So I am finally tired of looking up room decor for the kiddos. Especially since we now have orders to NC, and with those orders we have found out that Hubs new unit will be deploying within a few months of us getting there. I went home during Hubs last deployment because all our friends were PCS-ing and leaving and I didnt want to be there by myself. I told myself that next time Hubs leaves I would stay put... but yea... thats not going to happen. It doesnt make sense to me to stay someplace where I barely know people, with two kids that rarely get to see their extended families, when I could be in Texas with said family.
So that got me thinking, Im putting all this time into looking for room decor but we are going to try to save as much money as possible before the deployment as well as during. So since we are only going to be in the NC apartment for about 3 or 4 months (depending on when we arrive) before he leaves and I head to Texas, we are thinking we are just going to try to get a really small two bedroom or if possible a one bedroom. Maddie can sleep in the pack and play and we can just use a blow up mattress for monk, and then me and hubs will sleep on our other blow up mattress. We plan to bring as little of the furniture into the apartment as possible. We know that TMO will leave your stuff in storage for a little while and Hubs is going to try to find out exactly how long. If possible we are going to try to have TMO move our stuff from their storage facility to our storage unit without ever having to move it into our small place. Our thinking here is theres no point to unpack and then repack shortly there after.
I mean we arent crazy we realize that we will have to bring stuff into the apartment lol. We figure that most of it should fit in my car since we will be towing that behind Hubs truck, but some of the actual furniture pieces we might have them give us a partial release of goods. Not sure the actual term the call it but we did it with this last move. We needed majority of our stuff stored since we were living in a motel but Hubs needed his uniforms because the movers had accidentally packed them in the wrong box. They released the correct box to us but let us leave everything else. They will only do that once though, and you arent allowed to give them stuff back to store. The only thing I have yet to decide is if we will live out of suitcases... That is a really long time to not have a dresser... but I figure thats one of those things that we will decide when the time comes.
Anyways all that, and all I really meant to put was that I dont need to worry about decorating because by the time we get back to NC to un pack Maddie will be a little over 1 years old and Nolan will be 3(!!!!!) so tastes may change... I doubt they will, but they might... or things might go on sale... yadda yadda yadda.
So since I havent had to look up decorations and room inspirations, I decided to start searching for quick and easy dinner ideas. Which brings me to yet another reason why I love Pinterest! I have been searching for three seperate key words: dinner, crockpot, and casserole. I have over 35 recipes pinned right now, and seriously some are sooo easy it makes me wonder why I've never thought to make it on my own. Also when looking up crock pot recipes I saw that several blogs said they use crock pot liners to make clean up a breeze. So pretty much its going to take me 10 minutes to prepare the food, and then 5 seconds to clean up afterwards... and I dont have to do a dang thing in between!?! Seriously I love crock pots! Another thing I found was a website where the girl batch cooks once a month. Her and a friend get together and let their kiddos have a play date while they cook a months worth of dinners. One afternoon of cooking, and then they each take home their dinners and freeze them. Well I dont have the money to buy all the groceries that it would take to make a months worth of anything... except maybe Ramen and well we all know that thats not healthy. But I was thinking and looking in my freezer and I probably have enough room for about 4 crock pot recipes in gallon freezer bags, and then maybe 4 or 5 meals frozen in those aluminum disposable cook trays. So I might try to batch cook all our meals when we get back from the grocery store that way theres no excuses... and it will get me used to doing it, so that when Maddie is born I can try to do a couple of batch cooking sessions and have plenty of dinners to last us a while...
