small plates and red meat...

I want to address some issues that I brought up in earlier posts about food and budgeting. I talked about soem approaches to being intentional about what we eat, including using smaller plates and only eating red meat on Fridays. I have discovered that there are some logistics to those decisions that make them hard to implement. For instance, we only have five small plates, and the kids usually get two of them. That means that Dawn and I get two and there is one left. Following alright, I take it? If we don't do dishes in between meals (which occasionally is allowed to happen), then we don;t have enough dishes. Then we go back to big plates and soon we just skip the littel plates altogether. So, I just have to keep at it and remember that using nig plates with small portions still works. But, its hard. When we tried to do red meat Fridays, we found that we had leftover meat from Friday which, on our tight budget, we could let go to waste, so we had to find a time to eat it in the following days. Then, we were invited to a cookout where there were only hamburgers and hot dogs. I could argue that hot dogs can hardly be classified as meat, but that wouldn't serve the purpose of being intentional. So, once we broke the rule a couple of times and instituted some exceptions, it didn't really stick. We are still evaluating our budget and trying to find ways to simplify, but I don't think that small plates and red meat Fridays are going to be part of the regiment. We have lots of food right now, so i am going to try and get to the end of the month without buying anything but milk and bread. We spent about $155 on food in the first week ( we did buy a couple of expensive things like salmon fillets that we didn't have last month), so we will end up closer to $200 probably for September.

The scripture reading is going well, thoug I have skipped a few days (mostly just wrapped up in this online stuff), but I am getting into a routine and it is getting easier to do it first thing in the morning. I think that I will find a way to start looking at solitude as a regular part of my sppiritual diet. One idea is to start fishing on Saturday mornings, so that I can have our fish (reducing our grocery budget) and spen some quiet time alone.

Other ideas?