Book Review: Family Feasts for $75

After hearing about it on a few blogs, I was excited to get this book from the library to see if I could learn a few new grocery saving tips. Unfortunately, Family Feasts for $75 a Week fell short of my expectations.

I felt a little misled by the title. Knowing Mary Ostyn has 10 children, I figured if she could feed her family for $75 a week, I had a few things to learn from her. But the author (or editors) did the math for her family and then reworked it for a family of four to come up with the title. Mary is not paying $75 a week to feed her family. Instead, she pays about $75 per person per month or around $200 per week. With her numbers our goal (for a family of 8) would be about $138 per week. We're already under that!

The first section covers the "how to" and is relatively short. If you need a "beginner's guide" to grocery savings this book would be an excellent place to start. It's not that I disagree with anything she says... in fact, the reason our grocery spending is so low is that we are doing many of the things she suggests! I was just disappointed by the fact it didn't really have an "new, improved" ideas. The second part of the book is recipes, some of them sound really good, so if you are looking for some new frugal recipes this book might be worth reading.

Either way, I suggest you check it out from the library first to see if you find it helpful before purchasing it.

Gratituesday: Books

I thought I would join in on Heavenly Homemaker's Gratituesday Challenge and share something I am grateful for today. I am thankful for books. I enjoy reading and if I didn't have other things to do would spend a good portion of the day doing just that! I love fiction (Christian mostly) and non-fiction. Cookbooks, organizing books, homemaking books, homeschooling books, craft books... you name it, I love them.

Just last night I finished The Shack by William Young. It's a tear jerker to be sure! While I take my nightly walk I listen to an audio book. I am almost done with A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain. A great treat... why did I wait so long to give it a try?!

Of course, the one book that is always on my bedside table is my Bible. While I read plenty of books, the Bible is the one book that I will never "finish". And for that I am grateful! I always hate it when a good book ends!

Sometimes I just read for entertainment. Sometimes I read to learn something. Sometimes a book really changes the way I think about something. The following are some of the books I have read in the past few years that have really challenged me. I used to view the world quite a bit differently than I do now, thanks in part to these books.

• Money: The Two-Income Trap: why middle-class mothers and fathers are going broke by Elizabeth Warren and Amelia Warren Tyagi AND The Complete Tightwad Gazette by Amy Dacyczyn
• Cleaning: Sink Reflections by Marla Cilley
  
• Coupons: Greatest Secrets of the Coupon Mom by Stephanie Nelson
• Feminism: The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality by Mary Pride
• Contraception: A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ by Rick and Jan Hess
• Children: Children: Blessing or Burden by Max Heine
• Assisted Reproduction: Everything Conceivable: How Assisted Reproduction is Changing Our World by Liza Mundy
• School: Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling by John Taylor Gatto
• Our Government: Every Knee Shall Bow: The Truth and Tragedy of Ruby Ridge and the Randy Weaver Family by Jess Walter
• Conservatism: Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots by Rod Dreher
• Food: More-With-Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre
• Islam: America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It by Mark Steyn
• Self Sufficiency: The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery
• Just About Everything: The Bible

Want to read more Gratituesdays? Head over to Heavenly Homemakers.

Daily Lit

Here is a fun website I came across a couple weeks ago... DailyLit will send you a book in installments by email (or to your reader via RSS feed!) one at a time. You don't even have to sign up for an account to try it out and it's completely free. Just find a book you want to read, enter your email address, and click subscribe. You set the schedule of when you'd like to receive the emails. If you decide you don't want to continue that book then you can unsubscribe anytime.

They have over a 1000 books. Mostly classics but also some more recent books. Some free, some you have to pay for. Each email takes under five minutes or so to read and if you are dying to know what happens next you can request the next section right away. So now you can finally read War and Peace! Me? I'm reading Wuthering Heights...

Books

I noticed something about our house the other day while I was putting away laundry. We have books or reading material in every single room of our house. We actually have book shelves in: our room, the baby's room, the kitchen, kid's room, and several on the landing upstairs. We have a big basket in the living room with kids books. We LOVE books. We are on our 4th copy of Goodnight Moon so sometimes we love our books to death.

Our TOP TEN favorite board books for children ages birth to two are:

* Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown and Clement Hurd
* The Going to Bed Book by Sandra Boynton
* Barnyard Dance by Sandra Boynton
* Snuggle Puppy by Sandra Boynton
* Blue Hat, Green Hat by Sandra Boynton
* Is Your Mama a Llama? by Deborah Guarino and Steven Kellogg
* Old, New, Red, Blue! (Cars book) by RH Disney
* The Foot Book by Dr. Seuss
* The Itsy Bitsy Spider by Iza Trapani
* Chicka Chicka Boom Boom by Bill Martin Jr., John Archambault, and Lois Ehlert

okay...make that eleven...

* Mirror Me (Baby Einstein) by Julie Aigner-Clark

One of my children had three of these (Mirror Me, Goodnight Moon, and Old, New...) memorized before he turned two!


Our TOP TEN most read (and requested) books for children ages two to five are:

* Snip Snap What's That? by Mara Bergman and Nick Maland
* Seven Silly Eaters by Mary Ann Hoberman and Marla Frazee
* Corduroy by Don Freeman
* The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs by Jon Scieszka and Lane Smith
* The Wolf Who Cried Boy by Bob Hartman and Tim Raglin
* Meet My Staff by Patricia Marx and Roz Chast
* Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett
* Birds (National Audubon Society First Field Guides) by Scott Weindensaul
* The Jolly Postman by Allan Ahlberg and Janet Ahlberg
* the books I made--see below


The boys love the books I made for them. I got blank books and used Sharpie markers to draw simple pictures. I put things in there personalized just for them: address, phone number, colors, favorite things, even our menu. I got a chunky board book instead of paper to make one for H since he loved the big boys books so much. They love to read about themselves. I think age 3 is the best age for this. They don't care if you can't draw! I didn't put any people in the books since I can't draw people or faces. I did draw a pretty sorry looking Bob the Builder in one though. If you want to avoid drawing altogether you could use stickers or now you can even take photos and have it made into a book online at Shutterfly or Snapfish.


This last year we branched out to beginning readers. I should make a top ten list of those because some are pretty bad. If you want to get started writing that would be a good place to start! Fresh material is badly needed in that genre. We did make a few of our own but I don't think they'll be published any time soon.

What we do to encourage reading:

* Keep books in all areas of the house
* Keep books where kids can reach them
* Read something every day
* Read to the kids
* Read in front of the kids
* Read in a house, with a mouse...just kidding, just seeing if you were paying attention
* Let each kid have their own books
* Make your own books
* Expect some books to get chew or ripped (hopefully not the ones YOU made!)
* Go to the library
* Record yourself reading books and let the kids listen to the CD at naptime

Please leave a comment and tell me your favorite kids book or books.