Milk & Water

A couple of weeks ago, I informed Patrick that I was going to cut out juice and Crystal Lite. His response was "Good for you!" Knowing that he thought I meant only for me I said, "No, no, no. No more juice or Crystal Lite in the house at ALL!" He wasn't nearly as excited about that. I had already been cutting back significantly on the soda. But we were keeping both orange juice and apple juice in the refrigerator and going through it so fast that it was a burden on our budget. And I myself was addicted to Crystal Lite after having weaned myself off soda. So while Patrick wasn't ecstatic about giving up the juice, he supported me in my decision because he knew how much money we would save. The transition from juice to only milk and water was difficult mostly for Mwende. At first she refused to drink water saying that she thought it was yucky. So I was making a lot of "chocolate" milk (aka Ovaltine) for her. But then I realized that what we were saving from not buying juice, we were spending on extra milk. So I restricted milk to only breakfast and dinner. They could have as much water in between as their hearts desired. Fortunately now, Mwende wants water just as much as she previously wanted juice. Even I'm getting used to drinking water with nothing added.

So if you come over to our house, the only drinks you'll find in our fridge are milk and water (and the occasional wine or beer!)

TV

When I first married my husband he had 4 television sets. He lived in a college town where graduating students would put the stuff they couldn't take with them out on the curb, so it wasn't hard to pick up a few. Then I brought my own television set into the marriage leaving us with a grand total of 5. There was one for the living room, one for the kitchen, one for the bedroom, one for the guest room and one for the office. I'm honest surprised we didn't have one for the bathroom! I immediately embarked on a quest to reduce us to a 1 tv set family. This was more difficult than I had imagined as my husband didn't want to give up a single set. But I finally wore him down and we moved to California with only one tv. After that I had a new goal. Get rid of the cable. For one, I hated that I allowed Mwende to watch so much tv. It just seemed so much easier to just let her watch tv to keep her entertained. I worked in a lot of playdates so try and offset that, but when we were home the tv always seemed to be on. In addition to that, my husband depended on the tv for his downtime. So when he got home from work the tv really was always on. (Especially in March for college basketball's "March Madness"). So at some point the tv started to stand for everything I didn't want in life. Zombies for kids and a husband who's attention I had to compete for.

So here we are in California with 1 tv. I started trying to talk Patrick into canceling the cable a couple of years back. He was definitely not keen on the idea. Then this past weekend he surprised me. He was in Indianapolis on a business trip and called me out of the blue to say that he thought we should cancel the cable and just order Netflix. I was ecstatic! Finally. So we made the calls to Time Warner and canceled the cable and upgraded the internet (from Road Runner Lite to Road Runner Basic) to enable streaming Netflix. We'll get some rabbit ears so we can continue to watch the news (and maybe a little American Idol! Okay, that's just me). I bet Patrick will even get the occasional basketball game on ABC or NBC or something. And if I can't get FOX with the rabbit ears, that's okay. I will survive without American Idol and I probably don't really want to listen to Mary Murphy's screeching on So You Think You Can Dance anyhow.

By the way, somehow we ended up with a new tv set through this whole thing. That's okay though, I made sure the old one went out to the curb.