I gave up shopping for lent.  This seems funny, until you consider Jon gave up hot sauce.  And our girls gave up cardboard boxes.  The impetus behind giving up shopping came from a couple of different directions.  One is that shopping is a form of therapy for me.  Since I am working on Weight Watchers pretty hard core to drop the remainder of my baby weight from Mercy & Z, I no longer can use food as a source of solace.  And exercise has never been an escape for me, and giving up exercise would be like Lucy giving up bananas (she doesn’t eat them anyway).  Shopping became the sand paper that made my life feel a little smoother.

So shopping it is.  Simplicity, organization, budgeting, sustainability. Unknowingly I am addressing all of this in my life.  It’s funny when one asks for the core issue, how sometimes it is actually revealed.  Shopping for me is shiny, happy, invigorating, a competition, a game.  Target is my drug, deals are my pride.

So I stopped it.  I stopped dreaming “researching” for the next greatest deal.  What I didn’t expect was the big void of space in my head, the massive amount of time I had left over.  I was too busy and overwhelmed, and discovered some of it was from “trying to save money” by finding deals.  I am a very frugal shopper, but like I said before, deals are like liquid ecstasy to me.

So it is done for at least 40 days.  Have I said how much I love the season of lent.  It is by far my favorite time of the year.  Creating voids in my life that can be filled up with Christ and the sacrifice he made for me, and my family, and our world.  My sacrifice, if you can even call it that, feels divinely inspired.

So it has been a week & 1/2 of no shopping, no on-line window shopping, no dreaming about what I want.  I have found myself kind of looking around at various times with nothing to do.  Wait, check that, plenty to do, but nothing that I really want to do.  So it is reading the daily emails from The Journey, thanks Michael, and letting myself be kind of at loose ends.  Sitting in that void and getting familiar with it, letting the echoes be loud and uncomfortable.

November is a month of beginnings for us this year. Which is weird, usually November is the beginning of the end.

My resolutions this month.

1. Start budgeting
2. Cook once this month for the rest of the month
3. Shop once this month for the rest of the month

So I started this journey, and am bound and determined to make this work. But a bit of planning error happened with this as I attempted it after traveling for 10 days. And Halloween.

So this is how I recommend not doing this, although the individual parts of the plan were sound, the overall execution was in fact, not.

Initially I intended on shopping on Saturday, prepping in the evening and cooking on Sunday. B/c of halloween, just getting back from traveling and Jon’s unusually fully client load on Saturday, shopping and prep didn’t happen on Saturday. So I took full advantage of daylight savings time, got up early and went shopping on Sunday morning, then went to church, then took my girls over to get their pictures in their costumes and pick up our freezer, sent Jon out to finish up some of the shopping, got the 11 month old down for a nap, and then proceeded to start prep and cooking. SO NOT A GOOD PLAN!!!!

And all would have worked out wonderfully if my stupid back wouldn’t have started killing me around 7pm.

Anyway, Jon completely picked up the slack and knocked out quite a few meals for us.

All in all, the meals look delish, the girls were drooling over the pumpkin pie, I was drooling over the pumpkin coffee cake, and I would like to say thank you to Once a Month Mom for the fab, no thinking cooking for once a month.

The nice thing about this menu, is that she thought ahead for the holidays.  My pies are done, I have a couple of cheese balls, side dishes to bring to dinners, brunch type stuff for Thanksgiving morning, and all for about $150 per family.  It was a little more this month as I got started up.  The other COMPLETELY fabulous note about this system is that she puts everything together for me.  Shopping list, podcast, instructions for day of, recipes.  I literally didn’t think about it.

And the other note is that on the recipes she mentions medium size apples or onions or potatoes.  I didn’t realize that everything in the grocery store is super sized, so I ended up with quite a bit extra of certain things.  But I would say success overall.  Having the first meal tonight.  Meat pie…  yum.