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The worsening economy started to hit our household in early February, when my on-call job at The Bee dried up. We were lucky that I was able to somewhat compensate for that by freelancing from home, and we paid off our minivan in August, which took some of the pressure off. My kids were already aware that  I had to work X hours to pay for a certain lifestyle, and when we were at a point where me working less didn't threaten our housing or food, they preferred that over road trips and meals out. We made sure they knew we were going to be OK financially; one of the advantages to not having that much before the recession is that we didn't have a house or stock income to lose!

In fact, the children have *thrived* in the last eight months with me not working nights. Less money meant saying goodbye to dinners at a restaurant where we can't sit for 45 minutes and talk about politics, religion and other not-in-public subjects. Eating together around our table every night, talking for as long as we like, is marvelous. I think twice about shopping, which means less time in the van going from store to store instead of being together as a family. No on-call work meant I could read bedtime stories and snuggle with the kids every night, which led to calmer days, too.

We go to the library every week and have a Netflix account we share with my mother. We have in-house movie and game nights, carpet picnics, and attend free events such as MoBand and the Third Thursday Art Walk in Modesto. Now that the weather is cooler, we traded our weekly smoothie run for cocoa at home, and I make more treats so we don't feel deprived. I am very grateful for the unique circumstances that allow us the flexibility to survive a job loss, but tightening down the hatches has been a largely positive thing for our family. 

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Emily

• http://thehive.modbee.com/everydaygeekery
• http://www.modmomsclub.com/growingupgeek