Catching up…

Finally, I feel like I can breathe.

The last month has been such a whirl­wind in our lives, but a won­der­ful one.  When I look back at the last few weeks, I won­der how we sur­vived, but we did, thank God, and we’re all set­tling in.  We couldn’t have done it with­out the help of our fam­ily.  We hired some amaz­ing movers as well to help.  If you are in need of a mov­ing com­pany, I highly rec­om­mend Two Men and a Truck.  They were A M A Z I N G.  The best money we ever spent.

We offi­cially moved into our new house on the 26th.  It’s been a lit­tle over a week, but now it’s begin­ng­ing to feel like we’ve been there MUCH longer than that.  I drive by Tyne Lane every day and won­der how our cute first house is doing.  I’m sure the new own­ers are lov­ing it, but part of me does miss it just a little.

We also had an awful deci­sion to make about a week before our move.  Our dog, Zeus, was 9 years old (that’s senior for a Dober­man) and his health had been declin­ing pretty quickly over the last few weeks.  We knew the time was com­ing, as hor­ri­ble of a deci­sion as it was, we made the choice to put him to sleep and let him cross the Rain­bow Bridge.  It was a very sad day for our fam­ily, but we knew in the long run, it was the right deci­sion. 

We’re now get­ting set­tled into our new home.  I have been tak­ing a few pics here and there, but it’s been such a mess with boxes and unpack­ing, that I’ve been hold­ing out on tak­ing too many until it’s all pret­tied up.   So, when it’s all nice and pretty for B’s party this week­end, I’ll be sure to take some new ones.

Speak­ing of The Princess, can you believe she’s turn­ing ONE on Sun­day?  I know I sure can’t!!  We took her one year pho­tos on Sun­day and did a cake smash.  Stay tuned for those, but here’s one of my faves of her laugh­ing at her brother.  And I LOVE my new nat­ural light stu­dio in the house!!  I can’t wait to use it over the com­ing years!!

While I’m on the sub­ject of photography…I’m hav­ing an amaz­ingly fun con­test over at the Ten Tiny Toes Blog.  Def­i­nitely go and check it out and I’d love to have you join in the fun!

Dinnertime Intervention | Our Attempt at Mealplanning

I just couldn’t take it any­more.  Tony tries REALLY hard, he does, to have some­thing ready for din­ner when I get home from work.  The prob­lem is, it’s just usu­ally some­thing that he likes and of course Ty doesn’t like it either!  So, I decided it was time for a what I was call­ing a “Din­ner­time Inter­ven­tion”.  I’d heard great things about plan­ning your meals and it’s hon­estly some­thing I’d been want­ing to try for some time.

So, we’ve been giv­ing it a go for the last 4 weeks or so and it’s been AWESOME!  We’ve been using e-Mealz.com to aid in our effort.  Every week they give you a list of 7 meals that you can choose from to plan within your week.  Some­times we use a few and then fill in our own around them, but they are an awe­some start­ing point and they pro­vide you a nice lit­tle gro­cery list as well that makes putting your gro­cery list together so easy.

The thing that has sur­prised me the most though is how much money this is all sav­ing us!  We’ve been going to the gro­cery story about every 2 weeks and our bill is what it was usu­ally was for ONE week!  Between this and the GroceryGame.com, we’re sav­ing SO much more money now on our meals.

To man­age all of the meals, I’ve been using one of my FAVORITE “life” tools, the Google Cal­en­dar.  I use these any­way to keep track of our fam­ily activ­i­ties, my busi­ness activ­i­ties and now have one for our Meal Plan­ning.  The best part is, once we decide that we want to keep one of the meals for sure on our list, I set them to recur every 6 weeks.  So, you only need to plan out about 6 weeks of meals and then just tweak them as you feel nec­es­sary, but the bulk of the work is done!  I also have each recipe embed­ded in the cal­en­dar for that day so that we can quickly ref­er­ence it, print it or email the day of or day before.  For things that need to be taken out of the freezer the night before, I have it set to email me a reminder the night before so I don’t for­get.

So far, it’s work­ing awe­some!  The eter­nal ques­tion of “What’s for Din­ner” is no longer.  Sure, we still have the occa­sional drive thru meal, but they are MUCH fewer and far between and it’s not only help­ing our pock­et­books, but our san­ity as well.

Give e-Mealz a try today!

So Thankful!

We had a won­der­ful Thanks­giv­ing this year.  We are so lucky to have such awe­some fam­ily and friends to spend the hol­i­day with.  It was fun hav­ing another “first hol­i­day” for Bai­ley too, we’re run­ning out of them all too quickly.  This year we spent with my Dad and step-mom and my sis­ter hosted at her new, first house!  She did a fab­u­lous job and the food was all so yummy!

We attempted to get a cou­ple of fam­ily pho­tos with my tri­pod set up and I man­aged to quickly teach my dad how to use my cam­era, he did great!  Now, these are not the smi­ley, per­fect fam­ily por­trait that I had hoped for, but oh well, you take what you can get, right?  They make me smile and really show our family’s per­son­al­ity

It was an excit­ing day for B, we man­aged to get a bow to stay in her hair!  Woooo!

The mon­keys with our lovely hostess