Archives for January 2013

Yesterday I came home from a trip to the library and the grocery store and the kids were, as usual, delirious with excitement.  New library books?!  And cereal?  And cheese?!  It’s very rare that I buy cereal these days, but I couldn’t resist getting three boxes of Mom’s Best for $0.50 each, and I bought a rare box of Velveeta to make queso for movie night.  They were just thrilled, and I can only hope that they continue being so thrilled with such small things! :)

On a similar note, they stayed with their cousins a couple of weeks ago while Jeremy and I went out, and when I told them where they were going, they said, “Yay!  We get to drink MILK at their house!”  Apparently they consider that a special treat (they do drink milk at home on occasion, but not regularly).

Oh yes, so I went grocery shopping yesterday and you are probably questioning that if you remember that I said I had $100 leftover from my budget for the month.  You can tell that I am new at the spending cash-only thing, because I somehow failed to remember that I don’t actually get paid until the 2nd or 3rd business day of the month.  We run payroll once a month (which saves us money in our payroll processing service), so it’s not like my bank account is empty, but not full enough to take out all of the money that I need for a whole month.  If there’s one thing that I’ve learned, it’s that in order to make cash-only work, I have to take out all of the money at once or I’m setting myself up for failure.

Anyway, so whereas before I’d planned on just getting through January 31st with our current stock of groceries, I realized that I wouldn’t actually be able to withdraw February’s money until Monday, and we definitely didn’t have enough groceries to go that long, at least not without the husband and children staging a revolt.  So, I grudgingly took my $100 “extra” and spent about 75% on it on enough groceries to last through until Monday.  I guess I just need to make my “month” from the 4th to the 4th.  Good heavens, this is hard, and those of you who have done cash only for years are probably rolling your eyes.

Since I was gone during the afternoon yesterday, Jeremy cooked the pasta for our Crockpot Lemon Artichoke Chicken and I had to combination roll my eyes and laugh that he broke at least two pasta cooking rules that I just preached to you about the other day.  But before that, when he got home earlier in the afternoon, he’d brought me flowers so I think I will keep him. :)

You know that my first goal for this year is to sleep through the night, so you also probably know that I am not the person to be giving baby sleeping tips.  However, if you need advice on how to cope with not sleeping through the night, I am your woman.  When I read chapter eighteen (Or was it nineteen?  I can’t remember; I’m short on sleep.) of the book I mentioned yesterday, I wanted to write the author and told her she’d stole one of my tips. ;)  Here it is:

One of the best things I ever did was to get rid of all the digital clocks in our bedroom so that I can’t see what time it is when I’m getting up with a child. When I got rid of the clocks, I also realized that not only did I not know what time I got up, I also couldn’t keep track of how many times I was up. That considerably cuts down on the amount of whining you can do, because the story becomes a whole lot harder to tell, when you can’t say “I was up at 1:30, 2:30, 3:45, and 5:31!” It sounds silly, but it really did help me have a better attitude. I’m not sure we’ll ever go back to having clocks you can see in the dark!