Smelly compost, h20, plastic duty, and no toilet paper.

Between soccer 4 days a week, my whole family giving each other their colds, and just plain everyday life it seems like I have no time at all. I have a few challenges/projects I have been working on lately and I thought I would share with you my ups and downs. 

The Cloth Wipe Challenge-Still going strong and my girls have had no accidents this week which has been nice. Ive decided to stop using the net bag that hangs off the toilet paper roll and just use a small basket by the toilet for my kids just to throw them in. I do laundry each day and have had no smells at all. Its been about a month now and I have yet to go buy more toilet paper. Before the challenge I would buy a 24 pack every 2 weeks. Savings this month-$15. Whahoo!

If your interested in trying this challenge, head on over to the crunchy chicken and get yourself some fun challenges.http://www.thecrunchychicken.com/2009/08/cloth-wipe-challenge-2009.html. I get much of my inspiration from this lady~!

Recycling my plastic-This one is hard to do but worth it. Our garbage man came yesterday and we only had 1 small garbage bag of trash in it. May I remind you that I share my trash service with my next door neighbors who are a family of 4. Yes thats 10 people's trash and it was only 1 medium bag. How do we do this? Easy. Recycle recycle recycle. We take care of paying the bill (split it between the two of us) and they take our plastic in to be recycled every few months. Everything but plastic goes into the traditional recycling bin. All plastic goes into another container or bag. I usually use potato bags, bags people have brought to my home, etc. We are getting way better and getting rid of our trash the right now. 

Compost-Yeah I suck lately at that. I'm a seasonal person and this means that when it gets cold or yucky outside, I stay inside. I really need to fix this problem I have. I forgot about my compost on my counter for a month, yes you read it right. I have such an excellent filter on it that I never smelt any odors. My husband was the one who found it. Sorry honey:). So now that its cleaned out, I need to be way better about putting out food waste in it and actually physically taking it out to the compost bin. Whats with my lazy butt? I don't know. I have no excuse. 

Caffeine- Ive been trying to cut back on caffeine of any type for health reasons. All the while I did not think about the money saving aspect of it. No caffeine means no dark soda's, coffee, and some tea's. My plan is to drink decaf till I get off my coffee addiction. Once I kick the coffee addiction I plan on drinking way more water. This is my own personal challenge. I am not a big water drinker and never really have been. I am really horrible  when it comes to getting my water intake. So from now on, gonna drink way more water. And you all know me, the frugal way to drink water is good old tap water. 

5 week pay period-My husband only gets paid once a month and sometimes its more than 1 month depending on the month( I am well aware how much this sucks). This month its a 5 week pay period and I have to make our money stretch an extra week. This is super easy to do, you will just have to deal with the family looking in the fridge and asking whats to eat. We will make it by doing a few simple things. I found half gallon milk for 79 cents on clearance last week so I bought up 6 of them. Half gallon sizes are perfect for freezing because they thaw out pretty fast. Yes you can freeze milk! So I really wont need to buy milk for 2 weeks. Also last week Fred Meyers had navel oranges 3lbs/$1. What a deal! I bought around 25 lbs of them and were still living off those and will be for a while. I plan on making jelly from it too.  I have plenty of food in my baking pantry so were good on bread, muffins, etc. Muffins make great snacks and my kids wont miss the crackers that I wont be buying. I have lots of stuff in my freezer and plenty in our pantry. Just gotta get creative! 

So you can see I have plenty of things to keep me busy. Soon it will be back to the usual. Hanging all our clothes to dry outside (once Oregon gets over all the rain ick! ), my garden planning is starting soon, and school will be out soon and I will have to come up with lots of things for the kids to do. But these things will keep me busy until then.