It is tulip season in the Pacific Northwest. I love tulips and the years we make it out to the tulip fields are my favorites! We don’t go every year but we try to go at least every other. We have been to RoozenGaarde and Tulip Town and both are great. We try to switch it up since they have very different styles. For 2023 we went to RoozenGaarde and it was beautiful! We went super early on a Sunday morning and the crowds were not bad at all. It was raining most of the long drive up but once we got there the rain stopped.

We didn’t go quite early enough to get the gardens to ourselves but it was pretty empty when we got there just after opening on a cloudy Sunday morning. Cloudy days are the best for taking photographs because of the way the light bounces off of the tulips. I always get the best pictures on cloudy days.

I loved the combinations of purple hyacinths and red tulips. They were very beautiful together!

The pink and white tulips were some of my favorites!

These purple and yellow ones were not quite open yet but I took a picture of them so that I could remember which ones I like in case I am ever brave enough to plant tulips again. I am going to have to take some serious pest control measures because the moles ate all of my bulbs from underground. It was very disappointing!

I thought these raggedy looking pink ones were beautiful as well. They also were not quite open but I loved how the water drops looked on the petals so I took a picture anyway.

I am not always a huge fan of daffodils but these apricot an cream ones were so stunning! I may try to grow more daffodils next fall since the squirrels and the moles tend to leave these alone more.

My kids called these daffodils “egg flowers” because they looked very much like an egg. These were also some of my favorite flowers I saw that day.

I tried to get a good picture of these flowers but it was slightly windy and there wasn’t a lot of room to get a good angle. I am not sure what these were called but they looked like upside-down tulips. We all loved these ones!

It isn’t a trip to the tulip fields without the obligatory picture taken across seemingly endless fields of blooms. I wasn’t able to recreate my purple tulip photo but I did get some great pictures of the reds and yellows that made up most of the fields.

There were only a few rows of the purple tulips this year but they were still stunning.

Surprise alpacas! We took a break from walking to watch these alpacas eat. They were super cute!

My favorite tulips this year were these red ones that almost glowed in the light. This photo hasn’t been edited at all and it really shows how bright the tulips were under the overcast sky.

We had a great time at RoozenGaarde this year. I saw a lot of tulips I have not seen before, or don’t remember, and it wasn’t too cold for us. We just made sure to wear our rain boots since the fields can be muddy. I did buy one bouquet of some deep red tulips for my mom but otherwise we didn’t spend much more than the admission tickets. Parking was free with our ticket.

I should also probably note that this year there is a new farm called Tulip Valley Farms which we have not been to. If you are local you might have heard about some of the controversy around Tulip Valley Farms versus Tulip Town. I won’t go into detail here because I am no expert but basically the person who started Tulip Valley Farms used to be one of the owners of Tulip Town and there is now a lawsuit going on around it. I did link their website below if you want to check it out.

Thanks for reading about our trip to the tulip fields this year! Each field has different pricing and policies for dogs, parking and drones so be sure to click the links below if you want more information on that. RoozenGaarde was open the earliest in the morning which is why we chose it. We are all early risers and we had afternoon plans so we had to be home by a certain time. Also look out for another shop update at Oscoey Shop in time for Mother’s Day with tulip stickers, postcards and a new mini tulip field cross stitch pattern!

Links:

Oscoey Shop

RoozenGaarde

Tulip Town

Tulip Valley

2022 was a year with mixed results for me. As I reflect on my 2022 goals post from March of this year I am struck by how different my year turned out from where it started. I started the year gung ho about my career and moving up the corporate ladder then a family member got very sick and my priorities completely shifted. It is crazy how one event can change the direction of your life. I took some time off shortly after I wrote this post because I was experiencing major burnout and at the moment I do not see myself going back to a corporate type environment any time soon. To be clear, my coworkers were fabulous and I loved my team but I realized in taking some time off that I love working for myself and being able to set my own pace.

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2022 Goals

Our goals from last year were:

1. Max out IRAs
2. Increase our 401k contributions
3. Save, save save.
4. Decrease our grocery spending
5. Be more mindful of our spending

After looking them over again I would say we met most of our goals for 2022 which is surprising. The only one I am not sure of is our 401k contributions. We did initially increase them but then decreased them for a few months and then increased them again towards the end of the year so I don’t know where our ending percentage was for the whole year but we are increasing my husband’s for 2023 by 1%.

As far as grocery spending goes we definitely made huge progress on that. We started out the year spending $1000 plus a month on food even though we were also getting free lunches from the universal free lunch program. For the last few months we have kept our spending to between $400 and $700 which is amazing progress. You can check out my grocery content on my Oscoey YouTube channel linked here. Below is our last grocery haul of 2022.

I am really proud of our grocery progress and filming as much of our groceries as well as a weekly fridge and freezer recap has been helpful to keep track of where we are at. I am going to keep up with it for 2023 as well as work on some self-care goals such as doing more puzzles!

2023 Goals: Puzzles

I am using my planner more diligently this year to help me keep track of everything. I use the Commit30 planners and love them. I love that they have goal setting built in every month but there isn’t a lot of pressure to keep up with it. The website can be found here. They are currently on sale so check them out!

That’s it for my recap of our 2022 goals. Short and sweet this time. Look for more posts surrounding our puzzles, cross-stitch and of course, finances!

Links:

Commit30 Planners

New Year’s Puzzle Start: If Fish Could Walk

Puzzle Trays

We were out of a lot of staples for July so I knew we would have an expensive month for groceries. We are still working hard at keeping our food budget well under $1,000 by watching prices more carefully, eating up what we have and reducing our food waste. Our ultimate goal is to keep it under $600 a month for our family of four plus our oldest daughter who is out of the house. She comes over very frequently for meals still and we love to have her so I include her in our grocery budget as a partial member.

We were having a hard time tracking our spending with both of us going to the store since we buy groceries from Costco, Amazon and Target a lot and they all have purchases mixed in the total. In June I set up a Google sheet that we could both enter the grocery portion of our purchases in and it is working amazingly! It is easy to check my total when I am making videos and we can see how far off we are from our goal pretty easily. We are also working on making as few trips to the store as possible so that we don’t get there and find lots of extra items. I am particularly guilty of this during our Costco run. I love Costco and I am easily swayed by fresh produce and new things to try. I am working on it though and we have been doing better so we will continue our efforts in the hopes that by the end of the year we have a streamlined frugal grocery routine.

Our first grocery haul of July was so big I had to film it in three parts. I went to Franz for our periodic stock up and we did a gigantic Costco run. Lots of our regular items were on sale at Costco this month and we stocked up on what we could. Looking back I think the reason our July grocery total was so large was mostly due to this stock up. We really didn’t spend money on too much the rest of the month. We won’t do a large stock up like this one for a while so hopefully we will be able to stick to our $600 budget going forward.

We went back to Costco again a couple of weeks in to get a few things Costco was out of and that we forgot the first time. This run was pretty expensive for what we bought but we did need a bunch of jerky for our kids to eat during camp. They really only get it regularly in the summer so it is rare enough they eat it at camp for a good source of protein. We also had to buy Luna bars to stock up on as well from Amazon.

We did a small haul at Costco and Grocery Outlet towards the middle of the month as well to pick up some fresh fruit and ingredients for a recipe. I didn’t end up making the chicken tacos. My husband was the one to make the recipe and he does not use pre-made taco seasoning so it was made a little bit differently than I had originally intended but I am still going to try and make it myself in the future. I realized my crock pot is way too big to just make a couple of breasts and it was too hot to use the oven for a long time. I will try that recipe again this fall.

Overall we spent a lot this month. We did end up trying the free lunch pickups a couple of times but they mostly had the same food every day and my kids were not huge fans. I felt really bad for the kids that relied on these meals over the summer since there wasn’t really a lot of variety. Universal Free Lunches are over in our area so we won’t be able to participate again in the fall when school starts up again. I guess a lot of families were shocked to hear they weren’t being continued into the fall for everyone. It will be a huge hit to many family’s budgets. We saved probably $200 a month picking up the 5 day meal kits and towards the end of last school year it was so much food we really couldn’t keep up with eating it. We still have a lot left but my goal is to eat through it by the end of the year.

I am proud of our progress these past few months with how we are paying much better attention to our grocery spending. We are getting better at using what we have and not doing much impulse spending. Thank you for reading!