Heavenly Homemakers

Encouraging women in homemaking, healthy eating and parenting

No Grocery Budget Comparing Allowed :)

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I am so glad so many of you are sharing about your grocery budgets and talking about what works for you in the area of food spending. I’m loving how we are all able to interact with each other in the comments and encourage each other as we look at sources for real, whole foods to feed our families.

One tiny concern I have and would like to address, is that sometimes I feel like we can look at what others spend on groceries for the month and either feel like a failure because “there’s no way I could keep my grocery budget that low” or feel like someone else is overspending because “wow, what in the world  is she buying with all that money each month?”

Neither kind of comparison is okay.

We’re all in different circumstances. We all live in different places. We all have different food sources. We all have different dietary needs. We all have different income levels. We all have different sized gardening spaces (or a lack thereof). We all have different sized kitchens and different storage situations. We all have a lot of laundry to do – oh wait…that has nothing to do with grocery budgets. Well, we don’t get to compare height of laundry piles either.

I was hesitant to post about our family’s grocery budget for several reasons, but mainly because I really didn’t want anyone to see what we spent on mostly organic, whole foods and feel like they weren’t doing a good enough job of keeping their costs down if they spend more than we spend each month.

And on the flip side, I occasionally receive comments or emails from people who can’t believe we actually spend $500/month on food because $500/month seems frivolous and outrageous and all of the food we eat just seems too high priced.

My intent is not to have anyone compare how much they spend each month with what our family spends or with what any family spends.  And please don’t be critical of me or of anyone if we happen to spend more than you spend on groceries. 

What I did intend is for us all to be challenged about what we spend and about what we’re eating and about where we get our food. I want us all to use this blog as a forum for sharing with each other and helping each other. I have no idea what the great food sources are in any place but my little neck of the woods, which is why it’s so fun to see you all sharing with each other and offering food source suggestions when you “meet” someone who lives close to you. THANK YOU for doing that for each other.

But please let’s nobody look at anybody’s food budget number and feel icky. (That may be one of the most poorly worded sentences I’ve ever wrote.)  (Okay, no…that one was.)

And also, my laundry pile is shrinking as we speak, but tomorrow it will be back up again and I’ll be right back where I started. What does your laundry pile look like? Oh wait…I said we WEREN’T going to compare laundry height. Never mind.

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Our Real Food Grocery Budget 2011

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I’m trying very hard to write a post about how much our Grocery Budget is for 2011 for our family of six. Many of you are curious about how much money it takes to eat the way we do (especially with four growing boys) and I’d really love to be able to share.

My problem with giving you a “We spend $X on our groceries each month” statement is that I don’t feel like any number I come up with will be accurate. I’d say we probably spend an average of about $500/month for our family’s food needs. But some months I spend $400 on meat alone…other months I don’t buy any meat at all…sometimes my Azure Standard co-op order is really huge…other months I barely buy anything.

I rarely shop at a grocery store, so I hardly ever have a store receipt to guide me on our food budget keeping. We get milk and cream from one farmer, eggs from our friend, chicken and beef from a farm, venison from hunters, lamb from a teenager raising lambs, raw honey from a local bee keeper, maple syrup once a year at the farmer’s market, bulk wheat once a year from a big bulk order a friend organizes. We get sweet corn in a huge batch once during the summer and put it up in the freezer.

And so, our grocery spending each month depends on what we need and when we need it. (We are blessed to have extra freezers and storage space to support our bulk purchases.)  If I were to buy what I need each month, then look at the budget and say, “Ooh goody…we have an extra $105 in our grocery budget that I haven’t spent yet…now I have money to splurge on extras like pizza and juice!” then I wouldn’t have enough the following month when we’re out of ground beef.

I don’t spend money just because I happen to have surplus in our monthly budget.  I spend the money I need to spend at the time I need to spend it and that’s it. Sometimes I go over budget, sometimes I’m way under…it all averages out.

Does that make any sense at all?

In addition, we tend to feed a lot of company each month. We LOVE having people over for meals and do this regularly. The money for this sometimes comes out of our “Giving” budget instead of out of our regular “Food” budget, but it’s all food so it’s hard to keep track of separately.

So…this is why I’m having a hard time sharing what our grocery budget looks like. I apologize for being complicated. I actually feel like the way we do things is simple, because we just spend the money for the food we need when we need it. It’s fun and it’s delicious and I love knowing where our food is coming from. But it doesn’t look very pretty on paper…or rather on screen.

As best as I could I broke down our food budget for each month with a rough guess of how much I spend on average for our groceries:

  • Raw Whole Milk and Cream:  3 gallons of milk at $4.00/gallon + 1 pint of cream at $3.00/pint each week =$15/week; $60/month
  • Free Range Eggs:  4 dozen a week at $2.50/dozen= $10.00/week; $40.00/month
  • Chicken, Beef, Lamb and Venison:  $150/month
  • Azure Standard order:  $150/month
  • Grocery Store/Walmart/Farmer’s Market (summertime):  $75/month
  • Bulk Wheat  $210/year = $17.50/month
  • Amazon Groceries:  Free with Swagbucks (more about this tomorrow)
  • Garden Produce:  Lots of hard work and sweat

We grow and preserve all of our tomato products, green beans and many other vegetables from our garden each year. We almost always have a chance to pick (for free) all the strawberries and raspberries and peaches and apples and pears and cherries we can get our hands on. We work very hard in the fall to can and freeze enough of these items to last us the entire year. This food is “free” but labor intensive. That’s okay, we get a big kick out of having dirty fingernails.

So, now that I’ve given you all of this information…I’d love for you to tell a little bit about what your food budget looks like if you care to share. Do you spend a certain amount on groceries each month, or do you just buy what you need as you need it? Do you feel like you should cut your grocery bill…or do you feel like you are buying high quality food at a good price?

Be sure to hop on over and read this too: No Grocery Budget Comparing Allowed

Tomorrow, I plan to address several questions I’ve received about eating Real Food on a very limited income. How can you eat a healthy diet when you barely have enough money for groceries?

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Hospitality Made Simple (ish) – Podcast #3

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Right this minute I have a houseful of company and I LOVE IT. While it can be hard work, there are some ways to keep hospitality simple so you can enjoy your guests.

You see, the key to relaxed hospitality is…

Oh wait, you’ll have to listen to the podcast to hear what I have to say. :) 

Heavenly Homemakers Podcast Three

Links I referred to in the podcast:

Please feel free to leave comments and suggestions concerning a future series on hospitality. Remember, it will probably take me a while to get around to writing this series…but your suggestions will help me know what to focus on when I DO get around to writing it!!

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Too Tired to Cook

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When I wrote this post suggesting that you eat out less as a simple step toward becoming more healthy, several of you asked, “So what do you do when you’re just too tired to cook?”

Well, thankfully I never get tired so this isn’t an issue at our house.

Just kidding.

I adore cooking and consider it to be one of my favorite hobbies, but there are several times a week (whether it’s breakfast, lunch or dinner) that I really don’t feel like cooking. Or I don’t feel like messing up the kitchen. Or the kitchen is already messy and I don’t feel like cleaning it and then making it messy again. Or I’ve been in the kitchen all day making tomato sauce or salsa or applesauce, which makes me feel like I’ve been cooking but there’s still nothing for dinner…and I’m tired.

Then my pitiful, starving children crawl into the kitchen clutching their empty bellies because it’s been like 28 minutes since they last put food in their mouths and they must…have…dinner…

This is when I am so thankful that I have taken the time to prepare food ahead of time and put it in the freezer.

So in answer to your questions about what I do when I don’t feel like cooking:  I make good use of the food I’ve prepared ahead of time and put in the freezer. Healthy freezer foods are a life saver for me. I HEART freezer foods!!!

Now, some foods take longer to re-heat from a frozen state (like a lasagna casserole)…so hopefully I am aware ahead of time that I need to grab something pre-made out of the freezer for a meal. (A frozen lasagna casserole takes a good two hours (+) to thaw and cook.)  Otherwise, many items just go directly to the oven in their frozen state, taking just a few minutes to reheat (like these burritos).

I encourage you to look through all the posts in my Make Ahead Meals series for ideas, recipes and suggestions for freezer cooking. It isn’t hard to spend a few hours each month making extra food and putting it into the freezer. Just do a little bit every few days until you have a nice freezer stash. You will be so thankful you did! The few hours you spend cooking ahead will save you many hours later. Plus it will save you a load of money and help you eat healthier too!

Here are the foods I’ve been making recently to have on hand:

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Banana Bread and Banana Muffins (Yes, that is tomato sauce in the background. 
It’s always good to bake something while you’re in the kitchen waiting for tomato sauce to cook down.)

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Sloppy Cornbread Muffins – these can be warmed in the oven
from their frozen state and ready in just a few minutes!

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Two loaves of honey whole wheat bread and two loaves of
cinnamon swirl bread. We discovered the other day that the
cinnamon swirl bread makes wonderful french toast for breakfast!

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Hamburger buns…and YES, I figured out how to make hotdog buns. 
SO EASY! I’ll share the “how-to” soon!

yogurt

Yogurt – okay it’s not a freezer food –
but I’m so happy to have a big half gallon jar of yogurt on hand for snacks or for soaking grains.

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Chewy Granola Bars – also not a freezer food.
I made a triple batch of these so now we have a huge supply in the
fridge ready for Matt or the boys to grab on the run!

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 I individually wrapped the granola bars and put them in a cute basket in the fridge.
  The men in my life don’t so much appreciate my cute basket, but you appreciate it don’t you? 
They do appreciate the contents of the basket, of course.

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You already know that I had a big chicken party and made four huge containers of chicken broth…

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And ten containers of cooked chicken.

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I made and dehydrated a double batch of homemade noodles
to go with that chicken and broth – perfect for these chilly fall evenings!

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Last but not least, I tried an idea I’ve been thinking about for a while – homemade poptarts!! They turned out so-so (read:  tasty but really sticky and messy), so I’ll be tweaking the recipe before I share it with you. But you can look forward to it coming sometime!

A few other fall back meals I rely on when I don’t feel like cooking:

  • Salmon Patties with vegetables
  • Quesadillas (if I have tortillas on hand)
  • Pancakes and scrambled eggs (using this pancake recipe – skipping the soaking part)
  • Hamburger patties with vegetables
  • Fried eggs on toast with smoothies

What meals do you make when you don’t feel like cooking, but you want to avoid eating out? Have you found that having frozen, premade meals in the freezer has been helpful to you?

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When to Compromise on Healthy Foods??

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I always try to make my guests feel like I went out of my way to “treat” them to some good home cookin’, but I will let you know that I do compromise a little on some of the ingredients I use when I’m feeding a very large crowd. Hey, when you’re feeding 40 people five different meals within a week’s time, can you expect a girl to make all the mozzarella cheese and tortillas and bread for every meal? 

Also, I’m not always willing to share some of my home-canned produce. I’d run out of our home-canned tomato sauce real fast if I used six jars to make enough lasagna to feed everyone one meal.

Is this selfish of me? Is it wrong of me to compromise? I don’t think so, but you may (kindly) disagree with me. My own family comes first and while I am very willing to share our good, healthy food on most occasions…I know that my resources are somewhat limited. I can’t just run right out and replace our home-grown organic produce once it’s gone. I have to ration it for the year and be wise with how I use it. 

I still use real butter and in general “real ingredients” when I’m cooking for large crowds…I just don’t always whip out my stash of real maple syrup or sucanat.

I find that in general, people are so used to eating processed foods, that even my homemade food made with what I consider to be compromise food is a treat for them. 

I also don’t feel like eating the occasional “less than the best” foods are going to kill my family. We eat very well at almost every meal. Eating the occasional store bought tortilla or white french bread from the bakery is okay. Really, I think it is.

I think that if I felt like I had to feed all of the extra people we feed our grass fed meat and homemade bread made with freshly ground flour…I would probably drop the whole thing and NOT FEED ANY EXTRA PEOPLE EVER. So what’s the trade off? Should I serve others, or be so worried about compromising ingredients that I never serve ever? 

I will say that in our day to day company…the times that we have just a few people over at a time…I DO tend to stick with our normal way of eating and I do it without a problem. We’ve budgeted in extra knowing that we feed a lot of company, therefore I buy extra meat and can/freeze extra produce to accomodate. But that’s just enough for “regular” company. Its a little different when we’re feeding 34 extra people at one time!!

Oh, and I will also admit that during these days that we’re feeding all these extras…we’re using paper plates. :(  I HATE using paper plates (both because of cost and because of waste) but seriously I don’t think I could stay sane if I was washing all those extra dishes. I’m still trying to get through a school day at home too, ya know? I bought a bag of Solo cups, had the girls write their  names on them and we’re using them all week long. And I did NOT buy styrofoam anything…but still. I hate using disposable and I’m doing it anyway. I know my limits.

Alrighty, well this was a choppy and poorly written post. Let’s blame it on the fact that my week is VERY busy and I don’t have time to concentrate or edit. :)

I’d love for you to share your thoughts on when you compromise on healthy foods and when you don’t. And when do you pull out the paper plates? ;)

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Cooking for a Crowd

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I often feed large crowds, whether it’s just a couple of families joining ours for dinner…or whether I’m feeding an entire soccer team like I’m doing this week. I think it’s rather fun, because apparently weird things like this make me happy. Big pots of food…lots of smiling people eating from the big pots of food…what could be more fun than that? 

Cooking for a big crowd doesn’t have to be stressful. I think the keys for avoiding big crowd feeding freak out are:

  • Make a thorough plan including very detailed lists
  • Prepare as much food ahead of time as possible
  • Keep the menu simple

You don’t have to make a four course meal with fancy dishes to make the crowd happy. I’ve actually found that less is more, both for my sanity and for the joy of the people I’m feeding. 

Like take today for instance. For lunch today, I fed the team Tammy’s Chicken Pasta Salad (a big hit, by the way!) and a big bowl of cut up watermelon. That’s IT. The pasta salad was the main dish, the side dish and the vegetable all wrapped up into one big pot of goodness. The watermelon was a perfect compliment to the salad and the girls raved about it all (like I had made the watermelon all by myself or something?).

Then I pulled out the homemade fudge brownies, homemade ice cream and hot fudge sauce…which I’d made five days before and stuck in the freezer. They LOVED it. It was easy to make ahead of time and wow was it a crowd pleaser. They all left our house patting their tummies and saying, “Thank you SO much for lunch…it was amazing…wow I can’t wait until tomorrow” and all that good stuff. 

You wouldn’t have to serve homemade ice cream…or even offer any ice cream at all. Simple brownies would have been fine too…I just really wanted to give the girls a great treat. And since I could make it all ahead of time it wasn’t at all hard.

Okay, here are some pictures of my cooking preparations last week. I did the majority of the cooking for the five soccer team meals all in one day. It is making my life SO much simpler this week!!! 

Please take note of all the messes in the background. There’s not really a good way to cook a huge amount of food without making big messes. Oh yeah, and my stock pot is my friend. We have SO gotten our money’s worth out of the stock pot.

I got groceries on Wednesday morning then dumped it all over the kitchen floor…

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This is actually only part of the groceries. Probably only half of it actually. But you get the idea.

I got to work then right away browning 18 pounds of hamburger meat. (Actually, I believe Matt was home at the time and he got all the meat in the pot for me.)  Once it was in the stock pot cooking, I started the ice cream machine with homemade ice cream. 

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Once the meat was finished cooking (18 pounds took forever by the way!), I separated it and seasoned some of it for the nacho bar, set aside some of it for beef enchiladas and made the rest into lasagna sauce.

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After the hamburger meat was finished, I cut up bunches of chicken breasts and cooked the pieces in olive oil for Tammy’s Chicken Pasta Salad and for chicken enchiladas.

Then, I began to assemble chicken enchiladas, beef enchiladas and lasagnas.

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Assembly lines rock. 

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I borrowed two huge pans from our church kitchen for the lasagnas. 
Now that is a lot of lasagna!

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I baked a gignormous amount of brownies. I allowed them to cool, then I cut them…

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…and froze them in pieces. 
When I served them, I just popped one into a bowl, topped it with ice cream and hot fudge. 
Easy!

It took several hours of work on Wednesday (with a lot of other things squished into the day like reading to the kids and checking handwriting books while meat cooked) but now all I have to do each day is pull food out of the freezer and make the sides to go with the meal!!! 

Now tomorrow, let’s have a little chat about how I compromised a little bit on some of the ingredients I used, shall we? Stay tuned…

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How I Freeze Food

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I’ve had many requests to show you how I freeze food. Silly me. I tell you all about what foods I make and freeze. Perhaps I could also tell you how I freeze the food. That would be nice of me wouldn’t it?!

I use these basic supplies:

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  • Pyrex Dishes
    I have six or seven pyrex dishes with lids, most of them are 9×13…but Matt surprised me with this last Christmas, so now I have a nice variety of other sizes too. I LOVE freezing food in these dishes as they stack so nicely in my freezer. If I make a casserole, this is what I freeze it in.

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  • Jars
    Are you surprised? Don’t I use jars for everything? Just be sure if you freeze food in jars, you only fill it 3/4 full, or it will expand in the freezer and crack the jar. Also, be sure the food in the jar has completely cooled before you put them into the freezer. Cracked jars are sad.  :(My favorite jars to use are wide mouth quart jars (for cooked rice and beans and hamburger meat) and half gallon jars (for broth and soup).

  • Seal-a-Meal

    One last thing I’ll tell you about is something I use A LOT this time of year while I’m freezing produce. A couple of years ago, a friend of mine bought me a Seal-a-Meal. I LOVE this thing. With the volume of strawberries, peaches, corn and green beans I freeze each year (usually a year’s supply of each), this Seal-a-Meal has been a wonderful way to make my freezer food last longer (cuts way down on freezer burn). Plus it is a HUGE space saver!! The Seal-a-Meal sucks all the air out of the bag so that I can get WAY more food in my freezer than I used to be able to when I just froze the food in freezer bags. 

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 See how the air is all sucked out of the bags!?! So cool!! 
I’ll try to do a video tutorial of this process sometime!

I think that if you just do a small amount of freezing foods…a small hand-held vacuum sealer is a great option. (I think Ziplock has a $5 variety at Walmart!)  But if you do a large amount of freezer preserving like I do a Seal-a-Meal is the way to go! By the way, I buy rolls of bags and cut them to the size I need them. They are a bit pricey (again, worth it to me since I am able to freeze SO much food and keep it good in my freezer this way). Lately I’ve been using my Swagbuck earned Amazon cards to buy big rolls of bags!

Hopefully, I have now answered many of your freezing questions…but did I forget anything?!

Food I plan to freeze this month:

  • Soft Pretzels
  • Giant Breakfast Cookies
  • Lasagna Casserole
  • Bean and Cheese Burritos
  • Popcorn Chicken
  • Turkey Sausage
  • Hashbrowns
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    Freezer Cooking for July

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    Um, first let me say that it felt very weird typing “July” just now. Really? July already? Weird.

    Anyway, Freezer Cooking for July.

    I’ll be doing a little extra cooking this week to try to stock pile some grab and eat foods.

    Here’s a list of food I’m hoping to make and freeze (or eat) during the next few days:

    It may take me a few days to get all of these foods made up. I just so happen to be in the middle of a huge, very big, gigantic, enormous project that I hope many of you will find interesting. If, that is, I EVER in my long leg-ged life get it finished! Matt is helping me. The boys are helping me. I’ve been getting very little else done but hours and hours of sitting at the computer…

    I’m excited to tell you about it within the next few days if I can at least get one more tiny (big) thing finished enough to show you. 

    But let’s just say that having some of the above foods prepared ahead would be a good idea so that as I’m working away on the computer, the boys have something besides watermelon chunks or bread crumbs to eat. 

    Anyone care to take a guess about what I might be working on? I’ve mentioned it here before, but it’s been a while.  ;)

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    Simple Steps Toward Healthy Eating, Part 1

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    When I finished telling you about Our Healthy Eating Journey, I told you I wanted to begin a new series to help break down some specific things you can do if you would like to begin your own journey toward healthy eating.

    You may already feel great about where you are on your healthy eating journey. You may already be eating a wonderfully healthy diet. If so, great! I hope you’ll still join us during this series, leaving your own helpful comments and ideas on each post!

    But, if you are just beginning your journey toward healthy eating and would like some practical tips and attainable advice on how to make this journey simple and do-able…stick around. I don’t promise to write this series very quickly. I may only be able to post a new “simple step” once every few weeks or so. But, that may be just the pace you need to begin making changes in the way you and your family eat and think about food. If you want to move faster, that’s just fine…but making too many healthy changes too quickly may be overwhelming to you and can certainly make a husband or child want to run away to find the nearest Cheeto. 

    Take small steps. Take simple steps.

    But do take steps. 

    It is important for your health and for the health of your loved ones that you start taking some simple steps toward healthy eating. Our bodies need nourishment. Start doing what you can to fill your bodies up with great nourishment! It isn’t as hard as you think! You can do this!

    Here is what I am going to suggest as a first small step toward healthier eating:  Focus on eating more fruits and vegetables.

    That’s it. All I’m asking you to do is eat a grape.  See? I’m totally reasonable and practical. Nothing weird. Nothing freaky or icky. Just focus on colorful fruits and vegetables.

    Here are a few helpful tips and ideas to encourage your fruit and vegetable intake:

    • Fresh or frozen fruits and vegetables are the most nutritious. Canned is better than none at all. Organic is best, but if that isn’t a step you’re ready to take yet, don’t worry. Just eat fruits and vegetables. 
    • Look for fruits and vegetables that are on sale…but try very hard not to focus on how difficult it might be to spend money on produce. I’ve heard people talk about how they just can’t stand to spend $3.50 on a fresh pineapple…but they’ll turn right around and throw a big bag of potato chips into their cart that costs the same amount. Let the fruits and vegetables replace some of the processed snacks that you normally buy and you won’t even feel the financial difference.
    • Stock up on your favorites. I personally can’t stand red delicious apples from the store. They taste grainy and nasty to me, so if all I have in the house are red delicious apples…I will not eat them. BUT put gala apples in the house and I’ll eat three. Each day. I LOVE gala apples. Get your favorite fruits and veggies, get your husband’s favorites, get your kids’ favorites. You are all much more likely to eat them if you love them.
    • Try something new. Have a little fun trying fruits or vegetables you’ve never tried before. Try fixing your old favorites in a new way.
    • Hide them. If you haven’t tried these Strawberry-Peach Slushies (that secretly have raw spinach in them) you are missing out. My whole family devours these slushies and never think twice about the fact that there is something green hiding within. 

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    Focus on how packed full of vitamins and wonderfulness fruits and vegetables are! Work on eating them as an incredible way to improve your health and the health of your family! What a perfect first step toward healthy eating!

    So tell me…what are your favorite fruits and vegetables? Think you can challenge yourself to eat just a few more?  (Nod your head yes.)

    Right before publishing this, I asked my husband what HE would recommend as the first, most important step a person should take toward healthy eating. I found his answer so very interesting and insightful…as well as completely different from what I was thinking. Want to know Matt’s advice and idea for a great first step? I’ll write about that next in this series!

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    Our Healthy Eating Journey, Part 8

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    healthyeatingjourney

    If you missed them, please catch up on
    Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7.

    Because of Malachi’s severe eczema, we had started looking into the world of healthy eating. Here’s one of the first (and biggest) things we learned:  This new definition of healthy eating I was reading about was WAY different from anything I’d ever heard of.

    For sure, I had spent years thinking that healthy eating meant eating as little fat as possible. Avoid the french fries and the pizza. Choose margarine over butter, don’t eat eggs, watch the cheese, eat chicken not beef. Drink fat free milk, choose fat free candy, eat fat free yogurt. This is what I’d been taught was “a healthy diet”.

    Suddenly, everything I had ever learned about eating healthy was being challenged. Not only that, but if I was going to start eating these whole foods I’d been reading about, I was going to have to actually spend money on food. I didn’t like spending money on food. What was I going to do? How important was it to eat healthy, anyway?

    About the time we were starting to wrestle with and learn about healthy eating,  my asthma started giving me some real trouble. The boys were 8, 5, 3 and 8 months at the time. I was pretty exhausted, mainly from getting so little sleep night after night trying to comfort Malachi. I was still nursing him exclusively because we were very afraid to feed him any food. I was drained.

    My guess was that it didn’t help that I was drinking a lot of Pepsi every day. Even though I was in the process of learning about raw milk and grass fed meats and free ranged chickens and organic produce…I was having the HARDEST time giving up my Pepsi. I drank Pepsi because I LOVED it. I drank Pepsi because it tasted so good. I drank Pepsi to “give me energy”. I drank Pepsi because I was in the habit of drinking Pepsi. And also, I just LOVED it. (But I think I said that already.)

    I drank it in the morning with my breakfast (I always called it my “coffee”). I drank it with my lunch. I drank it in the afternoon if I had some “down time”. I drank it in the afternoon if I didn’t get my “down time” because well…then I really “needed it”! I would usually go through almost a liter and a half a day (or 3-5 cans, depending on what I had bought on sale).

    And…if I went out to eat? I would SO take advantage of the free refills!!! Oh yes, I would. It’s almost embarassing. (almost?) 

    All that to say…my immune system was pretty shot. (I’m sure the Pepsi wasn’t the only reason, but, WOW that’s a lot of sugar consumption!)  Once my depleted body started to have worse asthma symptoms…I found myself unable to fight back. 

    It started with what seemed to be a cold, but I could not get over it. I got so sick I could hardly walk across the room for lack of energy and breath. Friends came over to help with the kids and laundry. I lost a lot of weight (I looked terrible). I had no appetite. Every breath hurt. I coughed all the time. I fell asleep in the middle of a noisy room with the kids playing all around me. I couldn’t answer questions. I remember my friends asking me what I’d eaten for lunch and I’d just give them a blank stare. Matt was trying to juggle his work and the kids and a very sick wife. He would fall asleep at night with his clothes on, he was so tired from trying to keep up. (By the way, during the time I was the sickest, I wasn’t drinking Pepsi anymore…I wasn’t that stupid! But I hadn’t decided to give it up for good yet!)

    My doctor was trying different medications to get the asthma under control, but nothing seemed to work. He was very concerned about my weight and overall health and wanted me to stop nursing Malachi since I was so depleted. He finally insisted on hospitalizing me so that we could do something about my lungs and get me hydrated.

    I was in the hospital for four days. My friends and church family were incredible. They took care of the kids. They brought meals. Some of my fellow nursing mothers were even kind enough to pump extra milk for Malachi. 

    It took almost two months for me to finally begin to feel well again. And then, I began to drink Pepsi again because I missed it so much…and I was feeling so much better, so why not?! 

    It didn’t take long for my lungs to feel wheezy and my energy to wane. I was getting sick again…

    To be continued…

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