Skip to main content

A Challenge

Perhaps if you've been reading my blog for a while, you've realized that I'm a person who loves a challenge.  I think that's part of why I've survived being a mom for nearly an entire year...yes, my Sweet Pea is almost one!  It's amazing how fast the time flies.  Granted, I don't remember half of it, but I have my previous blog posts to help me remember it all.

As my second year of being a mother begins, I had a thought...really a dare from my husband.  We have saved so much money by using cloth diapers and cloth wipes - as well as making most of our own baby food - that I wonder where else I could save money.  After all, I love to spend money, but I can't spend money I don't have!

So, here's the idea.  For the month of March, I am going to attempt to only make meals with items that I already have in my pantry, fridge, and freezer.  I'm going to attempt to spend nothing - or next to nothing - on groceries (which is usually one of our top expenses).  I'm going to get creative with what I have and what I can do with it.  Now, I'm not saying that I won't buy any groceries.  After all, I can't let the milk and eggs in my fridge last the entire month.  But, I will limit the food that I want to buy and only buy what is absolutely needed (this means taking out that extra trip to the store for the chocolate, soda, or cheese that I want to snack on).

Perhaps you're like me, you like to keep your pantry, fridge, and freezer stocked.  Well, how often do you actually use everything in them?  I realize that there are so many things that I am wasting simply because I want to always keep them stocked.  So, now I'm going to force myself to use them while trying not to make the same thing over and over again.  To begin, I must first inventory the items in my pantry, fridge, and freezer.  Instead of listing all the items, I decided that I'd simply take pictures (listing them would take too long and I'd be quite embarrassed to actually see a written list of the items I've been wasting).

Pantry: 


Freezer: 

Fridge: 

Comments

  1. Oh, the joys of modern housing. Your pantry is a vertiable grocery store! I could never find room in my 1912 kitchen to stock up on dry goods. I wish you the best of luck!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Good luck! We tried something similar as we were leaving Italy - got quite a few meals out of it, but still had to throw away a depressing amount of food.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Leadership Mom: SWOT Analysis

In business, leaders often analyze our Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats through a SWOT analysis.  So, if we are going to look at our role as moms as being the greatest leadership opportunity to us, let's start with analyzing ourselves and our kids.  Here's the SWOT I developed for my family: Family SWOT Analysis As a doting mother, there are hundreds of strengths that I could put up here for my kids.  Their hugs, kisses, bedtime stories and prayers, the fact that they come to me when they're seeking healing from an injury (physical or emotional), the notes and drawings they make for me, their precious hearts when they try to help me or that they've learned how to use the Keurig to bring me coffee in the morning...I could go on and on. Now, here's the part where we get honest with ourselves.  Yes, we love our kids and we love our family (or, hopefully, most of the time), but we are not perfect.  Nor should we be perfect.  As we analy...

Why can't they just be friends?

Why can't my kids just be friends?  I must ask myself this question hundreds of times during the week.  I thought that having kids relatively close together was going to be great.  They'd have a playmate and an automatic friend.  However, the truth is that - most of the time - they don't get along.  It's not that they're enemies...it's that they drive each other crazy.  They each want the other one to do what they want to do.  Then, when the other one does what they want, they get mad at them because they wanted to do it themselves. They don't want to share their toys.  Then, they play together only to then get mad and purposefully break the other sibling's toys. They want to get the other one in trouble so that they look like the "good" child and get more rewards.  Then they get upset that the other sibling got them in trouble when they *tattled* on them. At mealtimes, they want to sit where the other one is sitting.  They wan...

Would you like pain or no pain with that delivery?

Brigitte Bardot said it well when she said, "I am not finding pregnancy much of a joy.  I am afraid of childbirth, but I am afraid I can't find a way of avoiding it."  There are a lot of fears that come with childbirth.  One of the biggest fears that faces many women is the amount of pain during labor and delivery and whether or not to get pain management - either in the form of narcotics, an epidural, or simple pain coping techniques. During one of our childbirth classes, my husband and I were asked to separately answer a simple question about our idea of how to manage pain during labor and delivery.  We were given a piece of paper which had a scale of 1 - 10: 1 being "I want no pain at all.  Give me the epidural as soon as I enter the hospital" and10 being "Under no circumstances do I want any type of pain medication."  For me, I chose # 3, "I'll go a little bit with pain, but I want an epidural!" and my husband answered # 7, "I...