The Dealio

So what I should have said at the beginning was the point of this blog. Here's the deal: I'm a stay-at-home mom who would rather be working, but that would require that I put my one-year-old daughter into daycare, which I don't want to do, and I would be lucky if my salary was enough to make the whole thing worthwhile. So though I choose to stay at home, it's not what I would really like to be doing.

What would I like to be doing? Not really sure. Probably getting paid to post pictures on people.com, since reading it is about the only thing I do these days anyway. Besides cook, clean, run errands on foot and play Freecell.

We are not a rich family. Neither of us comes from rich families. We get a little help from Mark's parents around holidays. But what it boils down to is that we moved to London to live in London so we didn't move some place more affordable, like Kingston or god knows where else. We are the poorest people I know, the only people I know living outside central London who don't have a car. At this point I can't afford the $3 Starbucks decaf (which isn't even brewed, btw), a glass of wine with my dinner every night or even a music class for Vaughn once a week. And we never, EVER go out. However we do use our savings to go on nice little vacations (to Seville next weekend, for instance). And hopefully that will make it all worth it.

In the meantime, I wonder how American moms living over here get by when things are so expensive and so freaking foreign (food, for example), and so my mind continually wanders to Gwyneth Paltrow and how she gets by. It's just natural. She's the postermom for us ex-pats. But then I remember the money, the nannies, the enormous house in Primrose Hill, the friends, the social scene, the car, the money ... and I'm just right back where I started. A poor, but not poor, American living in the Nappy Valley of London.

With no queso.