Menu plan monday

Hi guys, I hope you have had a good day today, are you counting down to the weekend?

For this weeks menu plan I need to work out fairly easy meals, it is only Monday and my first morning  of getting up at 5.30am and already I feel worn out and have very little energy. I really should be cleaning and preparing lunches whilst dinner is cooking (oops).

Monday

Sausage, hash browns and beans

Tuesday

Chicken, roast new potatoes and sweetcorn

Wednesday

Shepherds pie, sweetcorn and green beans

Thursday

Pork steaks, mash, onions and peppers

Friday

Jacket potatoes with cheese and beans

Saturday

Beef stroganoff and chips

Sunday

Chicken curry and Rice


Hopefully this should be a fairly easy menu that I can cope with. I think shopping needs to be done on a weekly basis rather than daily and maybe the slow cooker needs to come out next week.

Have a lovely evening I am off for a bath and an early night.

Spending Update 30/08/15 - 05/09/15

Hiya peeps, how are you all on this fine Sunday morning? I hope you are well!

I am a little excited today because I have just found out that Sainsbury's a local supermarket has a coupon site. Oh I almost feel like my lovely American friends.

Let me tell you how this works.

1. You will need a Nectar loyalty card
2. You need to log into mycoupons.sainsburys.co.uk and sign up
3. The site looks at your shopping history from your card and gives you coupons based on this
4. It will then give you a list of coupons and you can choose five, which are then logged onto your card for the next time you shop

The coupons give you extra nectar points which = money off (yay big cheer!)

I chose:-
Toilet rolls = 50 Nectar points
Whole Chicken = 70 Nectar points
Hovis bread = 40 Nectar points
Warburton crumpets = 40 Nectar points
Cathedral City Cheese = 90 Nectar points

As soon as you have used your vouchers you can download another five coupons, these coupons can also be used alongside any other offers in store. (Yay, double whammy).

Okay, so now for this weeks spending.

30/08 - £8.04 ASDA
31/08 - £41.81 ASDA (includes 2 packs of batteries for Christmas fund)
01/09 - £11.24 ASDA
02/09 - £16.10 ASDA (includes two school shirts for my son his old ones were far too small)
03/09 - £4.00 CO-OP
03/09 - £2.50 ASDA
04/09 - £1.30 ASDA
04/09 - £2.25 TESCO
05/09 - £12.77 B&M (includes a lunch box for eldest son)
05/09 - £38.97 ASDA (includes two lunch boxes)

Total = £138.98 now I am going to take off the extras so I have a food total.
Food Total = £110.48

This week we are £10.48 above our food shopping weekly budget but down again on our average food shops over the last six weeks. I am really pleased with that.

Whilst I am going to keep to the £100 weekly budget, I am also going to start looking at it on a monthly basis as that is how we get paid. This will then allow me to cut back if I have gone over the week before.

New lunch boxes, lets hope they stay clean like this.

I love the fact that my children get on brilliantly with each other, they look out and take care of each other. This morning I came downstairs to my daughter and my thirteen year old watching t.v together.

Love these guys so very much!

Have a wonderful relaxing Sunday. Ah we have homework to do (nothing like leaving it to the last minute ha ha!)

Brrr its cold outside

Hey folks! Happy Saturday.

Are you cold? Today it feels super cold. O.K so I know its September but wow I try not to put the heating on until October. I will try not to change that but I am a little concerned because two of my little ones are upstairs watching Netflix and the youngest said to me "Mum, I am freezing, can I climb into your bed?" Well of course I said yes. I don't like the kids feeling cold.  I have to buy them all new winter coats this year and I hadn't even started to think about that yet!

Sweet mans mum keeps telling me there are lots of berries on the trees which means its going to be a bad winter. Please don't tell me that, I am not a cold person, I love heat and warmth. The only thing that I don't mind about winter is wearing warm pyjamas and slipper boots whilst reading a good book but that is only because I am then warm.

This was taken from our house a couple of years ago. Brrr too cold!

Today, I have spent the day naming and ironing uniform and buying lunch boxes, I did chuck last years ones away at the end of term because they were gross and no amount of scrubbing could get them clean.

I have also been trying to work out the lunches that I am going to pack for the children next week especially as you know I do have a fussy one. So here goes my lunch menu for next week.

Monday

Cheese or egg mayonnaise roll (depending on child)
Cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes
Breadsticks and hummus
Grapes
Jelly
Drink

Tuesday

Sausage roll
Cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes
Breadsticks and hummus
Jelly
Tropical fruit pot
Drink

Wednesday

Cheese salad or egg salad roll
Jelly
Cheese cubes and cherry tomatoes
Chocolate chip brioche roll
Grapes
Drink

Thursday

Chicken drumstick
Boiled egg
Cucumber slices and cherry tomatoes
Buttered crackers
Tropical fruit pot
Drink

Friday

Chicken or Cheese roll
Chocolate chip brioche roll
Apple slices
Crisps
Drink

I am hoping that the lunches are varied enough that they won't get bored and luckily I have got quite a lot of the lunch items reduced or on an offer so they have worked out cheaper than school dinners which are priced at £2.15.

I have decided to go back to logging what I am eating on my fitness pal after reading that my dear friend Nathalie from imperfectly frugally had decided to start doing this. If you have not had chance to check out her site please do she is a great saver and has brilliant ideas for saving money. So I am going to log what I am eating and use my bike to travel to and from work in a bid to lose some weight before Christmas.

Have a lovely evening and I will be back tomorrow with this weeks spending.

Clean Fridge Friday 04/09/15

Good Evening Friends, I hope you are looking forward to the weekend as much as I am.

I have a confession to make I know I normally completely wash out my fridge but this week I just emptied it and got rid of my food waste, which was minimal (hurrah!).   I will clean it out properly tomorrow. Today I worked for about four hours longer than I planned.

Before photo of the fridge, argh its already starting to look messy!

 

After photo of the fridge, the items in the bowl on the second shelf is lamb hotpot that I got out of the freezer to defrost for tomorrows dinner.

This is the total of my food waste for this week. A small amount of cheese that I found at the back of the fridge. I would have used this up but there is a tiny amount of green on it. (I just can be mean enough to feed someone mouldy cheese ha ha!).

Do you remember the lovely flowers that I received from my dad on Monday? Well the Lilies have now started to open up so I thought I would show you how beautiful they are now.

Well I am now going to cuddle up with my little ones as I haven't seen them for a day.

Have a great evening.

Organising a teenager

Good evening dear friends.

Ooh what a busy day it was today.  I was up nice and early so that I could have coffee and breakfast before taking a leisurely walk to work.

It was an interesting day as we had meetings most of it and we heard about any changes and the expectations of this year.

Once home, I made dinner and took the youngest three to stay at Granny's house for the night as they are not back to school until Monday.

Rather than having a nice relaxing evening reading all the interesting blogs that I have found over the last couple of months, I took it upon myself to organise my darling thirteen year old who is back to school tomorrow.

At the end of last term I received a phone call from the school telling me that he had not brought in his asthma pump recently. The school has one but there were a few incidences last year where he was unable to make it to the medical room and resulted in them having to rush a nebulised to him. So a plan was put in place for him to carry one with him and the school to have two that were kept in different places.

Following this phone call I decided to check his bag OH MY big mistake, it was horrid! His books invariably had no covers or corners, pens and pencils were all over his bag, sheets of paper were screwed up everywhere. I was shocked. I  thought at thirteen years old he was capable of organising himself. Clearly not!

We cleaned his school bag, I have not bought them new ones this year (last years are still in good condition). No need to spend unnecessary money. Then we got together all the things necessary for the start of the year.  As we put the items in his bag I listed what was enclosed and we have discussed how I am going to write him a checklist, laminate it and put it on his bedroom door. I expect him to check his bag daily to ensure that everything is in it and that it is kept tidy. I will be doing spot checks and if there are items missing or it is untidy he will lose his Xbox time that day.

I am hoping this will make him more independent and aware that he needs to look after his things.

Do you have a disorganised teenager? If so what do you do to try to make them independent and organised? I would love to hear your ideas.

Well I have packed our lunches for tomorrow (yay, for saving money) and I am off to bed.

Night, night

A day in the life of... me!

Good evening my dear friends,  I have no extra income to tell you about this week because I haven't got around to putting anything on ebay or sorting out any extra books.

So today I thought I would just ramble on about our day and the costs involved.

This morning my eldest had a doctors appointment to have a meningitis injection, he has always been nervous of injections so he asked if I would come with him.  Of course I said yes, but we didn't have the car today as sweet man was working an hour away from home so we caught the bus to the doctors surgery. This cost £7.50. Although it almost cost more. We came out of the doctors, ran for the bus assuming it was ours, hopped on and headed off in the wrong direction! Oh no! I had to run down to the bus driver and he let us off at the next bus stop. We got on the next bus going in the right direction, I explained to the bus driver what we had done and he didn't charge us. (Big Yay for nice bus drivers).

On the way home we stopped at the supermarket.  I am starting to get packed lunch things in ready for work and going back to school. I did very well!

I got three lots of bagels for the freezer for 45p each. Two bags of chocolate chip brioche rolls for 32p each. Crisps reduced from £1.50 to £1.00 and juice reduced from £1.25 to 85p. Yippee!

My littlest son got hold of my phone today and took this photo of my daughter which I really like.

For tea tonight I got food out of the freezer, so no spending and an easy dinner.

Well I did other things today such as cleaning and ironing but I don't want to bore you with the details so I am going off for an early night as I am back to work tomorrow.

Sadly, six weeks have flown by.

Goodnight for now.

Starting to get organised for christmas

Hi folks, I am pretty certain that most of you think that I am a bit crazy for mentioning the C word this far in advance but for the last three years I have set myself weekly targets from the 1st September so that by the time we break up from school I can relax and enjoy the Christmas holidays with my favourite people.

Trust me guys it works! And it is worth it! No more last minute stressing because you have forgotten to buy a present for someone, or the house is a tip etc. I have been there its no fun.

So every week I am going to tell you the tasks that I intend to do that week to get ready for that busy time of year!

Each week I choose an area of the house and spend the week thoroughly cleaning and clearing that area. I normally start at the front door and work my way around the house but where you decide to start is your choice.

My first room is the hall.  Our hall includes the ominous cupboard under the stairs. Wow this is a scary place to clean! I could find smelly teenage shoes in there or leftover sweets stuck to a jacket! Yuk.

Come in... take a look

Our hallway, small right! Not too much to clean here. Its just a case of scrubbing the front door so it sparkles, washing the windows, washing the skirting boards and dusting the other doors including cleaning the door handles.

And now welcome to the cupboard of doom. See what a scary place!

I break this up into daily tasks so that I am not doing it all in one day.

The next thing that I intend to do is pull out any presents that I have bought on sale throughout the year so that I know what I still need to buy. Most of the presents that I buy during the year are stocking presents.

 

 

Then I write a list of who I need to buy presents for, I don't buy that many presents but the ones that I do buy are for people who are special to me so I like to make sure I take my time and get them a present  that they will love.

I also from now on make one freezer meal a week so that life during that busy time is much easier,  looking at my menu plan this week I will make two toad in the holes one for the Christmas section of my freezer.

As most of you know I can't stand shopping so most of the Christmas presents that I buy are ordered online. I write an inventory of what I buy and wrap the present as soon as it is bought. (This stops those little prying eyes, Yes I know you look in my cupboard kids, you don't shut the doors properly).



The final thing that I do on a weekly basis is to add two items per week to my shopping. I start with things like lemonade as these have a long best before dates on them.

I hope you join me on our venture to make Christmas 2015 a happy and relaxed affair.