Jacob's First Cereal

Last week I posted video of Ava's first taste of cereal. Here is the video of Jacob's first foray into solid food. They are about the same age.

Food, Glorious Food

I have been using Quicken to record my purchases since I got out of college 10 years ago. I am fairly meticulous about recording the category that goes with the purchase, for example Dining, Auto:Fuel, Shannon:Clothes, etc. When you have that much history and information at your disposal, you can find some interesting trends.

I was recently looking at our yearly expenditures for food, groceries and dining combined. Back in 2003, our first full year of marriage, we spent $8853 on food. Last year, we spent a whopping $19,634. Almost $20,000 on food!

Over half of that expenditure comes from dining out. Dining out is a luxury and more expensive than eating in, but it is often easier to do for us, for several reasons. One, Shannon works part-time, and as the primary cook, that situation makes it harder for her to be home to make dinner, both because of diminished time and energy. Another point to consider is that with the added money from the part-time job as children's minister we have more money to choose to dine out if we want.

Also, we do have Jacob now. Besides being another person to feed, he affects the food budget in ways you don't expect. It is easier to eat out with Jacob since cooking for 3, especially one who is a little picky, can be hard. Also, you are out and about more because of various activities with him so stopping and eating out gets done more.

Another reason is the high gas prices. I work from home so we are not heavily affected by gas prices as most, but I still see the hidden cost of rising fuel prices. Food production requires lots of tractors and combines and transport trucks. The added expenses of gasoline gets put into the prices we pay for groceries and dining out.

(As an aside, even though I work at home and Shannon is 3 miles from our church, high gas prices do affect us. Back in 2003, we spent $1263 on auto fuel. In 2007, we spent $3396. $2000 more, but far less significant than the increase in food expenditures. Back in 2003, Shannon worked full-time and Dallas has many more great dining spots than Springfield/North Nashville. I bet we ate out as much then as we do now, but it just costs so much more.)

With this realization of the high amount of food expenditures, I felt we have to find a way to cut back. To do so, we needed to make a solid commitment to eating in instead of dining out. That sounds all well and good, but you also have to commit to planning your meals and grocery shopping. I decided to take the lead in doing that . Grocery shopping is not something Shannon loves to do, mostly because she usually has Jacob with her. Since I have never done it before on any consistent basis, I am a little jazzed about it, like a new challenge. Of course, I still work with Shannon on planning the meals and making the grocery list as she will be the one cooking the food.

We are now 1 month into this and we are seeing substantiation improvements. It is early to state the savings with great confidence, but it looks like making an effort to eat in is saving us $750-$500 per month.

As my sister mentioned, I have turn her on to the wonderful and mysterious world of coupons. I will say more about that later as it truly a strange world, but one that I do see benefits from.

By the way, lunch today is taco soup which we made last night. Yum, yum.

Visiting Noah

A few weeks back we went and visited my sister and her family. Her son Noah is 2 weeks older than Ava so it is neat to see them together and watch them grow.

The Sad State of Politics in America

I just got a telemarketer call which the caller ID listed as simply “Political Call”. The girl, she sounded quite young, said she was representing the Republican Majority Campaign which is some type of Republican PAC group. I decided to humor her and actually have a conversation. It went like this…

Call-Girl: “Who do you plan on voting for in the November election, Barak Obama or John McCain?”
Me: “Are those my only two choices?”
Call-Girl: “Uh, yea.”
Me: “Well, if those are the only two whom I have to decided between, I will vote for John McCain, but for the actual election, I am considering other parties.”
Call-Girl: “Uh…Hillary Clinton has dropped out. And uh…Ron Paul has dropped out. So, uh…those are the only two candidates left.”
Me: “…Sure.”
Call-Girl: “Uh…bye.”

That PAC is getting there money's worth.

Ava's First Cereal

I suspect there is an disproportional relationship to the busyness of my life and the quantity of posting on my website. I have not added anything here in 3 weeks and just a few things in the last couple of months. Yet, it has not been because nothing has been happening, but the opposite that too much is happening.

The biggest change is from my work as this is my busiest time of the year. I am in the middle of my SAML interoperability test event which is my major focus of the year. We are almost half way through this test, and it has gone very well. Things have eased off slightly this week, but that can change in a moment.

Too much has occured in the last month to catch you up all at once. But I will try to do a little back tracking this week as we have done some fun things. Below is Ava's first attempt to eat rice cereal, a  solid (barely) for the first time.

News of late

I have not written much here in a while so I felt I need to publish something. So, here is just news of note in the Meadors household.

We visited Shannon's Aunt Jan and her husband Dan in Blacksberg, VA. It was a nice visit and we survied the 7 hour distance with 2 young kids.

Ava turned 4 months on Sunday. Then on Monday, the rolled over for the first time, from belly to back. She holds her head up very well. I need to get some video of that.

Jacob is still his fun loving self. Today at the YMCA pool, he swam for the first time. No swimmies or floatation devices. He did a doggy paddle to Shannon who was about 6 feet away. Shannon was very impressed. I can't wait to see him do it.

We are staying home this weekend. I plan on doing some outside jobs around the house on Saturday. Next Friday, Shannon and I are going to see the new Batman movie at the IMAX theater. I am so excited.

Visiting the Frist Center

Last Friday, Shannon and I had a date night, and I took her to the Frist Center in downtown Nashville. Frist Center is the major art museum in Nashville. I think I went to an art museum once in high school, but I barely recall it.

We toured two exhibits: Tiffany leaded glass lamps and the Color Field exhibits. I appreciated the Tiffany lamps, but I was very impressed by the Color Field works. The Color Field artists came around in the 50s and 60s and involved artists whose vision used power color displays on large canvas to exploit the various emotions we have from color. Seeing it up close you really are moved.

My favorite of the artists was Morris Louis. You can see some of his paintings here, but you can't really appreciate the brilliance of it from a small image file like this. He works were on huge 20x20 foot canvas, and the colors were so vivid and striking.

You can see the traces of their work in modern design shows where the designers routinely use small paintings, some they do themselves, of contrasting colors. But back in the 50s, this was ground breaking work.

Shannon and I both really enjoyed it, more than I thought we would. We got year memberships so we will go back again when some new exhibits come in.