Photo-A-Day #1758
Today was a really nice day at home with the family. We were up way to early after a night of being up way too late. Eva would not go to sleep last night so at 2:00am when she was finally asleep Allison put her to bed. I guess that was out punishment for Eva finally taking a nap after a month or so. She’d taken a three hour nap and that really supercharged her with energy. While Allison and I dozed Eva was wide awake watching Winnie-The-Pooh.
This morning I put together our first Gazelle Budget through Financial Peace University. I really am enjoying the online part of FPU. The site has some great resources like the ability to enter your budget, debts and direction on how to pay down the debt efficiently. It also gives you a way to create a journal (a very blog like interface). This morning when I came to the living room Allison was watching Dave Ramsey on tv. Yeah we are becoming Dave Ramsey fans big time.
Part of Financial Peace University and Dave’s system is an envelope system where you put cash in the envelopes and you make your purchases with that money. It was really strange but also freeing paying for our groceries in cash, straight up cash. Sure we’ve paid with our debit cards too, but there is something different about taking cash out of that envelope and paying.
Another thing that we are trying out is meal planning. Allison put together a monthly meal plan this morning before our trip out to BJs for groceries. So our years of cooking magazines and recipe books are going to go to good use. I’m feeling really good about this right now.
After our BJs run we came home and I downloaded the Curious George movie on iTunes (still have a balance from gift cards) and we watched that while eating some popcorn together. Curious George was a pretty good movie. It was cute and funny (for adults too). I even enjoyed will Ferrel’s performance. He was very similar to the of of Jeff Bell who voices the PBS Man in the yellow hat. I really ended up enjoying the movie.
In doing some research on the Curious George movie (aff link) I learned something very cool. Curious George is Megatron! Yes, Frank Welker the original and best voice of Megatron also voices Curious George. That is just so very cool in my book. I do love the things I learn from a little bit of research on IMDB.
It’s amazing what a difference it makes planning meals, although I’ve never tried a month in advance. It really forces you to try new recipes, and helps with the “I have no ideas/energy for making dinner, let’s just order out-itis.”
.-= Look at what Wheeler Images wrote blog ..Slideshow =-.
Andrea, that’s exactly what we’re trying to avoid. We have scheduled in a couple of nights out – that are in our budget – and I’m always willing to be flexible. But I think planning out a month and adjusting a little as needed is important for us so that we don’t get the after church “What do we need at the store this week?” chaos and aggravation.
Of course, the real laugh came when I scheduled a meal for every night in February then looked at Drew last night and said – we have nothing planned for dinner tonight…. Chicken nuggets to the rescue!
.-= Look at what Allison wrote blog ..A Visit to the Eric Carle Museum =-.
Andrea,
The meal planning is a great help. We bought all the meals and things like that and brought them home and used the food saver to seal them up and freeze them. I hate throwing out stuff that we bought because it got freezer burned.
Today I bought 3 newspapers for $6.00 to get coupons and wound up saving well over $50.00 in our purchases today.