June 29th 2015 - Party planning

June 29th 2015 - Party planning

As daft as it may sound I am planning my sons birthday party that is in 2months time (yesterday).  But there is a method to my madness, I have loads happening over the next few weeks and I won't even be holding the party at my house but my sons godmothers house over 5hrs drive away!

Therefore I am unable to stick loads of stuff on walls etc like I do at home and go OTT for the party.  Don't get me wrong it will be good but wont have stuff everywhere like I usually do.

I was looking online for Thomas the Tank party banners and bunting and realised very quickly how expensive they actually are.  The 2 images linked to the pins above gave me a good idea.  I started hunting the net for images of thomas trains with their names on them, there are loads that were made as jigsaw puzzles.  I added these to w word document, flipped them over and added next to it so that I can double side them.  Only thing I didn't thing about was the name is now backwards on the reverse, but never mind!  It's better than plain white paper.

Here are some of them:

Once they were all printed I cut them out, doubled them up and then laminated them all.  I am going to put a hole in each one and a few pieces of curling ribbon so they can hang from door frames.

I also copied the design of the above link and edited it to my sons name and age, and have printed loads and laminated them as well to go around the table edge.

I also printed food labels linked to the trains and have printed wheels to go on the food tubs as cargo cars behind some of sons trains that I will be taking with us.

Watch this space for more updates on the Thomas Tank party.

January 8th 2015 - Monthly meal planner

January 8th 2015 - monthly meal planner

Since the begining of December 2014 when money was abit tight we have sat down and worked out meals for that week, and bought the things we needed only (plus the odd snack type bits for lunch times and weekends, health n beauty bits, fruit, cereal  etc) and we have saved LOADS of money compaired to when we just went and bought "stuff" or "everything".  WHY I haven't done this sooner I never know!!!

Well I decided if we can do it for a week can we work out a plan of food for the whole month?  The answer is simply yes!  I sat and made a list of all the meals we eat/cook regularly and it came to 33, now I know my maths isn't great BUT I do know that no month has this many days in it, so i'm already onto a winner.

The hardest part was actually working out what to put on what day and what week, so that we didn't have all chicken in 1 week or on consecutive days (if possible) but as chicken is the main meat we eat this wasn't a totally easy task. But I managed it.

Then there was a harder task of working out what we needed for each meal so as to compose a shopping list.  So I worked my way through each of the meals from list 1 noting down what we needed for each 1, and things that were used in multiple meals I changed the font colour to red.

Even though we have the planner things may change on it if my knee is playing up and I can't stand to cook, or if we are ill or not at home or decide to have a take-away.  But by doing it and saving money we will have extra money to be able to get a take-away every now and then.


I found the idea of the monthly meal planner here on pinterest, so used this for todays task.  It doesn't seem possible that I have done over a week already.