With Heart From the Home

 A few days ago I sat with my trusty notebook and pen and revisited our budget. Since we are very conscious of what we spend and where, I have it mostly memorized but it does help to pull up our budget spreadsheet and make sure I list all areas. The last month we've been more spendy and I know the holidays coming up will be an area we need a plan for if we want to keep on track with financial goals.  Walmart is already promoting toy sales and their holiday decor has been out for a few weeks. Last year we did homemade baking and handmade gifts for family. It went over really well and we plan to do the same this year. I am certainly a consumer that loves packaging and holiday promotions so I really have to check myself and stay focused on what really matters during the holidays.   Since I have been more spendy and because I know there are several areas we plan to invest in next year for our family I decided to check in with our current budget and see if there are any areas ...

With fall comes all things cozy--leaves falling, soft blankets, pumpkins around every corner. But fall can also mean cold season and unfortunately Josh has come down with an awful cold the last couple days. When he let me know he'd be heading home from work early yesterday (before I had gone grocery shopping) I quickly added ingredients to my list to make chicken noodle soup (along with Kleenex, cold meds and cough drops). This soup is hearty and chunky. If you like a more liquid consistency I recommend adding more broth. I searched recipes and found a good, basic recipe on Tasty.com. As usual, I used up what we already had on hand and changed up the recipe a bit. See my version of THIS recipe by Tasty below.  Ingredients: 4 TBSP butter 2 chicken breasts cooked and shredded (I used frozen shredded chicken we had on hand) 8 oz of egg noodles 48 ounces chicken broth (I used one large container) Beef stock (optional) I pulled some we had saved and frozen the last time we cooked a who...

 This past week we covered Farm theme for our tot school lessons. I feel like I fell short a bit on plans for this week, though I often feel that way. I sat down and made a list of what would be helpful for her for the week and chose only a few items from the list to cover and then spaced them out. When I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed about adding lessons into our weeks or feeling like I'm not doing enough I like to do this.  I've also learned in this process that people love to help when you ask them! If I feel like I can't really bring the lesson to life (I couldn't find a working farm nearby to take her to) I will reach out to a friend to help. My friend Kim who I went to middle/high school with now lives in Texas and has a farm with chickens and cows (many different kinds). I sent her a text and she put together a video for Leighton that toured her farm. This was certainly the highlight of our lesson! Leighton got a kick out of her dog Rooster, the very large cows...

 I love budget math. This would have shocked the junior year me who stayed afloat in Algebra 2 by having a tutor and extra meeting hours with my teacher. But (maybe) because my desire to do well for our family by budgeting, keeping us on track with our financial goals and continuing our debt free journey, I've come to love budgeting/household finances. This includes budgeting for household items, groceries, etc. If you've been to the grocery store recently then you know grocery prices are rising. Bacon at Aldi has now reached above $4. We'll be having breakfast sausage for awhile.  So it's very easy for our household to question whether shopping at the grocery store is worth it with the price increases, or should we order take out a few times a week? Are those prices comparable?  I wanted to share our breakdown of price per meal and per serving for our family. Breaking the numbers down this way is so beneficial to staying on track with budgeting, even with adding $20/we...

 This week we learned all about apples in our tot school lessons. The week ended with us going to an apple festival about 40 minutes away. She had a blast and the week was so fun! We worked on graduated order with different sizes of apples. We did both large to small and small to large. This was pretty easy for her but she really enjoyed it. We also did a prewriting activity by drawing lines to match objects. She has really been liking shapes and tracing them so I drew out some shapes for her to trace and name.  A few activities we included this week was a simple apple sensory bin for her to construct an 'apple pie' and a 'Ten Apples Up on Top' activity which turned out be so fun. We read the book (which is really funny) and then cut out photos of family along with small apples for her to glue. She chose how many for each person and we counted them all out and put them on top of our heads like in the book. We did a color match activity by drawing an apple tree and addin...