Jodi’s January Updates

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Wow this year is already flying by! This year I’m working on my prepping following two plans. I’m working through The Survival Mom’s Weekly Prepping Calendar, and I’m swapping out my 3 month supply foods and replacing them with meals-in-a-jar. I wanted to give a little update on how I am doing each month to help me stay accountable and to give you a behind-the-scenes look at my own prepping plans. This is a little bit late for my January report but late is better than never right?

My savings plan is going strong, but I have to admit it’s starting to feel a little harder already. The most annoying thing is having the cash on hand to put in my envelope! I’ve started selling a few things and stashing away the money to use for future weeks. lol. My kids made me this cute envelope to store our savings in (I think they think they get to share the money at the end haha).

I loved The Nightengale! It’s one of my favorite WWII books I’ve ever read. I read it on vacation and was sobbing on the airplane because I happened to read the end right during my flight. It was so fun to talk with everyone in my Facebook Group about what we learned from reading the book and how much we enjoyed it.

February’s book is called Locker Nine and they didn’t have it at my library so I did a free trial to Kindle Unlimited on Amazon because it’s included as one of the free books! I’m excited to read the rest of the series too if it’s good.

There were a few tasks to collect papers for your grab and go binder (emergency binder). The birth certificates were easy because I already have them in my Prepare My Life Planner. The other task was to compile my insurance documents. This was another story. Some of them I just have in my email and never bothered to print them, others I’ve stashed in my “financials” folder and forgotten about. I started to collect these to include in my planner but still have a few to go.

One of the cooking assignments was to eat a rice and beans dinner. The week I planned to do that got a little bit crazy and I ended up eating out at a Mexican restaurant instead of cooking the recipe I had planned for the night. I’m ashamed I failed. lol. But I have practiced cooking with beans and rice a lot so I feel pretty comfortable using them. I also enjoyed flipping through my Peggy Layton book “Cooking with Beans and Rice” to get some more ideas.

The other cooking was to make a soup and watch a movie. I did this one as I was testing out a new meal-in-a-jar recipe but I ended up doing it as a crockpot soup and it got a little bit mushy. So that was a good lesson to learn and next time I will just make it in a regular saucepan! We watched Infinity Wars for our movie to get us excited for the new Avenger movies coming out soon. It made for a fun family night

We were also supposed to track our food expenditures in January so that we can spend LESS in February. I was traveling for 10 days of the month so it was not a typical month for me so I am going to do this task in February and then try to spend less in March. A few of our group members shared their thoughts on this post here. (You have to be a group member to see the comments).

Meal-in-a-Jar Monthly Group

So the other thing I worked really hard on in January is putting together my first monthly meal-in-a-jar group. I sent out the information on how to create your own jar meals for everyone who joined the email group (details can be found here). But I also did two classes at my house where we all put together our meals together. It was a lot of work but it was so fun!

I’ve got 10 meals put together and am hoping to have 100 by the end of the year so if I can keep it up and not use too many of them for “emergencies” I think I will be on track to hit that. Here are a few pics from our Meal-in-a-Jar Class. If you live in Utah County and want to join us next time let me know, or if you’d like to organize your own group I can help with that too

How did YOUR January go? Leave a comment and let me know!

-Jodi W.
http://foodstoragemadeeasy.net

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