Eat from the pantry challenge

One of the blogs I read regularly is hosting a challenge for the month of January -- to eat from your pantry and buy very few, if any, groceries. So, I decided to give it a try. I am still going to buy some groceries, like milk and fruit, and if I need one or two ingredients to make a meal made up of mostly pantry items, I will do that. The idea of this is to use up and eat what you already have on hand -- in the cupboards, fridge, and freezer. I have a lot in the freezer right now -- we shared a 1/2 pig with some family so we have a lot of pork, plus several freezer meals I had made, including enchiladas, chicken ala king, turkey pot pie, soups, breads, pancakes, and more. I also have some things in my cupboards to use.

Last night, I heated some frozen Ham and Bean Soup and homemade bread from the freezer.

It's a good month to do this for us, since we are going on a trip to Arizona the beginning of February. The money I save on groceries will help balance out the remaining cost of the trip.

Speaking of our trip, I am so excited to be able to go to Arizona! We are going February 4-10 and are staying with my cousin and her husband for most of the trip, with a one-night hotel stay in Sedona as we head up to the Grand Canyon. We will explore the Sedona area Monday, and then Tuesday morning we will get up early and continue on up to the Grand Canyon for the rest of the day. Our out of pocket cost for the trip (for airfare, one night hotel, and three day car rental) is $269, thanks to our Cash Back Bonus with Discover and being able to stay with my cousin for the majority of the trip. Evan will be staying with my parents, so this vacation will be a special time for Matt and me to relax and enjoy our time together without constantly chasing after our sweet and very active little boy! I know we will miss him terribly, but he will have fun with Grandma and Grandpa!

Financial Goals

Over the past few years, I have come to desire a simpler way of life (hence the name of this blog). One of the biggest ways to live more simply is to have financial freedom. I think financial freedom is something almost everyone wants, but not many people want to take the necessary steps to get there. It's taken me awhile to get past the American way of instant gratification, and I'm sure it will always be a little bit of a struggle, but I am ready to take the plunge.

Our pastor said a phrase during one of the sermon series that has stuck with me, and I really think it's true: you can live life/do finances two ways -- Easy Hard, or Hard Easy. In other words, you can have all the things that you want now -- a nice house, a boat, a fancy car, etc -- and pay for it later by way of lessened retirement funds, paying more than twice what you would if you hadn't charged up your credit card, etc. OR, you can save and pay for the things you can afford -- a more modest home, saving up to buy your dream car, building up your savings account before you take your dream vacation -- and reap the rewards of not paying high amounts of interest, having a savings account, and not being a slave to your lending institutions.

Matt and I have worked hard and have come a long way from where we were 6 years ago. Over time, we have completely paid off our credit cards and have no student loans. We have $1000 in an emergency savings account and are two payments away from paying off Matt's car. Once we do that, we will start applying that monthly payment amount to my car loan. By August this year, we should have both of our vehicles fully paid for. After that, the cumulative amount of both car payments will be going into a savings account so that we will be able to pay cash for our next cars and never have a car payment again.

We are putting our home on the market next week. Our next home will be a modest single family home and our goal is to be able to get a 15 year mortgage and still pay less per month than what we are currently paying for our townhome. Based on what I've seen, it is possible. The difference between what we currently pay and what we will pay will be put into a savings account. We will apply this money toward principal on our home after we have saved 3-6 months worth of income to keep in a savings account.

Attaining financial freedom takes a lot of sacrifice, but it is well worth the payoff. If we meet our goals, we can be completely debt free in 13 years. By the time I am 40, we will completely own our house, our cars, and everything else we have. We will not be enslaved by any debt. How amazing!

Living this way gives us the freedom to spend the money we do have and wish to spend without guilt or worry, give generously, save for college for our children and for our own retirement. It is also a great model to set for our kids.

I know there will be bumps in the road, and things may not happen as I've laid them out here. But this is our goal, and we are going to work hard to meet it!

Some good deals I found today

You can get a free 11 month subscription to Parenting (early years) magazine here.

And a $1.50 off 2 Ziploc bag packages here. If you purchase 3 packages of Ziplocs total, you can mail in this $5 rebate!

What I've been up to in the last 20 days...

Wow. Has it really been that long since I posted? I guess having good intentions doesn't equal posts magically appearing on my blog...

Well, since I last wrote, I:

• Roasted my first turkey! The hardest part was thawing it and getting the neck/giblet bag out of the cavity. Gross. After that, I just put it in the roaster, slathered the bird with butter, sprinkled it with salt and pepper and added chicken stock to the roaster (I didn't have turkey stock). It turned out okay. A little flavorless, actually. Not as good as my parents' turkey. But, it was pretty good. We only actually ate a couple slices of it. The rest turned into some other great food.
  
• Froze 3 turkey pot pies! And a Ziploc full of cubed turkey. Plus the filling for 1 more pot pie.
• Made turkey rice soup from the turkey bones/meat! Delicious. I have 5 2-serving bags of soup in the freezer, and we ate another 5 servings throughout that week. That means I made 15 servings of soup.

So, for all of the above food, I think I paid about $8 out of pocket. Most of that was butter and half and half for the soup. Unbelievable to get that much food for so little!

• I went to an apple orchard with my cousins and picked a huge amount of apples. They have an arrangement with the orchard to pick up any apples that have fallen to the ground, good and bad. We pitched the bad apples into their compost heap and were able to keep all the good apples for free! On Saturday, we are all getting together to make applesauce. We'll likely each come home with at least 25 quarts of sauce! Plus some sliced apples to freeze for pies, crisps, etc. Wow!
  

• I pureed a bunch of baby food for Evan. Mixed veggies (corn, peas, beans, carrots and tomato sauce), peaches, sweet potatoes and squash. Making my own baby food has been so much cheaper than buying baby food! The mixed veggies were from a frozen veggie pack, plus the tomato sauce. That cost about $0.75 for a good 12 meals' worth. The peaches were canned peaches in apple juice (not syrup). I bought 3 sweet potatoes from the grocery store for about $2 and got 10 meals' worth from those. I paid $2 for a couple acorn squash, plus a couple butternuts I had in my garden. I pureed the squash for Evan's food and for us. I got about 10 cups of squash.
• Went to Mikes Discount Foods (thanks MP!) and got the squash mentioned above ($1 each), 4 containers of strawberries ($2.50 TOTAL for all 4), raspberries ($1), celery hearts (2 bags for $1) 1 lb of ground beef ($1.99), pureed sweet potatoes ($1 for a frozen gallon size bag), and a couple other things I'm forgetting right now. Great place to get some great food cheap!
  

So, that's what I've been up to. I'll try to be better about posting!

The verdict: Granola bars

I finally had a chance to make the granola bar recipe yesterday afternoon. They were fairly easy to make and turned out great! They are somewhere between chewy and crisp, so when I try to break off a piece of the bar it sometimes crumbles a bit, but I'm sure that is because there is no HFCS in them to make them gooey.  One other thing I'll make sure to try is to use regular instead of kosher salt. The kosher salt was too coarse to every now and then I'll get a bit that tastes a little too salty. I think using regular salt in a smaller quantity will distribute better throughout the granola mixture.

I love that these are so much more healthy than store-bought granola bars, I know exactly what is in them , they are fresh and pretty inexpensive to make! I am going to try making these with chocolate and butterscotch chips, too, for a sweeter treat!

I used a dried fruit mixture of berries and raisins, and a friend of mine did hers with cranberry and mango. That's the great thing about these, too -- lots of great fruit combinations!

What else is cookin? Well, tonight I think we'll go to Chipotle for dinner, and tomorrow I'm throwing a beef roast in the crock pot to be served tomorrow night with mashed potatoes, gravy, and carrots from my garden. Yum!

Coupons

Did you know that some retailers accept manufacturer's coupons for up to three months past their expiration date? It's true!

I had a "$5 off your next grocery purchase" coupon at Cub. It was a manufacturer's coupon that printed out after my last grocery visit when I purchased a bunch of Kraft Foods items for a great promotion they ran. It expired August 29. I went to Cub and asked at the register whether I could still use it, thinking it was probably no longer usable. Instead, she told me that they accept manufacturer's coupons for three months beyond the printed expiration date!

So if you have old coupons lying around, don't throw them away! Give it a shot -- you might still be able to use them!

Another cool coupon thing I stumbled upon: Mobile Coupons! There are several websites that offer a service that sends coupons and deals to your mobile phone. I have an iPhone and added an app that does the same thing. The app I have is called mobiQpons. It was free and has a list of coupons available depending on my location. Last night when we were out to dinner at T.G.I. Friday's, I looked and it showed a coupon for T.G.I. Friday's, Best Buy, Michael's, JoAnn Fabrics, and several more. Pretty cool! All you do is show the checkout person the coupon on your phone and they are able to grab an authorization code from it to enter into their system. I've also done this with email coupons I've received from Gap and other retailers.

Cloth diapering

A friend of mine posted on Facebook yesterday that she was anxiously awaiting the arrival of a special FedEx package...her first shipment of cloth diapers! I remember 6 months ago feeling the exact same way and feeling silly for being excited about diapers, of all things. I shared with her what I have and my method for doing things and thought I'd share it here for anyone else who could benefit.

First of all, I must say that I absolutely love using cloth diapers. There are many benefits to cloth diapering, including:

1. Cost savings. This was my biggest reason for deciding to go with cloth. I knew I would be returning to work at just 20 hours per week instead of 40, and I also hated the idea of spending up to $2,000 in 2 years on disposables.
2. Better for the environment. Yes, I use water and energy to wash and dry my diapers (2-3 extra loads of laundry per week), but I am not contributing thousands of diapers to sit in a landfill for years. I am by no means an environmental "nut" but I do believe it's important to take care of the earth God gave us to live in, and using cloth helps to that end.
   
3. Rumored to help potty train faster. This is TBD for us since Evan is only 6 months old! But supposedly, cloth helps babies potty train faster because Baby feels more wet than (s)he does when wearing disposables. Disposables are designed to pull moisture away from Baby's tush, so even when (s)he is wet, they don't feel uncomfortable enough to want to learn to use the potty. Cloth, on the other hand, wicks away a lot of the moisture but still can make Baby notice more easily that (s)he is wet. As I said, TBD.
4. Contains mess and odors. I didn't believe it until I used them, but it's true: cloth diapers are so good at containing the mess and odors! I think the whole time I've used them, I've only had one minor leak. I used disposables a lot more the first 2 months of Evan's life and still do use disposables on occasion. I remember sometimes having two or more blow outs a day in disposables. Not anymore. LOVE this. It contains the odors so well too! I notice the urine smell almost right away when I'm using disposables, even if Evan has barely wet the diaper. With cloth, I really have to get close and personal with Evan's tush to tell whether he has a dirty diaper.
5. Softer on skin. They just feel so nice! I like having the nice fleecy feeling fabric on Evan's sensitive bottom. :)

So, those are the benefits I see. Of course, as with anything, there are also drawbacks.

1. Not as easy. Doing cloth is a lot easier than I imagined it would be, but they are definitely more time consuming than disposables. I have to wash them on 2 cycles, dry them, stuff them and put them away.
2. Less convenient. When we're gone on vacation or even a day trip, disposables are a lot easier because, obviously, you can just throw them away. With cloth, I have to store the used diapers and bring them home to wash. The clean and dirty diapers both take up more space in the diaper bag as well.
   
3. Childcare. Cloth diapers can be daunting, so when we have someone else watching Evan, we understand that not everyone is comfortable using the cloth. The diapers we use go on just like disposables (prestuffed and ready, velcro closure), but some people don't want to deal with the cloth.
4. The "ick" factor. Let's be honest. Dealing with any diaper is icky. We're dealing with human waste! But cloth diapers are slightly more icky than disposables because of having to wash them. But it really isn't bad.

So now that we have what I see as pros and cons out of the way, I'll share what I do specifically! And I'll also share tips I've learned along the way.

What I use
After much research, I decided to go with Bum Genius 3.0 one size pocket diapers. The reasons I went with BGs were that they seemed the least scary to me (no folding, pinning, etc), I liked that they would "grow" with my child since they are one size, and I read a lot of good reviews about them and heard good things from my cousin who had tried a few different kinds. The only real drawback with these was that I couldn't really start using them right away because they were so bulky. I tried Evan in them, and I'm sure they would have worked to contain the mess, but he looked pretty ridiculous in them. Next time, I think I might get some other kind of cloth diapers that are made for newborns or I'll do what I did this time and just use disposables that first 6 weeks.

Tip: If you decide to go with the BG 3.0s, order them from CottonBabies.com and get them in bulk. You'll save by buying in bulk, get free shipping on orders over $75, and at Cotton Babies, they include a doubler/infant insert with each diaper (when I bought mine, Amazon and other online retailers did not include the doubler with each diaper).

When I ordered my diapers, I also ordered cloth wipes, wipe solution concentrate, diaper liners, wet bags, and a diaper pail liner. In total, I have 17 diapers and 24 wipes. I got a garbage can with a push lid and a spray bottle to use for the wipes at Target. With the diapers, wipes and all accessories, I spent about $370 (I was given 2 diapers as a shower gift also). This should last me until Evan is potty trained and probably for one more child. I think by this point, they've already paid for themselves in what I have saved in not buying disposables.

My Method: Diapers
I do a laundry load of diapers/wipes every Tuesday and Friday, sooner if I need to, but that's my schedule. I follow BG's washing instructions exactly. I have read too many stories about people cutting corners with washing them and ending up with diapers that need to be stripped constantly or even replaced because they hold odors or leak, even after multiple washings. So far, I haven't had any issues with lingering odors or leaking. I've only bleached them once.

I use Charlie's Soap and love it. In fact, I now use Charlie's for all of our laundry, not just the diaper loads. When I wash, I wash ONLY the diapers, wipes and liner. Nothing else. This keeps the velcro tabs from fraying or getting less sticky. I dry them in the dryer. After they're done, I stuff all the diapers and line them up in a basket I keep in Evan's dresser. That way, they're all ready to use when I need to change his diaper. Each night at bedtime, I add a doubler to the diaper for more absorbency overnight. Since adding the doubler, he hasn't soaked through.

Tip: I would really recommend investing in a good laundry detergent if you're using cloth -- protect your investment! Here is a list of detergents and whether or not they are recommended for use with cloth diapers. I got my Charlie's Soap from the Linden Hills Coop Natural Home Store in Minneapolis, but other places sell it too.

As for storing the dirties, I use a flip-lidded garbage can with a pail liner. I close the velcro tabs, shake the insert out and drop them in the pail.

Tip: Make sure when you close the velcro tabs, you are careful about covering the sticky side completely. If you don't, the velcro will start to lose its stickiness and curl.

Up until recently, Evan's poo has been runny enough because I've been breastfeeding that I haven't had to rinse/spray or otherwise remove the poo from the diaper before dropping the diaper into the pail. But now that we've introduced solids, his poo is getting more solid. We have just started using the diaper liners I purchased to keep from having to spray the diapers to get rid of the poo. The concept is great -- I have yet to actually have Evan poo on one though to tell you how well it works! The concept is that the poo sits on top of the liner (it feels like rice paper or like a dryer sheet), while the liquid soaks through it into the diaper. Then you can either flush the liner or shake off the poo and throw the liner in the trash.

Tip: To help keep odor down, I taped a cotton ball with lavender essential oil on it to the inside of the diaper pail lid.

My Method: Wipes
I was really on the fence about whether to get reusable wipes or just use the disposable ones. I decided to try the reusables and I'm glad I did! I have a small basket with dry wipes in it on the changing table and a small spray bottle with wipe solution in it. All I do is grab one of the wipes and spray it with the solution and it's ready to go! The used wipe goes into the pail with the diapers. They wash up really well! They're soft and the solution smells nice. I can also use the wipes for a runny nose or as a washcloth.

What about diaper rash?
The diaper lotion potion I use as a wipe solution also doubles as a diaper rash helper. You just add witch hazel to it. I have yet to use it for this. So far, when Evan has a mild case of diaper rash, I have just put him in a disposable and used diaper rash cream. He doesn't get it too often. If your little one has a diaper rash a lot, I'd recommend trying the diaper lotion potion if you're using cloth. That way, you're not switching him/her back and forth between disposable and cloth, which for some babies can irritate their little bottoms even more.

Cloth diapering away from home
I have and use disposables on occasion. Sometimes, it just makes more sense. I have used cloth away from home and, in fact, did so on a 5-day trip just last week. I used some cloth and some disposables. I just brought both wet bags with me (which, by the way, work great for swimsuits and other wet items as well!). I used the small bag for the poopy diapers and the large one for the wet diapers. Then, when we got home, I just did the laundry. It wasn't too bad! Not as easy as just doing disposables, but money is tight and it was nice not to have used up most of my on-hand disposables. That being said, sometimes I don't use cloth at all if we're on a day trip. I just do what makes sense for each excursion and weigh my sanity level for the day! If I don't feel overwhelmed by the thought of doing cloth while we're away, I do it. If I feel overwhelmed, I don't.

I am by no means an expert, but I have been doing this consistently for 4 1/2 months so far and did a whole lot of research before I started. These are just things I figured out along the way. I hope this helps!