The Minimal(ish) Life With a Toddler

My wife and I signed the lease in 2017 on a one-bedroom, one-bathroom, 864 sq. ft. home just before getting married in April. It was the perfect location and the perfect size… until we received the semi-unexpected news that Maggie was pregnant.

We’d only been married for a few months. Our bedroom was already doubling as my office, which it functioned as during the day while I worked from home full-time. We had a decision to make: Go bigger, or save money.

At this time, we had six figures in debt: A 2016 Chevrolet Colorado purchased a year before and prior to the marriage, two bachelor’s degrees, and a nearly-finished MBA. So while the idea of a larger home was certainly appealing, the idea of a larger rent payment was not.

And the Phoenix metro area is resoundingly a seller’s market, so it would have been a much higher rent. So, we decided to stay in that small house, and we prepared the bedroom for triple duty: bedroom, office, nursery.

The downsizing begins

Because we needed to make room for all that comes with a baby — a crib and space for clothes and diapers, we began getting rid of things. I’d already donated a lot of stuff prior to when we got married, because I had the same amount of space but was now sharing it with another person. I got rid of a lot of stuff. Especially clothes I’d been retaining from cold Ohio winters, in case I might move back there.

So to make way for baby things, I got rid of more clothes, and sneakers (I had a thing for them), and most of my 300-album CD collection from high school, and outdated electronics, and unused dishes… the list goes on.

I also made the decision to sell my truck at a loss (I was already upside down on it after just a year), because even then it was still a cheaper decision at $500 monthly. It was terribly hard for me because I’d always wanted a truck ever since being a kid, but I knew immediately it had to go and was less important than family.

At this point, we had significantly less stuff than we did when we first got married less than a year before. And it was freeing. Even though we both came with a lot less stuff than I’ve found most people have, it was still pretty unbelievable. The amount of “I haven’t used this in the past year… or two, or five” stuff that we’d been hanging onto was incredible.

And to just get rid of it all was weird at first, but once we started tossing stuff into bags marked “Goodwill,” “recycle,” and “trash,” we didn’t look back.

The high cost of minimal-ish maintenance

As our daughter grows, she gets more stuff — toys, high chairs, trampolines, clothes, shoes. We’re trying to save as much of it as we can after she outgrows it in hopes of re-using if we have a second child, so we de-clutter even more of our own things that aren’t being used.

But too often, we find ourselves giving away things like expensive car seats to make way for the toys and books she needs to learn. So realistically we’ll be spending that money again if baby number two does come. And as relatives shower her with gifts against our wishes, we frequently cycle toys from unwrapped to played with to Goodwill, because we’re already constantly tripping over everything, all the time.

We’ve managed to store two adult bicycles, some unused shelving, a fishing pole, two laundry baskets, and a Little Tikes trampoline in the approximately 7x4 space in our laundry room between the machines and the wall opposite them (that’s also the pathway to the back door of the house, by the way). Because there’s nowhere else to put those things. I’ve had a bruised shin for two weeks now thanks to bumping it on the support bar on the little trampoline, which we use almost several times per week with our toddler (and it’ll surely become daily as the Phoenix summer heats up in March).

And our pantry, which we had to repurpose as a closet for towels and storage, is purged on what seems like a quarterly basis: which of Maggie’s craft supplies does she use the least? Did I wear any of those winter clothes last year? Should we get rid of more DVD movies? Didn’t we use that last month, do we really have to get rid of it?

Why it’s worth it

It can get really annoying, really quickly to not have a space for just you and your spouse. It can be difficult when your child begins to associate her bed with punishment (because where else is she going to do time out other than her crib, in a house so full of stuff that all the corners are occupied with stuff we use regularly). It’s exhausting to clean the bar counter in the kitchen every day because you have to use it as a desk to get work done while your child naps in your bedroom/office. It gets really old tripping over laundry baskets that are in the narrow hallway because they don’t fit anywhere else, and over piles of toys in random spots for the same reason.

But we know that our daughter values what she has. She’s only one and a half, but we can see it already. She doesn’t tire that quickly from her toys — she still plays with toys that were given to us before she was born. And she sees things like movies and screens as a privilege, because we’re minimalist in those areas too. She doesn’t have her own device, and won’t for the foreseeable future. We don’t keep our TV turned on, and our own phones are pretty clear of clutter and unnecessary apps.

And while not having a separate room for our daughter can get tiresome, it’s actually pretty convenient to not have to walk down a hallway to soothe her at night when she wakes up (this was especially true when she was a newborn).

But more importantly, we’re able to instill in her at an early age, by example, that we don’t need “stuff” to make us happy or give us joy. That we don’t need to be so consumer-driven. That we don’t need to have such large footprints. We’re looking at upsizing our home as she gets older and we consider a second child, but you can bet that we will keep it free of “junk” and “stuff” that goes unused. It’s something that Maggie and I have continually agreed on when discussing — we don’t want to have stuff for the sake of having stuff.

So we’re hopeful that as she grows and learns and is more exposed to different environments and worldviews that she will value and embrace a simple lifestyle. Because when you live simply, you enable yourself to be more generous and hospitable.

Photo credit: Burak K/Pexels