Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Ice Cream Birthday Party - The Starting Point

As I mentioned here, one of my reasons for writing this blog is to record the birthday parties I planned for my babies. I have been planning to have a candy birthday party with the color theme of pink, blue, and yellow.

One of the mood boards I created for my babies parties

I know I have been terrible in planning the parties since we are already in April 2014, people! And I have not been doing my homework properly.

So last week I sort of contact the beautiful and talented graphic designer / baker / gym bunny, Marcella Clarissa to start brainstorming the ideas of having candy birthday party. Within two days, she came back to me with ideas and input.

She firstly design these pattern for the R1's second birthday party
The initial choices for the R1's birthday

We were straightly chose the first patter for the babyish and fun ice cream logo. The look itself makes me giddy excited to move forward with choosing the color scheme which she gave me the following choices

Three color scheme option

Although I very much in love with color scheme number two since it brings out the Pantone Color of the Year 2014 theme (duh!), we decided to use the color scheme number three. Yippie! Woop woop!

So I am now in the process of choosing the decoration material that goes well with the color scheme meanwhile Ms. Clarissa is designing the printables with the selected pattern.

source herehere, and here
Excuse my minimal Photoshop skill, I am learning to create better photo collages. Do you think we can finally have a decent planned birthday party? #fingercrossed

Sunday, April 6, 2014

Managing Our Groceries

I would like to start to manage our groceries more properly. Currently, peoples in our household are my husband and I, our two adorable babies R1 and R2, and the nannies for each. For the nannies we decided to have catering prepare their daily meal. The catering deliver their meals everyday at 10 AM which is more or less when the nannies have their late breakfast. They serve three types of meals and they last for a day. Our groceries is more like an additional for the menus from the catering.

Menu for April, three meals a day for the nannies

As for my husband and I, we like to have light breakfast like coffee and toasted bread or the ready-made breads from the bakery. We have our lunch out in the office since I don't cook, hopefully next year this flaw of mine will change next year. For dinner, we usually eat out or buy something to bring home.

Coffee with sugar and some ready-made bread. Man, I need to learn how to cook #sigh

Baby R1 is now 20 months old and R2 just starts to eat solid. We will always need to have some fruit, vegetables, and chicken meat. Their milk is certainly the utmost important things in the list of course.

I have been saving this format I have downloaded from the net for quite sometimes. I don't remember where I have downloaded it from. Basically, I start using this format because even though they categorize the groceries into so many category, I found it applicable to our situation, moreover since I will be the one (and maybe the only one within this household) who uses the list, I find its arrangement is the closest to how I categorize my groceries (I put this grocery categories as a mental note, that is)

My grocery list draft

Some of the category are applicable to our household while others don't so I have altered the list to our own needs and expand it further into a price book and an expense tracker.

After 5 months (already?) of trying to manage our household groceries, I concluded that we always need these grocery must-haves:

Our grocery staples

We always keep stock for the following items :
1. Broccoli
2. Carrots
3. Boneless chicken breast
4. Eggs
5. Meatballs
6. Red chili
7. Potatoes

At first I thought that since we need them regularly, I bought them in bulk. But we found that system is not working since a couple of times when we want to cook them, the vegetables may not be as fresh as I first bring them home

Nowadays we purchase those items every week or at least every 10 days from our local market except maybe for the meatballs which we still buy in bulk for 60 pieces.

Do you categorize your groceries or just buy as you went along? What are your fridge staples? Please do share how you manage your groceries.