Long Time, No Blog

Another Project

I recently made these wall decorations for the girls' room out of some fabric scraps I've been hanging on to. It's a garden/flower/butterfly themed room, so I thought these would fit in nicely. Joe says they look like modern art--not my typical soft edged style.


Austin's Midnight Moment

Austin, our five year old, has never wet the bed. If we forget to take him potty before bed, he cries in the middle of the night, I wake up, take him to the bathroom, and he goes back to sleep. The other night, I heard "the cry", and was about to get up when I heard stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp, stomp (I could tell he was running in place, not towards to door). I jumped up and ran to his room. When I flipped on the light, he was standing on the area rug in the middle of the room with his pants down, peeing on the floor. He pulled up his pants and got back in bed and went to sleep. I pulled the area rug out and took it straight to the front porch so I could deal with it the next day. When morning came, Austin asked where his rug was. I told him he peed on it in the night. His confused look said it all--he had no recollection of the incident. Is that what they call sleep walking?


The Big Experiment

This month is our big food storage experiment. The rules are 1) we can't go to the store to buy anything and 2) we keep track of everything we use. At the end of the month, we'll multiply everything we used by three to make sure our three month supply will actually last three months. To help out, I made menus (breakfast, lunch, dinner) for the whole month. Before the month started I stocked up on stuff we didn't have already in our food storage, including three huge packs of TP from Costco. Our experiment will actually end next Wednesday when we leave to visit my family for Thanksgiving. It's been so nice not to have to shop for groceries--a chore I'm not fond of. I think shopping once a month is a habit I would definitely like to keep. Today we drank the last of our milk, so it's powdered milk for the rest of the month! I've also been grinding wheat and baking bread every other day with pretty good success. The other night for a treat, we let the kids take a quarter out of their piggy banks and we all went to Safeway and got a quarter pop from the machine. You wouldn't believe how happy the kids were to drink pop.

We're also not spending any money other than pay for phone, electric, water, sewer bills etc. We're not even buying gas. We filled the cars up on Oct 31, and if we run out we'll walk everywhere. Joe's been walking to work, and we've only driven to church and back, so for now I think we'll have enough gas to get by. Joe's having a hard time not ebaying and doing impulse buys at Walmart; hopefully this will break him from these habits. I can't wait to see how much money we've saved!