videos!

Sometimes little sisters knock down towers. Jonah thought this was funny...until he didn't.



And while I was looking for the video, I found this snippet from early last year. It's amazing what a difference a year can make.



I also found an absolutely awesome video of him impersonating his Nursery chorister (using and old phone to "Look for the song", including a "Wow, you guys did a great job" at the end and a "Whoops! Wrong song!") but since it was while potty training, I've opted to leave it off the internet. Oh, but it's cute!

anything new?

Every day (and often twice a day), I check some of my favorite blogs. I'm always so happy when there is something new from Rachael or Anna-Lisa or Shante. (Other friends, too, but since your blogs aren't private, my Google Reader picks up the blogs so I never have that delay of wondering what will show up when the page loads!)

I realized when I sat down to write about surviving the week of spending nothing that it had been 5 days or so since I'd posted last. Hypocrisy, your name is Kimberly?

Still, I'm feeling rather uninspired. I blame NBC. You see, the summer Olympics are quite possibly my favorite two weeks every four years. For some reason, even with the fancy antennae and a newer tv, we don't get any television channels. And because we don't have a cable provider, we can't watch them on NBC's website. I'm feeling quite grumpy about the whole thing, actually.

So we'll watch the highlight clips and see what we can find elsewhere online. Jonah might not understand why, but we'll run our own gymnastics meets (surely every house with children during the '96 Olympics did the same, right?) and have fencing matches and pretend we're there like I've been doing every Olympics for the last 16 years. Kerri Strug is still my hero. Also, how is it that the last time the summer Olympics were on Jonah was only months old?

pay day!

Guess who's going to the store on Monday? Woohoo!

Some of our food experiments went really well. We had tortilla española and loved it. This was my third or fourth try and the combination of watching Juan Carlos and finding a recipe with the right proportions worked for us. I imagine we'll eat this lots. Plus, with just eggs and potatoes (basically), it's a great inexpensive dish. It also reminds me of my time in Spain, so that's great.

Some nights we just ate whatever we could find. Today we ate a loaf of bread with honey for dinner. It was tasty, though hardly nutritionally well-rounded.

Now, the trick will be to go to the store Monday without blowing half the month's budget in one trip...

the year of less

I saw a plug for this and I got intrigued. Will we follow along? Perhaps.

After the tornado, it was hard to spend money on anything because we didn't really want things, we wanted a secure feeling. We'll be moving eventually. If we're lucky, we'll stay in this house another 3 years. Still, we know a move is eminent. Even more compelling, it might not be for 3 years. We have not lived in one home for four years in...ever! I'm worried that without a move every 18 months to force us to consider every item individually, we may end up swimming in stuff.

This article did intrigue me. I've followed this philosophy with food for the last few years. While we still have more sweets than we need, I do my best to stop them at the door (decline when offered to take some home, not buying them at the store, etc).

on the menu tonight

Chicken salad sandwiches. Not bad. It uses the frozen shredded chicken leftover from a rotisserie chicken who knows how long ago and  1 tiny can of canned chicken I found in the back cupboard. We don't have any celery or grapes or lettuce or sprouts (my favorite pairings with CKS--the code for chicken salad at Kneaders if I remember correctly) but we do have apples and onion and cucumber and walnuts. Kneaders CKS has water chestnuts in it, but most people thought it was apples. Onion is good in anything. Josh doesn't like cucumber on anything, but I'm thinking I'll slice it thin and hope it covers for the missing lettuce. I don't usually put walnuts in my CKS, but Wendy's does, so someone has to like it that way, right?

Right. What started as chicken and mayo and nothing else might taste good. Will I stop buying grapes and celery in the future? No way. Am I happy we're not eating Cheerios for dinner (my second idea)? Mostly.

dragon face

When trying to snap a picture of my mom and Jonah before their walk in the woods, Jonah did this:

When I said, "ok, this time without the dragon face," he did this:

 Finally, Grandma made him laugh and we got a keeper:

 Caroline, however, has not yet learned how to do the dragon face.

update

Purchased last night: dog food and lettuce ($12 total).

Our bills came and so did the refund check and it will take the check plus $20 to cover the bills. That leaves me $8 after my dog food last night for gas? Hm. I haven't decided yet if we'll fill up and dip into the buffer (we have a buffer in our checking account..never fear those of you who were getting nightmares of overdraft fees) or look around the house for some quarters.

A lady in our ward had a baby this week and I'd love to take them dinner or a gift. It's really important to me to stick to my guns for the next 2 weeks though, so here are my ideas:
-wait on dinner/gift
-make something
-provide company or manpower. Mopping the floor takes no money.

frozen...July?

First, because the following post is mundane and void of pictures, here they are showing off Caroline's new talent:

 And now, a few unrelated happenings that became very related as of 10 minutes ago:

-In February, Dan and Rach decided to go on a spending freeze.
-A blog I was perusing a while back talked about how twice a year their family devotes a month to eating down the pantry before restocking as a way to save money and clean out the pantry.
-I balanced the checkbook this morning.

And guess what! After all the bills go through (since I am always ahead of the bank, thank goodness) we will have $1.87 in our checking account. Now I could siphon some money out of savings, but I think I'd rather try and see if we can make it work.

Potential problems:
-the car is almost out of gas
-we're going to Birmingham tomorrow which will take at least 1/4 tank of said gas
-our gas and water bills still haven't come for the month

Those needs will be covered (I hope) by the cash in Josh's wallet and a refund check that's already in the mail. Still, we're going to have to get creative and last night's Pizza-for-dinner-because-I-don't-feel-like-cooking isn't helping.

My main concern (as always) is food. I love to cook and take the charge to feed the family quite seriously. I only have 10 days or so until August, though, so here's what I'm thinking we'll eat for dinner based on what we have in the fridge right now:
-sweet pork salads (already in the crockpot)
-enchiladas
-tortilla española
-this spaghetti (although with only one chicken breast between the three of us. Hm.)
-regular spaghetti with some meatballs I made and froze last week
-ham and cheese quiche (which would be better with spinach, but there's none left in the house. I'm sure Jonah won't mind)

I should get 2 meals each out of the pork and enchiladas, so that only leaves me 2 days short. A couple nights of pancakes for dinner and we should be set. It looks much easier written down. Now to stick to it...

dad is great

Sometimes, Josh takes pictures of his adventurers with Jonah as evidence for me to laugh at later:

Found on my desktop in a folder entitled "While the cat's away, the mice will play"

Sometimes, I find evidence on Josh's phone of the fun they have together:

Sometimes, I walk back into the room to a hollar, "Mom! We're having Dr. Pepper with dinner! Yahoo!"

thanks, mom

I called my mom tonight right as she was falling asleep. She talked me through a few ideas and dilemmas for 40 minutes. I hope she gets to sleep in an extra hour to make up for the time she gave me.

Also, while remembering little things my parents did that have stuck all these years, I remembered this: I used to make my mom say goodnight to each of my stuffed animals by name. I may have had upwards of 20 and if I remember correctly, some of their names changed regularly. Thanks, Mom.

Jonah and the grass

It has been dry here, so very very dry. It seems silly to bemoan a month without rain when we know it could be much worse at home (and yet, Facebook tells me it must have been raining in AZ; there are lots of "yay! rain!" statuses running around these days). Still, the plants here aren't used to it being so dry in the summer and things are not looking hot.

Our grass is dying. I finally broke down and started watering it when I noticed that a small patch by our garden was lush and green and the rest was dry and brown. Also, we are currently house sitting for Josh's adviser. He asked us to please not mow the lawn because he was letting it grow so it wouldn't scorch.

Cut to a few days ago when it rained all day. And then a few days later when it rained all night. First, it's good we're familiar with slime mold (it showed up in our grass a few months ago). If not, we would have panicked, seeing as we want everything to be better than pristine when Bob gets back.

Second, my sweet little Arizona-born child declared this morning, "Oh look! The grass isn't crunchy anymore!"

sometimes, you just need a nap

some things are okay incorrect

Sometimes, I intentionally let Jonah say funny things. For example, he thinks he's strong because of his nuscles and I love to hear, "look at my nuscles!"

Well, just now was another I'm in no rush to correct: "Mom, can you put me a flavor?" (We were having hot cocoa, so I was thinking he wanted it flavored. No, he wanted a favor.) He has many variations on this theme.

Also, his new favorite game is "numbers":

123456789101114151617

pi8uyttreewwwq
jonah

Ooops, baby awake. Ciao.