Frugal Things I Did Last Week (almost 2 weeks ago)

I let Eli cut our lettuce this week.  

Summer has kept me very busy so far but I hope to blog a little more regularly.  Here are a few of the frugal activities that have been keeping us busy: 

We enjoyed a number of salads from our garden.  Okay confession here, I actually grow loose leaf lettuce in our landscaping next to the flowers.  :)  Surprisingly it does really well.  This past week we cut a few different types of loose leaf lettuce: Buttercrunch, Argula, and Tom Thumb (a bibb lettuce).  Yum!  Growing lettuce is an easy way to save money and is really easy.  We have also successfully grown it in a container.  In our big garden I planted more buttercrunch and a bunch of romaine lettuce.

Eva's Dedication Cake: I opted to go for taste instead of looks and used a cream cheese icing instead of a decorating icing.  I had originally planned to make a cute little banner to put on top but didn't want to wake up my nieces who were sleeping downstairs.  

We spent a wonderful Father's Day dedicating our daughter Evangeline.  I felt so blessed to have all of our immediate family present!  Such a treat for us since we live far away from many of them.  We opted to have lunch afterwards downstairs in our church's fellowship hall since treating 25+ people to lunch is completely out of our budget and would be incredibly too chaotic!  Can you imagine trying to seat that many people together?  :)  It was actually very simple and almost everything was done ahead of time since I spent most of the day before out of town.  For lunch I served: Homemade BBQ (made ahead in the CrockPot) on buns, cole slaw, potato salad, baked beans, green beans, potato salad, and jello salad.  We had sweet tea and strawberry lemonade to drink.  I made Evangeline's cake and we served it alongside brownies and Graeter's ice cream that was leftover from my brother's wedding.  This was such a special day for us and I am so thankful our families were able to be a part of it.

We ate from our freezer for meals this past week.  I have just a couple meals left from my most recent OAMC adventure.

Nina & Poppy Steve bought a slip-n-slide and a sprinkler for us to play with us. 

Eli loved the slip n slide! 

On Monday we headed to the zoo with Brandon's side of the family.  Before we left we packed a picnic which we enjoyed while at the zoo.  We have a zoo pass so this ended up being an inexpensive family activity.  One guest got in free and we used all of our 1/2 priced admission tickets we received for the year.

I finally weeded through the entire garden.  After 6 days of rain it was really bad!  We have lots of things planted and expect to have a number of items to pick by the end of July.  Hopefully I will be able to put up lots of garden bounty in August and September.  This week I am hoping to plant a few more rows.

Love my boy!

Eli & I canned 12 1/2 pints of strawberry jam.  I purchased the strawberries on sale at our local grocery store.  One day I would love to grow our own strawberries but I haven't had time yet.  I would really like to build a raised bed for them.  I have fond memories of my strawberry patch as a little girl.

I stopped by a yard sale and picked up a few t-shirts for Eli and a few spools of ribbon.

We visited the library for story time this week.  Eli & Evangeline turned in their reading logs and each received a nice prize for reading.

What frugal things did you do last week?