Dear parents, thank you for all the wonderful work you have been doing in raising the next generation of presidents, governors, professors, engineers, medical doctors, nurses, ICT experts, teachers, entrepreneurs, and so on. It is not an easy task, but God who gave you this assignment will continue to strengthen you to do it diligently.
It is mid-July and many schools are beginning to close for the long vacation. Soon the children will all be home. It is an entirely different ball game from when they have to go to school every day and return home in the evening or when they are completely away in the boarding house. This time around, they will be home for longer and this will come with a lot of pressure on your pockets. The children, especially the much younger ones, will want to eat as many times as there is food made available and also make other demands. That there is hardship in the country is not so much their business, they want what they want. How then do you cope with this reality in the midst of daunting economic challenges? Well, it may be time to dust up your Home Economics notebook. This is not a joke. Some of those secrets you learnt in your secondary school Home Economics class will come handy at a time like this.
While you set about looking for your Home Economics notebook, here are some tips you may consider that can go a long way in helping you out this period.
Number one, draw up a meal timetable and paste it where everyone can see it. This way, everybody in the house knows what meal is available for breakfast, lunch and dinner. This will help the children to understand that it is not a period for them to make so much choices of what to eat at a particular time but a time to eat what is made available. Following the timetable judiciously helps you to spend less as you avoid cooking a different meal for each child.
When drawing up the timetable, consider putting more of some of the meals you can make yourself. Pap is a good example and it is very good for breakfast. To save cost, you can buy corn in the market, make your own pap in large quantity and store it in the refrigerator instead of having to buy every time you need it. You can also make akara yourself to accompany the pap. This will really save you some reasonable money. An average ball of akara now goes for 100 naira. How many of that can you buy for the entire family’s breakfast on a Saturday morning? But say you are to prepare the akara yourself, you will end up with more than enough balls of better-quality akara prepared in a more hygienic way.
Another secret is to consider different ways of making a particular kind of food so that the children don’t feel they are eating the same food every time. For instance, yam or potatoes can be fried and used for breakfast. The next time it can be cooked as yam pottage or boiled and eaten with vegetable sauce. Beans, on the other hand, can be cooked with rice; it can be cooked as pottage beans with yam, sweet potatoes or ripe plantain. It can also be used to prepare moi-moi for the family which can serve as a dinner on Saturday and the remaining can be paired with Sunday jollof rice.
This is also not a period when everyone makes their own tea in their separate teacups without your supervision. You can make the tea in a big bowl and share it in their different teacups. You can also buy the small refill packs of the beverages. For each breakfast, you provide the number of refill packs required and they go ahead to make their tea. If it is possible for you, learn some recipes like home-made bread rolls and doughnuts or bring your older children to learn the skill. Once in a while, you opt out of buying bread from vendors and bake yours. This might appear to be on the high side, but you are sure of what your children are consuming. I say this because I have had a situation where I bought a small loaf of bread from a vendor and forgot it in the car for about four days. As at when I remembered it, it still looked fresh. That sends a signal that it must have been produced with some generous amount of preservative to still keep it fresh for so long. This does not include the number of days it may have spent at the vendor’s.
There is also the need to avoid wastage this time. One way of doing this is to ensure that food is dished to each child according to what they can finish. Wastage should not be encouraged in normal times, let alone in a time of economic downturn.
Lastly, your children might make demands at this time which you might consider unnecessary spending, seize the opportunity to discuss your holiday spending budget with them. Don’t avoid talking about your spending with them, especially if you have grown-up kids who can understand the message you are trying to pass across to them. The holiday is a good opportunity to talk to your kids about money.
Have a great weekend.
Queen, a personal finance advisor, can be reached via [email protected]
