There are a few reasons for this. Follow me down this rabbit-hole of my thoughts and I'll tell you how I reached the decision about this plan...

So, the other day (Wednesday, for those of you who take issue with the phrase "the other day"), I was driving to my parents' house to do laundry (our washer is broken). I realized we'd need to put gas in the car soon and we're on a pretty tight budget, so we have to pay a lot of attention to this sort of thing. But you know, doesn't everybody, anymore? Gas here seems to hover around $3.80 a gallon and it has for a bit now. Yeah, sometimes it'll dip to $3.40ish and everyone gets excited, or rise to 3.90ish and everybody complains, but it's mostly in that upper three dollar range. The closest I get to $2.90 anymore is having a ridiculous number of gas points from Kroger or Shop-n-Save. 

Anyway, I had the thought that we need to get used to this. We have to adjust. We have to stop treating it as this horrible thing the current administration, the previous administration, the environmental preservationists, etc. etc. have done to us that somebody is going to fix sometime. The truth is, "expensive" gas is probably here to stay. And my family just has to get used to that idea. 

This led to me thinking that I should tell Adam we needed to look for somewhere in a city to live whenever he got a job after grad school-- I imagined living in an apartment a couple floors up, walking a couple blocks to the grocery store every day, walking to the park, walking to the library, and so on. We'd save on gas, I'd be healthier! 

And then it hit me: I don't have a car during the week anyway. The one day Adam can stay home from campus to save gas, I end up using more gas than he would have to just run errands. If I'm going to change the way we live, why not start now? I live in an apartment on a busy street, yeah, but it has sidewalks. I'm .8 miles from the grocery store, about the same from the library and a park. I wish the park was a bit closer, but I'll get over that. 

So we're walking to the grocery store every day or every other day and buying groceries for just that next day or two (next day so I don't have to haul us down there at 6am before breakfast). We went yesterday and we'll go again today. I'm sure there are days that I'll want to quit, but I'm going to try to give it at least two weeks before I reevaluate. 

I need the exercise. And we need a lifestyle change. I need to learn to be less dependent on our car. And like I told Adam yesterday, "I don't know why I'd expect myself to walk everywhere just because we live in a taller building-- to get everybody out and down the elevator and out places, especially if we have another baby by then-- if I'm not going to do it now when we already live that close." It's not realistic for me to assume we'll find a place where everywhere I want to go is within two or three short blocks. So here's to experiments and exercise! 

Also, I'll leave you with the other thing I've been doing for exercise! Dancing with the boys to this: