Welcome, Money Saving Mom Readers!

Thanks for stopping by! I hope you'll enjoy browsing around my blog. You can follow along with my journey with RSS Feed, Facebook, or Twitter.

I also invite you to check out my friend Debra's blog, Sweet Kisses and Dirty Dishes. She currently has a giveaway going on for $25 worth of products from Pampered Chef!

Meeting Money Saving Mom

Last night I got to meet one of my favorite bloggers: Crystal Paine, the Money Saving Mom!

Crystal in the light green shirt under the Starbucks sign, me in the blue shirt in front,

other awesome ladies all around whom I will not try to name. (Photo from Money Saving Mom)

Crystal was in town for a conference with a friend, so eight of her local blog readers got together for an informal meet-up. I've been reading Money Saving Mom for about a year now, so this was exciting for me. Thanks mostly to tips I've learned from Crystal's blog, the amount I spend on groceries for Nathan and myself each month is the same as I spent for just me when I was single. And she has over 134,000 Facebook fans, so she's kind of a big deal. Some of the women drove over an hour just to have coffee with her!

After meeting Crystal in person, it's clear that she doesn't think of herself as a big deal. She greeted all of us with a hug and was happy to meet us. She seems to genuinely enjoy helping and educating others, without even the tiniest bit of a know-it-all attitude. 

It was great meeting all these wonderful women and chatting about our frugal adventures. I found out I'm definitely not the only one lamenting that we don't have a Rite-Aid around here to take advantage of their great deals, despite the fact that we have about every other store! I was the only non-mom in the group, so I got to hear what shopping and couponing with kids is like. It was a lot of fun and I wish we'd had more time together.

Have you ever met any of your favorite bloggers/celebrities in person? Who would you most like to meet?

Enemy of Decluttering: Sentimental Value

Nathan and I have been doing a lot of decluttering lately. We just don't need all this stuff we've accumulated, so a lot of it needs to go. Purging feels pretty good once you get started. However, some items are difficult to toss. If I've had it for 20 years or I wore it on an important day in my life, discarding it is no easy task. And if my grandma gave it to me, getting rid of it is almost impossible.

Nana gave me a lot of stuff. Clothes. Luggage. Plastic containers. An alarm clock. Dish towels. Jewelry. Lotion. After she died, all of that became almost sacred. These simple objects transformed into a tangible link to someone no longer here. How could I get rid of any of them?

I found a new perspective recently as I was snapping green beans. I'd never bought fresh green beans before, but I had snapped them with Nana years ago. As soon as I started working on them, I immediately thought of her. The smell, the sound, the feeling...it was like I was there on the back porch again, with Nana there with me in her apron, working away.

These are the true gifts in life - memories that are so simple yet so powerful. I don't need to keep a broken umbrella to remember my grandma. I don't need to keep the shirt I wore when I was baptized to know I was baptized. I don't need to keep all my stuffed animals to remember all the fun I had playing with them. I could lose everything I own and still have those memories. And what new memories are these boxes and drawers of junk creating?

Our First Farmers Market Trip

I'd been meaning to check out the local farmers market since it opened a couple months ago, but I had never managed to make it there. I usually don't go grocery shopping until at least 11:00 on Saturdays, and the market is only open until 11:30. 

What finally motivated me to get out of bed and go? Corn. Corn is one of the five vegetables Nathan will eat, and he's very picky about the kind of corn. All my attempts at serving him good corn had failed, and locally grown corn was my last hope. I also wanted to find some tomatoes, green beans, and red potatoes.

Now that we've had our first experience, I can't believe we waited this long to go. I found everything I'd hoped to find and even threw in a beet as well. The corn was really, really good.

I boiled the red potatoes and green beans and served them over pasta, loosely following this recipe. I think my potato to pasta ratio was a little off since the potatoes I used were so big, but it was pretty tasty.

The most amazing find for me was this lovely little thing. I have always hated beets. Or so I thought. It turns out I just hate canned beets.

After 35 minutes at 400 degrees and some olive oil, it's a completely different story. I was shocked. The taste reminded me a little of sweet potato fries, which I love. That beet pretty much changed my life.

I cut the corn from our last cob and tossed it with chopped tomato and avocado. Too bad we don't have any locally grown avocados!

  

We will definitely be returning to the farmers market. The food might be a little pricey, but if it's 20 times better than the produce you can buy in the grocery store, not to mention chemical free, I think it's worth it.

Do you shop farmers markets?

More Try New Adventures Thursday at Alicia's Homemaking

More Finer Things Friday at Amy's Finer Things

His hands are full too!

When Nathan and I first started dating, several of his friends told me things like "You have your hands full!" or "You don't know what you're getting yourself into!" It was all in fun (I think). What they didn't realize was that dealing with me isn't exactly that easy either. My own quirks and personality flaws have provided him with plenty of challenges.

Here's a recent example of one such challenge. Nathan was at the first day of GenCon, having tons of fun playing games without his wife. He was just about to begin Munchkinsanity, a game which he had very much been looking forward to playing.

Then he got a phone call. 

His wife had walked out the door to take the dog out and locked the door, only to discover that she had forgotten her keys. He didn't know what to do. He didn't want to leave his game, but he knew his wife needed to be the priority and she didn't want to stay outside with the dog for three hours. So he left to return home.

After he had been home for a while, his wife went to get her keys out of her purse but couldn't find them. She checked the other obvious locations in the apartment. Still no luck. Finally, she went outside with the flash light and found her keys next to a bush right outside the door.

She had remembered her keys after all! They had just fallen out of her pocket when she tried to jump away from the attack of the lawn sprinkler! And, being the scatter-brain that his wife is, she had completely forgotten that she had remembered her keys.

No...I really don't think he knew what he was getting himself into either.