The Humidifier

One of the trickiest parts of learning to live on just my husband's income is knowing when it's actually worth it to buy the more expensive of something. It has been a trial and error process for me. Very often the generic brand of something is just as good (or good enough) as the more expensive version. As a general rule, if you see a name brand item in my refrigerator or my pantry, you know it must have been on sale. And I had a coupon. That I doubled. There are some things, however, that I will not buy generic. Mayonnaise is one example. The first time I switched from Venus razors to store brand disposable, I felt like I was 12 years old shaving my legs for the first time, they were so mutilated. So I learned that is not a good way to save money. Any pennies I saved on razors were spent on band-aids.

This brings me to the point of my story. A while back, when my husband and I went to the store to purchase a humidifier, we were presented with several choices. I had done my homework, researched the difference between cold and warm, and found that which one was preferred depended on whom you spoke to. Both had their positives and negatives. So with those things being equal, Mark and I decided there could be no possible reason to buy a $75 humidifier when there was a $15 sitting on the shelf right next to it (made by Vick's....we trusted Vick's to do right by us). Steam is steam and if it produced steam it was doing it's job. Right? Wrong. The reason that we ended up with black mold in our kids' room was because it was producing too much steam. But the mold didn't pop up over night and we didn't realize until just this spring what was going on. (Don't judge...this was our first humidifier...I didn't know how much steam was too much steam. Now I do.) We decided next fall, when cold and flu season began again, we would invest in a nice new, humidifier. Little did we know that cold and flu (and croup) season would hit again in June. Which led me to my previous post debating whether or not to pull out the beast of a humidifier. Purchasing a new one was not in this payday's budget, so I had a dilema on my hands. Until....

Our friends stepped up. And offered to loan us theirs (I knew this blog would come in handy for something). I know to these friends, this was not a big deal. Of course they would let us use it! But to us, it was a very big deal. We slept last night without having to worry about whether we were actually harming our son more by having the humidifier on. He got a good night's sleep and so did we, and that is priceless. So thank you friends. For your generosity and for offering when we didn't bother to ask. So the moral of the story, kids, is don't wait for your friends to ask. They may not. If someone has a need and you can meet it, meet it! (Oh, and don't buy cheap humidifiers!)