why hello March, we've been waiting for you!

The last time I posted was February 1st, exactly one month ago. In that post, I described that our family was going to be participating in "No Spend February".  So....An update on how it went??
--Actually, it went quite awesome! I'm proud to say that we did extremely well, far beyond my expectations! I won't lie, I found it to be difficult at times, and somewhat of an inconvenience sometimes, but overall - it was a lot of fun. It forced us to be creative and organized.
As always when trying to save money, things did come up. If you can recall, we had decided to only spend money on GAS, GROCERIES, and BILLS. We did that. In fact, we rocked that. However, we did have more bills than normal, which kind of sucked. During the month of February we had plumbers over twice, a dishwasher repair man, and because it was the coldest month of the year, our heating bill was higher than normal as well. But even after paying those extra bills, we could still see a difference in our checking account. I can't give you an actual number-- my husband would be the 'numbers' guy--but I can tell you that he was super impressed! We didn't go out to eat or "grab a quick bite, or coffee, or snack" once --unless we had a giftcard to use. We didn't buy eachother pointless cards and gifts for Valentine's day. In fact,  I didn't step foot in a Target or a Mall, because that would have just been asking for trouble. I didn't even check out the sale papers because I knew there was no point! Everytime I started itching to buy something, I wrote it down. It's funny now to see the stuff that I wrote down over the month--they were definitely impulse buys! Looking over it, some are things that I definitely feel are important, but others are not so much at all.
So, we did it once, and we'll likely do it again. And, we even inspired others to give it a try! (Good luck, KJK!)  But for now, it is March and I feel like I can let out a big sigh of relief. In addition to not spending any unnecessary money, we've had quite the sick household for the last couple weeks. Ryder had the worst of it, but we've all been dealing with our own version of illness, and we are so ready for the weekend! Ryder is heading up to Breezy Point and Piper is having a sleepover with her auntie and grandparents, so Max and I are having a whole day/night together alone! I can't even begin to describe how excited we are to get out of the house and spend some time together sans kids... For now we are planning on spending the day in the cities to check out our half marathon course, do dinner, of course, and maybe grab a drink or two ;) --Oh yeah, and grocery shop....Isn't that what all hot dates include?!