Welcome to the weekly update.
So as I said last week, my food planning goes from Saturday to Friday. I calculate the monthly budget from the first Friday after payday to the Saturday after the next payday. So if payday falls mid-week, then the next Saturday is when I start counting the budget. This month there are 4 weeks in that timeframe so I aim to spend £60, as one of those weeks is Christmas, it’s likely that instead of a detailed plan and breakdown, I’ll just add the £15 to the money that Ma and I spend on that!
So this week is the first week that I did my own shopping, instead of giving Ma a list. The plan needed to take account of the lunch for Ma’s birthday on the 4th December, and the bacon sandwiches that I promised Ben as a thank you for taking me to the hospital on the Tuesday. I still had a lot of food in the freezer and even though I’ve been a bit more active, I’m still not hungry enough to eat three meals a day.
I got the majority of what I needed in Lidl and then topped up at Sainsburys
The sharper eyed amongst you will notice that I forgot to buy puff pastry and bought a bottle of tonic and jar of red pesto. The days of me always having the ingredients for a G&T in the house are mostly gone but a I wanted one with Ma to celebrate doing my own shopping. So tonic was purchased, however because I’m an idiot, I forgot to buy limes! So I spent an extra £1 to buy two limes and a lemon from the Tesco local. Living where I live is great for lots of reasons but the abundance of places to buy food is both a blessing and a curse. In total I spent £15.06. A little bit over the budget but I thought ok for the first week.
To eat there was pizza because I was mobile enough to make it. I used my last bag of frozen dough and it was amazing.
There were bacon rolls on Tuesday as a brunch before we set off for the hospital.
There was spinach and chickpea rice, I love it when I see a recipe that I like the look of and I have all the ingredients for it in the cupboard/freezer!
I ate it the first night with a piece of smoked haddock & afterwards with a fried egg.
For Ma’s first birthday lunch (she had two lunches it’s not the first time she’s ever had a birthday and the details of the second will be in next week’s update!). We had leek, anchovy and goats cheese tart, with new potatoes. This is possibly my mother’s favourite meal and her request for lunch. Pudding was gingerbread, also a request from Ma and part of her birthday present (so not from my food budget). 
Other meals were mostly soup and a date bar with yoghurt and stewed fruit. The good news is that I got to sort through the freezer and have a bit of tidy, it’s nice when it’s got good stuff in it but not so much that I can’t open it, I want to defrost it before Christmas so running it down a bit seems like a good idea.
Tuesday was my final appointment at the hospital and it was pretty much as expected. The headlines are that the foot is still not straight but the surgery corrected it as much as it could be corrected. At the moment, the foot is still swollen and I can’t get my shoes on yet, but it’s looking good. More disappointingly, getting back to walking and exercise isn’t going to happen as quickly as I hoped. I’m going back to work on reduced hours for the next six weeks because of the difficulty of walking and standing during the commute and my hour of walking a day is off the cards until about March and I won’t be able to start body balance classes until at least June. The last of the bad news is that I had hoped that once I’d recovered, I would be able to run again but the consultant has said no running ever again! In fact he’d prefer that I learnt to walk on my hands! The bad but not unexpected news is that the likelihood of reoccurrence of the bunion is high. The surgery has bought me another 10 years or so but the mechanics of my feet are such that it’s probably not a permanent fix, it’s gone from a severe to a moderate bunion and it is less painful so all of that is good.
The rest of the week was pretty quiet, Ma came over on Friday for a birthday lunch and stayed over for her second birthday lunch with the rest of the family on Saturday. 
Cue cuddles with Joe and tickle fights with Oli! 
I spent Sunday sorting myself out for a working week, expect me to be mostly exhausted this week…
I did say that 2015 was austerity year and so it has proved to be. I tried to be more careful about money and wasn’t 100% successful about 70%, I’d say.
All of that is positive. The big change is that I got honest about it. I took a deep breath and told people that Christmas will be on a small scale this year and explained why. This is a big deal emotionally for me, I don’t like asking for help and I worry that if I don’t have it or appear to have it all under control, people won’t want to be around me. Which is ridiculous as I have good friends who are good people and like me for more than what I can do for them and how messy my life is or isn’t. However, it’s been a leap for me and I’ll talk more about that next week.
I’ll post every Tuesday about the food and shopping the week before and weeks run Saturday to Friday because Saturday usually when I shop.
Any money I don’t spend from this budget will go into a money box and at the end of the year we can see if I managed any spare.
I hesitate to say it but the only bad thing about this week was the dawning realisation that very soon, I’m going to be well enough to go back to work….
