The lovely and talented Sarah of Everyday Gluten Free said, "I'd love to hear how you got from separate checking accounts to where you are today!"

The marriage of one Gluten Free Frugal and one SuperDad is a mysterious and magical thing. HA ahhh ha ha! What I mean by that is, "Uh, I don't really remember."

Back in the day, I felt pretty strongly about each of us taking responsibility for our "own" stuff. I had MY money and he had HIS money and never the twain should meet. We were both making minimum wage or just above. I was a seller of movie tickets and he was an artist of sandwiches. That year, for my birthday, he bought me candy bars and crossword puzzle books. (BTW, do I remember what he bought me last year for my birthday? I do not. But I was thrilled with the candy bars. Actually, who isn't thrilled with candy bars? Crazy people, that's who.)

Time passed. Blah blah. It happened to be that I was making more money that he was. Like, by double. And splitting everything evenly wasn't really working anymore. Plus, I believe now, marriage isn't a "split" thing, it's a "share" thing. There shouldn't be "his" and "mine," there should be "ours" (except the comic books, I don't really want those, but thanx, mmmkay?), and so we put it all together. And that made moving to one income so much easier.

Now SuperDad is a very excellent type of person, and he doesn't spend money on silly things (well, other than comic books), and we all know that I'm ultra cheap a very reasonable shopper. So, that helps us, as far as that goes.

If there's one single thing a couple can do to succeed with money, it's to get on the same page.

And how are things going? A) I wrote a check for the entire cost of my braces (which will be reimbursed through my flex spending account). They asked if they should wait to cash the check, and I said, "Nope. It will be fine." How cool is that? B) It took SuperDad 10 days to pick up a paycheck. I asked what he wanted to do with it, and he said, "Whatever." A paycheck that we don't *need*? What is that?

These things didn't happen because we have so much money (BWAHAHA! As if!), but because we're on top of the money we do have. And that? Rocks!

The end. (Who is sorry she asked? Sarah is! Hee.)

Well

SuperDad said it, so it must be true. If we don't get our house clean, Christmas isn't coming! Eek!

How Many Books Until Christmas?

We have a lot of Christmas books. Like. A lot. So I took a small percentage of them and wrapped one for every day until Christmas. We open one every day at lunch. How many days until Christmas? Find out by counting the books left. They've loved it, so far!

Falling Off the Frugal Wagon

Okay, and moving on! :)

The end of pregnancy (hey, I thought we were moving on?) is always rough for me. I'm tired. Unmotivated. Uncomfortable. And, oh yeah, I had to put on 4 shirts this morning before I found one that even remotely fit. And that's kind of a stretch - literally.

Frugality takes organziation and committment, neither of which I have right now. So, we've done some decidedly UNfrugal things lately. Like:

• Eat out. A lot. When we eat out with the kids, it mostly involves cheeseburgers, plain, with no buns. And fries. Or we'll go to Taco John's and get them the chicken that comes in the soft tacos, with no shell, covered in cheese. They like that. We've done Qdoba. We let them have hashbrowns for breakfast. As you can tell, we've WAY overdone our food budget.
• Hire a cleaning person! Is there anything more unfrugal than that? Not really. Do I care? Not at all. She's coming in at least once before the baby arrives, maybe twice, and if I can talk SuperDad into it, maybe a couple of times after too.
• Bought a tree. You know, for the baby.
• Signed D up for some classes at the community center. Because E is back in school now, and he misses her. :(
• Not done cloth diapers. According to my very informal survey, gluten in diapers shouldn't be a concern. There are other great reasons to do cloth, and we'll probably go back to it eventually. But not now.

We're dipping into the savings we built up for the baby. And I'm okay with that, because sometimes that's just how it goes.

Our gluten free eating has been anything but blog-worthy lately. Our menu this week:

• Sunday: Scrambled eggs, ham, peanut butter toast, grapes
• Monday: Nachos, corn, beans
• Tuesday: Chicken nuggets
• Wednesday: Spaghetti
• Thursday: French toast
• Friday: Macaroni and cheese and baked beans
• Saturday: Scalloped potatoes and ham

So this blog may not be very inspirational for awhile, but if you stick around long enough, I promise to show you baby pictures! :)

Living in a Mixed Household

We're not all gluten free at our house. The kids are. I am trying to limit my gluten during pregnancy. SuperDad? Well, he's fully glutenized.

How do we keep things separated? I think there's always room for improvement in this area, and some people have found that for their healing and health, the whole house needs to go gluten-free, but we've been okay with doing this:

• Anything that touches gluten gets washed in hot, soapy water.
• GF foods are stored separately - snacks have their own shelf, flours have their own drawer in the fridge (we refridgerate flours, as a friend had suggested, but I don't know that we need to?), other GF staples (rice, quinoa, lentils, chickpeas) are stored in their own section of the pantry.
• I use metal bowls for gluten baking and plastic for GF baking. Just to keep things straight in my head.
• I generally make the GF version of things smaller, because our gluten freelings are smaller. So, when I make a regular cake, I'll make GF cupcakes. If I bake regular bread, I make mini-loaves of GF bread. This just makes it easier because the GF version is immediately identifiable.
• Separate butter and peanut butter containers so that there isn't any double-dipping of the knife. Squeezables would work well, but we don't especially like them, they're usually the fakey icky kinds.
• Separate toasters.
• LOTS of hand-washing.

There's probably more, but that's what I'm thinking about right now. Would love to hear what you do!

Laundry Day(s)

Rockin' Granola has a great post today about laundry (and a couple of really great posts before that about toy storage).

At our house, we recently moved from doing laundry one day a week to doing it two days a week. I know it's kind of silly, but I'm REALLY surprised at the difference it makes in the amount of clothing that we need. I never thought I'd make it through the summer with just three pairs of shorts, but it's been no problem (well, other than having to replace a pair that I "outgrew") now that we do laundry more often. (If I didn't spill on everything I wear every single time I wear it, that would additionally help.)

We don't have enough laundry right now for daily loads (though we would if we used cloth diapers), and for now, two days a week is working.

How often do YOU do laundry?

(Also, SuperDad swears by the method of putting laundry away after EACH load, but I haven't yet been converted. Which is why the basket of laundry *I* did is still sitting on my bedroom floor. Sigh.)

What Lurks in the Closet

I don't know what's more embarrassing about this, the state of the closet before, or how very little is done in the "after."

Before:


I decided first to tackle the books - they were heavy and everywhere and E couldn't get them off the shelf anymore. So I took the 4 empty Luvs boxes we had and the Contact paper leftover from lining the baby's dresser drawers and made some boxes for the books. (Three straight ahead and one in the upper left corner you can only just barely see.)

I kind of like how the boxes turned out and I think I'm going to keep doing it - one for doctor toys, one for tools, etc.


I worked more last night on the toys, but the battery in my camera died. If I get pictures, I'll post!

Oh, no. I know what's most embarrassing! The fact that I didn't even think to move all those dresses out of the way so that you could actually see what I was taking a picture of! Yeah, that's it.

Howdy

A) Toys
I am LOVING all these comments about toy storage - keep 'em coming! If my camera lens isn't completely clouded over with embarassment, I'll try to take some before and after photos of what we come up with this weekend.

Stacey has much better kids than mine. Her kids actually *help* her sort out what toys to keep. My house: Moooooommm!!! Noooooo!!!! That's my favorite [piece of junk mail, wheel to car we no longer have, deflated balloon, ripped and stained coloring book page]! You can't throw it away!!! (Insert whining and screaming, mostly by me.)

I love LeeAnn's idea for keeping toys in a separate playroom and storing them in dressers.

We store our art supplies in the kitchen just like Jamie, with parent-only access. Actually, lots of our storage methods sound a lot like Jamie's. Hm.

Lindsey sent me the cuuuutest pics of her kids' rooms, including canvas storage bins, which have been my personal hope and wish for what toy storage could look like at our house.

*I'm noticing that pretty much everyone spent "money" on storage solutions. What, no free, gorgeous, perfect toy storage solutions? ;)

B) Food
A little update on the eating situation. I was averaging a gain of 2.2 pounds a week. Which would put me way over the healthy range to gain during pregnancy. So I've decided to go on a modified version of Weight Watchers' Core program, if you're familiar. (It also somewhat cuts back my intake of wheat, which is probably a good idea.)

Breakfasts have looked like this: Shredded wheat (not frosted, uh), or oatmeal, skim milk, fruit

Lunches: Lettuce salad, carrots, eggs, cottage cheese

Dinners: Lean meat, potato or brown rice, green beans or corn or pineapple or whatever

The "modified" part? The Core plan allows for 35 weekly allowance points to eat things not on the Core list. I'm maybe going to double that or so. I mean, if I want some ice cream I'm going to have some ice cream. Let's not be silly.

Other than my personal cereal choice (unsweetened puffed rice would be fine too), Core is really adaptable to gluten free eating, and I'm eating a lot healthier than usual. I'm on day 5 and overall really happy with how it's working. Of course, I haven't yet seen the scale, so...

Toy Storage

So... how do you store your toys?

Our plan, up until now, was to stuff everything into tubs, and store the tubs in E's walk-in closet. Then I would proclaim, loudly, that only ONE (1) tub was allowed out at any given time. If you wanted to get out a new tub, the old tub needed to be filled and put away.

And then everyone ignored me.

Advice? Ideas? I'm planning a *shhh* giant toy purge *shhh* this weekend, and would like the hopefully small number of toys left after the purge to be stored in a way that works better for our family.

Whatcha got?

100 Things

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html

This great article discusses the 100 Thing Challenge, something that really inspires me.

Though *me* isn't so much the problem, as I'm an ardent tosser myself (hi, college roommate, sorry for throwing away those concert tickets before you used them, they were cluttering up my desk, you know).

It's the kid stuff that gets me. The toys that were gifts. The clothes stored in future sizes and past sizes for future kids. Or possible future kids. The books upon books upon books. How can books be a bad thing? (This is easily answered on my behalf - I happily let the library store my books and Netflix store my movies and my MP3 player store my CDs, but...)

Could you ever live with just 100 things? Because I'm sure 100 things (or 50?) would have seemed an unbelievable luxury to the Ingalls family. (Though I'm finding the Wilder family to be quite from a different eschelon, socially. THREE barns? An eat-in kitchen AND a dining room? Fan-cy!)

Unstuffing

In a pursuit to live more simply, and in a more manageable way, I've been on a mission for the last year or so to pare down our "stuff" to the minimum. This is somewhat difficult, since SuperDad is kindof, maybe, a liiiittle bit of a packrat (but he's so cute!). Plus, you know, I'm feeling all nesty and buying all sorts of unnecessary things for the baby and my big giant belly.

Anyway, as of yesterday, our entire basement was packed full of boxes, which were packed full of stuff. Because I was going to have a rummage sale this weekend.

And then I decided it just wasn't worth the trouble. Not for me, not right now. So almost every one of those boxes went to the church yesterday and will be sold in their rummage sale this weekend. I set aside a few nicer things and have appointments set up to consign those.

It feels really great to have that stuff out of our house (especially since we got water in the basement last night!), but I think we could probably get rid of three times that amount without ever noticing it was gone.

How about you?

My Pantry and Your Pantry, Sitting By the Fire

So, I was recently super-inspired by an old post of Vegan Ruthie's, The Pantry Principle, a.k.a. how I grocery shop. (Please say I'm not the only one who finds a cool blog and then reads the WHOLE thing when I really should be cleaning my house?)

I've mentioned before that I like to keep an empty pantry. I like to use up every single thing we have, food or shampoo or whatever, before I deem to spend money on more. But the pantry principle was kind of making sense to me. Keep all the ingredients on hand to make all of our regular meals and we don't have to plan menus. We can make any of our regular meals at any time.

So I made a meal list. It looks like this (click to view larger):



Then I made a list of all of the ingredients we would need to make any of the items on this list.



I've made a few changes here and there - but for the most part, this system HAS worked.

But... I'm thinking I still need a menu plan. At least some idea of a menu. Because it seems to always happen that I get home from work and oh... nothing is thawed. So yeah.

On the other hand, it has really regulated our shopping expenditures, because we pretty much buy the same stuff every week. This is our 4th week on the pantry system, and our groceries have varied from $77 to $85 a week. Plus we're never OUT of food. Which has been nice and has cut down on the eating out somewhat.

If I had a third hand, which would bad really, I'd say, "Uh... our meals have been kind of boring lately."

So, in conclusion, I like the pantry system, and I think we'll keep it, with a few modifications, which would be A) a general idea of a menu for the week, and B) trying at least one new recipe a week.

Anyone else do a pantry system? I'd love to hear about it!

Clothes

Besides the obvious benefit of jeans with stretchy waistbands, switching completely over to maternity clothes is good for another reason too - it's a great opportunity to evaluate my "regular" wardrobe. I've been inspired the last year or so to really pare down my closet to only what I really love and really need.

I took this month's $25 clothing budget and went to Target, where I bought four tubs for clothing storage. I had determined that, even though I keep having babies, meaning I've gone way up and down the size ranges, and even though we fully have all four seasons here, that four tubs should be enough to store any sane person's clothes. I was ready to chuck (and by "chuck" I mean "save for a rummage sale") anything that didn't fit in the four tubs.

Imagine my shock when I only filled up two and a half.

Maybe a sane person only needs 2 tubs of clothes? Or maybe I just bought too large of tubs. There's a thought.

Storing Spices

The Natural Mommy (LOVE that blog!) posted about her spice storage today. Thought I'd throw my hat (or, um, photo) in ring. This may take up more space than some people have, but I've done this since our first tiny apartment, and it's always worked for me.


I line my spices up around the perimeter of my cupboard, so I can read all the labels with one look. Some of the things I use most, I keep in the middle (dried diced onion and bouillon here). Also, most of these spice containers were refilled with bulk-bought spices which is SO much cheaper.

Sorry this photo isn't the best!