Homemade Pizza and Dental Expenses



March 13 - Lots of homemade and partially homemade goodies lately.  I made homemade pizza dough and turned it into pizza pinwheels.  Then we have had 3 days of bento box type lunches.  It's been fun to get ideas off of pinterest and bento box websites.  Abby seems to have enjoyed all the lunches so far.  You'd think all the homemade items would save me money, but actually our grocery budget has been going up, up, up.  I set aside $160 for this week and blew through that and another $30 before Wednesday.  I had to make another run for butter, sour cream, and cheese for our baked potato bar tonight and that plus a few other items ran up another $40.  So now just this week, we are up to $230 for FOOD!  Next week won't be a light week because we are out of all meat in the freezer and I'll need to get at least ground beef and chicken, plus all the other odds and ends.  I'm really going to have to sit down with the budget and take a long look at our grocery consumption.

Claire had a tooth removed today.  It was in the way of a permanent tooth behind it and she will have a spacer put in on Friday.  That was $242 that I had not planned on.  I thought I would get a bill at a later date.  Luckily I was able to quickly transfer some money from our Christmas fund to cover it.  Budgeting for medical and dental is not a top priority in our budget.  Whenever I build up the fund a little bit, it gets used.  So it's frustrating.  I'd like to get a couple of thousand in the HSA and then not have to think about the copay here and the deductible there each year.  Will probably need to re-work the budget to include a larger contribution.

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