It is my goal each night, to serve dinner to our family for $5 or less, a la Erin (www.5dollardinners.com).  Although initially,  in the process of becoming acquired to all things domestic it likely cost Pat and I a total of $10 to eat together per meal, it is now easy for us six to eat on half of that.   (Not that Will really counts yet:))  And healthfully too.

Experience has taught that shopping the 6-week sale cycle- combined with coupons- combined with thinking outside the bounds of strict recipes, allows for good eating.  And inexpensive eating.

Experience has also taught that through reining in our food expenses, we have more money to enjoy, to spend and to give.  (Think about all the restaurant/fast-food/last-minute grocery trips and how they add up?  It’s always more money than you think).

Chicken: On sale for 99 cents/pound.  One meal baked with olive oil and herbs.  Left-overs diced up for chicken-barbeque pizza.

Pot roast: On sale for $1.99/pound.  One meal roasted with potatoes and mushrooms.  Leftovers shredded up for beef fajitas.

I can remember our newly-wed days.  I would sift through the refrigerator each Monday, tossing out pounds of produce that had died that week, due to neglect and inactivity.  While Pat and I kept local restaurants in business, this lifestyle did nothing for our maturity or responsibility.  It was a blessing in more ways than one when Anna came into our lives, and forced growth and order upon us.  We could no longer do as we please.

But as in all things, those restrictions forced a greater good: and in this case, my recipe repertoire has only flourished.

I will never utter the c-word on this blog.  You know, the word for tickets that reduce prices on products?  You clip them out of the Sunday paper?  It rhymes with “moupon”.

I cannot be associated with the frugal blogs, ever. If I were to type in the c-word right now, I would immediately be spammed to death by cruel hoaxters, who would link me up with all sorts of promotional offers for free everything strange under the sun.  Prosthetic body parts and such.

My brother is convinced that most of the frugal blogs are the reverse of consumerism, but a fresh new spin on:

 LOVE OF MONEY. 

 Only through obsessively conserving it, rather than through recklessly spending it.  We talked about this over Christmas.

And I agree. 

Money-saving blogs, though exceedingly helpful on some counts, can lead to a pre-occupation with money that is neither healthy nor good.  A focus on the temporal is just that: temporal.  We will not take any of our crisp dollar bills or shiny pennies with us when we die, so life is to be lived in light of eternity, not the now.  Right?

I get that.  But, I also get this:

28 yogurts for free. 

I do love a good c*upon:)

I am one of 5 siblings.   A family of seven, divided up into two sons and three daughters.  The boys are first in line: Andrew, then Tim.  And the girls all along at the end: myself, Susanna and Grace.  My Mom actually only wanted three children, and with my birth she thought child-bearing was through.  (She swears I was an easy child, but this ending re-producing post- Maryanne makes me wonder).

God’s hands are etched all over our family, because while my sisters and I used to fight over anything we could possibly dream up, now we are a fairly water-tight unit.   No one can convey truth to me like these women, no one can make me laugh like them, and certainly nobody has the same courage to sift away my dirt.  

I cannot imagine life had my mother had her way: I would be the lone ranger, set to emotionalize life away in the void of male understanding about such things:). 

God was merciful.

My sister Grace, is our youngest.  The proverbial baby of the family.  She is COMPLETELY the baby.  She is the one who still wants us all to be in our jammies together Christmas morning.  She is the one who hunts and gathers photos together, to make sure memories live on.  She is the one who checks on everyone’s feelings all the time: the nurtured baby.

Grace has recently become a Mom.  And she is a young Mom.  Only 23.  She has fallen in the last two years into the cycle of figuring marriage out, sacrificing for a husband AND a baby.  And learning to conserve money, so that Justin’s life is as stress-free as possible, scaling back into a single income.

Recently, she posted to her blog- which I will not share, because she is WAY private- about how she has been making her home “work”, on a firm budget.  Kudos to you Gracie, for pulling it all together.  Grace inherited Justin’s home when they married.  It is a “family” home, having been part of his life for quite some time.  And is relatively small by North-American standards.  The configuration of an older home can be problematic at times, given smaller and more closed-off spaces.  But, Grace has made her space so sweet and welcoming, and when she posted these photos, I was not only inspired, but proud.

 The unforgiveable sin, is that she found these tables on a thrift-store venture without me, but that is all water under the bridge now.

 Cute what can be done, on a shoestring.