Use Your Leftovers!

A great way to stretch your food budget is to use your leftovers on purpose. We've done this a lot of different ways over the years.

When my now teenage boys were toddlers, leftover bits from meals were the perfect portion size to serve them for lunch the next day. When my now 10 year old daughter was a baby, I would puree leftovers for stage 3 baby food.

If we have some pancakes, egg in a hole, waffles, or french toast left over after a breakfast for dinner meal, we'll put them in our freezer where all of our kids can reach so they can heat them up for breakfast.

We also use ingredients leftover from the previous meal in another meal. This works well if you keep things separate when you serve the food like fajita chicken and peppers or taco meat and rice. I can put the fajita chicken meat with cheese in a tortilla and make quesadillas. I can re-use plain rice in a homemade fried rice meal. I can put taco meat and cheese on tortilla chips for a yummy nacho meal. We also use leftover eggs, bacon, sausage, and tater tots to make breakfast burritos.

How to Store Melissa and Doug Reusable Sticker Pad Pages

I'd like to note that this is a really old post that never got published as those kids I'm speaking of are now 11, 10, and 7. Not to mention they have a 3 year old little sister! We still love these sticker books just as much and have found the poly envelopes to be worth their money. They have held up well!

We have 6 different sets of the Melissa and Doug Reusable Sticker Pads. We Love them! We have the dollhouse set, animals set, vehicles set, fairies set, places around town set, and dress up set. My 6 and 5 year old boys, and 3 year old girl love them all. 

The only problem is that once you tear out the sheets (and they will tear out by themselves), they get lost and crumpled up, and the stickers get lost around the house. We keep them in a large pull out drawer but that just wasn't enough. We needed a way to organize them in the drawer. We found these poly envelopes that fit them perfectly! Put one set in each envelope.  

Click here: Over sized Poly Envelopes

What we did to help our new house start to feel more like home

Image via Lost Bumblebee

When we moved out of the only home our kids have ever known and into a house they have only seen once, I knew we had our work cut out for us. At first the excitement helped carry them through the empty rooms with paint they hated. But that only works for a couple of weeks at best! 

We had lived in our little old house for 10 years, but ironically we had only started doing anything to make it feel like home while we were prepping to sell. It was only ever meant to be a temporary home, a place to bring home our first child (whom I was pregnant with at the time). We did not want to live there more then 5 years. Within a year, the economy crashed and with it our hope of ever moving. We never really loved that house and didn't put much effort into making it feel like a home. Don't get me wrong, we filled it with our belongings and hung a few things on the wall. But, we never painted walls that we hated or hung family photos up. It just felt like something between a temporary rental and a weight dragging us down. It was almost 30 years old when we moved in and needed a lot more work then we realized at the time. The backyard was small, yet someone had managed to get an in ground pool in there that took up most of the yard. It was only usable a small amount of the time we lived there. It was more a dangerous pit for our children and took up their only usable space to play. The front yard was full of trees that quickly became over grown and stopped grass from growing in most of the yard. The AC needed freon added every other year to keep it even at 80 inside in the hot summers. The covering out back fell apart, a toilet flooded a good part of our house, and the roof needed replacing. It quickly became cramped and just didn't serve our family well.

10 years and four kids later, our city had recovered from the crash and was having it's own little housing boom. We realized we could finally leave that house and it was a VERY happy day! We found a much bigger, much newer house with a big back yard a few towns over. It is easy to think that we would be so excited to be here that it would just feel like home on it's own! Ha! Nope!

While we love this house, I definitely noticed a disconnect even in myself because it WASN'T home! As much as we loathed the old house, it was a constant for many years. So I sat down and thought about what made me feel at home. Seeing my favorite color (turquoise!), smelling familiar smells, and knowing what light switches go where! So here is what we did to help make it feel more like home.

Small House Organizing Tip #2- Easy Winter Hat Storage

At our house, the kids winter hats are supposed to hang on the hooks by the door with their backpacks and coats. But, usually they just end up in the floor. We have a closet just inside our entryway for our shoes and extra jackets. But there wasn't a good place to store the hats.

As I was unpacking the boxes of winter clothes this past fall, and hanging up the jackets in the closet, I had an idea. If there was just a way to attach the hats to the hangers the jackets are on, that would solve our problem. Clothes pins would work if I had thin hangers, but we have thick plastic hangers. Then it hit me! I have a little box of 1 1/4" binder clips. They attach to the hangers and hats perfectly without causing any damage to the hats! Yay!!!

It also works for gloves...

Fashion Tip #1

Do you ever stop by drive-thru while you are out running errands, eat it in the car,...and then proceed to drop some on your shirt? Yep, me too! And, then you have to wear that dirty shirt the rest of the day until you get back home. So annoying!

So here's my tip...

Grab a neutral scarf and keep it in your car! Pick one that will go with almost anything you wear. Now, you can hide the mess while still looking fashionable! Yay!

 

The spot still remaining is a drop of water from washing my hands. It successfully covered up the food I dropped!

I hope that helps you ladies!