peelosophy

I love Taco Soup.  I have been known to eat it for 4 days in a row – sometimes for lunch and dinner.  Plus, my kids love it. You eat it with chips – what’s not to love?  I’ll come back to Taco Soup in a minute.

So I’ve been challenging myself with our grocery budget,  I’ve been evaluating and re-evaluating what we spend on groceries. I’ve been pondering what I can tweak with my recipes to make them less expensive while trying not to sacrifice nutrition (or taste).  I have come to discover it’s a delicate balance.  I have an outrageous goal of only spending $400/month on our groceries – food only.  I’ve been able to keep it for two months now and love the challenge.

Before I go further, I don’t buy organic so that explains some of it.  But I do try and buy as fresh as possible and non-processed foods.  I do menu plan and that helps my budget and sanity a ton.  I love it when John looks at his iPhone at work and is able know that we are having spaghetti tonight. I love it more when people think he’s nuts that his iPhone told him what’s for dinner. And I especially love it when they think I’m a super wife – if they only knew how easy it was to menu plan (that’s another post).

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Here’s some evidence that I need some adult time.

First, I referred to our Boppy as a throw pillow.  It has clearly been in our lives/living room for too long.

Second, while watching Spirit with JJ, I thought for a few minutes to myself if it was based on a true story.  For those of you who do not know the movie, it is told from the viewpoint of Spirit, a horse.  Enough said.

• Odeedoh has a great post on reusing a train table.  Right now ours is at the Kuhn’s b/c of lack of space, but when it returns it maybe reinvented to either a contruction site or dinosaur island.
• I do love Soulemama and came across a tour of her home on Cookie’s Nesting Blog. Even though her style isn’t really ours, there are so many things that resonated with me.  For example, she has 3 kids, a dog and a cat in a sweet little house. We totally have her beat by one dog.  I also loved what she had to say about talking at breakfast with her kids about what they would all like to do that day and try and make a way to accomplish it – including her stuff.  Which by the way, the whole having a conversation at breakfast is a little foreign to us.  And I really loved the sweet picture of her baby sleeping on the fur rug.
• Lastly, I really enjoyed this post from Simple Mom about menu planning.  It always seems like this should be such an easy thing to do but I always complicate it.  I really appreciated her simple (I guess hence her name) approach to it with the added techie (I sleep with one therefore I am) ideas that made me salivate a little.  Sorry gross.

We had a big Sunday last weekend, George was baptized and we celebrated Henry’s 2nd Birthday.   JJ was a little left out.  After church we had lunch over at our house with our family and friends.  My brother-in-law, Jeff,  is an excellent smoker– of meats — and supplied us with pulled pork for sandwiches.  Everything went without a hitch and we had a great time. Read more…

We tried a great recipe the other night from The Pioneer Woman.  The boys were unsure before they tried it, so I renamed it Cowboy Spagetti and they were all for it.  Now I’m thinking about all the other things I can rename for them to try!  Dinosaur Delight….Speed Racer Stew….Thomas’ Favorite Chicken Dinner….

Anyways, I highly recommend The Pioneer Women, she has a beautiful site and I can’t wait to try more of her recipes! And, since she has such great step-by-step photos, JJ totally got into the preparation of the meal.  He was able to look at the pictures and tell me what to do next.

Dinner tonight was a new experience. There were candles. It all started because I’m reading the book, “The Intentional Family“.  It’s written by a family therapist and talks about how families can greatly benefit from cultivating family rituals.  These rituals can be anything from family dinners, holidays, couple time, vacations, etc.

So one of the rituals I am working on is our dinner time.  I would say we already had a pretty good thing going.  We sat and ate as a family I would say 70% of the week and I cooked.  After reading the book, I realized that I really wanted this time to be a ritual for family connecting.  Before the book, I don’t think were very intentional about making it a time for this connectedness, I guess it I thought it would just happen on it’s own. Read more…

My Fridays are back.  This is b/c I take the boys to a during the school year to Kids Day Out program from 9-12:30pm.  I started doing it a year and a half ago  and  it was actually John’s idea to give me a break…I know right – how lucky am I?!?!  So 3 1/2 hours of whatever I want.  I totally recommend this to every mom, even if it’s just a couple hours a week.

But this year I am going to make some changes to how use this time.  I want to make my Fridays a time of renewing, re-charging, re-connecting, basically just put “re-” in front of a word and that’s what I want.  I want to make it my restart day.  I want to hold this time precious and sacred because of the impact that it can have on the rest of my week.

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One of the projects I loved doing this summer was creating and then using JJ’s Zoo Field Guide.  We are Zoo members (thank you to Mr. and Mrs. E!) and with that you receive a STL Zoo Magazine.  JJ and I usually look through it together when it arrives and talk about the animals we want to see the next time we go to the zoo.  Unfortunately, the next time we go to the zoo we have already forgotten what animals we saw in the magazine.

This time when the magazine came, we recycled it by making a Zoo Field Guide. Here’s how we did it: Read more…

You know the toy bins I’m talking about.  We bought ours at Target thinking this is a practical way for the kids to organize their toys.  After a couple months,  I realized that JJ (2yo then) does not have the ability to remember that the Turtles go in the small red bucket and the blocks go in the large yellow bucket, etc.  So inevitably, the bins would have random stuff in every bin, no matter how much I showed him the “right” way to organize them.  Well, duh right? He was 2 years old. Read more…

Greta tore out an article for me at the OT’s office titled, “How to Let Kids be Kids“.  I knew it was up my alley when I saw the title picture of kids running through a big mud puddle.  It basically talks about the benefits of not over-scheduling your kids, how society hypes up over-scheduling and how to get your kids to discover simply playing.

I think the majority of the time,  our lives reflect the ideas this article. So this is one of the few articles that makes me feel like a good parent. (:   Most of the time it’s just my laziness, not my intention, that he plays with a cardboard box for an hour…and this article says he may learn more from the box play then a planned activity.  Yea! Read more…