eid mubarak!

Happy Eid ul-Adha to all the Muslims out there! For the rest of you, i.e. everyone who reads my blog except for Jon, here's a brief explanation of the celebration.

I'm cooking bean soup from ---gasp!--- dried beans for the first time in my life. I loooove my new crockpot! The beans are in there simmering along with cabbage, onion, and turkey sausage. It smells really yummy.

We've implimented a cash-only grocery budget and it's really working quite well. My goal is to keep main meals under $5 for the four of us and I'm doing pretty good. Last night's---garlic spinach pizza and salad---was under $3. Once you start counting every penny, though, it's easy to get irked when you see substantial mark-ups. I went to a grocery store in the "bad part" of town yesterday, which I expected to have similar or lower prices than the normal one I go to. Nope, prices were, on average, 30-50% higher. Geez.

Oooh, and I have a good deal alert for the mamas out there. I dropped by a Dollar Tree this afternoon and they had Hanes sweatshirts in sizes starting at xs (4/5). I picked up a couple...I'm generally curbing my desire to buy ahead for clothing, but you can't beat a $1 sweatshirt. I got a navy one and a black one that should last Tristan for the next two winters; they had several floral designs as well, but at my store, they were only in larger sizes.