Anyway, I wanted to post our weekly menu and quickly update on our budget. I spent $75.73 on groceries this week (so technically 73 cents over budget haha) but also felt very accomplished with what I purchased. We got all of our weekly meal stuff, plus enough to make two extra casseroles for the freezer, and a turkey. We are hosting two Thanksgivings at our house this year (which I'm so excited about!) and are responsible for the turkeys so I needed to make sure I purchased at least one this week. Kroger's deal is 79 cents per pound for a turkey as long as you spend $35 on other groceries, so I figured I could just work it into my regular shopping trip. I plan to do the same thing next week and maybe the week after depending on how many people we end up planning for.
Another exciting thing this week is that we FINALLY turned our deep freezer on...yay! When I got home from the grocery store and tried to put the turkey in our freezer it just wasn't happening, so Billy turned the deep freezer on and thank goodness it works! It came with the house we're renting so we weren't sure if it was in working condition or not. Definitely exciting because now I can make a freezer cooking plan to prepare for when Grace is born and I have TONS of space to store all of the food. I've already started working on that list...now to find a day in December that I can actually get all of that done!
Here's our menu for this week:
Breakfast:
Freezer Breakfast Burritos (for Billy)
Oatmeal, toast, fruit, eggs, muffins (for girls)
Lunch:
Sandwiches, quesadillas, leftovers, fried rice with eggs, fruit, crackers, etc.
Dinner:
- Soup from the freezer, green beans, and fried potatoes
- Homemade pizza for Billy and the girls (I had book club so I made potatoes for that)
- Crockpot BBQ Chicken, steamed corn, and English muffin bread
- Tater Tot Casserole (one for dinner and one for the freezer) with green beans
- Chicken Enchilada Casserole (one for dinner and one for the freezer) with rice
- Creamy chicken and pasta with veggies
- Santa Fe Soup (this is a use-what-you-got type of recipe that's basically a spicy chili) with homemade cornbread
- Twice Baked Potatoes, steamed broccoli, and bread
I know there are 8 meals listed for dinner this week but I had enough to plan through Sunday instead of Saturday and figured that might work better anyway (since I rarely want to do grocery shopping on Sunday and usually just wait until Monday morning).
I am also trying to make some extra meals every week to store in the freezer for those times when I just don't feel like cooking or when we need to use our grocery budget to stock up on bulk items (which get expensive fast but also last forever or are cheaper in the long run). So far, I have two casseroles in the freezer and plan on putting two more in this week. Probably by the end of this month I will have enough for a whole week of eating freezer meals, so we will reallocate the majority of our grocery budget that week to put toward the baby-preparation-freezer-cooking marathon. My goal is to save up $150 to make freezer meals so we'll see how that goes. I'm hoping to make 30 meals this time around...which is a daunting number for me! Before Piper was born, I made 14 dinner meals as well as some random extras like banana bread and muffins. Even with only 14 meals it was such a huge help. The first two months of Piper's life I hardly did any cooking because of our freezer meals and our loving friends/family who brought food.
My goal is to make life as easy as possible on myself after Grace is born. I had a lot of expectations with Piper's birth that just didn't happen (such as my all-natural and perfect VBAC...ha!) and I don't want to do that to myself this time. I know I'm having a C-section this time, which means that I have to plan for my recovery as well as taking care of my family. We have two flights of stairs in our house that I know I will have to go up and down multiple times per day, and that's just the way it is. Our bedroom is on the top floor, the girls and our living area/kitchen are on the main floor, and the dog and girls' play area/TV are in the basement. Because I will definitely have to do stairs right after surgery, I have to take it easy on everything else. Cooking won't be realistic (hence the freezer meals). I won't be cleaning the house or doing laundry for at least a couple of weeks, so that's where my dear husband steps in. He is already AMAZING at keeping up with the dishes (we don't have a dishwasher) but I plan on buying a giant load of disposable plates (and putting all of our freezer meals in disposable pans or freezer bags) so that at least we won't have as many dishes as usual to wash. Laundry is my thing (it's the one chore I really don't mind doing at all haha) but I can't lift baskets of clothes up and down the stairs so he'll have to take that one over for a while. And on top of all of my surgical restrictions, I will have three precious little girls to care for. My priority is to make sure that everyone is fed and loved and that I heal properly from surgery. Everything else can wait.
So that's where my mind is these days. We have a busy but exciting month ahead of us as we plan for two Thanksgivings, getting Christmas gifts in order, deer season, and the UVA-Tech football game at the end of the month to celebrate Billy's 26th birthday. We will even have a few days sans children that weekend which is pretty exciting! We love our girls, but we also know that we just need time away from them every now and then to be Billy and Kristen instead of Daddy and Mommy. Plus, it will probably be the last time we get a chance to get away before Grace is born....and then we will be a family of 5! Ahhh! :)
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