Happy October! Wait… what. How is that even possible. Time is such a weird thing these days. The fact that it’s now October… I don’t know where September went.

Pfizer has passed along their studies for the 5-11 age group, so now it’s in the hands of the FDA to approve their vaccine for use. Fingers crossed the kiddo might get his first dose before Halloween. A fully vaccinated Christmas? I can’t think of a better way to celebrate.

Friday’s Frugal Five

1. Since it’s getting to be the end of tomato season, I picked up a big bag of tomato “seconds” from the farmers market to can more pizza sauce for the upcoming year. We have just a few jars left from last year still, so we need to have another pizza night soon.

Homemade pizza is actually a pretty quick evening meal, especially when the sauce is pre made. Someday perhaps I’ll grow enough tomatoes for all the canning I want to do, but for now, I buy the discounted ones from the farmers market.

For such a warm summer, the weather was weird, and my tomatoes didn’t do as well as I would have hoped. I’ve talked to other local gardeners, and it seems that was pretty common this year – though a few people did get a bumper crop. My best guess is that variation depends on when the tomatoes were planted – mine had a bunch of flowers right when the heat dome happened, and I think they simply cooked.

I still got a decent number, but that was more owing to the number of plants I had and less to them fruiting well.

2. We made homemade English muffins again this week. Every time I make them, I remember how much better they are than the store bought variety and tell myself I’m going to make them regularly. They aren’t a huge time commitment, but then again, some weeks somehow get too busy even for that.

We had breakfast sandwiches for dinner one night with the English muffins – and with scrambled eggs from OUR chickens. It’s time for the husband to make some more bacon himself again, so we can take it a step further. (That and bacon is SO dang expensive now)

Growing, baking, harvesting your own meals. Really, it’s hard for me to think of a satisfaction greater than that.

3. October 1st means another month ticked down for my clothes buying ban. I started counting March 1, 2017, so four years and seven months ago. Someday I’ll do an update post on this, but clearly this isn’t that week. If you’re curious about anything related to this challenge of mine, ask away!

With the supply chain challenges of late, not needing to find clothing for myself is one less thing I need to worry about. That, and I think this challenge has made me more resilient to supply fluctuations because I’ve gotten very used to “making do” and being creative.

4. Other than garlic and some onions, I think I’m now finished up planting my fall and winter garden. This week I transplanted the purple sprouting broccoli I’d planted a while back and planted some more leafy green seeds. At my parents house, I planted radishes as well, but since I don’t like them and my husband will just eat a few here and there, I’ve learned not to grow them. They’re such a satisfying garden crop because they grow so rapidly, but there is absolutely no point to grow something your family won’t actually eat (see: same lesson I had to learn with canning).

I also have a lot of kale seeds that fell and sprouted in some garden beds accidentally, so I’m going to monitor them and perhaps find people to pass them along to. I’ve grown the kale enough years now that it’s beginning to select specifically to our climate, so it does well self seeding and growing based on our seasons. But whoops, I definitely didn’t mean to have so many seedlings.

5. The kiddo lost another tooth! It had been really loose for a while now, so since it finally fell out he’s been eating a lot to catch up with the nibbling he’d been doing around it.

Thanks to the first tooth he ever lost happening on a camping trip, we have a tradition that we plant a “tooth tree” whenever he loses a tooth. So this weekend we will be going on a hike and selecting a tree to bury his tooth under.

Like Santa, we don’t pretend with him that the tooth fairy is real. He will forever get the truth from us, even about “silly” things, so he knows that the money he gets from his lost tooth comes from us.

We’ve decided on $5 per tooth: $2 to spend, $2 to save, and $1 to donate. It definitely filled my heart when he got most excited this time around to donate the money to plant more trees in the woods he loves. That kid has a giving heart for sure.

Exercise Update

My ankle is slowly healing, so I decided I couldn’t wait any longer and ran a few times this week. I put the ankle brace on and alternated between a minute of slow jogging and a minute of walking. I was able to run three times this week that way, and my ankle seems to be holding up. I can tell it’s not 100% yet, but this seems to be an okay pace for now.

Otherwise, I’m back to my 12,000+ steps a day, and that’s going okay as well. If I’m going for a longer walk, I wrap up the ankle, but I can take the walks now.

Happy October! Do you have any fun plans for the spooky season?