Our grocery bill has gone through a lot of changes in the past few years. We went from feeding two people to three and now four. At the same time, we started to prioritize our savings. So even as we need to feed more people we are frequently looking at what we spend on groceries and trying to see how we can do a better job. We shop at Trader Joe's on a weekly basis and just recently bought a Costco membership after careful evaluation. Chris and I worked up a spreadsheet with every item we normally buy at Trader... Read more →

On our way home from work most weekdays we gain a small pile of artwork and scribbles by way of preschool/daycare. Cedric comes home with a creation or two per week but Dashiell is downright industrious. Each day there are freehand drawings, photocopied coloring sheets full of color, a letter-of-the-week-themed creation, and sometimes something large and folded into thirds. One time it was a truffala tree! Especially as Dashiell starts to express his own creativity and imagination each piece of his work feels precious! But if we start collecting now we will surely need an entire storage unit to house... Read more →

A smaller home is why we're able to live such a full life. Read more →

I had strong thoughts about how we'd handle screen time with our kids even before I was pregnant. I'd love to share an update on how we're handling screen time with the boys. In short, they get very limited screen time and our approach is essentially as I imagined it would be. Among my in-person and online friend circles my sense is that our family is among those that have the most restrictive screen time rules with their kids. I wanted to share our approach to screen time not to make anyone feel guilty about the screen time their kids... Read more →

Last year I read Better Than Before by Gretchen Rubin and I still think of it often. Erica and I even discussed it in a Girl Next Door Book Club! In the book, Rubin outlines four habit tendencies - Upholder, Questioner, Rebel, Obliger - which describe how a person responds to internal and external expectations. (You can take the quiz here to find out your tendency.) I'm an upholder and respond equally to internal and external expectations. In other words, I love goals and enjoy meeting them. Surprise!! I had so many lightbulb moments while reading about my own personality... Read more →

I love making our home cozy and functional. It's essentially a project I'm always working on. And finally, after eight years, I'm starting to feel confident in how I want to decorate and style our home. I have a lot of ideas about the yard, too. But all these ideas often lead me to want things for the house, which can quickly translate to spending money. This year, Chris and I have an aggressive savings goal of $20,000. We chatted our our 2017 budget and savings goals in a recent Matrimoney episode if you'd like all the details. Our savings... Read more →

What you see above is my new and improved grocery list. It makes me ridiculously happy. So does talking about grocery list habits (totally serious). So let's talk about it. Let me answer a few questions. Yes, the columns are arranged by aisle content at my Trader Joe's. And yes, our most frequently purchased items are listed according to where they are in the store. And yes! there is a spot for listing meals and items to purchase elsewhere (Target/other grocery store) at the bottom. I KNOW. Designing a grocery list template like this is something I had on my... Read more →

Digital photos can be so overwhelming. So! Overwhelming! We can fill up our phones, dump the photos somewhere and then tap, tap, tap our way to thousands of more photos. Quickly there are photos across devices and clouds (what is this cloud exactly again?) and it's hard to know even where to start. But there is hope! My system for managing our family photos does not require a lot of work, keeps my phone from getting filled to capacity and has me regularly printing photo books that are family keepsakes. I have an iPhone and was originally using albums in... Read more →

One of my verrrry early blog posts (beware of terrible photos and tumbling deep into the archives!) was about going paperless in the kitchen. More than five years later and we still have a paperless kitchen - and love it! In fact I often forget that a paperless kitchen isn't the norm at everyone's house. If you're interested in going paperless in the kitchen here's a quick start-up guide: + Identify the different tasks for which you use towels, rags and paper products. At our house we identified the tasks of: wiping up spills from the floor, wiping the countertops,... Read more →

Slowly we're working to put our personality into our cookie-cutter suburban house. And somewhere in the last year I decided that our house needs a name. Because a name distinguishes a thing from the rest and you name the things you love. It took months before Chris and I could agree on a name. Naming our house might have been more challenging than naming our boys. I suggested things like East Nook (since we live in the east Phoenix valley) or something French-inspired with the word Chez (meaning "house of") but Chris didn't love them. But Chris came up with... Read more →