03.11.08
Simple Pleasures
After reading “How to make a volanco“ on A more Green and Simple Life’s blog I promised my DS that if he had a good week at school then we would make a volcano at the weekend. [To cut a very long story short, he has been having a few problems at school and we've found that we can help to ensure that he has good days if he has something to look forward to at the weekend]. We ran out of time at the weekend but I promised that we would do it as soon as he got home last night.
I didn’t take any pictures like Donna but we did have fun, only the volcano started to erupt before I expected it to so we were caught unawares…. This was great for me since I have been struggling to come up with ideas for a weekend treat for us to do together without actually spending money / much money. Fortunately there are lots of resources on the Internet which give similar ideas for experiments so I shall be visiting them for more ideas of experiments that we can conduct.
Meal Planner w/c 8 Mar 08
Again a bit late….
Sat – planned to have chicken kiev w/ potatoes but the day went pear-shaped, I didn’t eat anything and OH got a take-away!
Sun – roast lamb & potatoes w/ cabbage, broccoli and carrots. Jam roly poly pudding w/ custard for desert
Mon – Turkey and vegetable pie w/ chips and peas (from the freezer – made from the Christmas turkey)
Tue – Cottage pie (make 2 and freeze one)
Wed – Jacket potato w/ tuna and salad
Thu – Stewing steak and veg in giant yorkshire puddings
Fri – Fish and chips
Grocery Budget
I set myself a budget of £200 for groceries for a 4 week month or £240 for a 5 week month. I get paid on the 25th of every month and currently get my shopping every Friday or Saturday so the budget depends on how many Fridays or Saturdays there are in the month. This month is a 4 week month for me so the budget for March is £200.
I have already planned my meals for the month and so in theory should be under the budget that I have set – however the budget also includes wine (I have been making my OH buy his own lager/cider so he appreciates how much it costs!) and household stuff. Additionally I have recently given up on the breast-feeding since it was taking so much time out of the day – I would finish feeding Izzy and then barely have time to do anything else before she would need another feed. This means I also have to take into account her formula milk as well, but I guess this is compensated by the fact that now I should need to eat as much (apparently by breast-feeding I should consume an extra 500 calories a day, unforuntately now I don’t have an excuse to eat so much!!)
So back to the process of budgeting, I have just gone through my receipts for the last two weeks and by now my budget is up to £120 (£80 wk 1 + £40 wk 2) and I have spent £120.38…. I think I got about as close as possible there! However I do have a fully stocked pantry and a few meals in the freezer along with all the household products I need (toilet rolls, cleaners, washing soda, etc). The theory is that I only need to buy fresh food in the next two weeks; meat, vegetables and fruit – according to my plan I only need to spend a futher £50 and not the budgeted £80.
Once my garden is producing vegetables hopefully I can reduce the budget even further as I use the fresh produce from the garden. After the garden the next project I need to work on for reducing the grocery budget is making my own wine and my OH is very keen to brew his own cider as well. We both agree however that we need to clear the garage out first to give us the space to make our own.
