On Monday, a high school classmate of mine lost her husband in a car accident on icy roads. He was 32 and they have an 8 month old baby. On the same day, there was a fire down the street from one of our family members, and a 12 year old and her grandmother passed away. Granddaughter ran back into the house to try and save her grandma, and the little girl's dad ran in after them to try and save his daughter and his mother. He's the only one who made it out. Today we had icy weather here, and my husband's coworker's father was killed in an accident. His truck slid off the icy road and it was 5 hours before anyone saw his truck down the embankment. Can't help but wonder if he could have been saved if he was found earlier. What a depressing start to 2015! I wish everyone a healthy and safe rest of the year!

I haven't had a day alone with my 7 year old son in a while, and the 3 year old had a birthday party to go to today, so hubby took the 3 year old to his party and I spent the day with my first baby We went out to Chili's for lunch, and we have the Kids Dine Free membership (which you typically can get for about $10-15 for a 3 month membership) so his meal was free. They have tablets at all the tables now, and so being the technologically savvy child that he is, he grabbed it and started playing games. Well, apparently, they charge you $1.99 for playing games. We're used to going to Buffalo Wild Wings where their games are all free. He swears that there was nothing that told him it was going to cost money, and he is pretty responsible with those things (he learned his lesson after he charged up $45 in movies at a hotel a couple of years ago, which they graciously took off of our bill because they could see that we didn't actually watch the movies.) Anyway, I protested the charge and they took it off our bill.

So lunch cost us $14, then I had 2 free movie tickets from my MIL so we saw Annie, which didn't cost us a thing. I promised him that we could go to Sweet Frog for frozen yogurt after the movie if we didn't buy any popcorn or candy at the theater (their prices are nuts!) So movie cost nothing.

Then we went to Sweet Frog, for which he had a $5 gift certificate for some contest that his 2nd grade class won, so that cost us $0.67.

So 5 hours of fun with my sweet baby for $15 - I was pretty proud!

And my husband was left with the 3 year old who threw a temper tantrum at his friend's karate birthday party, wouldn't do any karate at the party place, and wouldn't even let go of his leg to go eat cake. I think I got the good child today

I did a lot of frugal things today that I am proud of! We had several varieties of "past their prime bread" - parts of 2 different loaves of bread and half a bag of hot dog rolls, so I made my own bread crumbs! Never did that before but read about it on a Dave Ramsey grocery budgeting FB page I am on, so I figured I'd give it a whirl. I got about 4 cups of bread crumbs out of it and it was so easy!

One of my Christmas presents from DH was a special pan where you can make different "pockets". You use pizza dough or pie crust dough for the top and bottom, and then you can fill it with whatever you want, and bake in the oven. So I made a batch of pizza dough in my breadmaker instead of buying store-bought dough.

I also got a mini-loaf pan for Christmas, and made 6 mini loaves of raisin bread.

I organized and took inventory of my kitchen freezer and the deep freezer in the garage, and I have quite a bit of stuff that I had forgotten about. Tomorrow I will make my meal plan for the next week and a half or so, trying to use a lot of that food. I don't think I should need to buy anything next week other than milk, produce, and maybe some lunch meat. I have a huge stock of homemade and frozen muffins, pancake, and egg muffins for the kids for their breakfasts. I can't believe I forked out the money for those pre-packaged muffins and frozen pancakes for so long!

I have gotten so into making food from scratch, eating less processed foods (although we still eat our fair share, but every little decrease helps!) Not only does it save me money, but it's healthier too!