Friday’s Frugal Five (Year End)

I’ve been home all week with my son thanks to the holiday break. His preschool was closed anyway, so I’m thankful I have the week off as well (my husband doesn’t). I don’t know what we would do if we both had to work while preschool was closed. Being a two income family is mostly positive, but it can get dicey sometimes. Weeks like this make me debate the stay at home option, but I know that the grass isn’t really greener and the best option for our family is to continue with the hours I work now. Plus, a week off is very different than when it becomes months and years. 

1. Part of being home means I’ve been more apt to try new things in the kitchen because I have more time. I made homemade naan for the first time ever this week and it was so good. In the future, I plan to make up extra to stick in the freezer for later meals. I really need to dive into more from scratch baking because homemade options are pennies on the dollar compared to store bought, plus they just taste better. 

2. We went over to my in laws the day before to make up some homemade pho for Christmas Eve dinner. If you’ve never made it before, this recipe will not steer you wrong. The only “downside” is that you’ll never want to go out for pho again and have to make it yourself because it tastes so much better. We had a fantastic homemade meal and spent a ton of time just hanging with family, which was wonderful. 

3. Christmas Day was spent first enjoying a fancy breakfast and low key morning at our house, and then we headed out to play in the snow. A white Christmas is really, really rare for us (first time in recorded history to have more than 1” on both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day) so we had a fabulous time sledding on our hill. We have a pretty steep dead end street, so everyone in the neighborhood comes to sled with us, which makes it extra fun. 

After lunch and a failed attempt at naptime, we headed to see both our families at my parents’ house. We are so lucky that we do a big celebration all together for holidays instead of having to balance separate events. 

4. We had fancy ramen for dinner one night. The temperatures have hovered in the high 20s to low 30s for a week now, which is really cold for us, so nice and hot bowls of soup sounded like the perfect kind of dinner. Cheap, easy, and we were able to use up some of the last of the beef from the freezer. One of these days we will clean it out entirely and defrost it before filling it up again with more bulk meat. 

5. We had some library books to return yesterday so we headed to that area of town after breakfast. We ended up arriving twenty minutes before the library opened though, so we decided to take a short walk while we waited. The area where the library is located has been a very unexciting drive by area for as long as I can remember, but the city is doing a great job in turning that around with the new development going on. A new building had gone up a few months ago, but I thought it was just a coffee shop and restaurant, so we hadn’t ever gone in. Turns out, it is actually a big free community space with a fireplace, comfy chairs, free WiFi, and a bunch of toys and games (plus a coffee shop at one end). 

It’s only three or so miles from our house, so I expect we will spend a lot of time there in the future. I’m excited to see how it evolves as it matures. I love free community spaces (as well as the library) because they are places you can go and enjoy regardless of your financial situation. 

I hope you’ve had a wonderful holiday season and had some time to relax and enjoy before we begin the new year. 

Any frugal wins you’d like to share this week? I’d love to hear them.