogging stroller as an opportunity to get donuts from our local bakery. Ever since then, Frugal Boy asks for donuts when we go on our morning run. We indulged him again yesterday. Hopefully exercise is now permanently associated with good things.
