Oct/Nov Update

I hate going so long between posts because I tend to forget all the details! Though if you are on FaceBook you've probably seen many of my pictures, I try to save details for the blog, though since there's more room.

Let's see, we left off at the pumpkin patch.  We of course then have carving pumpkins and costumes. This year Valerie was a pink dragon, Henri was a pumpkin like last year (I want to put one of his pics from last year up to, I wonder how much he's changed in a year!) and Carter was a ninja which we revamped the ninja costume ET wore last year.

Valerie gave me some much needed quiet time....

We started putting her hair in 3 pigtails until we could cut it....

 

Post haircut:

 

 

 

Valerie's being potty trained. She's doing better than the boys, but the major progress like telling us when she should go rather than the other way around and the "big stuff" is a bit problematic when she barely speaks.  I'm thinking some of the non-verbal stuff is that she just wants us to do her bidding. As seen in her frequent self-satisfied smile.

She's still loving simming!!! (swimming)

The little kids have been helping me run errands while Carter's at school...

getting the car checked out, they gave the kids rock candy and silly bands....

 

Valerie and I hung out at the bakery while our windshield was replaced (Paul hit a very small, very sharp rock) and I worked on the church charge conference membership report.  BTW, the conference is over and the district superintendant said it was "the most detailed membership report" she'd ever seen :D and was impressed by the amount of work that obviously went into it.  I'm so glad that the job will be 100x easier next year!

 

 

Valerie's also taken to watching TV (mostly Super Why & Dora) in odd positions...

 

 

And fallen asleep in odd places

 

 

Finally at 7 1/2 Carter lost his first tooth!

 

 

And finally, some videos....

 

 

Pumpkin Patch 2012

Valerie, Henri and I met Henri's class at The Farm in Snohomish  we went through the simple hay maze with slide, the petting zoo, then took a tractor ride out to the pumpkin field, picked out pumpkins (pics will be later when we carve) and then had ice cream.  When his class left, we went and played in the corn kernal pit. The kids loved this as much as going out to the pumpkin field.  No cider doughnuts, though, we were sad to find out that they are only available on the weekend.

Lyttle Food Co-op in the Suburbs

Many of the books I've read in my quest to decrease our monthly food bill have said not to buy at Warehouse clubs like Costco.  They cite the reasons that between the annual fee and the fact that not everything is the best price you can get, you could probably do just as well at the grocery store.

Well, over the last year I've learned some things about Costco...

Unless you are buying at the business Costco by the case, meat is most certainly more expensive than a grocery store sale.

Baking supplies are DIRT cheap at Costco.

Coupons there go in about 3 month cycles and they are usually multiple dollars off.

Produce deals can be had, but make sure you know your grocery store prices.

I personally have an executive Membership, which is $110 (used to be $100). This is $55 (used to be $50) more than the regular membership, but we get a rebate check for 2 percent back.  Considering my check last year was $101 I figure the membership fee is not a deterrant for me. Last year I also went almost every week due to my son's preschool being next door.

Some things I buy there on an almost weekly basis are:

Bananas. They are 33 cents a pound
Spinach. 10 pounds of spinach you need to wash is a little less than $4.50.  If you want organic spinach that you don't have to wash, you can get 4 or 5 pounds for this price.
Milk. We go through about 2 or 3 gallons a week and Costco sells 2 gallons for $4.98. Considering most places sell a gallon of milk for $2.50-$2.89 a gallon, it's a safe bet I'm not overpaying. 
Butter. It's $2 a pound.
Cheese. They sell 2.5 pounds of cheddar of a local brand for $4 something, which is less than $2 a pound, which is where I like to buy cheese at.  The local grocery store had a 2 pound block for $5 on sale when I was there last.  And that's the regular price.

I also buy my baking supplies, but I try to split them because, frankly, I don't want to give up my pantry space to store 50 pounds of flour, which is what the wheat and bread flour comes in. I can handle the 25 pounds for all-purpose, but I digress.  So this time when I needed bread flour I asked around to my bread making friends if they were in need as well. I think I last bought it 2-3 months ago so I've used about 25 pounds in that time frame and I haven't bought bread in probably 4 months?  So this month my former meal swap buddy and my mom and I are sharing the flour.  Some information if you are planning on doing this...

My mom wants 10 pounds, Katie and I will each get 20 pounds.

I use a liquid measuring cup to estimate how much flour there is for splitting. Note that I completely estimate. I'm not measuring out exactly. This time I measured approx 138 cups of flour, so my mom will get 27 1/2 (or 3 of my 8 cup scoops a little light on the last scoop) Katie and I each get a smidgen over 55 cups each. 2 gallon bags (sold by Ziploc, and now in generic at Top foods for about 30 cents each and I'll wash and rewash them or just reuse them) hold 24 cups  (3 of my 8 cup scoops) and comfortably close, so I put aside 1 2 gallon bag for my mom with her 27 1/2 cups of flour, kept 2 gallon bags and topped off my own flour bins with my 55 cups and put the other 55 cups back in the original bag to give to Katie.  The 50 pound bag was $16.38 this time (I think last time I bought it, it was closer to $17.30) so 20 pounds is costing about $6.60.  To compare, the local grocery store sells 5 pounds for $2.99 generic or $4.29 for Gold Medal.   Then when you use that flour to make your own bread... savings abound.  I use 3 cups of flour for each loaf, so for my $6.60 (along with other ingredients, but most are just pennies) I an make 18 loaves of bread.  When you consider most bread is $2-$5 a loaf, I'm getting 18 loaves of bread for the price someone who buys it already baked of 1-3 loaves.

I was going to split granulated sugar as well, however, when I went to Costco, it was .55 cents a pound to get the 20 pound bag and only .555 cents for the 10 pound bags, so I just got the 10 pound bag.

So there's some more ways to stretch your grocery bill-make as much as you can from scratch and buy the ingredients in bulk-if it's too much for you to handle, split with a friend! Now that I know how much 1/2 a bag of 50 pounds of flour is, I can take out just my portion and wrap up the rest for someone else, no more measuring the entire bag. 

Shank Ham

So I got a shank ham at Top for $1.29... that's ok, I know they'll go down to 89 or 99 cents a pound closer to the holidays. I got it because it was 9 pounds and a friend needed 4.5 pounds so I told her while I was at the store I'd pick it up and I'd give her the 4.5 pounds she needed and keep the rest and the bone (split pea soup) well, I started cutting off bone and fat and was left with only the 4.5 pounds she needed!  Since the ham was about $11.50 that's $2.55 a pound. Still ok as far as meat goes, but not the bargain I was imagining.  However, I can make myself feel better when I know the ham steaks, which she was planning to buy for her recipe were marked $4.99 to $5.99 a pound, so it's still half the cost to cut it down, plus the bone is available for soup....

Little Miss Smarty Pants

She knows most of her alphabet, upper and lower case, yet still is working on asking for a drink of milk. sigh.

Link:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ySl8u71X4Sg&feature=youtu.be

A typical morning.

Just another Saturday night...

Before I get started, let me say, I am like my Dad.  Let me give an example. If someone were to tell my immediate family, “That wall is very hard.  Hitting your head against it would be painful.”  My brother and Mom would say, “wow, ok, thanks for the warning.” and they would walk away.  My Dad and I, on the other hand, would probably walk right up to the wall, hit our head against it a few times and say, “ok, you are right, that was pretty painful.” 

Anyways, it’s been a few weeks since the shed incident and my husband’s away this weekend curling up in BC.  He called my cell phone while I was visiting my grandparents this morning and asked me to call him back when I got home.  I got home and called him at 3:45 and what I thought he said was, “We curl again at 6pm, if we don’t win we are out of the tournament and I’ll head home, if we do win, I’m going to get a hotel up here and you could come up and watch with or without the kids.”  I told him I was planning to take my parents out for dinner for their anniversary and I’d talk to my parents about taking the kids for the night.

I meet Mom and Dad ½ way between our house (aka North, as in North towards Canada) and we have a nice dinner and dad mentions that there’s a train leaving for BC in an hour and I could probably have just enough time to run to my house, grab the stuff I need including my passport and make the train, esp since they generally run a few minutes late.

So, trusting dear old Dad, I drive his car to my house, realizing ½ way there that I have no house key and no garage door opener. Leave it to me to make nothing easy.  After searching for a Hide a Key (none) and checking for unlocked windows (none) I finally make it in (no, I’m not telling you how I broke into the house, suffice it to say, we are about to get more security) grabbed passport, change of clothes, stuff for Paul and keys and hightailed it to the train station. My dad met me there.  “You missed it by 2 minutes, we can catch it at the next stop and you can get a ticket on board because it has to go slower than us.”  We check on the progress on his phone and it says we should just meet it.  Well, kind of. We get there, the train is stopped in the road.  In front of the station.  I yell, “I’m running for it” and much to his dismay I run in flip flops in the dark right behind the train.  The train proceeds to leave. 2 minutes ahead of schedule (yes, a miracle, Amtrak is running on schedule) as I’m screaming and waving my hands, “NO NO NO!!!!!!”

Defeated I get back in the car and Dad starts driving back to his place where the kids are as I try to convince him and I that I’ll just drive back home.  He stops to get gas and I try calling Greyhound to see if there’s a bus (there is, but it doesn’t arrive until 1am, in a town about 45 minutes from where the hubby is) so I give up. And realize I don’t have my cell phone.  If you guessed it fell face down out of my bag on the platform while I was waving my arms at the train you are the winner.

My dad’s terrified a train hobo is going to pick it up and calls his bff who lives near the station (it’s now 8:30pm at night) to go look in the dark for his daughter’s cell phone.  They have been best friends since childhood, so my dad is not at all surprised by this insane request and he and his wife (who luckily my dad introduced to the bff) get to the train station about the same as us.  We chat a few minutes and head back to my parent’s house.

 

Dad calls my mom, who, having just celebrated her  36^th wedding anniversary to the guy is not at all surprised to hear how the saga has turned out. 

I send a text to my husband, “After losing my phone from literally chasing 2 trains and breaking into our house, it looks like I’m not going to make it. Sorry.” And get a call back from him with him scheming to drive home tonight (it’s now 8:45pm) and then we’ll drive up in the morning together for his 9am game.  My husband is a night owl and I have no doubts about his ability to drive home (apparently neither does my dad who agrees he could have made it) however, getting up in time to make it to Canada for a 9am game?  Probably not going to happen.

I get to my parent’s house and ask my mom if the kids are up to decide if I should drive home or not.  “Well, Carter might be sleeping but I’m sure the two little ones aren’t.”  I failed to mention to my mom that the little ones can’t bunk together (Carter and husband can sleep through a bomb going off but the little ones wake up if someone 2 houses away sneezes, hence V, H & I cannot sleep in the same room).  We check on the little ones who are out of bed and laughing to go home.  Carter is sound asleep in the other room.  I get them loaded and tell Carter the tale in the car.  He listens with no surprise. 

We just got home put kids in bed and Paul called, he’s in fact staying in the hotel tonight, sleeping well and planning on kicking ass tomorrow. So far where they are is that they’ve won their entry fee back, if they win at least one more game, it will pay for the hotel room for the night and he’ll feel like he came back even (of course, he also got to curl competitively when we JUST got ice at our home club).

It’s now 11:30 and I’m going to check on a few things and head to bed myself. And finish doing all the stuff that I was going to do this evening in the morning, I guess!

What to do while Valerie naps on school days

Craft of course! I've gone off my internet friend, Joan's blog and made two fun fold cards this week.

Her main blog is: http://www.dailystampede.com/

Here's the first card: Her's: http://www.dailystampede.com/2012/08/10/fun-fold-friday/

My take on it with some paper I was trying to use up:

Today she posted a tutorial for another Fun fold card she did while back. The tutorial is here:  http://www.dailystampede.com/2012/09/09/fun-fold-tutorial/

the original post is here: http://www.dailystampede.com/2012/07/31/trending-tuesday-36-halloween-fun-fold-card/

Here is my take. I only used one sheet of 12x12 double sided printed paper (one side bolder print, other side more subtle) and one piece of 12x12 cardstock.

A night with the kids

I had a meeting tonight, so I left my husband home with the kids. When I came home a huge TV was in the playroom. No big deal, he’d been researching and wanted to get one.

He’s telling me, “Valerie went crazy when she saw Super Why on this thing.” We head upstairs and he tells me about his night with the kids.

“Honey, I’m going to tell you something, but don’t get mad.” 

“ok”

“So I went out to the shed.”

“Did you do something to the spider?” (I’m a fan of spiders, the hubby is not)

“Yes, I killed it… them, there were TWO and they were huge” he makes a shape with his hands like the size of a grapefruit “they were making baby spiders and I just couldn’t let that happen.”

“Wait, they’d already made baby spiders or you stopped them during”

“No, before, but they were about to make baby spiders.”

“Well, you could have at least waited to kill them until they were doing it so they’d die how we all want to go.”

“Well, here’s what happened.  I went out into the shed and the dad spider came out.”

“Wait, how did you know it was the dad spider.” 

“He was smaller.  I just figured.  Anyway, a moth flew into the shed because it was dark and I had the light on.  It got caught in the web and the dad came out and totally chomped on it.  Then the mom got a couple bites in, then dad and I thought, ‘oh, no, I gotta stop this before they make babies.’ So I sprayed it all with the hose (by the way, there’s a lot of wet stuff in the shed now) and after I chased them outside I cut them up with a shovel.”

I laugh.

“oh, and after we got the TV, I stopped by Little Caesar’s to pick up a pizza and I asked Carter if he wouldn’t mind going in to get the pizza and he agreed.  So I sent him in with $11 and it was busy and he saw the pinball machine and started looking over at it and I thought, ‘focus! Order the pizza!’ then he remembered and ordered and went back to the machine.  Then he remembered what he was in there for after the checkout person gave him his change back which he forgot to take. He checked if his order was up and it was. He headed out to the car. A man picked up the pizza and breadsticks and followed Carter out. I opened the door and the man told me, “cute kid.”  Apparently Carter announced to everyone, ‘hey, could someone help me carry this pizza?’ and this random customer agreed to carry his pizza out for him.”

Those are the only stories he told me that I can share. :)