Boy I need to be more consistent with my blogging. Time really zooms by when you are trying to cook dinner every night. Some nights double or more dinner. A few nights back my husband made pizza from scratch for him and the kids. It was good and I realized the next day as I ate the remaining leftovers that maybe I should not focus solely on cooking for health and economic reasons but also take advantage of the menu planning capabilities. I am a bit of a perfectionist, and a little obsessive at times. This applies very much to when I shop (which takes quite a while), and when I eat. I seem to have convinced myself that if we are going to make dinner at home that we have to make it super healthy, as cheap as possible, and dynamic (a.k.a. complicated). What can I say other than it should be perfect. My problem is not that I hold all others to ridiculous standards, (which has been a problem and occasionally tries to rear it's ugly head) but I hold myself to ridiculous standards (which unfortunately when I got married started to encompass my husband too). Sorry honey!! So when I fail to make everything come together perfectly I get overwhelmed (since I have control over everything right?). What complicates this further is an inability to focus because I have pretty severe ADD. It makes me who I am right? (Or should I be a totally focused and brilliant speed addict) So if I am never truly totally focused that means I screw up a lot and can't be perfect which leads me to feeling like I have failed. That is where I was a few nights ago. I cooked a ridiculous amount of food until very wee hours of the morning (4am-ish), I used lots of vegetables, did it all from scratch, put it in nice freezer packaging, labeled it, and stowed it away in the deep freeze (except what we are going to eat this week, which is in the fridge). Then found myself sad as I forced myself to eat it and stare at the healthy food I cooked in the fridge. Did I say cooked? I meant totally slaved over!! Sacrificed sleep for! A couple days later as I sat in the doctor’s office explaining how I felt (Exhausted!!). I mentioned that I had been up all night the night before with a crying sick feverish baby, but somehow left out the part where I stayed up the night before that cooking for the end times (at least you would think!). She checked us for the flu, nope. Said I was probably starting to come down with something. The whole time I was counting the 4 hours of sleep I had in the past 48 hours. Resenting the healthy food that sat awaiting me at home. Being secretly mad at my husband for getting sick at such a bad time. Mad at myself for having this brilliant idea to cook for the week. It was a little of a dark hour. The next day as I ate the left over pizza my husband made (not on the meal plan I might add); I thought how great it was that my husband cooked yummy food (instead of the healthy food I made). All of a sudden I realized the potential of cooking at home. Also the support of friends helped with encouraging me along the journey after a rough start. I had an epiphany that it does not have to all be super healthy and complicated all the time. I realized we can have pizza once a week and that will be fine, not to mention something to get excited about. I love cheese, pasta, pizza, bread, cream, butter, pretty much itallian or french style food. I realized it is okay to eat that too. As long as we are also eating healthy on some days. I know it is basic but I have had an inconsistent food journey. It went from being single eating out occasionally (not much) and eating non-meals most the time, aka snacks (smoothie, popcorn, fresh fruit, nuts, a yogurt, microwave meal, advacado, cheese slices, sandwiches, an egg, a tortilla with butter, piece of toast) to being married and learning to adapt to eating dinners together. I was vegetarian for the first part of the marriage so we ate out and at home some. The meals we made I don't remember fully, but no meat. (I need to try to get back to eating less meat). We ate lots of canned and frozen prepared food I know. The home made meals were hit or miss (experimenting). Then when I got pregnant and became a complete carnivore again we started eating out a lot, we bought packaged meals, and cooked occasionally. Grilled, husband cooked most of the meat meals (which was most). Even though we cooked it has never been consistent enough to have any particular staples or food we made often. Our most common foods were grilled, or baked fish and baked chicken. Neither of which I particularly love. I eat them because they are healthy sources of protein. I have realized I don't enjoy eating at home because I don't allow myself to eat food I enjoy the most! So my new goal will be to make several meals I really enjoy despite the fats, proteins, carbs, vitamins, and sodium they may or may not contain. Pizzas, pastas, cheesy yummy goodness. Now I can get excited about making and eating that! Of course after I had this revelation today I told my husband maybe we should start having desert after dinner. To which he laughed and said "didn't you just tell me we need to make less complicated meals!"….. Oh yeah... then I said "Well desert would give me something to look forward to after I eat the meals I force myself to eat". At least my inconsistency can provide him a good laugh every once in a while.
I used to always take healthy food for my work lunch because I knew I couldn't eat anything else and I would force myself to eat it. I almost always did. It was a way to keep myself eating well, but I now realize I can’t do that all the time with all our meals. God blessed us in this country with the availability of milk, and honey. In moderation this is a good thing! And if used properly can create some mighty tasty food!
Pizza… pizza…. how I enjoy thee, and will perfect the making of thee.
I almost forgot the point. We passed several favorite place to dine as we drove around tonight running errands. Luckily we decided we had to eat dinner before going out. It surprised me how much those places did not tempt me since I had a great and filling dinner (and was not the slightest bit hungry)! The trick to fighting the temptation to eat out is to not leave the house hungry or unprepared. Always have a yummy snack handy. Now to actually stick to that!
November 06, 2009
November 01, 2009
I repent!! Please forgive me!
I recently ran both me and my hubby's credit because we are considering trying to move (AGAIN!) and I noticed something disturbing from the past year. It was VERY disturbing. While our goal at the beginning of the year was to decrease our debt (actually an ongoing goal since we got married), the sad reality was it appeared to increase. SO I began to investigate. Now the way this happened was not one simple thing but many many oversights, disorganization, and lack of discipline and planning on our part. Oh how my heart sinks just typing that! Ahhh. Am I actually admitting how completely terrible we were this year with our finances. It is totally embarrassing and completely true! I am on some level hoping the truth will set us free though. One thing we were very convicted on was that we have been eating out WAY too much. This has led us to commit to a fast from eating out. We will be eating from home (or with others at their home when invited) until our anniversary in April (approx 6 months).
The story of our debt and bad habit forming is a long (maybe uninteresting) one….
We both came into the marriage with debt (me much more) and not to minimize that but we both put ourselves through school and in a challenging degree so at some level I believe there had to be some sacrifice.
It is possible we could have done better and had less debt but I am not sure how much less. Every semester I did my budget and the expenses were always over the income. It was depressing. And I lived in some places I am sure would be considered dumps. I paid I am sure close to the minimum possible to have a roof over head. I went several times through the years car-less. I ate Ramen more times than I can count and I tried to find the cheapest books, food, cars, and rent possible. So it wasn't as if there was not an effort to not accumulate the debt. I constantly applied for (and received a few) scholarships. With all that effort though I had still accumulated some debt.
Then I feel there was a decent reason, lack of decent income and huge expenses. This time what happened was we experienced a short time of life where we had two great and steady incomes (when we were first married) and had a plan to get out of debt (quickly!). Our income (due to the degrees we obtained debt for) was far exceeding of our expenses. We had a low house payment (comparatively), a big house, decent cars, and plenty of money to pay off debt. We had a plan and when we didn't stick to it completely and splurged it was not a huge deal. Ultimately it just slowed down our long term debt payoff plan. We built up a good savings, we were knocking down our debt in large amounts each month, we were serving and volunteering. Things were going exactly as planned. Until......... I decided to believe the lie that we would struggle with having children. I decided that we would have to adopt. Very quickly I was informed this was a lie, and prayed over by some wonderful friends! We started trying to have a child (which was not in the quick debt payoff plan or any short term plan). Of course we got pregnant within a month! We were ecstatic about our blessing! Our perfect budget plan though did not have a place for this change. We soon decided to reduce our income to less than half of what it was. This meant we had to sell the big house, buy a small much less expensive house, and slow down our debt payoff plan (pretty much halt it). We decided to save money on commission and sold our house on our own (looking back a terrible mistake-we sold way too low and didn't save anything!). Bought a little cheap fixer upper and started just barely getting by on one income. This was not as easy as envisioned. So we spent all our savings for me to get started in a new career (in real estate). I worked really hard and made enough to replace the savings we used plus some the first year. We were surprised (and slightly depressed) when the second pregnancy came. We were already crammed into the small house and the urge to get into a bigger home was overwhelming. So we bought a bigger house further out for a great deal and rented out the smaller house. It actually worked out that the new house overall only costs $100 more per month than the other house that was 1000 square feet less. God really was all over that move and blessed us with it! So what is the problem? Well in all those moves and changes I don't think my mentality ever really changed from the large income to the small income. Our margin changed of how much wiggle room existed. We were wise to decrease expenses we could, but we could have done a little better there. Where we really messed up though was changing our lifestyle and perception. We (in a short amount of time) got used to eating out and not worrying too much if we spent $20 that was not budgeted. For a short amount of time we could do that. We never learned to live without eating out and never developed a habit of eating at home. We never tracked our spending very closely because we were not at huge risk of spending more than we made (for a short amount of time).
Also we had more time to cook before we had kids. We did not have any clue that how busy we thought we were was nothing compared to what was on the horizon. We did not know how busy, busy could get to be. We thought we knew what tired was, but had hardly experience the true tired that you just have to get through because there is no other option. All this is to say we were not prepared for the discipline that would be needed when things got really tough. We went through a period when our 2nd was coming due and after she was born of truly living on one income. With the cost of the birth and the unrealistic budget we ended up realizing we would have to use our credit cards to get by for a little. The real problem is that we have credit cards and that was our emergency plan. Emergency had arrived. We bought groceries on credit *gasp* I felt convicted. We were moving the wrong direction with our finances. Then what happened next was so much worse. We didn't take the credit cards out of our wallet/purse! I just can't believe it after the progress we had made!! Then we used them when we knew we didn't have the cash. Our method of tracking our budget relied on tracking our bank account and not necessarily our spending. I was not as involved in our finances as I should have been (can't you just ignore it and hope it goes away or that someone else is handling it). We had lost control and given into entitlement, gluttony, sloppiness, I am not sure what to call it. We started realizing things were going badly, we had some talks, I started trying to get involved, I started trying to track down what was going on. I put all the credit cards away (I thought). The problem was still there though. Bad habits, bad ideas about money, lack of an accountability system, heck lack of a good system. Slowly it built up to the climax of the credit report. We had managed to pay down some credit card debt despite our bad habits the year before with the income overage from my working part time. Then came the blow of no income for a while. Then many months of using 2 credit cards willy nilly. I don't pay the bills and managed to just ignored the reality for a little while. No bills were late and the minimum was being paid. Then I finally realized (opened my eyes to the fact) things in our finances were not going well! Then the revealing credit report. Realized we increased our debt (as a pose to paying it down this year). Tallied up exactly how much we increased it in 12 months. What was SO important that we accumulated more debt for it. What WAS so important. What was our emergency? Some did go to things we needed, car repair, utility bills, and groceries. Though if we didn't have credit cards maybe we would have found creative solutions to pay those things. That is how it started apparently (things we didn't have money for because income was less than expenses). Then the really bad part........... Eating out, over and over. On two different cards in a matter of months we dug ourselves quite the little hole! Is it possible when things got to the worst we spent the most! Maybe trying to convince ourselves that we were still doing great. Just stick our fingers in our ears and go "la la la" in hopes that it would all go away. Even worse than that we bought gifts and paid for others to eat out in complete denial that we were seriously strapped for cash. Oh just unspeakable! SO we were convicted and we both reviewed the finding together. After a little prayer and a lot of talking we repented for being completely terrible with what we had been entrusted. For not being totally honest about the reality and trying to hide from it! We committed to developing healthier one income habits. Because really our original plan when we first got married was to live one income and save the other. To pay off debt, build a savings and then have kids. We never learned to do the first one (living on one income) so we were setting ourselves up to fail on the rest. The one thing I can say without a doubt we never learned to fully do was eat at home. Grabbing something has always been an option. Which means poorly planning and being unprepared has always been an option on some level. So we are going to get in the habit of eating at home. To help us in doing that we are committing to not eating out until our anniversary (approx. 6 months) other than on the cruise we are taking in January (was already paid for before the complete reality check). We started this commitment off several days ago with a great meal at home of roasted lamb chops(bought a long time ago), eggplant, and corn. Plus made from scratch apple pie for dessert! It was good and surprisingly did not take all that long. I planned out all of our meals for the week (for the first time since our marriage) and made a grocery list from that. We have committed to making a list and sticking to it also. After talking with a friend I realized I may be making the eating at home thing too complicated and need a little help in the basic meal planning arena. If I plan too complicated of dinners I may be making things much harder on us and ultimately setting us up for failure. SO time to learn how real people really eat at home every day (who don't have Martha Stewart running the kitchen). She gave me a great idea of eating breakfast for dinner. What a great idea! So easy and breakfast tastes so much better at night. We have a lot of learning to do and I can already tell we will be very tempted and must guard ourselves from that! The first day we were starting our fast from eating (and drinking) out my two year old said "where are we going?"
I said "home to eat dinner"
He said "I don't want to go home, I want to go to a restaurant"
I said "No you don't because we are going to go home and have a yummy dinner"
He said "But I want rice without peas and carrots and some orange chicken" (to which I was astonished)
I said "Well I don't have money to pay for that so tonight we are going to eat from home"
He said "That's okay mommy I can use the money from my piggy bank to buy us orange chicken" (my jaw dropped)
Then I yelled.......... Satan get back!
JUST KIDDING!
Then I realized, Wow we have been modeling that for him and he learned that though he will not spend money from his piggy bank on anything because he wants to "save it" (as we try to teach). Buying food is worth losing all that saved money for. Sad really. But made me realize how much we really needed this fast from eating out.
Then today at our neighborhood fall festival my hubby won a certificate for a free pizza. Unexpected and in our face the temptation to eat out FOR FREE. We discussed it and I think we are in agreement that we will be giving that away to someone. Because we are trying to get in a mentality that eating out is not an option. It is too ingrained in our minds that eating out is an easy back-up plan and it really should not even be an option according to our budget. Once we get in a healthier place financially maybe we can budget it in eventually but for now I think it is important that we plan as if restaurants and fast food didn't exist on every street corner. Pack lots of snacks, and meals when we are driving. Plan out our meals in the weeks and months ahead. Freeze more meals for the crazy days. Develop more regular recipes that are locked in the brain and easy to fall back on regularly. Also I am realizing our grocery budget can be reduced if we cut back on convenience foods and learn to make more from scratch. In the next 6 months I hope to learn many tips and tricks to cooking at home and eating at home, meal planning and grocery planning.
Also for the record we did decide if someone insists on taking us out their treat, we will not turn them down for the sake of the fast because it is the same as rejecting a dinner invitation to someone's home which we would not do. We do not intend to cease fellowshipping with people, but if possible will try to do it at our home or theirs if possible. I have a feeling it will be most times. Also if we go to an event with food provided of course we will eat there (such as a wedding, conference, and banquet) we are not trying to be too crazy with it. We are trying to change a bad habit and create a healthy one in its place.
The story of our debt and bad habit forming is a long (maybe uninteresting) one….
We both came into the marriage with debt (me much more) and not to minimize that but we both put ourselves through school and in a challenging degree so at some level I believe there had to be some sacrifice.
It is possible we could have done better and had less debt but I am not sure how much less. Every semester I did my budget and the expenses were always over the income. It was depressing. And I lived in some places I am sure would be considered dumps. I paid I am sure close to the minimum possible to have a roof over head. I went several times through the years car-less. I ate Ramen more times than I can count and I tried to find the cheapest books, food, cars, and rent possible. So it wasn't as if there was not an effort to not accumulate the debt. I constantly applied for (and received a few) scholarships. With all that effort though I had still accumulated some debt.
Then I feel there was a decent reason, lack of decent income and huge expenses. This time what happened was we experienced a short time of life where we had two great and steady incomes (when we were first married) and had a plan to get out of debt (quickly!). Our income (due to the degrees we obtained debt for) was far exceeding of our expenses. We had a low house payment (comparatively), a big house, decent cars, and plenty of money to pay off debt. We had a plan and when we didn't stick to it completely and splurged it was not a huge deal. Ultimately it just slowed down our long term debt payoff plan. We built up a good savings, we were knocking down our debt in large amounts each month, we were serving and volunteering. Things were going exactly as planned. Until......... I decided to believe the lie that we would struggle with having children. I decided that we would have to adopt. Very quickly I was informed this was a lie, and prayed over by some wonderful friends! We started trying to have a child (which was not in the quick debt payoff plan or any short term plan). Of course we got pregnant within a month! We were ecstatic about our blessing! Our perfect budget plan though did not have a place for this change. We soon decided to reduce our income to less than half of what it was. This meant we had to sell the big house, buy a small much less expensive house, and slow down our debt payoff plan (pretty much halt it). We decided to save money on commission and sold our house on our own (looking back a terrible mistake-we sold way too low and didn't save anything!). Bought a little cheap fixer upper and started just barely getting by on one income. This was not as easy as envisioned. So we spent all our savings for me to get started in a new career (in real estate). I worked really hard and made enough to replace the savings we used plus some the first year. We were surprised (and slightly depressed) when the second pregnancy came. We were already crammed into the small house and the urge to get into a bigger home was overwhelming. So we bought a bigger house further out for a great deal and rented out the smaller house. It actually worked out that the new house overall only costs $100 more per month than the other house that was 1000 square feet less. God really was all over that move and blessed us with it! So what is the problem? Well in all those moves and changes I don't think my mentality ever really changed from the large income to the small income. Our margin changed of how much wiggle room existed. We were wise to decrease expenses we could, but we could have done a little better there. Where we really messed up though was changing our lifestyle and perception. We (in a short amount of time) got used to eating out and not worrying too much if we spent $20 that was not budgeted. For a short amount of time we could do that. We never learned to live without eating out and never developed a habit of eating at home. We never tracked our spending very closely because we were not at huge risk of spending more than we made (for a short amount of time).
Also we had more time to cook before we had kids. We did not have any clue that how busy we thought we were was nothing compared to what was on the horizon. We did not know how busy, busy could get to be. We thought we knew what tired was, but had hardly experience the true tired that you just have to get through because there is no other option. All this is to say we were not prepared for the discipline that would be needed when things got really tough. We went through a period when our 2nd was coming due and after she was born of truly living on one income. With the cost of the birth and the unrealistic budget we ended up realizing we would have to use our credit cards to get by for a little. The real problem is that we have credit cards and that was our emergency plan. Emergency had arrived. We bought groceries on credit *gasp* I felt convicted. We were moving the wrong direction with our finances. Then what happened next was so much worse. We didn't take the credit cards out of our wallet/purse! I just can't believe it after the progress we had made!! Then we used them when we knew we didn't have the cash. Our method of tracking our budget relied on tracking our bank account and not necessarily our spending. I was not as involved in our finances as I should have been (can't you just ignore it and hope it goes away or that someone else is handling it). We had lost control and given into entitlement, gluttony, sloppiness, I am not sure what to call it. We started realizing things were going badly, we had some talks, I started trying to get involved, I started trying to track down what was going on. I put all the credit cards away (I thought). The problem was still there though. Bad habits, bad ideas about money, lack of an accountability system, heck lack of a good system. Slowly it built up to the climax of the credit report. We had managed to pay down some credit card debt despite our bad habits the year before with the income overage from my working part time. Then came the blow of no income for a while. Then many months of using 2 credit cards willy nilly. I don't pay the bills and managed to just ignored the reality for a little while. No bills were late and the minimum was being paid. Then I finally realized (opened my eyes to the fact) things in our finances were not going well! Then the revealing credit report. Realized we increased our debt (as a pose to paying it down this year). Tallied up exactly how much we increased it in 12 months. What was SO important that we accumulated more debt for it. What WAS so important. What was our emergency? Some did go to things we needed, car repair, utility bills, and groceries. Though if we didn't have credit cards maybe we would have found creative solutions to pay those things. That is how it started apparently (things we didn't have money for because income was less than expenses). Then the really bad part........... Eating out, over and over. On two different cards in a matter of months we dug ourselves quite the little hole! Is it possible when things got to the worst we spent the most! Maybe trying to convince ourselves that we were still doing great. Just stick our fingers in our ears and go "la la la" in hopes that it would all go away. Even worse than that we bought gifts and paid for others to eat out in complete denial that we were seriously strapped for cash. Oh just unspeakable! SO we were convicted and we both reviewed the finding together. After a little prayer and a lot of talking we repented for being completely terrible with what we had been entrusted. For not being totally honest about the reality and trying to hide from it! We committed to developing healthier one income habits. Because really our original plan when we first got married was to live one income and save the other. To pay off debt, build a savings and then have kids. We never learned to do the first one (living on one income) so we were setting ourselves up to fail on the rest. The one thing I can say without a doubt we never learned to fully do was eat at home. Grabbing something has always been an option. Which means poorly planning and being unprepared has always been an option on some level. So we are going to get in the habit of eating at home. To help us in doing that we are committing to not eating out until our anniversary (approx. 6 months) other than on the cruise we are taking in January (was already paid for before the complete reality check). We started this commitment off several days ago with a great meal at home of roasted lamb chops(bought a long time ago), eggplant, and corn. Plus made from scratch apple pie for dessert! It was good and surprisingly did not take all that long. I planned out all of our meals for the week (for the first time since our marriage) and made a grocery list from that. We have committed to making a list and sticking to it also. After talking with a friend I realized I may be making the eating at home thing too complicated and need a little help in the basic meal planning arena. If I plan too complicated of dinners I may be making things much harder on us and ultimately setting us up for failure. SO time to learn how real people really eat at home every day (who don't have Martha Stewart running the kitchen). She gave me a great idea of eating breakfast for dinner. What a great idea! So easy and breakfast tastes so much better at night. We have a lot of learning to do and I can already tell we will be very tempted and must guard ourselves from that! The first day we were starting our fast from eating (and drinking) out my two year old said "where are we going?"
I said "home to eat dinner"
He said "I don't want to go home, I want to go to a restaurant"
I said "No you don't because we are going to go home and have a yummy dinner"
He said "But I want rice without peas and carrots and some orange chicken" (to which I was astonished)
I said "Well I don't have money to pay for that so tonight we are going to eat from home"
He said "That's okay mommy I can use the money from my piggy bank to buy us orange chicken" (my jaw dropped)
Then I yelled.......... Satan get back!
JUST KIDDING!
Then I realized, Wow we have been modeling that for him and he learned that though he will not spend money from his piggy bank on anything because he wants to "save it" (as we try to teach). Buying food is worth losing all that saved money for. Sad really. But made me realize how much we really needed this fast from eating out.
Then today at our neighborhood fall festival my hubby won a certificate for a free pizza. Unexpected and in our face the temptation to eat out FOR FREE. We discussed it and I think we are in agreement that we will be giving that away to someone. Because we are trying to get in a mentality that eating out is not an option. It is too ingrained in our minds that eating out is an easy back-up plan and it really should not even be an option according to our budget. Once we get in a healthier place financially maybe we can budget it in eventually but for now I think it is important that we plan as if restaurants and fast food didn't exist on every street corner. Pack lots of snacks, and meals when we are driving. Plan out our meals in the weeks and months ahead. Freeze more meals for the crazy days. Develop more regular recipes that are locked in the brain and easy to fall back on regularly. Also I am realizing our grocery budget can be reduced if we cut back on convenience foods and learn to make more from scratch. In the next 6 months I hope to learn many tips and tricks to cooking at home and eating at home, meal planning and grocery planning.
Also for the record we did decide if someone insists on taking us out their treat, we will not turn them down for the sake of the fast because it is the same as rejecting a dinner invitation to someone's home which we would not do. We do not intend to cease fellowshipping with people, but if possible will try to do it at our home or theirs if possible. I have a feeling it will be most times. Also if we go to an event with food provided of course we will eat there (such as a wedding, conference, and banquet) we are not trying to be too crazy with it. We are trying to change a bad habit and create a healthy one in its place.
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