...

so my weekly photo idea clearly has not panned out.

good try amy good try. lol.

as much as i would love to blog consistently i think i have to accept that it's just not happening right now. maybe if i stop putting those expectations on myself it'll just happen.

but i do wanna talk right now.

for those that don't know, my little family and i moved in with alex's mom right after christmas.

we moved from my parents' where we had lived since alex graduated in may.

before this, in october we planned and did in fact start our house hunt.

we were veeeery excited to buy a house.

but after a weekend of looking and realizing our financial state we decided to put the house buying on hold.

it was hard but definitely the smart decision. we didn't want to go into home ownership with little to no savings.

so we decided to move in with april and claire where we have more of our own space and privacy.

we are working on paying off as much debt and also saving as much money as we can while we're here.

i like to spend money (ha) but i'm excited for this challenge!

something that we just started doing to keep us on track with our grocery budget is adding everything up as we put it in the cart.

it (mostly) works!

i'm amazed at the stuff i usually buy that we don't really need.

next time i might just bring cash and leave my card at home so i have no choice but to stay within budget.

but i might be too scared to do that lol.

i have also been cooking consistently since moving in here!

for me, this is no small feat.

i have always loved baking but until now i have not enjoyed cooking.

while we lived with my parents my brother cooked a lot.

and he's amazing. seriously whoever marries him is one lucky girl.

and honestly up until the last couple months scarlett was still mostly breastfeeding so

i just majorly slacked off on preparing food.

BUT now, even tho we still live with family, because of their schedules, most of the time i have the kitchen to myself.

tho making room in the refrigerator for everyone's stuff has been challenging. but we're dealing with it ok.

as a lot of you know eating whole (un processed), organic foods is really important to me.

which means i've had to suck up my dislike of cooking haha.

this is something that has always been important to me from a relatively young age...

but for a long time i also felt so overwhelmed.

i didn't know where to start. i felt like i had to do all or nothing.

and because i couldn't do it all meant i did nothing.

honestly that is probably why until recently i barely cooked.

but thank God i am outta that rut!

starting one thing at a time and making that habit proved to be very helpful to me.

simply becoming aware of the ingredients made such a difference for me.

for example, in one loaf of bread, even the "healthy" kind there are like 30 or 40 different ingredients, half of them unpronounceable and you certainly wouldn't find most of them in your kitchen. ew.

so we now pretty much only buy things that have about 5 or so whole ingredients.

we haven't cut out all our favorite junk food snacks yet.

that will be hard. but we're making progress.

 i have to say that the more informed i have become on the power of what we put into (and not only into but onto) our bodies the more excited i get about whole foods!

i have actually enjoyed cooking recently and i think when i eventually have my very own kitchen i will enjoy it even more :)