Three weeks later, when the boxes were gone and I could see my floor, I sat in my unfamiliar kitchen, staring at the phone. Back home, I’d be preparing lesson plans, setting up my classroom, and getting ready to meet a new group of students. Here, there was nothing.

“I don’t know who I am here,” I whispered to the silence.

There was no one to answer.

The loneliness hit hardest during quiet moments. Sunday afternoons, when I used to sit in the nearby park with my neighbors. Tuesday evenings without a tefillah shiur with women who’d known me for years. I called my friends regularly, but phone conversations couldn’t fill the spaces where real friendship used to live.

“I invited the Steinmetzes for Shabbos,” I told my husband.

What I didn’t tell him was how much effort each invitation cost me. How I had to push myself to reach out when every interaction felt like a performance. I was playing the role of someone who belonged while feeling like an imposter.

“Mommy, can we make chocolate chip cookies?” my daughter asked one Thursday afternoon.

I opened the pantry. “We don’t have chocolate chips, and the kosher store is closed already.”

“So we can’t make them?”

“Not today.” I closed the pantry door harder than necessary. It wasn’t just about chocolate chips. It was the luxury of spontaneity I’d lost. Here, everything required planning, preparation, or doing without.

That night, I served plain cookies, and they were fine. But I mourned the ease of my old life, the simple pleasure of last-minute decisions.

My block was too quiet. The suburban wildlife was too loud. And my only chance to socialize was at the shul’s weekly kiddush — a grueling, hot, half-hour trek with four little kids in tow. Would I ever get used to this place?

Five months after our move, during one of our weekly calls, my sister asked, “So how long did it take to feel settled?”

The question hung awkwardly in the air.

“Meir loves it here. The kids are making friends and settling in. And even though it’s a small place, everyone is so nice. But I’m… still working on it,” I admitted. “I keep waiting for that moment when it clicks, when this feels like home. Maybe for some people, it never comes?”

“I think,” my sister said gently, “you have to invest in it.”

I tried. I started a new job as a secretary at a local business. It wasn’t the same as standing in front of a classroom, feeling like I was exactly where I belonged. Nothing here needed me specifically. But I forced myself to go to community events, even when I couldn’t remember any names (didn’t that lady tell me who she was five minutes ago?). Slowly, though, I began to notice things. Rachel, who always asked about my kids. The way Bracha smiled when she saw me across the room at the weekly kiddush.

The friendships I’m starting to build here are different from the deep bonds I left behind, but they’re no less real.

And I’m learning that as adults, we have to choose to invest. We have to show up even when it feels uncomfortable, invite people over even when we’re not sure we have enough in common, and say yes to opportunities that feel outside our comfort zone.

Home isn’t a feeling you stumble into after enough days pass, but a decision you make — every day.

I’m not there yet. But for the first time since we moved, I believe I could be.

Some stories don’t end with the perfect resolution. Some stories don’t end. I’m still waiting for mine. But at least I’m trying to write it.

• I loved… almost nothing about our new hometown when we moved. I have to actively seek things to appreciate, and I’m starting to find them. One example? I live in a beautiful, traffic-free
  neighborhood.
• I hated… starting over. Moving meant rebuilding an identity that fit so perfectly in my old life. I still feel like I’ve lost pieces of myself.
• Something I didn’t expect… how hard it is to move. I knew it would be difficult, but I didn’t grasp how hard it would be. Logistically, moving is complicated. But it’s also emotionally difficult. I still find myself constantly comparing my old life to my new life.

Newcomer to Bubbyhood:

A Story of Forever

I

t’s 2:47 a.m., and I’m wearing a trail in my daughter’s living room carpet, carrying a screaming two-week-old.

I’m exhausted. My back, never at its best in the middle of the night, hurts. My eyes are burning. And I can’t stop smiling.

Twenty minutes ago, I gently took this little girl out of my daughter’s arms while they both cried. My daughter was sobbing because the baby wouldn’t stop screaming and she hadn’t slept in three days and she looked at me with watery, desperate eyes and whispered, “Ma, I don’t know what I’m doing.”

The second I took her, my granddaughter stopped crying (at least for a few breaths). As if she was waiting for me. And my daughter, my baby who I know was just born yesterday — stumbled off to bed, collapsed, and was asleep in 30 seconds.

I’m left to walk the dimly lit path of the night watch, with this tiny person who is finally starting to snuggle in my arms, and I’m thinking, I know exactly what to do. For the first time since my little girl grew up, leaving me feeling a little unsure of my role, I know that I’m where I need to be.

Growing up, grandparents were something only other people had. Very few of my friends had grandparents. Mostly, it seemed to be a non-Jewish thing. And that image was reinforced by sturdy children’s books with pictures of grandmothers: white hair in a smooth bun, red-checked apron, baking cookies. I was fascinated by the image of this Grandma, this mythical fairytale character. It wasn’t how most Jewish families in my neighborhood worked. My grandparents, I knew, were buried somewhere in Europe.

When my daughter told me she was expecting, that childhood part of me wondered, What do I do with a grandchild? I’m too young to be a bubby! I don’t have white hair. I don’t bake cookies.

But here I am, after 3 a.m., this little girl sleeping against my shoulder (until I stop walking), and I finally get it.

When you have your kids, you feel like you’re flying blind half the time. You’re terrified you’re messing up. Every decision feels huge and permanent (and often wrong). You second-guess everything. You lie awake, wondering if you’re ruining their entire future because you lost your temper or forgot to read them a bedtime story or let them watch a video when you were exhausted and needed them out from underfoot while you threw together a not-exactly-nutritious supper.

But this?

I look at this tiny human being, and I don’t feel panic. I feel privileged. I get to love this precious new life without the crushing responsibility. I get to be the safe pair of arms that holds her when Mommy is too tired.

She stirs, smacks her little rosebud mouth, makes soft, tiny noises in her sleep, and I remember when her mother was this size. It feels like yesterday, and at the same time, a lifetime ago. I was so scared. Afraid I was going to break her. So sure I was doing everything wrong. But I must have done something right. I feel a rush of pride in my beautiful daughter, who is now a mother herself.

Back and forth. Back and forth.

Around the living room carpet, and, for some variety, I even venture into the kitchen. Everything is quiet now, except for her snuffly breathing and the soft ticking of the kitchen clock, measuring the minutes of this night. It’s too long. And too short. Because if my daughter was a baby yesterday, how long will it take for this tiny bundle to grow up? I’m holding her, and I’m holding my own mortality, the passage of time slow and swift in my arms. And I’m thinking about that grandmother in the book, with her apron and her cookies, and how I used to think it was just pretend.

But it’s not pretend. It’s just different than I imagined.

I don’t have an apron, but I have arms that remember exactly how to hold a baby. I don’t like to bake cookies (I’m more into potato kugel, which doesn’t fit the American stereotype), but I can walk circles around a living room as the sky grows gray at its edges. I’m not old, but I’m experienced enough to know that babies cry and it’s not the end of the world, and sometimes they just need to be held for a while by someone who’s not frantic and exhausted.

This little girl doesn’t care that I never had a bubby show me how to be one. She doesn’t care that I’m going to have to figure out this role as I go along. She just needs me to hold her, walk in soothing circles, and stay calm while her mother gets the sleep she desperately needs.

And I love every second of it.

This is what I was waiting for, the part where everything I learned raising my own kids means something again. I’m not only someone’s mother anymore. I’m a bubby.

The sun’s going to come up soon. My daughter will wake up and take the baby back, and she’ll probably cry and thank me and tell me she doesn’t know what she would do without me.

And I’ll smile, but I know that the opposite is also true.

Because being needed like this, snuggling the future in my arms, is better than any fairy-tale. In my child and my grandchild, I’m reading a story of forever.

• I loved… everything about being a bubby! (What’s not to love?)
• I hated… having to bite my tongue when I knew my advice wouldn’t be welcome. I might know the best way to burp a newborn, but it doesn’t mean my son-in-law wants to hear it. (If they ask, I’ll tell them.)
• Something I didn’t expect… how emotional it was to hold my granddaughter for the first time. I never expected to cry.

Newcomer to Yiddishkeit:

A Story That’s Timeless

I

stared at the foil-covered table: grape juice in a paper cup, makeshift Seder plate, matzah, and my never-used-before Haggadah. I was alone. My food was cold. But my heart was on fire.

A month ago, I had approached Rabbi Klein after class. “I want to keep Pesach this year.”

For me, this would be an epic challenge.

My assimilated family “did Passover,” an afternoon get-together complete with schmoozing and a hearty, chometzdig meal. My family, cousins, grandparents — it was an ironclad tradition that we all participated in. It was nice family time, but a Seder, it wasn’t. And I wanted a Seder.

Rabbi Klein knew how important it was for me to stay on good terms with my family despite our differences. He knew that I was going to have to be home for Pesach and run my own Seder after the family get-together.

“Liat, that’s an amazing idea!” he said. “We’ll figure out how you can keep Pesach food in a house that’s chometzdig, and then we’ll work on the Seder.”

It was going to be a wild ride. But as a teenage baalas teshuvah from a completely non-frum home, I was used to ups and downs.

My earliest exposure to my Jewishness was at my next-door neighbors’ house. They were Jordanian, and we were good friends. But one day, some traditional cousins visited, and when they found out I was Jewish, their faces twisted in disgust.

“Dirty Jew!” they taunted. I was shocked.

I could have pushed the incident away, but I was introspective, the type of kid who stayed up late reading thick books. And in sixth grade, when I decided to write a biography report on Hitler, I stumbled upon the Holocaust. In my world, far from anything authentically Jewish, I had heard of Hitler, but never the Holocaust. It was a world of Jewish history I’d never imagined.

Then, two childhood friends became Orthodox, and I was fascinated. I was stuck in a Conservative day school that was incredibly anti-Orthodox, but it only made me want to learn more. I read endlessly. I’ll never know how I had the strength to do this in the face of my parents’ opposition, but the passion pushed me forward. In school, I gravitated toward the Orthodox teachers who taught the Hebrew subjects and asked them all my questions.

But the hardest part of my growing attachment to Yiddishkeit was practical. My parents were pretty tolerant, thinking this “religious stuff” was some kind of phase, but they were also completely baffled by my interest in frumkeit — and definitely not going to change their habits to suit my growing commitment. I was still a child in a completely nonkosher home. Every Shabbos, I arranged to stay with my rotation of frum friends.

The kitchen was a huge problem.

“Everything is treif,” I told Rabbi Klein, one of my mentors from school. “What should I do?”

His response was to pull out a wad of hundred-dollar bills. “Go get your own dishes,” he said. I did. Even though I was young, I was forced to grow up quickly.

My first Yamim Tovim were brutal. My mother worked full-time and hated cooking, so driving to McDonald’s was a common dinnertime destination. And I had to go.

“You have lots of rules,” my little brother observed candidly. But I was also thriving. I was thirsty to learn and grow, and being surrounded by students who lived the opposite made it clear I wanted to do the right thing. It kept me focused.

But that first Seder was a challenge.

Rabbi Klein presented me with a translated Haggadah, the first I ever owned. We spent two hours going over all the detailed halachos I needed to be aware of on Pesach, and then we discussed what I should do at every step of the Seder. I took copious notes and left armed with Rabbi Klein’s gift and his advice. I knew he believed in me, and intense desire burned within me. I was going to do this.

As the sun set and night deepened, I filled a plastic cup with purple grape juice and softly opened the pages of my pristine Haggadah.

I was alone. At first, I felt awkward. A little sad. But then I realized that it was just me and Hashem. Our Seder. It was a heady feeling, and as I took my first bite of matzah, I tasted real freedom.

That feeling followed me to seminary in Eretz Yisrael, where I ate at homes that radiated simplicity and were overrun with more children than I thought possible.

“This is it,” I told a friend. I wanted this enchanting world.

Marriage and motherhood helped coax me back onto solid ground. Growing up with one younger brother in a spacious house, I quickly realized that the lifestyle I admired so intensely wasn’t one I could sustain.

“I’m not made to live in poverty and have a million kids,” I told my husband with chagrin. And always, those thoughts would float up — Maybe if you were an FFB, you wouldn’t have such a hard time. You’d have child after child, no money, a smile on your face — and you’d realize that that’s how it should be.

I still battle that inner voice, the niggling feeling that being a newcomer is, in some ways, permanent.

There are nuances I still haven’t grasped because of how I grew up, and things I can’t discuss with my parents because they can’t understand, much as I love them. I have a wonderful, solid relationship with my mom, but I never complain to her about my kids, because I know exactly what she’ll think (and maybe say): “You’re the one who wanted more than one or two kids!”

When I feel like I’m drowning, I call a close rebbetzin. She makes me feel like a regular mother instead of a zookeeper (who should plug her charges into the TV to keep them tame).

Once, I was talking to an FFB, and I told her how my girls fight constantly.

“When I was a kid, my sister and I would put cereal boxes in front of our faces so we didn’t have to see each other at breakfast,” she said casually. “Now, we’re best friends.”

I just stood there, thinking, thanks for letting me know we’re typical. Even when the internal newcomer doesn’t leave, it does become normal.

My friends in our yeshivish neighborhood think I come from a more modern home. I’m proud of my journey, but I don’t feel the need to share all the details about growing up barely knowing what a Jew was.

Today, I sit on my three-year-old’s bed, saying Shema. And I marvel at this: The story of Yetzias Mitzrayim will never be new and strange to her. Torah and mitzvos will always be her world.

Newcomer or born into this life, we’re both part of the same timeless story.

• I loved… learning. The depth and meaning of every new idea in Yiddishkeit was amazing to me, even as a young teenager.
• I hated… not understanding what all my frum friends seemed to know by instinct. I didn’t like asking questions, since I was always afraid of looking silly.
• Something I didn’t expect… how my family came to respect the frum lifestyle, even if they’re (barely) traditional.

Newcomer to Loss:

A Story Missing Chapters

T

hose first moments of realizing that I was living in a world without my mother were surreal. At first, I couldn’t absorb it. It couldn’t be true. But then the pain hit — deep, crushing waves of physical agony that left me breathless.

“I’m no longer anyone’s daughter,” I cried to my husband. There was no one left to love me like my mother. The one person who just wanted the best for me, who cared about every boring little detail of my day, who thought I always looked great, the one who kept me anchored and safe — was gone.

I’m a young mother — and so was she. My mother was diagnosed at 30. Lived through 20 years of increasingly invasive treatments. I watched her lose energy, the strength to talk, to smile, to laugh.

But until the end comes, you don’t believe it can really happen.

Losing a parent doesn’t ease in slowly. It hits, raw and overwhelming. The first days don’t feel like life at all. I floated through empty space, stunned. Until the kevurah I was an onen, which made the whole world feel even stranger. I was suddenly outside the comforting rhythms of everyday life and doing mitzvos. I would pick up a glass of water, find myself murmuring a quick shehakol, and have to stop myself.

The levayah blurs in my mind — the tears, the pain, the crowds of people pouring in to share their grief. I saw my mother’s students, her coworkers, friends of hers I barely knew, neighbors, and family.

“Mommy should be here. She would love to see everyone,” I whispered to one of my sisters. And she smiled, because my social, people-loving mother really would have enjoyed seeing everyone she loved together in one place.

The shivah is like another world. An alternate universe where the delicious cakes, cookies, and hot, fresh food never stop coming — but you don’t have an appetite.

And the people. There were so many people. It was the whole world, my life flashing in front of my eyes every 15 minutes. One second, I was talking to my former high school teacher; the next, my mother’s students were coming in. Two minutes later, the rav of our shul walked in together with my father’s chavrusa… while I was on the phone with a seminary friend I hadn’t spoken to in eight years.

There were the comforting moments when people shared special memories. The bizarre moments, like when one woman wouldn’t leave on Erev Shabbos until someone physically removed her chair. The hard moments, when a neighbor remarked, “I know how you feel, I lost my mother at ninety-five.”

“Whenever you lose your mother, it’s a loss,” I replied. Because it’s true. But there’s a difference when the person who passed away was young, and you were young. You don’t only lose a parent; you lose the years that should have been.

The emotions were wild. One minute, we were laughing hysterically at funny memories. The next, we were sobbing hysterically. During one day of shivah, my siblings and I sneaked into the kitchen. My brother told a great story about my mother, and we sat there on the cracked kitchen floor, howling with laughter until we cried — and then we started sobbing until we couldn’t breathe. My aunt had to shoo aghast visitors out of the kitchen with a reassuring (but not particularly convincing), “They’re okay, they’re okay.”

By Wednesday, after days of visitors, I lost it. I hid in the basement. I was too raw and vulnerable. One of my sisters discreetly directed my closest friends to the basement so I could see the people I needed.

But even the longest week in the world ends. The family needs you. The long-neglected house needs you. The work you couldn’t do for a week is still waiting for you. But I had to relearn how to live.

I kept picking up the phone. Dialing my mother’s number by reflex, and then remembering she wasn’t here. How do I make the fudgiest brownies for a birthday treat? What kind of dress should I buy my six-year-old? Which brand of dish soap is best? There was so much I wanted to ask, to share, to know. I ached to hear her voice. Instead, I was left wondering, what would she have said?

I’ll never know.

Every Shabbos, my mother sent me potato kugel, chicken soup, fresh challah, and containers of cut-up honeydew and cantaloupe. Two days after shivah was over, it hit me like a bolt of lightning — I needed to cook for Shabbos! I’d never even used my food processor. I took it out, looked at it… and I couldn’t use it. I didn’t make the potato kugel that week. Or the next.

How was I going to live without my mother?

Two weeks later, my daughter graduated from kindergarten. And it was hard not to notice that a family was taking up six seats in the front row — parents, four grandparents. I was the only person cheering for my little girl. One person, one chair, trying to clap loud enough for two people, for a bubby watching from Shamayim. I remember thinking at the front row cheering squad, Can you move over a bit so I can take a picture?

And then it was suddenly the shloshim. Thirty days that felt like a hundred million days, like I hadn’t spoken to my mother in forever. But I could also see her so clearly in my mind. Wasn’t it just yesterday that I visited her at the hospital?

“You probably don’t worry about little things anymore,” my neighbor told me the next day.

“Death doesn’t mean you stop being human,” I said. I get upset over little things. But I also carry a deeper layer underneath. I know that life is short. That time is precious. That people are not forever.

A close friend told me, “It gets better.” I thought she was crazy, but she was right. That crushing, can’t-breathe sensation does lift. The grief of the shloshim was already different.

But I also know that my life in this new world will always be bittersweet. I’ll always miss my mother. I’ll always feel the empty space where she should be.

If you still have a mother, thank Hashem every single day. Even when she drives you crazy. (Especially then.) Call her. Appreciate her.

All of us newcomers to the universe of loss grieve differently. But you can make space for the person who only needs one seat at graduation. Show up at our simchahs with an extra-wide smile — and maybe a colorful bunch of balloons.

The chapters I thought I would read together with my mother will never exist.

But that doesn’t mean the story can’t be beautiful.

• I loved… the outpouring of kindness and warmth from family and friends during the shivah. I appreciated every phone call, visit, and message.
• I hated… everything about my situation. What can I say? You never stop needing your mother.
• Something I didn’t expect… how much losing my mother affected every aspect of my life. I hadn’t realized how much I relied on my mother — physically and emotionally — even though I was already married. When she was niftar, I had to learn how to live again.

Newcomer to Kollel:

A Story I Chose

I

sat in front of the Chanukah candles, crying.

The flames blurred through my tears as the door closed with a sharp click. My husband was going back to the beis medrash. That’s what I wanted him to do. But sitting alone in our tiny Lakewood apartment, I felt the weight of my choice settle heavily on my shoulders.

In my mind, Chanukah was always family time. Growing up, my father worked late, but when he came home, the night belonged to us. We’d light the menorah together, have parties with cousins, and stay up, talking and laughing. Even in college, I’d come home to the tail-end warmth of a shared celebration. But this was different. This was the new life I wanted, and I was learning what that meant.

“You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into,” my siblings warned me. The youngest of four, my three married siblings all thought I was “nuts” for wanting to marry someone learning in kollel.

I was the odd one out, the dreamer with a vision that made no sense to anyone around me.

But I knew what I wanted. I was a thinker, the type who would lie awake at night, wondering: What kind of life do I want to build? What kind of person should I build it with? And the answer was always the same: I wanted somebody who learned, somebody connected to Torah, somebody who loved learning. Somebody who always carried a sefer, because how could he not?

“Learning Torah is very important, Aviva, but why isn’t four years enough?” That was how long my father learned before becoming a successful computer programmer.

“Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?” my mother asked. “Don’t you want to live comfortably?” Like all your siblings?

When they first started setting me up with boys, I could tell right away that they were the type who would learn for a bit and then go to work.

“That’s not what I want, Ma,” I tried to explain.

“I can see you fitting so well into the Schwartz family,” she replied wistfully. But to their credit, my parents tried to understand this strange daughter of theirs who was asking for something so different from what they’d raised her to expect.

My husband was everything I wanted, and I knew that our next inevitable stop would be Lakewood — a place I’d barely seen before I checked out the apartment options.

There was so much I didn’t fully understand. When your husband is working, there’s an assumption that eventually, he’ll be the main breadwinner. But when you send your husband off to kollel, you’re making a decision together that learning is the focus, and parnassah will come from somewhere else… meaning you.

I didn’t know about the issues I would have to deal with myself. My closest friend, whose husband works in an office, has chunks of time when her husband is home. Sundays. Evenings. When she needs help, when there are doctor appointments or there’s a minor crisis, she calls him. But if your husband’s in kollel, you don’t call him because the plumbing is acting strange. You take out the Lakewood directory and start calling — because from morning until night, eight hours a day, he’s out of the house, learning.

I wanted it, but I also learned that during that first year, one crying session at a time.

The worst was my nephew’s upsheren. It was on a Sunday, of course. I got in the car with my screeching Shaindy, born on our ten-month anniversary, and drove from Lakewood to Brooklyn alone. She serenaded me the entire way with an ear-piercing wail that made my hands shake on the steering wheel.

By the time I arrived, I was exhausted.

I wanted my husband to go learn. But choosing something and living it are two different things.

I didn’t grow up thinking about money. On our first grocery shopping trip as newlyweds, I grabbed the brand of the mushrooms that my mother always bought and tossed them into the cart.

“Why’d you get those?” my husband asked. “They’re double the price.”

I didn’t know the difference. But I learned.

And my parents worried.

Why wasn’t I buying myself a new dress for Yom Tov? And my sheitel was looking a little limp after only three months! Shouldn’t I get a new one?

How could I explain that these luxuries were no longer in my budget without making them even more nervous? It was a delicate dance of deflection, diplomacy, and outright denial.

When I needed a medical procedure a few months after my chasunah, my mother called with the names of top doctors in Manhattan that she thought I should see immediately.

“Does she realize you’re on Medicaid?” my husband asked incredulously. “We can’t afford to pay the rates these fancy doctors charge.”

I understood, though. In my family, when illness strikes, you visit the best doctor. It’s as obvious as breathing. No one is considering affordability.

But I did love the fact that I could take a break from the office at lunchtime and meet my husband at home. We timed it perfectly so there was time for me to throw together a nice salad and for us both to enjoy a quality conversation. And my husband was home in the morning at the shockingly late hour of 9 a.m. I was used to a working father who left for his long commute at dawn, returning only after we’d eaten supper and gotten ready for bed.

And our Shabbos table was everything I’d dreamed of. There was time for my husband to say a nice devar Torah, for us to talk about the parshah and discuss Torah-related subjects. In my own family, I was gently teased for my intensity. I was the “deep” and “complicated” one. But my husband was delighted to share his insights and listen to mine.

The first year was the learning curve. But it was also filled with the realization that, despite the difficulties, this was the life I wanted.

And that knowledge was something to hold on to over the years that followed. Because when a family keeps growing and everyone needs things, when life gets more expensive, you might forget. You never grasp what a kollel life is until you experience it.

But I do know this: I’m creating a home with someone who doesn’t see learning as an obligation, but life itself. Someone who doesn’t take a “break” from Torah during vacation because you don’t take a break from life.

So yes, there are moments when I sit by the Chanukah candles and cry. When I drive alone with a screaming baby. When I calculate grocery prices and make hard choices about what we can afford.

But I also watch my husband’s face light up when he describes how he figured out a difficult Tosafos… my sons begging to learn with Tatty in kollel… my girls helping on a hectic Sunday so Tatty can go learn a little earlier.

The candles eventually burn down. The tears dry. And in the morning, I get up and do it all again, not because I have to, but because this is the story I chose.

• I loved… how everything in my life suddenly felt purposeful. Work, cleaning the house, the chores I had to start doing myself — doing it so my husband could learn gave everything a new dimension.
• I hated… that I had to look at prices on clothing. I don’t think of myself as very materialistic, but my parents love quality clothing, and I was used to getting new dresses pretty regularly. Now, I need to have a budget before I set foot in a clothing store.
• Something I didn’t expect… how expensive everything is! And how a few frugal tips can save a lot of money.

(Originally featured in Family First, Issue 962)