Frugal Fridays #7

I’m rounding the corner to my third trimester, and I’m really feeling it lately! The aches and pains and exhaustion. This pregnancy has gone by super fast. I’ve never been able to say that before. All of my other pregnancies I felt like they draaaaaaaggged on for-ev-ER (said like the kid from The Sandlot). I’ve heard from other moms of larger families, that the more kids you have, the faster your pregnancies tend to go because you’re just too busy to really even think about it. But hey, I’ll take it. I just can’t believe we’ll be meeting this little guy in about 13 weeks or so!

As I get more and more tired toward the end of the pregnancy, I usually tend to let myself relax a little more and not be so “whole hog” on frugality ( if we can afford a little wiggle room, that is). However, with my husband’s hours being cut at work, and with Christmas and several (10!!!) family birthdays coming up in the next 3-4 months (big, big family), not to mention a few big ticket baby items that we need to replace before baby is born (we need a new carseat since the last one got  moldy out in the garage), I’ll really need to try to keep it up as much as possible. We do keep things very simple, but even if we just spend $5 per birthday, and doing as much homemade as possible, it really adds up with such a large family. Oh, and our boys need new beds sometime fairly soon. The beds they have were second hand and have undergone a lot of abuse, and are getting wobbly and not sturdy at all. And my husband’s truck is dead, so he’s driving our gas guzzling van to and from work everyday ::sigh:: Haha!

That almost sounds impossible to manage on such humble means, but nothing is impossible with my God. We’ll figure it out and He will provide. Through all of these things, I can’t seem to feel anything other than gratitude. Because we have a home that is warm, food in our pantry, family that is healthy, and my husband and I love each other madly and have these 4, going on 5, little people who are just insanely amazing. Against all that….any struggles we face seem like small potatoes!

I just keep reminding myself of what my MIL used to tell my husband and his 3 siblings, “Just do your best and let God do the rest.” So that is what we will do.

Successes/Blessings (I usually just refer to this section as successes, but many of them were not successes…they were very much a Blessing for which we are so thankful):

1. I got 4 new books from paperbackswap.com that I’ve been needing for our homeschool. That was really exciting!
2. We have stuck to the monthly grocery budget.
3. My dad gave us his artificial tree this year. We’ve always done real trees, but just couldn’t justify spending $50 on a tree when my father’s tree was being offered for free … and it’s really a very nice tree! Someday when/if we have acreage, we’ll cut a tree down in the backyard.
4. The night that we went to pick up the tree from my dad, he invited us to stay and treated us to a pizza dinner. It’s not small bill to feed a family of 6 take-out pizza, so it was really appreciated.
5. We were given a couple of large boxes of Christmas decorations and ornaments from my MIL. Our halls are very much decked at the moment.
6. Our furnace has remained off except at night, even though the temps have been in the 20’s. Our pellet stove is a God send this year.
7. Homemade bread, yogurt, and granola was made. Ditto for dishwasher detergent.
8. We ate meatless for 3 dinners this week.

Fumbles:

1. There was one day last week where I realized I had run our dishwasher 4 (FOUR) times. That’s nuts. Our family may be larger than the average American family…but we aren’t THAT big. Yes, I do a LOT of cooking and baking from scratch, but honestly the bulk of those dishes were cups. We’re horrible at reusing our cups! Same with towels…I wash wayyyy too many towels. We live near Lake Ontario, which keeps our water bill very, very low. Like $15-$20 a month, which I understand is nothing compared to a lot of people. However, I still feel like it’s excessive to need to do 4 loads of dishes in one day.  I’d like to try to work on reusing our cups and bath towels. It’s something we always did when I was growing up, but my husband didn’t…so the idea is a little strange to him. We’ll see….

Goals:

1. I have some more old sheets that I’m planning to cut up and sew into cloth napkins (like those pictured above). I only have enough right now to get us through 2-3 days. I’d like to have a few more. Just need to find the time to sew them!
2. I still haven’t gotten around to purchasing buckets for the 50 lbs of rolled oats that we bought from the Amish store. When I go to the grocery stores and Sam’s club this weekend, and I’m going to see if I can get any from the bakery departments. Then I’ll just go pick up some gamma lids from Lowe’s or Home Depot.
3. I need to start the garden planning process pretty soon. I noticed a sale at Garden’s Alive for up to 67% off. I’ve never purchased seed from them before, and I’m not sure if they carry heirloom varieties, but they sent me a coupon code for $25 off a $50 order since I’m a new customer. So I’m going to look at their inventory and see if there’s anything that I need. I got my Baker’s Creek and Johnny’s Seeds catalogs in the mail yesterday!! I haven’t had a chance to sit down and look through them, yet, but I love getting seed catalogs!
4. I’ll be making some homemade healing salve this week to give away to family for Christmas. I’d like to get that done this week.
5. I’m hoping to finish 2 of of the 4 kid’s quilts I’m making for Christmas by next Friday.

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