Frugal Friday - getting serious about saving now

Wow there is so much to be learned from blog hopping! I love some of the ideas I have been finding and I am starting a list of things I am planning to try.

The way I see it, this need to cut back and manage our money better is an opportunity to be more creative and use our talents. I love that we are working together to come up with creative ideas for having fun and living well even on a limited budget. And it has pushed me to become more proactive on my personal desire to simplify my life and become more self sufficient.

Here is a list of things I plan to try this week:
Grow celery from celery stalk bottoms: Premeditated Leftovers: Something From Nothing
Grow green onions from roots: Penniless Parenting
Make a sourdough starter: Frugal Creativity
Bake a batch of soft pretzels with the kids: hmm, can't find that link right now but it sounded wonderful and Destructo Boy loves soft pretzels and baking so that will be our Sunday Funday treat.

Oh, she found me, thanks Haleyleanne! Here is the link to the soft pretzels recipe.

One of our biggest challenges is finding fun and affordable things to do with the kids.

Here is what we will be doing tomorrow:

We have tuna salad, bread, chips, grapes and cherries and kool-aid so we should be all set for a day in the sun. When we get home we are going to make a batch of homemade plain vanilla ice cream. Yummm...
There is a Dragon Boat Race and Festival at Sloan's Lake this weekend so we are planning to take the kids. They have been really good about doing chores this week so we will give them each part of their allowance to spend. We have found that it helps a lot when we go places if they have a little money of their own to decide what to spend it on. It does seem to keep them from asking us to buy them trinkets and garbage.

Sis, who was the most brilliant single mom I have ever known used to go through the coupons with BB when he was young and let him pick which cereal and snacks he was going to "spend" his coupons on. She knew she was going to have to buy those things anyway, but it gave him a little buying power and he didn't wheedle and whine for things she couldn't afford. She is a genius, don't you think?

This week's challenge is to menu plan for 2 weeks using only what we have on hand. That shouldn't really be too hard because I went shopping and stocked up on neccessities today. I will probably try to push it into an extra week of using everything we can before shopping again, that will be more fun.