Starting to calm down...

Things are calming down in the household now that all the celebrations are over. I'm sure things will be hyped up again with the children being excited about welcoming the new year in a few days time, but I shall try to keep things to a minimum amount of fuss.

Today we had one of our ordinary family days, including a lovely long walk with Kira. I do love where we live, we have such a choice of walking areas including beaches, woodlands, fields, parks, and country lanes. Great dog-walking territory.

Before our walk, we headed out to Torquay. Both Tiegan and Joseph had birthday money seemingly burning a hole in their pockets and they *needed* to spend it. Actually they didn't find anything they wanted to spend it on so it is still making that hole in their pockets, but at least we tried :o) We came home and played wii games together, getting to grips with the controls by using Nintendo Play. We had ordered it instead of just buying the extra wiimote and nunchuk. We had quite a laugh playing the games. Callum loved watching people play on the fishing game, and we all laughed at Lee not having a great deal of success on the Billiard game. I liked the target practice.

I have spent the evening typing a couple of chore charts (for me and the children!) in the vain hope that we can organise ourselves better. I'm not asking them to do a huge amount, just a couple of things they are perfectly capable of doing to help me out a bit. I've also set about creating meal planners in the hope of getting to grips on our budget in 2008. I know that we waste HUGE amounts of money, especially because I traipse to the local co-op to buy our dinners each day instead of doing a weekly or fortnightly shop at the cheaper supermarkets. Of course, when I go to the co-op I see things on special offer that I wouldn't normally buy but have to because "they were cheap" or see goodies that I can't resist. Such things will be cut out and my money saved in future :o)

If anyone has any good links to frugal websites, or budgets / meal ideas for larger families I'd be most grateful. I'm hoping if I do a good enough job with the budgets and organising I'll convince myself that baby number 5 is a good idea *wink*