faithful with a little...

Everybody knows that the economy is not exactly booming, and living on a missionary's salary can be, well, faith building : ) and we wouldn't have it any other way. We feel that the Lord has challenged us to really be faithful with the little things in our life. We took a look at where most of our money was going and here is what we found. 1)With an 11 month old, we were spending a fortune on diapers. 2)Our dishwasher doesn't work very well, so we are constantly doing dishes and using a lot of dish soap. 3)Along with all of those dishes, we were going through all purpose spray (like 409) like crazy in an attempt to keep our house clean. 4) An active toddler makes for a lot of laundry and we were using a lot of detergent!
 I heard that people made their own household products before, so I decided to do a little research. Turns out you can make most of the items we were going through with just a few simple items and for a fraction of the cost! I was excited to give them a try and see if they stood up to the test of our family. We have been pleasantly surprised with the results. Most of the items use the same ingredients, so once we bought it all (totaling around 20 bucks or so) we was ready to roll. My favorite so far has been this laundry detergent. It makes around 3-4 gallons of detergent for just a penny per load. It works just as good as our store bough detergent and it smells great too!

laundry detergent (almost gone)

I am still tinkering with which all purpose spray I like, but here is a good site I have used.

Next up is the dish soap. This site has 3 different recipes that were easy to follow.

As far as diapers were concerned, we just weren't certain on how to cut that cost. Diapers are necessary, and unfortunately you can't make them at home. : )  I've known a few people who have cloth diapered in the past and I even looked into it while I was pregnant, but I just never saw myself actually going through with it. It wasn't until recently that I have been hearing a lot of great things about them. Many of my friends have been doing it and were talking about how much money they were saving monthly. Matt and I did some research and looked into different brands, and we decided that it may take a little extra work, but it would save us a lot of money in the long run. The start up cost was about $150, but the diapers we bought will last until Liam is potty trained and will be able to be used by our future kids. I do diaper laundry about 3 times per week, so our homemade laundry detergent is really coming in handy!
We are constantly trying to come up with different ways of saving money, so if anybody has any great ideas, we would love to hear them!

The products we bought are:
Arm and Hammer Baking soda
Arm and Hammer Super washing poweder
20 Mule team Borax
Vinegar
Castile soap
'Fels Naptha' soap bars


Here are some pictures of our products.

all the products we use

we started a small "garden" to help with our onion and bell pepper addiction. : )