Anna and Elsa Barbies

Just like most little girls, my daughter is totally into the Frozen movie. All Frozen all the time. Whenever she gets to choose the movie for movie night, which is most times, she chooses Frozen. My husband says if she picks anything else it will be "for the first time in foreverrrr...."

I considered spending our limited Christmas budget on the Disney licensed dolls, but my crafty self got inspired when I saw my daughter's platinum blond Barbie. Then I called my mom and asked her if she had any red-haired barbies in her stash of children's toys. She did!!

Creativity ensued. I had leftover fabric from Blueberry's halloween Elsa costume and other scrap fabric. It is in these times I am glad I didn't throw away the scraps. The hair was the hardest part actually because these dolls have so much hair that getting it to stay right and in a way that they can be played with without the hair falling out is a challenge.

I don't know a lot about hair terminology but I kind of had to fake the braids in some parts and kind of pull just part of the strand around wrapping most of the hair in the middle so it looked like a braid. I gained a lot of respect for people who do this for commercial dolls. I'm sure they don't pay them enough!

Anna's skirt and top are separate and are attached in the back with velcro. The designs are painted on.

Materials Exchange

Blueberry and I visited our local non-profit materials exchange place. They had a dollar-per-bag sale and we came away with some fun things for craft projects.

I took my 4 year old and I loved to see how random objects sparked her imagination (and mine). Repurposing and reusing items is a great way to stay on budget while homeschooling. Some cities have materials exchange opportunities, but you can always look at your local thrift stores.

I can't wait to see what we come up with.

This is a bracelet Blueberry made with a cardboard spool, some paint and some rhinestone stickers we have been saving for a project such as this. She gave the bracelet to her Nonna.

MOPS: Meal Planning

Our MOPS meeting was about meal planning. Our speaker today was one of our own moms. I appreciated her honest walk-through of her process of meal planning. I really like people who tell of their own experience without pretenses. She was real.

My own version of meal planning has evolved over the years. It was hard for me to come to the realization that we had to plan meals, but I have learned to enjoy it. I didn't grow up meal planning. My mother can just throw stuff together. That is how I learned to cook, but I also like to make certain meals and I don't like having to go to the store because I'm missing one ingredient (or many). I don't like grocery shopping and eventually by meal planning I figured out how to only go grocery shopping once a week. I could probably go every two weeks except for the fresh produce and the small apartment fridge.

As with many things, we can learn by doing. Just pick one way. Try it out for a while. See what works for you and what doesn't. Our MOPS speaker today showed us her way of meal planning, and it is a good way to do it, but each of us has to do what works for us. I liked how she presented it in a very open-ended way.

We all have challenges. We all have goals. We all have some sort of budgetary restriction. We can all save money and time, while sticking to our family's goals and challenges if we take up some intentional planning with our meals.

These days I plan about 5 dinners per week. I plan on having leftovers or a back-up easy meal (maybe a crock-pot freezer meal) the other two days. I pack up leftovers and freeze them for David to take for lunch. We only recently settled into this routine and it is working very well for us. I am thankful he likes leftovers. We have eggs for breakfast. Sometimes a breakfast meat, sometimes just cheese. My 3 year old likes cereal or yogurt for breakfast and then she has a bigger mid-morning snack. David takes leftovers for lunch. I eat leftovers or I will make myself a salad, quick soup (from scratch) or sandwich.

Some things I have learned recently to reduce waste and maximize efficiency:

1) When I only need 1/2 and onion or pepper, I chop up the rest and freeze it otherwise it ends up in the back of my fridge and goes bad before I remember to use it. If it's in the freezer I use it in stir-fries or soups when I need it.

2) I buy meat in bulk and freeze it in meal-sized portions, OR I cook it and then divide it up into meal sized portions. I sometimes buy in bulk from Zaycon Foods and I prepare crock pot freezer meals in gallon freezer bags. I can just put the whole bag in the crock pot and have a meal ready in about 4 hours. If I have stuff to do I put it in at about lunch time and it is ready by dinner time. Here is a link to my crock pot recipes. 

3) Putting leftovers in the freezer. While David doesn't mind leftovers, he prefers to eat the same thing at a later date. I don't blame him and this has greatly reduced how much we have to discard. By freezing it doesn't go bad before he wants to eat it and we cycle through meals with some variety and he can even choose what he wants to take each day. We use containers that have dividers and I add frozen vegetables on the side (that I transfer directly from the bag frozen) that end up getting steamed while he warms up the leftover entree.

4) Going into Costco with a plan, knowing it is a war zone. Let's face it: Costco is full of expensive temptations. Go there with a list. Only buy what is on your list. If you can't do this, don't go to Costco. We only buy what we know we will need. I have very specific things I know I will use. I don't buy anything that I will only use more of (or have to waste some of) if I buy it in bulk. Generally I buy unprocessed meats, eggs, cheese, coffee, grains, legumes, vitamins, OTC medications, supplements, diapers, wipes, toilet paper, printer ink cartridges (if you wait for their coupon you get $20 off two double XL packages, which is a great deal). I can't afford to buy processed meats, meals or specialty cheeses or anything else that generally gets featured at the taste-test carts.

5) I find I save a lot of money buying in bulk. We try to find a store that has gluten-free flours and pastas in the bulk section.

6) I am not a "couponer". I use coupons sometimes but they don't make coupons for most of the things I buy. The times I have tried to use a lot of coupons, I ended up going over in my budget because I was trying to change what we ate according to what we had coupons for and I found it did not save me money because I was buying things that were too processed and we just didn't eat. I cook from scratch and I save more money that way.

MOPS Craft: We made Friendship Soup Jars

Food Budget Challenges

We have been successfully using a budget plan for over a year now. (Thanks to Dave Ramsey) It is quite an accomplishment for us. We have paid off all of our credit card and medical debt and all we have left is David's student loans.

One thing I have still found challenging, however, is budgeting food. The constant change in the price of food, the variety that I like to cook, examining the various purchasing options (local food store vs. Costco wholesale), perishability (is that a word?), etc. There are so many variables, plus the fact that I just haven't gotten this meal planning thing down because either I plan too much or I don't plan enough or something comes up like getting invited over for dinner last-minute and then what do you do with what you planned to make....

Food was also the hardest to budget because of my fear of depriving my family of nutrition. Weighing the value based on NUTRITIONAL VALUE instead of weight or volume is very complex. While refined food is cheaper, it is also less nutritional. While I want to buy nutritional food, I also have to stay within a certain budget that is reasonable for our overall budget. Then there is that thing that I'm a foodie. I love deli olives and fancy cheeses. I love to try new recipes with obscure ingredients like that $6 bottle of gluten-free soy sauce that I will use only once a month that I really cannot justify in the budget any more.

Two months ago it occurred to me that what worked for our overall budget could work for our food budget. Namely itemization and prioritization of items. Like Dave Ramsey's irregular income budget (which you can print for free off his website) you make a list of all the things you buy and their average cost, then you prioritize the most important and then the next most important, until you get to the end. Because of the varying cost of food, I must buy proteins and vegetables, dairy and eggs before I buy gluten-free bread or convenience snacks for my toddler. If the price of meat goes up, things at the bottom of the list just don't get purchased that month. It makes so much sense to me I don't know why I didn't think of it sooner.

Yes, it is tedious at first to write down everything we buy and the cost. I grouped items on a spreadsheet by type (meats, vegetables, dairy, frozen (veg and fruit), non-perishable, convenience-packaged food (string cheese, individual yogurt, etc.), and other. The first month I just tried to stay on budget and bought things like I normally did. The second month I put the items in order of priority. Tried to buy the things we needed before the lower-priority items. I found that just doing this helped me stay on budget better. This is the third month and I am refining my list.

Not only do I have a better idea of what things cost, I also have a better idea of our monthly consumption of each group of items. That is very useful when budgeting because then you can see if it is worthwhile to buy in bulk. I was hesitating to buy some more perishable items (dairy and deli meats) at Costco for fear that they would spoil before we ate them, but it turns out we can save about 30% by buying certain items now because I know we will go through them.

For now I am still keeping track of each item and how much I am buying in each category to see if I can refine the system more, but it really seems to be helping me plan meals better. I know I am kind of a perfectionist but making the most of our food budget is my job. I take it seriously.

Thankful Day 12

I wasn't sure how to write this without sounding like an advertisement. So I will just start off with a disclaimer that I get no payment or benefits of any kind for writing this. I am just hoping it will bless someone else.

I am really thankful we encountered Dave Ramsey and his financial plan to get out of debt. I started listening to the Dave Ramsey show on the radio, during short periods of time when it just happened to be on when we were driving around doing errands. I liked his direct, no-nonsense approach to people's financial problems and they seemed like common sense.

I found his website and got his free financial tools, his baby step plan and worksheets. Yes, they are all free. We just started with step one and took it from there. We were struggling with debt mostly from medical expenses and paying for David's school and student loans. We aren't big shoppers, so it was just bad planning.

ig·no·rance  (gnr-ns)

n.

The condition of being uneducated, unaware, or uninformed.

We eventually realized we could clean up this mess if we set our minds to it. These tools gave us hope. Hope for the financial future of our family. It also gave us a different perspective: that debt is not necessary. In fact, there is no such thing as "good debt". Anyone who believes that is in denial.

We eventually bought the "Total Money Makeover" book by Dave Ramsey (which is currently on sale for $10 on his website). It was a very motivational book, but all of the worksheets and information are found for free on his website. The literature goes into more detail on how to apply it, but he really does give this information away. It is a great ministry.

I only wish we had learned this sooner. We were ignorant and we have learned so much, mostly on how to apply this wisdom to our lives. I am thankful that we learned and that we came together and it has strengthened our marriage. It gave us a common goal and plan for our financial future. It also taught us to lean on the Lord to provide for our needs (and not our wants) and see that he truly does provide us with what we need.

We are happy to be out of credit card debt, and never looking back. We are still working on baby step 2 but we see a debt-free light at the end of the tunnel.

Here is another blog post about Dave Ramsey: Why I Dislike Dave Ramsey by Life with Four Boys

Surrender

I am in the middle of planning for next year's preschool curriculum for Blueberry. She is doing pre-writing tracing right now so I will be starting her on letters in the fall. She is already learning the sounds some letters make so next spring she might be ready for three letter sight words. I am planning ahead because we will be pretty busy in the coming year. January we are expecting an addition to our family and I know we will have to take a break around that time so we will need to be flexible too. I am determined to keep her challenged even with everything that is going on.

As we were settling into the idea that we will be having another child soon, we found out David is losing his job at the end of this month. It is not time to panic, and somehow I am not. I would expect myself to be really stressed out right now but I have this general feeling that everything will be OK and that this is a step to something better. I feel like there must be something wrong with me because I am not panicking, maybe I'm delusional or in denial. David's uncle says I am a great wife (supportive and all) and that it must be my faith. My good friends also say I must have a really strong faith. I guess I don't really think it is my faith but my surrender. I haven't really had a problem with faith, but surrender is HARD!

I have surrendered a lot in the last couple of years during the ups and downs of my husband's post-graduation job-search. I have learned to say "Let Your will be done, Lord!" We have surrendered our expectations, humbling ourselves that things do not work out in our timing. We have surrendered our budget to the Lord as we have been led to a Total Money Makeover. We have surrendered a lot of our material things either to someone else who gave us some minimal cash for it or just donated stuff. We surrendered time around the holidays last year for David to work a seasonal job to try to get ahead with some of our debts. We will eventually be surrendering our home back to the bank because we cannot afford it and we cannot sell it since it is worth about half of what we owe on it. Surrendering is getting easier and maybe that is what we are supposed to learn.

Before David and I got married we decided that I would stay home when we had children. Being a SAHM is the hardest and best job I ever loved and we still feel like that is what is right for our family but as his job is coming to an end, as I was helping him search for jobs online, I found a part time position in my old line of work (phlebotomy) that was closing soon. I applied for it and figured we could talk about it and I could still turn it down if we decided against it. I still don't know what to do. I have an interview on Tuesday and I am leaving things in God's hands. I have been praying so much for what His will might be. I know what mine is, but I feel like I am being led in this direction and I have never been one to turn down an opportunity if I felt like it was the right thing.

As it turns out my mom is available right now to watch Blueberry a few days a week. I am still praying for guidance and David is supportive either way. I am relying on faith that I will know the right decision when it is the time to make it.

Monthly Food Budget

(This is copied over from my Wisdom Nutrition blog)

The food budget is always a work in progress in my house. Eating mostly lower-carb and gluten-free whole foods is a challenge even with a liberal food budget but with our lifestyle choices (me being a SAHM) we have a tight budget and I am always working on how to minimize cost without compromising nutrition. Saving up leftover money from our budget allows us some luxuries like stocking up on some items at Costco.

We keep cutting back our food budget by finding new strategies and I was curious to see a national average. I wanted to see how we were doing. I came across the USDA Food Plans Average Cost of Food at Home which is updated monthly. It is fascinating how they break it down by different "plans". Even with our food restrictions we are still in the "thrifty" range so I'm patting myself on the back right now.

Here are some ways we cut back: (Please note this is only regarding food purchased to be prepared at home. The first thing you should cut back if you need to cut your food budget is eating out.)

Buying a Chest Freezer: This is a worthy investment. Don't buy all those bulk foods if you don't have a place to store them. How are you going to buy half a cow if you don't have a place to store it? How are you going to stock up when there is a great deal on anything that can be frozen if you don't have a place to put it? Of course, then you have to Cook out of the Freezer.

Getting smart about wholesale purchases: Costco (or whatever wholesale store you shop) is great but you go in there and drop $100 without even filling up your cart. That is not a problem unless you are buying empty calories, things that spoil quickly or things you wouldn't normally buy. Things I never buy at Costco: things I wouldn't buy a lot of if they came in a smaller package, produce, cookies, candies, empty calorie snack foods (I make an exception for whole-grain snacks for my daughter like Annie's snack variety pack), things I don't go through a lot of (examples: spices, or ingredients I only use for that one dish I make twice a year, etc.) Great things to buy at Costco: highly nutritious foods that have long shelf-lives or can be frozen (if you have the freezer space), and things you know you will use a lot of. Compare prices for everything, just because it is at Costco, doesn't mean you can't find it cheaper per unit somewhere else. Always go with a list!

Make the most of bulk foods: Maybe I'm spoiled but my local grocery store recently remodeled and expanded their bulk foods section. Herbs and spices are more fresh and SOOOOOO much cheaper in bulk. Just reuse the shaker bottles you already have, or find some glass jars at a yard sale or thrift store. I have been using mason jars to store things more and more. Compare prices because often staples like rice, pasta, flour, sugar, salt, etc are ALL cheaper in bulk.

Buy Local: Local beef, local eggs, local produce. Often cheaper than the free-range store-bought and more nutritionally packed too. Produce is especially fresh if purchased from a CSA or U-Pick farm. As I already mentioned beef, if bought as a portion of a whole cow usually comes at a fraction of the cost that you would pay if you bought some of the cuts you get individually. Check Local Harvest for one near you. Here in Oregon we don't get much local produce until June and it sometimes lasts through October, but get it while you can. We do a lot of freezing of our favorites like blueberries and peaches. I plan to do more canning this year, but mostly tomatoes as I am trying to get away from using store-bought canned tomatoes because of concerns with BHT in the packaging. Special note about eggs: for the price, it is more important that you know where they are coming from and that the animals are healthy than getting the best "deal" so ask the farmer what they feed the hens and check out their living space.

Price Foods Online: Some examples of high-nutrition-content foods I have found much cheaper online (often free shipping with minimum purchase) are: Extra Virgin Coconut Oil, Unsweetened Grated Coconut, Sesame Seed Butter, Extremely Fresh and Organic Herbal Teas (high mineral content), and non-denatured whey protein powder (we get Nectar brand.) Some people don't look online just because they expect to have to pay shipping. If there is a shipping cost, just factor it into your comparison calculation.

Read Labels and Try the Generic: Sometimes you will find that the generic or store brand has the same or better ingredients than the name brand. I actually prefer the generic versions of some items. Try new things. Did you know that credit card companies contract with Mattel to get their logos on their toys because studies show we are THAT loyal to brands that if we are exposed to them often as children we are more likely to stick to that brand as we get older. Think about that one...

Coupons: I had to throw this in even though I'm no expert. Some people can get into this and save a ton of money. If you have a good resource for this, please feel free to leave it in the comments. The grocery store we use has the cheapest prices of all of the other stores by far but they don't accept coupons so I don't use them often. I personally find that where I live it is not worth my time and gas money to go to all of the different stores to save just a few cents, but other cities might be different. I also have a hard time finding coupons for the things I buy since I don't buy a lot of prepackaged or name brand foods.

Meal Planning: I don't know how much money I save meal planning, as this was just one of many things I did to cut back our food budget. The fewer trips to the grocery store might  count for something. This frugal mom did find that she cut back significantly by meal planning for her large family. Meal planning helped me more with my stress level and organization than anything, but it also helped me to get more into a rhythm of using what I had first instead of just stocking up on foods I liked to cook with and getting creative when it was time to cook dinner (which I admit has been my strategy until more recently). Even if you can't stick to it from week to week, try meal planning as a way to reorganize yourself mentally. I try to plan Lunch and Dinner every day and breakfasts/brunches on weekends.

Planned-Overs: My mother-in-law taught me this term and I liked it. Instead of making a large pan of enchiladas, split it up into different pans for each meal you plan to serve, so there is only enough for each person to have their appropriately size serving. If I make a big pan, my dear husband (who LOVES enchiladas, his mom said that she never could make ENOUGH enchiladas when all the kids were at home) will eat much more than he should just because they taste good but then I don't have enough for another meal, so essentially messing with my plan. If I make two pans and I say "this one is for Friday", or BETTER YET! not even cook the second one and just freeze it ready to go in the oven then I have enough for two meals. Some people have different names for this and some working moms prep all of their dinners the weekend before. I have never been able to make that work, but when I do get inspired to make something, it only takes a little more time to make a second or third batch, saving me much more time later.

Children: Little ones are great at self-regulating so it can be frustrating when some days they eat twice as much as you do and other days they merely nibble. I don't believe in rationing food for children but do BEGIN with smaller portions so there is less waste. This also helps them to eat a balanced meal. 1 tablespoon per year of their age for each food group (protein, grain, vegetable, fruit or second vegetable) plus milk. Tell them they at least have to try some of the other food groups before they get more of their preferred food. This encourages them to try a variety and allows you to give them more as needed without having to throw away a large portion. I will reheat food once, same day only. Of course, make sure that uneaten food is not left out for long periods of time and follow food handling safety precautions. Err on the side of caution: when in doubt, throw it out!

Pregnancy, Breastfeeding and Children under 5: If you are struggling with your food budget, do see if you qualify for food assistance like WIC. They have a lot of great nutrition resources and education for young families as well as financial support for putting food on the table. They provide food assistance for women who are pregnant or breastfeeding and any children up to the age of 5 if the family meets the income restrictions. Their Farm Direct program even allows beneficiaries to purchase locally grown vegetables and fruit directly from farms or farmer's markets that participate in the program. Their food choices have expanded recently to allow for gluten-free and dairy-free substitutions.

Do you have any strategies not listed here? How do these strategies work for you?