Basic Update

I know it has been awhile since I last posted anything. Like most things, once you get out of the habit of doing something, it just gets harder and harder. Things have certainly not died down in the home front. But I also have not been feeling inspired enough to sit down and do some serious posting. I still don't, so this will be a pretty brief.

The big news in the household is that Slim finally learned how to swim. Anybody who has known us for a lengthy amount of time, must know about how deathly afraid of water Slim is. He never liked baths, lakes, or sprinklers. He finally worked out the sprinkler fear this past summer, so that was nice.

We paid for several swimming lessons, but nothing progressed. In fact, with this session that he is in now, things definitely regressed. Listening to the advice of others, I decided to take Slim to open swims, just him and I, to work on his fears. It only took three times of this for him to swim. Last week he has lessons on Monday, Tuesday night he and I went to open swim for one hour, lessons on Wednesday, Thursday with me at open swim, Friday open swim with the family, and open swim with the family again on Saturday. By Saturday he was a total fish. I made the mistake at the beginning of these lessons that if he graduated from B class to C class, I would buy him a huge Harry Potter lego set. Oops.

Peaches is Peachey. She loves to talk, sing, and yell, all at volumes the human ear was not intended to hear. She is really loving school lately and she has not been complaining in the mornings about how annoying school is. This was a common occurrence rather recently.

About two weeks ago, she came up to me and told me she wanted to read. So we got the first Bob book, Mat, and she totally rocked it. It was freaking amazing. We got the second book, Sam, and again, she read it without help. I was so impressed. We are up to book seven in the Bob book series and she loves reading.

Hurricane and I have implemented a very strict budget and February is the month we designated our "trial" month. We are not spending money on anything except emergencies. I am being strict with our menu planning and grocery shopping. We are not eating out, not buying clothes, no lattes, nothing. Should one of us want to buy something, we have to discuss it with the other one, thus to help determine if it is a real emergency.

So far, I know that this month we will spend about $100 more than we make. All because of stupid medical licensing. Next month, March, we already know we will spend more than we make again. And again, all the thanks goes to medical licensing. This time for some ridiculous radiology society thing-y he has to belong to.

The good news about our budget is that I buy scrip gift cards through Slim & Peaches' school, so I have a pre-determined amount for groceries and random household essentials. I am experimenting this month with $500 worth of gift cards to Fred Meyer. I am hoping that this will encompass groceries, office supplies, cleaning supplies, and whatever else comes up in the month.

I do my menu planning on Sunday, then go shopping right at bedtime. There are several wonderful reasons for this. One, nobody else is out shopping, and two, Hurricane is forced to put the kids to bed, and three, they are asleep when I get home. I was super excited when, last night, I only spend $70 for our weeks worth of groceries.

I am also back to running. My foot seems to be healing, but I still taking things really slowly. I started running on January 1st, and this week is the first when I will run 3 times in one week. I am only doing 2 miles each day and most likely will start to increase that next week. I still swim at least 2 days a week.

Our household fixing projects have been most likely moved to next year, as I decided I would rather go to Alaska. Kind of stinks that for the same price I could really fix up and modernize our house, I can buy four tickets to Anchorage. Oh well. I have been feeling homesick lately. A childhood friend got married recently, the matriarch of the community I grew up in passed away, I have still not met my two nieces, and I would love to see my parents new house.

Well, I am on bed-time duty tonight. Our kids are getting harder and harder to wake up in the morning, so we are starting the routine at 7 with the goal of having the kids in bed by 7:30. We shall see.

Sorry about the boring post, but it feels good to keep some sort of record of our lives and the things that we do daily. This blog is as much for me as it is for my mother!