All Aboard! Benjamn's 5th Birthday

This year Benjamin turned 5 years old. 5! I can't believe I have a 5 year old. I can't believe my son is going to Kindergarten in August. Where has the time gone?

Benjamin's birthday party was hastily put together because I was applying and training for a new job the two weeks leading up to his birthday (which I will write about in a later post!). Benjamin loves trains, I mean he LOVES trains. He has a train set that we have been adding on to that he plays with every day. He watches train videos on You Tube. He makes real life train noises perfectly. He knows the correct names for each car and pieces of the track. This kid loves trains. So of course that was the theme for his party, games, and cake!

I made train cars out of cardboard boxes, with paper plates for the wheels, and ribbon to hold on their shoulders. The boys got to color on their train cars with markers and crayons. Then we went outside and made a train. The kids took turns being the conductor, and then my mom was the conductor and took them around the front and back of the house.

We let them free play outside until Benjamin asked for his piñata. All the kids got to go twice, swinging three times. But then they got kind of bored because they were all so little they weren't making any progress. So the other moms and I took some swings at it and got some good cracks in it and let Benjamin take the final swing to break it open.

After that Benjamin opened his presents. Then we sang Happy Birthday to him and had cake and juice boxes. Benjamin was so excited for his cake, that when I was making it he wanted to help. So I let him watch me frost it, and then I let him choose which trains would go on the cake, and he got to place them on the cake in the order that he chose.

At the end of the day Benjamin told us that he loved his birthday and had so much fun. He wasted no time in getting creative with his new train tracks!

Using Our Food Storage

At the beginning of this year we ran into some temporary financial trouble. We could not spend our normal amount on anything, including groceries. Although we live in a small 2-bedroom apartment, I had created a small food storage, and I decided that we would live off of that for a month or two while we got back on our feet.

The reason why our financial trouble was only temporary was because Gerson still has his job, so we needed to hang onto his next few paychecks and spend as little as possible from them while we revamped and reorganized our checkbook and budget. Since we had a paycheck to look forward to, I saved money by only buying needed fresh food like bread and milk. I used any frozen meat, fruit and canned vegetables and fruit, and boxed food first before buying any fresh ingredients. That got us through the first two months of the year, and by March we were good to dive into our new budget and I could begin to rebuild our food storage.

I used to think that it wasn't possible to have a food storage in an apartment. You see, I had been raised by my mom, and her food storage is quite impressive. So I was going off of that when I got married and moved into apartments that had hardly any room to store a regular amount of food, let alone food storage. So for the first two years of my marriage we did not have a food storage at all. I just hoped that should anything happen we would be able to get ourselves to my parents' house and live with them. (Even today now that I have a food storage, getting to my family to my parents' house is still plan A so that we can be together as a family during emergencies/the last days.)

When I was pregnant with Benjamin I read a parenting book titled, Mom! I'm Home! It was written by my aunt's mother Rosanne Buhler Orgill. One section of the book talks about food storage and she advises to rotate your food storage by placing your oldest food items first in line and using those when you cook and replacing them with new items in the back of the line. I started doing that by slowly buying more than I needed of canned and boxed  ingredients. Now when I grocery shop, I buy the amount that I need for the meal that I am making, but I already have some in my pantry, it's just going to replace what I use.

So technically I am always using our food storage, so what I mean by us living off of our food storage for the past two months is that  I wasn't replacing the food that we ate. I couldn't so that we could save money. Now I am rebuilding my food storage again. Situations like this are why we have been taught to have a food storage, to be prepared for any storms  that come our way. I am grateful that I had a food storage prepared. If not, we wouldn't have starved, but we would have had some interesting meals and would have had to rely on neighbors and family. This experience strengthened my testimony that our leaders know what they are talking about when they teach us how to be prepared. And if the temporal preparedness is correct and important, than the spiritual preparedness is too.