Grosse Pointe Moms Club

Grosse Pointe Moms Club
Doug DuBois for TIME

In the Shade
Anderson and her son Corey sit on a bench at Metro Beach Metropark with another club member, April Zaidi, and her three sons. Zaidi hosts the weekly kids' music and movement class. She makes maracas from plastic eggs and drums from empty infant-formula cans for the class, confident that, as a former glee-club member and drama-camp teacher, she could offer as much as any fancy studio. "I've seen people pay $10 for a half-hour class with a lot of rules. Why should we do that when we can teach the kids for free in the basement?" says Zaidi, who has dubbed herself Miss Frugal. She bought the furniture for their three-bedroom bungalow on Craigslist and keeps to a strict $140-a-week cash budget. "Everything we have is used, but who cares? With three boys, everything looks used as soon as you get it into the house anyway," she says.

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