I have mentioned before that this is really a “choice/lifestyle” more than just here is what I saved at x store today. To illustrate, I want to blog about my weekend. I ended up with a ton of pictures, and don’t want to distract at all from the cuteness of the kids so I will limit pictures and post links to the pictures.

The weather over the past week has been predicting the possibility of a “freeze/frost” which turns out happened Saturday  night. Many of the activities this weekend directly or indirectly related to this. Friday evening, Matt and I decided to go ahead and harvest all the green peppers and basil that were of any size. I ended up freezing 4 bags (1 cup ) of these and chopping up the remained for salads and cooking this coming week.

For breakfast, Saturday morning, we decided on BLT. I have been making our own bread for the past 18 months, only buying hot dog or hamburger buns. I wanted to use up the loaf so I could make fresh this weekend. We used both fresh lettuce and tomato from the garden.  Most of the morning was spent digging sweet potatoes. Around lunch we decided to venture out to a fall festival at my best friend’s church. They provided chicken stew, hot dogs, homemade ice cream and kettle corn in addition to candy that was given as prizes. We ended up enjoying this so much that we spent 4 hours. After getting home, we fixed an easy dinner of grilled tenderloin and baked sweet potatoes. Kendall said that this was an AWESOME day,  one of the best ever! Total spent $0.  I was concerned a little about the drop in temperature so we chose to clean the oven last night in addition to completing several loads of laundry. The temperature in the house did drop to 67* but this is only a degree below where we set the heat so not a big deal. Unfortunately, I did not move the rising bread dough from the top of the stove and it actually cooked during the oven cleaning. We used old milk containers to cover our lettuce and cabbage plants from the freeze and picked all the tomatoes that were eatable prior to the temperature drop which turned out to be our first freeze. This is what our kitchen window looks like currently.

Sunday morning, we made biscuits and gravy for breakfast, I did freeze half of the gravy to use one morning when we don’t have the time to make it. For lunch, we had bacon cheeseburger pizza,  This afternoon, I am going to head to CVS to pick up Diet Coke, Matt is taking Zach to registers for indoor soccer and Kendall has a friend over to play. We are choosing to eat at home in order to keep our spending down for the month. I realized this morning that all three of the little kids are in need of winter clothes. This afternoon I have made a list and contact a friend from whom I have previously bought clothes for Zach from. I should be able to purchase enough from her to set him for the winter at about 1/4 the regular cost, I am going to check out ebay and a couple of other sites to purchase the girls clothes before we head out to Winston in a couple of weeks. I may even check out a couple of consignment store, I just have not had much luck finding clothes for Lily at these before.  As you can tell, we are doing a lot to try and stay within our budget no matter to surprises/changes that happen.