Menu Plan Monday... again already?

I did a really good job sticking to my menu plan from last week. The only difference was that on Friday, we ate at Isaac's parents' house, so I pushed the Salsibury steaks back to Saturday since I'd already gotten them out of the freezer when we decided to go.

Monday: Meatloaf (Isaac made five meatloaves for our freezer yesterday!)
Tuesday: Velveeta Cheeseburger Mac by request from Kadin
Wednesday: Spaghetti (We'll try it again for this week.)
Thursday: Eating at the in-laws
Friday: Not sure yet what we'll be doing.
Saturday: Hosting my mom's family for Thanksgiving--turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, hot rolls with honey butter, sweet potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cranberry salad, pumpkin pie, pecan pie
Sunday: Leftovers!

And a random helpful household hint: If you are going to wash your curtains, be sure to make sure that they are not dry clean only FIRST. Otherwise, they will come out of the dryer completely wrinkled and about six inches shorter. (Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything...well, maybe a little bit...)

Menu Plan Monday

Well, I completely fell off the thankfulness wagon! Life got busy and the kids and I all got colds. Have you ever taken NyQuil 2.5 hours before you could sleep? You get to feeling pretty looping before you crash! I was desperate for some cold meds and all I had with me was NyQuil, so I took it anyways. So, I'm abandoning the thankfulness challenge. Instead, I'm going to plan out of menu for this week so that I am not wondering what to make last minute. Of course, it is always subject to change!

Monday-Half of the ham we bought last week with a "buy a ham get a free turkey" coupon, cooked with brown sugar and maple syrup
Tuesday-Sweet Onion BBQ Burgers (These things are amazing!) We have store-bought buns leftover from yesterday, so I'll skip making my own this time!
Wednesday-Roast in the crockpot. We still have a ton of roasts left from our quarter of a cow.
Thursday-Cheesy potato soup made with leftover ham
Friday-Salisbury steaks (Already made and in the freezer. I love freezer cooking!!)
Saturday-Spaghetti-Unless we are at the in-laws, which is highly probable considering it is the last Saturday before Thanksgiving and the lights aren't all up yet.
Sunday-Lunch at Isaac's grandparents' for Thanksgiving. I think I'm supposed to make the hot rolls.

Day #5 of Thankfulness

I don't know which one thing I should say I am thankful for from yesterday! So, I guess I'll go with Dave Ramsey. I first learned about Dave Ramsey in the spring of 2008. Some ladies at a Bible Study I was attending were talking about him. When I got home that day, I looked him up online and the rest is history! Dave lives completely debt free and has a method called the 7 Baby Steps that he teaches to help others get out of debt. I started listening to the first hour (of three) of Dave's podcast that you can download free on iTunes to learn all I could.

Baby Step 1 is $1000 in the bank as a starter emergency fund. We got that easily because we already had a few thousand in the bank from a couple money market accounts we started when we got married and lots of savings bonds from Isaac's childhood. Check!

Baby Step 2 is the debt snowball. You are supposed to pay off all your debts except your house as quickly as possible, starting with the smallest payoff amount to the largest, and turning old minimum payments into a "snowball" effect on the next debt. We had a few credit cards, a small student loan, and a larger van loan. This is where we had to decide to get serious if we wanted to get out of debt. We cashed in the money market accounts except $1500 in savings bonds, we got a couple insurance payments from hail damage (although we did have to replace our house roof), and we started our debt snowball. We tried to get out of debt without making a budget and we weren't doing very well. In January 2009, we made our first real budget and started using cash envelopes for quite a few spending categories. Over several months, we kept tweaking it and by May 2009, we were debt free except our house! During this time, I was learning more about Dave's program called Financial Peace University, which is a 13 week video series of him teaching almost everything you can know about money (or at least everything you can learn in 13 weeks!) We saw that a church 30 minutes away was hosting FPU and we debating on spending all the gas money and extra time driving to it when we decided that we would just start hosting it at our church. We started our first FPU class in the summer of 2009.

Baby Step 3 is a fully funded emergency fund of 3-6 months of expenses. Our monthly written budget and lots of long hours of Isaac re-roofing several houses in the county, helped us along the way. We finished our FFEF in October of 2009.

Baby Step 4 is contributing 15% into retirement. We didn't get this started until January 2010 because I was trying to get our checking account built up so that we always have a one month buffer in our account because of Isaac's unstable line of work. (And, it did end to be a very slow winter)

Baby Step 5 is contributing to kids' college accounts. We haven't completely decided yet what we are going to do for this, so we skipped it!

Baby Step 6 is pay off your house early. In January 2010, I looked at our house loan and made a goal of paying off $10,000 of our house, which had a balance of just over $19,000. We got super gazelle intense and me, being a numbers person figured and re-figured and figured again how we could get the house paid off faster. In July, we decided to temporary stop retirement funding and put it all on the house (which the goal of repaying the retirement fund once the house was paid off.) We scrimped and sacrificed and lowered our FFEF amount a little bit, which brought us up to Monday of this week. Isaac called the bank to get the payoff balance and it was less than I was expecting. So, after he got paid from his work for the first week of November, we had enough money to make the trip to Kirksville and write the final check to pay off the balance of our house!

Baby Step 7 is build wealth and give, and I'm looking forward to it! We have a lot of smaller goals now, like refilling retirement and our FFEF and saving for some things we've put off (new flooring in the living and dining rooms).

If you live in the Unionville area and haven't been through Financial Peace University, we will be starting again in January and would love to have lots of people come. You will learn a ton of things, whether you have a lot of debt or no debt at all. The lesson on insurance saved us a lot of money in our monthly budget. And I will make a yummy cake for our graduation!

Day #4 (A day late!)

Friday was a busy day, with Isaac only working a half day and spending the rest of the day in Kirksville (more on that later!), so I didn't get my Thursday post made Friday. On Thursday, I was thankful for work out DVDs. More specifically, Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred. I started my thirty days for the second time (the first time I hurt my ankle halfway through and quit) on Monday, October 25th. In the 30 Day Shred DVD, you do the same 24 minute workout (plus warm up and cool down) for ten days, for each of the three levels. On Thursday, I moved up to the second level. It's a lot harder than the first level, but then again, I thought the first level was hard when I started it. I'm loving the daily workout and am starting to see results, which is always fun!

Day #3--Internet Recipe Websites

Yesterday, I was thankful for internet recipe websites. I am my father's daughter. He has a massive stack of recipes printed off the internet, but I just have a bookmark folder in FireFox called "recipes to try out" that has tons of recipe ideas that sound really yummy and that I might end up making eventually.

Last night, we made Papa John's Pizza Dough Recipe. We don't copy the pizza sauce recipe since we can our own pizza sauce, but the crust is amazing. It tastes so much like Papa John's, which is my favorite pizza place, but is an hour away from home. And, homemade pizza is much cheaper than buying it, and if you know me, you know I like that!

I previously posted my recipe for Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits, but there is not enough time in the week to post all the recipes that I have found on the internet and have quickly become some of our favorite meals. My favorite recipe places are Recipezaar (now called food.com) and Pioneer Woman. I haven't actually made too many Pioneer Woman recipes, I just like to look at all the yummy pictures! I did make her Braised Beef Brisket once and it was amazing, and am looking forward to making it again someday when the occasion arises since I have a brisket waiting in my freezer.

Apparently, posting my thankfulness challenge in the afternoon is a bad idea. So, I'm just going to always write about what I was thankful for yesterday.

Yesterday, I was thankful for naptime. Not for me. For Jeriah. And yesterday, I realized how thankful I am for it because he refused to nap. All. Day. Long. I love Jeriah's naptime because it is my most productive time of the day. For generally two hours a day, the house is so much more peaceful. This isn't just due to Jeriah not getting into things, but Kadin is quieter because she is not picking on her little brother. Naptime is me-time. Lately, I've been using about 30 minutes of nap time for doing an exercise video, 30 Day Shred with Jillian Michaels. I also often use the time to take a shower, have computer time, pick up scattered toys (without them being immediately displaced again), fold/hang/put away laundry (before it gets unfolded/unhung), work on supper, or any combination of the above.

Thankfulness Challenge

After a very quiet October from me, I am going to join the masses and do the Thankfulness Challenge. If you haven't already heard about it, the challenge is to write every day through the month of November (or at least to Thanksgiving Day) what you are thankful for. And, since today is the 2nd, I'm already a day behind. I kept thinking about it yesterday and saying that I would do it later. Well, later turned into today! So, I'll try and get another post done this afternoon to make up for it.

Day 1: (Yesterday) I was thankful for cloth diapers. Yes, this is a strange one! Yesterday marked the beginning of Diaper Decision's Great Cloth Diaper Hunt. Until this year when they skipped May, it has been a bi-annual event since 2004. I started participating in November 2005 or May 2006, I can't remember which. The idea behind the hunt is that numerous Work At Home Moms hide an icon on their site and you are required to visit the site and find it. Some moms give you hints and some leave you on your own. And, there is an extreme category of sponsors where the icons are incredibly tricky, for instance, when the icon is at a link only found when you hover over a period at the end of sentence. So, most of my internet time yesterday was spent browsing websites looking for the icon (and therefore, I did not spend my internet time blogging). There are tons of really great prizes, none of which I've ever won. The Great Cloth Diaper Hunt is what got me interested in cloth diapering. I had always thought that cloth diapering was a pretty disgusting concept, but through my first hunt, I kept reading about it and seeing so many different diapers that I got more and more interested. In May 2006, I bought my first cloth diaper on eBay. By August of 2006, I was cloth diapering Kadin full time in FuzziBunz. And, except for the first couple weeks of Jeriah's life and our two trips camping in the Colorado mountains, Jeriah has probably only worn 20-30 "disposies". A few months ago, I tried to figure up how much we had saved using cloth and it was close to $2,000 just for Kadin. Jeriah would be close to that, too, and his number will continue to increase before he is potty trained. Yes, you do have a huge initial start up cost (which I was lucky enough to get in when FuzziBunz was clearancing one style and moving to the next, so they were deeply discounted.) And there is the on-going cost of laundry, but I'm certain that I haven't used $4000 worth of soap, water, and electricity in four years! Plus, nothing is cuter than a big fluffy diaper bum!

Digital Scrapbook page of Kadin's first cloth diaper.
(Ignore the harsh shadowing on the paper squares, I was new to digital scrapbooking, too!)

Jeriah with his red, white, and blue FuzziBunz in July 2010, I was trying to win a contest!


Another contest, with Rockin' Green Detergent where I won a free bag of their soap!

I love food.

A lot. And I will probably write about food. A lot. For instance, tonight, we are having steak and something yet to be determined and copycat Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits. And I will share the recipe because these biscuits are so good. I've only been to Red Lobster twice in my life, and the best part of the experience was the biscuits. I really can't remember what else I ate, but I know that it was not nearly as good as the biscuits. So without further ado, the recipe.

2 1/2 c Bisquick
4 T cold butter
1 c cheddar cheese
3/4 c milk
3/4 t garlic powder, divided
2 T melted butter
1/4 t parsley flakes
1 pinch salt

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Combine Bisquick and cold butter. Don't combine too thoroughly. There should be small chunks of butter about the size of peas. Add cheddar, milk and 1/4 tsp garlic. Mix by hand until combined, but don't over mix. Drop 9 equal portions onto greased cookie sheet. Bake for 15-17 minutes or until tops are light brown. Melt 2 tbsp butter in a bowl. Stir in 1/2 tsp garlic powder and parsley flakes. Use a pastry brush to spread garlic butter over tops of biscuits.

And now I must go make them so they are ready approximately when Isaac gets home.

Expecting the Unexpected

Unexpected events do occur. Expect them! Those who have been through the first lesson of Financial Peace University have heard this line before. Of course, Dave Ramsey is talking about financial events. But, what about the physical, emotional, spiritual, etc. events?

We found out a week ago today that we would be having a miscarriage. We never thought we'd ever have to face to a miscarriage. It's just one of those things that you don't plan on. We had talked about it before and decided how each of us would react and we decided that we hoped we'd never have to go through that. Isaac is a very easy-going person. He is not good with showing compassion. He is not good about knowing what to do or what to say or being sympathetic. I probably don't help him any, though. My temperament changes in about half a second and then changes again, so it is impossible read me. So, we weren't really sure what would happen in a hypothetical miscarriage, but we did both agree that in a miscarriage, it is most likely God saving you from more heartache later on, like if the child was going to be unhealthy.

And then the unexpected does happen and we are doing just fine. We know that Jesus is holding our angel in His arms now. And, that is what keeps my spirits high despite it all. I have stayed strong and kept my trust in God, that He knows best. On Saturday and Sunday, I was repeating to myself Romans 8.28: And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. Monday, Psalm 118.24: This is the day the LORD has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it. Tuesday, Psalm 121.1-2: I lift up my eyes to the hills—where does my help come from? My help comes from the LORD, the Maker of heaven and earth. Wednesday, I did not wake up with a verse in my head and it was the worst day I have had through this whole ordeal. I lost my focus and it was obvious. Yes, I didn't have the greatest appointment with a substitute doctor the day before, but I think the disappointment was magnified when I was worrying about earthly things instead of keeping my mind on things above. That would be a good verse for today! Colossians 3.2: Set your minds on things above, not on earthly things.

We think (and pray) that the physical aspect of the miscarriage is mostly over, too. We praise God that we have so far avoided medical intervention and that we have a fabulous regular doctor who is no longer out of the office!

So, expecting the unexpected, like Dave says. We are thankful that we shouldn't have any financial expense for this, but I think our lives need to be preparing us for the unexpected, and the only thing I know to do for that is walking with God daily, which is something that I struggle with, too.