Blessed February

So it's February today. That means Fluorescent Yellow Food Day is this month. And Peter's birthday. And we get to go shopping.

Around the third of last month I got annoyed with how many transactions were on our credit and debit cards so I decided that we needed to stop shopping for a while. So I asked Peter if we could not spend money in January. He agreed..because he pretty much agrees to anything I ask him. I did say we could buy milk though. That day he called me from work to see if he could go out to lunch with some of his co-workers. I said yes. We were pretty liberal about what we did spend money on. We bought cough drops. And gas. And went out to dinner with Peter's co-workers (we had to meet the new girlfriend) and paid the babysitter. I should have bought some things so I could have taken a salad to a funeral, but I asked if I could take rolls instead. I really hope they had enough of the things they asked me to sign up for. I still kind of feel bad about that. The rolls were good, though.

I ended up bartering a little bit toward the end. I think the most valuable lesson I learned from all this is that you should always have extra toilet paper to barter with. I traded some white sauce and peas for some potatoes. I learned that white sauce isn't half bad with whole wheat flour. Maybe I just had low expectations, though. I also learned that I can't cook for one person to save my life. I traded toilet paper for hamburger and parsley.

About half way through the month I mentioned that we weren't buying groceries and the bishop's wife talked to me to make sure we were okay. It was a little bit funny. No, no, we're just doing it because I'm stupid. We're fine. It's pretty cool that we have such an on-top-of-it ward, though.

We got the stomach flu a couple days ago and I wanted pudding, but Peter said we couldn't get anything until today. Oh--I made a rule that my Jamba Juice gift card didn't count as spending money either, so we went to Jamba Juice twice. I love Jamba Juice.

We pretty much didn't make a dent in the amount of food we have and I even saved the kids a box of mac and cheese to have the last night, which was handy because I really didn't want to come up with something else to eat.

And that was pretty much our January. In rambling form.