Skinflint Sunday: Reduce your bills by evicting one of your kids!

There he goes!

Evan21 has finally decided to do tertiary study and is going to Federation Uni in Ballarat to do Acting for 3 years. Seeing as a  2-hourish commute each way isn’t the most viable of options, he moved into Res on Friday.

Here’s his room. Living in Res doesn’t exactly come cheap at 10K a year. Thankfully, he’s a good little saver and once he realised that he was ready for study, he started hoarding his wages. He should get the living away from home allowance from Centrelink, but the student allowance won’t kick in until next year.

We were halfway up the Western highway when he sighed and said, “I forgot to pack coathangers.” This was after starting to get organised at about 5:30 on the day before and packing my car to the roof with all of his stuff. Realistically, he’s not coming home again to live for at least 3 years, so it makes sense to take practically everything he owns.

We met another family in the lift, also carrying boxes and bags up to their room. The mother said that her daughter had started packing 5 months ago!

After a while, I mentioned to Evan21 that it was funny to see that all the girls had obviously taken such care with their appearance, while the boys were all bearded and scruffy. he looked at me, cocked his head sideways and said, “I give it a week!”

The mothering instinct kicked in and I put together a care package for him to take up there. I don’t want my little vegetarian going without his lentils and chickpeas. I was going to go to Aldi with him and put it all together… together… but he was out seeing friends all weekend so I did it alone. When he came home late on Sunday I showed him and he looked, then said, “Actually, all of this is perfect.”

I knew that I must be fond of him when I voluntarily put in a $20 bag of Costco chia seeds for his morning smoothies.

The apartments all share a couple of kitchens. One has 10 kids sharing, the other has 4. He’s lucky enough to have the smaller kitchen, sharing with 3 girls.

Some friends came over on Monday night before he left to have dinner and say goodbye. You can see how long Evan21’s hair is when it’s released from the man-bun. He’s the one in the hat.

He’s been with most of these friends all through high school. The only one who sees me taking the photo is Cho. He’s been one of Evan21’s mates all the way through. I taught his older brother EAL in year 12. I just adore Cho. He’s always so chilled and cheerful… a bit like my boy.

He actually posed for this one.

After we finished moving all of his stuff up to the 4th floor – why he has so many vinyls when he has duplicated them all digitally I’ll never know – I swept him off to lunch. Most kids had 2 parents to help them move. Halfway through, when we were lugging some extremely heavy weights to the lift, he looked over at me and said, “And this is why you should’ve stayed with Dad!”

He’s a funny fella sometimes.