Frugaleers hurtling through November... is it too early to mention the C word? All welcome for money saving chat!

[Cagliostro]

Hi all, please settle in for chatting about all things frugal, and all things everything else :o

Sunny You do things that would frighten the life out of me.

Life You must've fell really hard. I bet your both shattered this morning.

I'm having another go at Mayo this week. I'm not being beaten by something my mother can make. She can do perfect rice with no measures or timings either

Oh life pleased it’s feeling better.

I’m buying lunch again today. The dc have been dicks this morning so haven’t had time to do anything and really cba now. Plus the electric was off all day yesterday so that saved us some money, right?!

life the typo in your last sentence made me laugh!

fluffy I could never do rice but followed Jamie’s rice method in ministry of food (I think). Perfect rice every time now. Although I never get the quantity right. We always have mountains of leftover rice.

I’ve never made mayo. Dm does though but only for special occasions (Christmas will be the next one - we always have fish as a starter - smoked salmon prawns crab and longoustines. Mmmm).

Picked car up yesterday. The bill hasn’t been sent yet but it only needed brake lights. So cost will probably be somewhere in the region of £100. Ish. I took it to my dads mechanic and he is good - won’t replace things unnecessarily (unlike the ford garage here who “hmmmm” at everything and take three days to do a basic service and don’t give you a loan car...)

Not sure what we’re up to today yet. May go for a walk. Might take ds to the garden centre to look at the Christmas decorations. And might price up trees. I want a big tree this year. A huge one. Like the one we had a few years ago which totally took over...

£39.50 on Photobox for 3 2018 calendars with pictures of ds. One for Dm and df one for dgrandma and one (maybe) for mil.

Photobox have a buy one get one free offer code at present FREE17 is anyone needs personalised stuff.

We slept last night! Well until 5 am but that's progress!

Hope your hand is ok Life.

NSD today all being well.

WOW!! snuggly amazing! Did you sleep too or did you stay awake all night wondering when everyone was going to wake up?!

Ds was super cranky last night. We bathed him and nothing seemed to help. I think he was over tired. He didn’t nap after 11 yesterday. But slept from 10 to 4. He’s napping now but I’m goinf to have to wake him up in a bit as were going out for 12. And he’ll need another bottle and a change etc. He was awake at 630 and went back to sleep at about 9. So I’ve used the last hour and half to shower dress do a load of washing change our bedding etc.

Not only did I sleep Em I booted dh out of bed to deal with them while I dozed!

All our dcs have had a nap at 9am as babies I think DD continued it until well past 12 months. Great time to do jobs!

Aargh gallbladder (or whatever the hell it is) attack since 2am. Still not gone away so it's worse than Friday. Fuck!!! It's moved up to my upper back as well, feels like my ribcage is in a vice.

Cag you must feel awful. Take it as easy as you can and I hope you feel better later

Thank you! Lovely friends offered help 💕 Including taking caglets to their club later (wouldn't be fussed normally but it's the culmination of a project this week and DD was gutted to miss it). Thankfully DD is able to do stuff like stick a pizza in the oven so we can just have a very easy day at home and they can watch DVDs etc. At least Cagletini is so young she won't notice or care if we stay in bed all day!

I am very glad I have the scan tomorrow. Hopefully that'll figure out what's going on

Oh cag that does sound like where dp had his gallbladder pain. They did try to fob dp off for a long time, but with this you need to be pushy. The pain is far to bad to just put up with. I hope your scan shows nice big stones I'm not being cruel as this is a clean cut decision. Dp had inflamation and 'sludge' and then you get into "lets wait and see" territory. No, lets not wait.

Spent £7 in tesco, and £53 in what was staples, but is now office depot? Packing stuff (how can you lose a roll of bubble wrap?), archive boxes, exciting stuff!

Listing ebay stuff today (am up to 70 active listings, about 600 to go then), and knitting etsy orders. The knitting is more fun. Will go and see my mum later, it will be warm round at hers!

More enabling sorry. but i just saw on the black friday thread that Lego Star Wars advent calendar is half price £11.50 at asda, it takes discount off at checkout.

lego advent calendar link

Oh and i just bought a Dyson handheld (£130 - reduced) on Dyson website . I wish i had it now though,need to blitz house for visitors

Cag ..

I'd better go tackle the housework..

Thanks Fluffy. I think I must be the world's shyest extrovert or something. The really weird thing is that doing a recorded voice-over for a talk is very much like doing it live, so I had to find out which room and how many people so that I could do it right. Very very odd.

Beavers is great though. Last night we did junk modelling where all the kids were sellotaping cardboard boxes and bottles together to build their own imaginary thing. At the end I had to tidy up all the rubbish and it was really hard to know which things were discarded bottles and which were critically important spacecraft.

Both of these things are free fortunately. Phew!

Yes I get what you mean lonely I am kind of worrying that it'll be really minor (also because if this pain is minor then what the hell does a worse attack feel like?!) and while normally I would be happy to wait and see - I managed the gestational diabetes stuff well admittedly while whinging a lot about it and I could learn a whole new thing if I had to... if the pain is going to be this frequent (and not have any obvious triggers so unpredictable) I'm really not sure I can cope with this now :( it seems it is very common for new mums to have their gallbladders out within a few months of birth. I had no idea it was a Thing before.

Hahahahaha ds just did the most massive poo. We’re at my parents and Dm said there was no way he’d pooped. She volunteered to prove me wrong and change his nappy.

She was wrong. It was a 12 wiper. And the. He peed on her. Hahahahaha.

May I join. Scrimping and saving in run up to Christmas. At the moment I'm

• Working my way through both freezers and food cupboardsand trying to buy as little as possible though keep failing on this
• keeping heating off when children are at school putting it on just before they get home
• Doing online surveys - very slow but might manage to get something by January when it will be useful
• Getting as much as possible from reduced counter

Today's victory was a birthday cake! My mum's birthday tomorrow and she's with us for dinner tonight so getting her an early cake. Went into M&S and first thing I saw was a lovely chocolate birthday cake reduced to £2.89 from £8.60! I'd budgeted £10 so very pleased.

Price of food astronomical though. Went into co-op last night - 2 packs sausages, 2 packs bacon, (had finished what was in freezer) some peppercorns, big bottle heinz ketchup and one of hp sauce and a packet of lemsip - nearly £25... I checked the receipt twice but it was right :(

Budgeting not going well :( Should have gone to lidl but didn't have time

lists I've noticed that about food prices too. I keep thinking that things ought to be 59p but are actually £4. I think it may not be the 1980s any more.

Think you're right.... butter is what kills me :(

Got a huge pile of dd's old school uniform and have just had an email to say that the school are having a second hand uniform sale next week so need to sort that - might bring in a few pounds

The co-ops very expensive here too. Welcome lists.

Cag Are you able to take any painkillers? I have heard gallstones are awful from patients. One woman had them for three years before diagnosis.

NSD & I got a free pack of sanitary towels for a survey.

Hugs Cag, you know I'm here. I love dungarees on babies and toddlers. Don't think I could get away with them on my big kids anymore. (Imagines DS, 18, in dungarees )

Ahhh, em, I remember those poosplosions well. A couple of times I was out and had to buy new clothes!

Hello Sunny, I'm a Beaver leader too. Is the grant for Beavers? I leave that sort of thing to someone else, I don't like talking to people. I don't really like people. Or children. 😂

£18 spent today on food and snacks. Left my rucksack in McDonald's, phoned and they said it wasn't there. Went back an hour later to ask and they had it. 20 minutes later they phoned to say they had it. Hmmm, no! Luckily there was nothing valuable in it, I only took it to carry my water bottle.

Got a rebate from the council tax, and also a bill for council tax. Not sure why they didn't take it off the refund, but these places never seem to do things the sensible way!

Spent £50 pounds yesterday on tickets for History of Magic exhibition at the British Library - I've told the kids it's counted towards Christmas presents. They are very excited (especially as it means a day off school. 2 will be "ill" Bad mum alert! I've told DS2's school why as he has ASD and wouldn't be able to lie) it's educational anyway!

Lists did you used to be on this thread before or do I know you from a Christmas thread? Can’t remember

£4.30 on lunch. It was worth it, lovely homemade curried sweet potato soup. Mmmm.

Cag that sounds horrible

Yes I drift on and off this thread - keep trying to rein myself in :)

I sorted the freezers out the other day - incredible how much food there was. We have joint of pork in the oven now that i didn't even know we had