Positive and Negative

As I sit here, the overwhelming feeling is that we failed today on the 30 day challenge. It's not the best feeling on the first official day! I'll start with the negative and work toward the positive.

I sent my husband with lunch this morning forgetting that he was working a twelve hour day. Usually on these days I pack extra snacks or one and a half sandwiches so he can have a snack at 5 o'clock or so. I didn't even give him any snacks today at all so he spent $8 on a sandwich for dinner - ugh.

I was in the neighborhood of my favorite kids thrift store and they were having a sale. Generally we accept any hand me downs for our kids and I buy what I can used both to save the expense and to reuse perfectly good items. So I spent $11 buying my son 4 sets of pj's for this winter, long underwear and 3 pair of pants. I could have waited until October to do this but it would have cost me probably $4-5 dollars more so it was worth it to me to do it today. I'm counting this as a neutral since it still saved me money. I plan to take some items in the next time I'm in the area and they give cash or store credit for used items so I'll just get the cash, enough hopefully to wash this expense.

I planned two weeks of meals and have a loose idea of the other two so I did a large grocery shop today for $200 and I have just about all of the main dishes we will need for the month. I will probably have to go back for fresh fruits but our garden should provide much of the veggies. Included in the $200 was a $20 vat of olive oil - the cheapest per pint and this will last much longer than just September.

I used up the very last drop of laundry detergent this morning and put that on my list too. Since I have made this before I looked in the cabinet and saw that I have enough ingredients to make another batch which should last us through the month.

The shopping trip seems like a lot since Mary's goal is $200 for a family 3 times the size of ours. For us though I'm aiming for about $300 or so for the month which should be doable.

It seems like I'm over analyzing everything but I think that is the point. As I looked at my cart checking out of the store I realized that there is NO way this experiment is really going to let me know what it feels like to actually live with nothing. It will show me how to live with less, still by the world's standards a bounty!