thoughts on groceries

we sat down a few weeks ago and set a budget for life with a baby - goodbye, dink-hood.  (i'm taking maternity leave in order to not burn the bridge of my awesome job before we need to, juuuust in case something happens to scott's job, but we're planning that i'll stay on at home as a full time homemaker.)  since we have two more full months before i start maternity leave and matson joins us, we decided to start enacting our baby budget now.  it's honestly not too terribly different than our current budget, mostly things like smaller allowances, vacation budget, and monthly entertainment budget.  in discussing how much we want to alot for grocery in the future, though, it came up that one of scott's biggest pet peeves of late is how much food we waste, most of it either leftovers or uneaten vegetables going bad in the fridge.

the frugal girl is one of the few blogs that i subscribe to and actually read faithfully, and not going to lie, i more or less want to be her when i grow up.  as it relates to the situation at hand, though, two of the big things in her blog are eliminating food waste and keeping a food budget of $100/week ... for her family of 6!  and they actually eat real, healthy foods, without the crazy couponing.  compare this with a grocery budget of about $80/week for just me and scott - and all of my food from 8am-5pm is provided by my company: breakfast, lunch, and snacks.  when i start maternity leave, we'll suddenly be responsible for that other 2/3 of my daily food consumption, not to mention that i won't be bringing home lunch leftovers for scott like i do now.  fg, by the way, homeschools her kids and packs lunches for her husband, so that $100/week provides all food for the six of them for every meal of the day, seven days a week.  as far as food waste elimination goes, in trying to cut down on food waste both as an environmental and a financial concern, she posts a photo every friday of the food that went bad as a motivation to herself to do better the next week.

anyway, i've been reading about her grocery budget amd food waste stuff for a while thinking that was awesome for her, but not thinking there was much application for my busy life.  with our life already entering a transitional phase, though, i decided that we have a perfect opportunity to make some changes with the way we do groceries.  since we'll be adding a lot of extra food for me to the budget, i don't necessarily want to try to trim our overall monthly grocery budget at this point, but i do want to try to keep it more or less the same as it is now.  so, rather than $80/week feeding scott breakfast and lunch and both of us dinner, i'd like it to provide three meals a day for both of us.  (yes, clearly we'll need to start figuring in food for mats by the fall, but i'll cross that bridge when we get there.)

how are we going to accomplish this alongside lowering our entertainment budget (thus limiting our eating out)?  very good question.  thus far, i have a five part plan:

1. get back in the habit of planning meals.  if i look at the calendar and have a mental expectation of what we'll be having for dinner, i find it a lot easier to muster up motivation at the end of the day to cook it, which drastically lowers the likelihood that i'll say, "screw it, we're getting taco bell."  plus, if i have meals planned out, i can be more efficient with my grocery shopping - looking for sale items or coupons, and only buying produce that we'll actually need, rather than just seeing that bell peppers are on sale, buying a bunch, and then forgetting to use them before they mold.
2. plan simpler meals.  i do love to cook, but i think i get too overambitious in my menu planning sometimes, and after a long day at work end up nixing complicated recipes for something easy to put together or doing take out, which often leads to wasted produce and a boosted grocery/entertainment budget.  (i get the impression i probably won't have too much more motivation or energy for a while with a new baby!)  fg, on the other hand, has lots of simple meals on her calendar.  like one night this upcoming week is asian meatballs, brown rice, and grapefruit halves.  nice and easy!
3. find frugal meal ideas.  my friend lianna is hands down the most intensely frugal person i know - a few years ago, in order to aggressively pay down debt, she and her husband eliminated eating out from their budget for a full year!  i asked if she had any advice on cutting our grocery budget, and she recommended the $5 dinner mom cookbook.  the $5 dinner mom also has a website with a bunch of recipes posted.  i normally am not much of a cookbook purchaser, but i got duplicates of a book at christmas, so when i return the unneeded extra copy, i'm planning to use my credit to get this book instead.  (last night's baked ziti, salad, garlic rolls, and blueberry apple coffeecake was inspired by this goal, by the way.  the plan to host small group sunday night came together on saturday afternoon, and i made it my goal to have dinner for six using only ingredients we already had on hand, with no extra grocery store runs.  i succeeded!)
4. use cash envelopes.  we took dave ramsey's financial peace university class probably about five years ago (one of the best decisions we've made, both for our finances and for our marriage), and he's a strong proponent of using cash envelopes to track your spending.  we did that system for a year or two, but then got back into just using our debit cards for everything.  we were all over the board with monthly grocery spending last year, but in the end hit a $350/month average for groceries, which was our budgeted amount.  entertainment, though ... i think we ended the year with a monthly average of spending that was about 27% higher than we'd budgeted.  ($190/mo avg instead of $150/mo.)  whoops.  since we will be cutting our entertainment budget and are effectively cutting grocery without really cutting it, i think being limited to the cash in an envelope will be helpful for us.
5. eat our leftovers.  currently, this end of eliminating food waste falls primarily on scott since he's the one who eats lunches provided by us every day.  once i'm home, though, i think it'll be a lot easier to monitor the status of leftovers in the fridge and make sure that we're eating stuff before it goes bad - and to make sure scott actually remembers to bring leftovers for his lunch.

so there you have it, my five part plan to keep my grocery budget the same!  i think i need a more exciting thought life.

nesting weekend

we had a gloriously productive weekend - i love it when that happens.  saturday morning, we finally buckled down and finished clearing out matson's room-to-be of non-baby-related paraphernalia.  since i'd already gone through it once, this mostly just meant scott carrying stuff into the basement for me.  the white paint from when we moved into the house two and a half years ago was looking pretty gloopy, so we went to lowe's for a fresh can ... and picked up some closet doors while we were there!  we got the shelves and wall brackets all painted up with our lovely semi-gloss bright white, and the closet doors are mostly done - two coats on the front and one on the back (which you really won't see anyway since we got bifold doors), which just leaves the sides and top/bottom of the doors to do.

hmm, when i write it out, it really doesn't sound like we got all that much done.  keep in mind that we had to wait for paint to dry before we could apply more coats, so a fair bit of that was just waiting time ... and we interspersed all of that with things like running four loads of laundry, going to a one-year old's birthday party, doing mounds of dishes, and hosting small group last night (for which i made baked ziti, garlic butter crescent rolls, salad, and a blueberry apple coffee cake).  oh, and that scott worked for four hours yesterday.

once we get the shelves and closet doors up and the crib assembled (still need to buy a crib mattress - maybe that'll be next weekend's task), i think we'll be pretty well set as far as the nursery goes!  i guess things still on my to-do list include finishing the glider's ottoman cover (which was my plan for this weekend until that got sidelined by the closet doors) and figuring out some wall decor.  curtains are also on my list, but i'm not letting myself think about that until the glider's done - scott's been making fun of my ability to follow through on projects that i start, so i feel a need to show him that i really can finish things.  really, though, with just a few hours of work this weekend, i feel way better about our level of preparedness already.

speaking of preparation, we're also slowly working our way through our labor book and hoping to be finished reading it by about 36 weeks ... which gives us five weeks!  we started reading it on our way to phoenix for christmas three and a half weeks ago (is that really all??  christmas seems forever ago!), and are just shy of halfway through the book.  hmm, although in retrospect we skipped some substantial portions of the beginning of the book about things like choosing a doctor and a hospital and why pain relieving drugs are evil.  we may need to pick up the pace a bit.

why you should always upgrade to metal hardware

quite the eventful week we've had!

on the pregnancy front, last tuesday, i had to do my 1-hour glucose screening (which tests for gestational diabetes), and at the same time they do a few other blood draws to test for things like iron and antibodies, the latter having something to do with the fact that i'm rh-negative*.  turned out that i have low iron and failed the glucose test.  bummer.  i wasn't entirely surprised by the iron thing and am now faithfully taking my iron supplement.  i was a little more bummed about the glucose thing because i really didn't want to have gestational diabetes.  (according to my internet research, in addition to having higher risk of type 2 diabetes later in life for both mom and baby, there's also a correlation with higher rates of adhd for babies of gestational diabetes moms?!)  i went in for the followup 3-hour glucose test on monday morning, though, and evidently passed that one with flying colors - hooray!

unrelated to pregnancy, we went into the laundry room on saturday morning and i thought it smelled really musty.  since we live in denver where there's super low humidity (it's standard here to actually have a whole-house humidifier on your furnace to keep things a little moist), musty is not a normal basement smell and thus indicated a water leak.  and, alright, confession, i'd actually thought it smelled a little musty when i was doing laundry after our christmas trip and just didn't feel like dealing with it at the time.  so when i smelled it again, and stronger, i knew we should look into it.

i noticed some dark (ie, fresh) looking water stains on the drywall above the washer and dryer - directly under our master bathroom.  no bueno.  although i hated it when we moved in, i am incredibly thankful now that we have removable ceiling tiles in the laundry room - scott got the ladder out and was able to look into the ceiling to try to figure out what the problem was.  nothing conclusive, but he guessed it was probably our toilet or sink.  some of the water had built up on the shelves above our dryer and then a bit had rolled out onto the dryer and accumulated under a detergent bottle i had sitting out.  as i was cleaning it up later in the day, i noticed that it had a rather distinctive smell ... indicating that it was, in fact, our toilet leaking.  right.  gross!

this was a toilet we'd installed ourselves last summer, so we figured we must have done the installation wrong.  we just had the plumber out this morning, and 30 minutes and $107 later, found that the problem was not, in fact, our installation.  care to take a guess what it was?  the plastic washers that came with the toilet.  even though the floor in there is tiled, it's not exactly even, and that combined with the fact that i hadn't gotten around to caulking around the base evidently put extra strain on the washers, causing them to finally crack, causing our toilet to leak into the basement.  lessons learned: always take the extra time to go to home depot and upgrade to metal hardware, and caulking is worth the time and effort.  as a matter of fact, i will be doing some caulking this weekend!  and some intense lysol-ing of our laundry room.

on to the fun side of pregnancy - despite the slightly overwhelming nature of getting ever closer to our due date (less than 10 weeks out, now!), getting closer also means that i get baby showers!  my primary shower with all of our denver friends will be at the end of this month, and i'm so used to going to other friends' baby showers that i was honestly just looking forward to how fun it would be to see everyone together and hang out.  then it occurred to me yesterday that i'll probably get some presents, too, and that makes it extra fun.  plus, i found out last night that my parents are looking at coming in for the weekend - awesome!  (although dad, be warned that i've already started brainstorming nursery projects that you and scott can work on while mom and i are at the shower, like installing closet doors in there, and setting up the crib.  :))  and then my work baby shower was just scheduled at the end of february ... two weeks before i'm tentatively planning to start my maternity leave!

* - quick sidenote: rh-negative ladies, just a heads up that if your doctor operates like mine, you have to get a shot of rhogam during pregnancy, and potentially another after birth if your baby is rh-positive.  they give it to you in your tush, and it stings hardcore and at least for me left a bruise for approximately a week.  you also get to give an extra vial of blood when they do your blood tests to make sure your body's not rejecting your baby.  all in all, not a big deal, but they do not seem to tell you these things up front and i'm all about expectations, so i kind of like to know going in that there are things like extra shots and blood draws in my future.  also, all pregnant ladies: get your flu shot!  flu season runs through april, and getting the flu can potentially lead to pre-term labor and bad things like that, so it's worth doing.  i'd been putting it off and finally asked the doctor yesterday if i should still get one - she said yes emphatically, sent in a nurse with the shot, and i was all done in approximately 2 minutes.

11 weeks to go

i can't believe it's 2011 already!  the change in year is really making this whole pregnancy/impending parenthood thing more real.  it's no longer, "next year when we have matson", it's "in 11 weeks when we have matson."  yikes!

as i was surfing babycenter.com this morning, i saw that a woman who's actually due about a week after me posted a picture of her almost complete nursery ... umm, wow.  we have a bookcase (actually my first nursery purchase for mats, via craigslist - literacy and frugality are both important!), a changing table, a cute city play mat from ikea, a stroller, and after checking out ikea while in phoenix and dismissing their cribs, we finally ordered a crib last week which should arrive today.  (no crib mattress yet, though.)  none of it's actually put into place, though.  not to mention, i did a bit of organizing/cleaning out of matson's room back at thanksgiving, but when we hosted our sunday school class's christmas party a few weeks ago, everything got put back in there - whoops!  so we're back to square one with nursery organization.  and haven't done any of the touch up painting or working on obtaining closet doors.  now that college football season is over, though, i'm a little bit more optimistic about being able to talk scott into setting aside a full saturday for us to work together on getting the room in order.

also on babycenter, i've been seeing postings by women who already have their hospital bags ready.  on the one hand, i think that's utterly absurd since we still have almost 3 months til that'll be an issue - if you go into labor at 29 weeks, i think you'll have more on your mind than, "did i bring my extra chapstick and my comfy slippers?"  on the other had ... the planner in me really feels like i should at least have a list going of what i will be packing.  maybe that'll be one of my goals for the week?

funny story of the weekend: scott has a myriad of ever-changing nicknames for me - his latest standard is "potamus".  yes, as in short for "hippopotamus", but i think completely unrelated to my expanding girth and more related to the flight of the conchords song "hiphopopotamus vs rhymenoceros" and my personal favorite lyric, "i am the hiphopopotamus, my lyrics are bottomless" (followed by an awkward pause).  anyway, we've been reading the book "natural childbirth the bradley way" in preparation for labor, and the author has lots of tips and exercises for the "coach" (husband) and mom-to-be.  last night, we were reading a section about early labor and how the woman in labor should be careful to not lie on her back, but may need gentle reminding by her husband ... to which my own dear husband responded, "roll over, potamus!"  it was hilarious, and almost made me roll off the bed with laughing so hard.

and, unrelated to pregnancy, we played the game carcassonne this weekend (on new year's eve, actually) and i am obsessed!  you pull tiles at random, and each one has a bit of map on it - you place it on the existing map/gameboard wherever it's strategic for you, matching up city, pasture, or road, and get points by making claims on any of those three items as the map grows.  we have played settlers of catan a fair bit, and the two games are similar in style, but i think what clicks with me about carcassonne that doesn't about settlers is that with carcassonne, you get to watch and be a part of the map growing, rather than having a pre-set map on top of which you put roads and buildings.  i thought it was super fun.  scott didn't love it quite as much as i did off hand, but i think if he figures out more of the strategy part of it, i can get him hooked.

i love being pregnant

at about 8-9 weeks, i thoroughly despised pregnancy.  i was tired, so nauseous (thankfully i never actually threw up), and simultaneously needed food in order to be less nauseous yet the smell of cooking food, particularly cooking meat inspired nausea ... blech.  vicious circle.  i told scott at one point that i was quite content never being pregnant again - and honestly, having friends who have lost a first pregnancy in the first trimester, i have absolutely no idea how they decided to try again, because if we had been put in that situation, i probably would have said that's it, we're done, we're adopting.  (which we'd like to do at some point anyway.)

anyway, now that i'm at 25 weeks, though?  love it!  everything about it.  nausea died down by around 11 weeks, tiny belly bump started to appear around 15 weeks, energy started coming back around 17 weeks, started feeling baby boy move around 18ish weeks - i've heard the 2nd trimester referred to as the "golden age of pregnancy", and i fully believe it.  i love having a distinguishably pregnant belly, yet not looking like a whale; i love feeling matson thump around in there and trying to figure out what he's doing (summersaults?  kickboxing?) and what limb i'm feeling; getting to plan and anticipate the delivery and the nursery and what he's going to be like without feeling like it's right on top of me.  it's awesome.
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unrelated to pregnancy is my my love for the christmas season.  i've been listening to christmas music off and on since the day before thanksgiving, and was thrilled when we got to put up our tree last weekend.  i even bought garland to decorate the banister between our main level living room and the upstairs bedroom hallway (along with a set of icicle lights i bought a few years ago in an after christmas sale to use outside, but forgot about the following year when we went to decorate, so we bought big colorful bulb lights instead) - it's cute.  our plans for the weekend include a date night tonight of going to goodwill to look for tacky christmas sweaters and stopping at a giant christmas superstore in town to look at ornaments (along with going out for burgers), and on sunday night hosting an ugly-sweater christmas party for our sunday school class!