Today is Halloween

And we are Halloweenies, because we don't celebrate it. Actually, we aren't anti-halloween (yes, I know what all of those mean, but) we are un-halloween. I'm sure, given time we might be anti, but for right now, since we don't know our stance on it, we are un. Mainly because here you have tons of people knocking on your door, opening up their bags for freebies and you can so slyly slip a tract in their bag. It's like the easiest witnessing ever! We've never done it, because by the time we think about it, it's too late to order tracts. Ugh. So anyway, we turned our light off and made for the hills (well there are no hills here) But you know what I mean.
I actually had an old woman talk to my daughter in the store last week. Nadia is still just a baby (ok she's 15 mo's, but she's still a baby to me!) and this lady said to her "So have the witches and ghosts got you yet?" Granted Nadia doesn't even know what those things are, but still, I was appalled! I would never say that to a child. Good grief.

So I thought I would mention that I nearly halved our grocery bill!!! YAY!! It's all since I have gotten the cookbook called More With Less. It has tasty tasty tasty! recipes and oh so healthy too. But very very frugal.
Some things I have been doing to cut our expenses lately:
I bake my own bread from scratch (not even using the breadmaker anymore, I use my kitchenaid instead)
I've made my own sourdough starter to use in place of yeast (although I've found a place where I can buy 2#'s for $2.50, so that's not bad) This will take some getting used to though.
I am using beans for half of the recipes I make. ie-Monday night is some sort of bean recipe with a salad and a bread product, either biscuits or homemade bread, Tuesday would be fish (you can get 9lbs of frozen filleted tilapia, which is a nice light fish for less than $10 and that lasts for a long time!) and then wed would be beans again. Hubby has been very happy with this set up and it's helped us to save money and on calories.
From each meal I freeze a large enough portion to be another whole meal for all of us. And we eat the other leftovers for lunches. Nadia eats from our table now, so I don't have to make baby food anymore. I am planning on utilizing those frozen portions for our future menus.
I save bones and scrap meat for stock, likewise with chicken. It's so much more healthy than the store bought, not as much salt.
When it's time to grocery shop I scour the online ads for local stores (we don't get a newspaper, that saves $$!) make a list of potential items that I would use and then make a menu from those items that are on sale.
I shop at Salvation Army, am a member of freecycle.org and go to consignment shops.
This has really gotten me to think about what we really need and what is a want. If it is a want, we go without. And ya know, it's not that bad. We have a new roof, heat (sometimes, but that's another story) and food (yeah, even with this new system I've still only lost 3#'s.)
So pray for us, our furnace only works intermittenly (is that how you spell it?) right now it's desperately trying to kick on and it won't do it. That's why the baby is sleeping in our room, so that if the furnace decides to go on strike, we only have to heat one room. We are slowly getting used to that.
I am sewing a lot of christmas gifts this year. It's another vest for hubby, a pair of flannel pajama pants for Sara, and a dress for mom. Our families exchanged names this year to minimize expense. Thank you Lord!
I'm going to go get more clothes on, I'm cold!! One blessing about that, it's saving us money!

A lot of crap floating around

A lot has happened since my last post, I realize I say that a lot. Right now at this moment, I am sitting next to my daughters diaper pail. And there is a nice scrapping loudly going on above my head. Both are a result of a problem we discovered two weekends ago. Resulting in everything being disrupted in our house. We knew the roof had a leak which caused some discoloration in the baby's room. Discovered that over a year ago. We tried fixing it with roof tar and stuff like that. Then around thanksgiving we discovered it was ruining the wall in her room. Great. Well fast forward to two weeks ago and we had another wet spot on the ceiling and the ceiling was getting heavy. Great. So now Nadia is sleeping in the study at night in her pack n play and napping in our room in her pack n play. That night after she was asleep in the study, we punctured a hole in that wet spot, causing a stream of water to run into a placed bucket. Great. Well we couldn't really do anything about it, because we have no money, so we called the insurance company to see what they would cover. Meanwhile the next weekend we had our first candidating appt with a church. YAY! We weren't approved yet for ministry in that region, but we had a meeting the following tuesday with the appropriate committee for that approval. So we were putting the cart before the horse, but the chairman of that committee is ok with that. The candidating went well, the meeting....well suffice to say it did not. Oh, they were much more respectful and more like brothers and fathers than the last meeting, but Andrew still did not get approved. Didn't get denied either, he needs to return in two months having researched an area of doctrine specific to the denomination we are apart of. And we're not talking about the deity of Christ, or how to get to heaven, you know the IMPORTANT things, no, it's a secondary issue, in my mind. So this church is making their decision before that and the commission is going to call them and let them know of their decision, so we are basically out of the running for that church.
I could just cry. There are two other regions we can go to yet, and the one doesn't have any churches open and the other one we have contacted and they haven't gotten back to us. So we are kinda in a rock and a hard place. We aren't making ends meet right now. I'm thinking of getting an additional job, hubby is looking for something else.
So do you understand my title for this post? There is a lot of stuff just flying around, literally. There are shingles falling from the roof outside the study and somehow I hope to get Nadia to sleep through all of the noise that is going to happen during her nap. I've been cooking and baking to feed our crew, of which is sparse. Pray for more men, or women, I don't care! I'm thankful for the people we have, but I'm afraid we won't get it done in time. Pray pray pray!!!!!!! Anyway, that's that. At least Nadia has slept great through all of this. Even nailing. Wow. I am shocked. Well gotta go check on stuff in the kitchen.