We eat a plant-based diet and use the insta-pot almost daily. It's great for beans and grains along with recipes that I've found. Some sites that I use are Oh She Glows and 365 days of slow cooking + insta-pot. I'm not sure about the price though because I bought my 6qt last year on an Amazon Prime Day deal.

To add to the pp: We follow Eat to End Diabetes / Eat to Live by Joel Fuhrman. It's a plant based diet. The books are wonderful for the principles, but I don't follow the recipes because they're too time consuming. I used the weekly prep plan at Hello Nutritarian to get started and then branched out by googling recipes. It was a learning curve at first but now is really easy. Breakfast and lunch were easy -- it was dinner that was harder for me. It's less expensive than when we used to eat meat and dairy because we didn't replace those things with expensive substitutes. We also buy all of our nuts from Azure Standard which is MUCH cheaper than buying at a store. Our entire family is on the diet, including our grandchildren when they're with us ( except they do have milk and some cheese ).

We also switched to a plant based diet with Eat to End Diabetes. We've been doing it since late July, and it's made a huge difference in our quality of life. Besides the weight loss, our bodies seemed to have healed themselves of our aches and pains. My "brain fog" has lifted. It's encouraging to know it could help with dementia.

Check out groupon for fun exeperiences they can share with friends after the holidays. We found an escape room groupon for ds' college town.

Just looking at your list, I'd think simple curries might fit the bill as an easy dinner. I'm assuming that coconut milk is okay. Maybe your picky ones would like the sweetness of some of the dishes. Will they eat any simple asian dishes like beef and broccoli?

I'd wait until April. We visited a college with ds3 when it was closed because we were close by on another trip. Even though we knew it would be closed, we ended up being frustrated that everything was locked up and no one was around. lol

We like Watergate Salad. MIL makes it for holiday meals and birthdays. When the kids were younger, they kept track of who's turn it was to grate the nuts in the little hand grinder. Such sweet memories!

We gave up prime a couple of years ago. I'm saving money by not buying the deals that are posted everywhere. Now, if I see a deal, I have to really want it enough to place a minimum order and wait for it to be delivered at normal speeds. We have Netflix and get Kindle books from the public library. If I need something not available locally, Target.com usually has what I need with 2 day shipping. With that said, I'm probably going to buy a month of prime( $12.99 ) to watch Mrs. Maisel next month. I really like that show!

nm

What are some things you use it for? Our last of four is headed to college next year so we're downsizing. Before that, we usually purchased the larger sizes. For example, my Lodge cookware is six quarts. I'm having a hard time visualizing less.

My grandma did. We're in the south. On an aside, I was reading a Royal Spyness book this weekend, and Fig was lamenting the use of "napkin" instead of "serviette" just because her husband used the word "weekend". lol

Thank you! This is awesome info that I had no idea about.

This is what's happening with my Lodge, too. I never thought I'd pay LC prices, but I'm looking to upgrade as soon as I find a good deal. So glad @Corraleno posted the advice about outlets and other deals.

Could you be eating because you're bored and not ready for sleep yet? Is there something else you could do from the 8:00 - 9:30 time slot instead? Maybe a stroll around the neighborhood, studying something you're interested in, or a hobby of some sort

I had trouble with it too. After you click through Ebates, go to the top corner and click on the Hulu icon. It'll take you to the 99cent offer.

How about vacuuming the dryer ? ( says the mom who'd rather not admit to it! ) lol

Ds birthday is after Christmas. We give the larger gift on Christmas and then smaller gifts and dinner on his actually b-day.

Noooooo... I hadn't heard this news. We visit TJs every month or so, and TTO soap is always on our list. Thanks for the heads up. We'll certainly email them to bring it back!

You should! When i purchased a new washing machine, I brought my largest king size comforter to the store to check that it would fit. lol

{{{hugs}}}

I used to own and manage a business while homeschooling and have taught outside classes for most of our homeschooling years. It seemed that we were always busy and trying to get things done. It was hard and as others have said you can't do it all. In a nutshell, we managed by creating a monthly schedule that included heavy work days for our business which would then be lighter school days and vice versa. I always tried to keep an overview of our calendar so we knew if the family and homeschooling were being shorted. For my outside classes, I really have to resist my perfectionist tendencies and keep to a time limit which is reasonable. I absolutely love teaching my subject and the subject itself, so self-policing is a must. Seriously, my timer is still my number one tool to get things done. On a daily level, I made certain that our days started together and tried to meet the kids needs first before starting ( or continuing my early morning hours) with business responsibilities. Late nights didn't usually happen here. When the kids went to bed, we stayed up maybe an hour later then went to bed. It's too easy to keep working late into the night so we tried to avoid it altogether. Consistent routines helped all of us stay on track. In our case, we decided that we couldn't sustain the business growth ( I still teach outside classes. ), our sanity, and our goal to homeschool so the business had to go. The money was nice and somewhat needed, but thankfully it wasn't necessary for daily survival. If it had been, then we'd have had to come up with a different solution. Hopefully our experience is helpful. eta: In hindsight, I would have hired out some of the housekeeping and possibly a sitter to do some fun things with the kids. It probably wouldn't have kept our business going though because it was just too much overall.

That's really awesome that you have a council-wide group for hiking and camping. We would have liked something like that. I agree that you can get creative with the journeys which we did when we could. We really liked our Media journey done as Cadettes. Others like Sow What were more of a get it done. Don't get me wrong -- we enjoyed the time we spent in GS. We just preferred the autonomy and wide scope of the program before Journeys were made a prerequisite for awards.

We had pretty much the same experience with GS. DD completed her Gold last year and had no desire to convert to lifetime membership when she aged out. We were part of a wonderful multi-age troop for our entire experience ( Daisy- Ambassador ). When Journeys were rolled out, our troop made the decision to only do the minimums that were needed because the girls had other interests and found the Journeys too simple and basic. The Ambassador level journeys were especially simplistic considering the age group they were written for. We also did lots of outdoor activities: camping, hiking, rafting, backpacking -- things which GS seems to ignore except for the expensive weekend "campouts" and their summer camps. The narrow program focus is driving girls away.

How about Cracker Barrel? We don't live in this city but have done CB before when traveling. It looks like there are several there.

Our experience is limited, but I'll throw it out there. We looked at this type of loan last summer and chose not to pursue it. Our reasons were the higher interest rate and the massive documentation of the repairs and estimates that were requested. It wasn't a home that we truly loved so we were okaying with letting it go.