It was Denali’s 4th birthday last Thursday and we had a party for her on Saturday. This had the potential to be an epic wasterous day. We were inviting 10 kids and 8 adults, which when combined with the four of us meant a full house. I had visions of plates of half eaten food and plastic tat all over the place.
We spent a lot of money - €25 on party decorations, €75 on plastic junk for props, prizes and party bags, about €50 on food and €50 on booze (for the adults). Barbara cooked a fantastic train cake for Denali who was gratifyingly impressed.
In the end just about nothing got put in the bin and everyone had a great time so overall a great success. I honestly I don’t think anything can be added to the wasterous score at all.
Massive Shop
Barbara did a massive shop in Tesco (€200), which really needed to be done because we can’t get everything we need in Lidl or Aldi. Overall this really isn’t too bad except that I had already spend €155 in Lidl the previous day – this was mostly wine, beer and stuff for Denali’s party. So while we didn’t waste anything over the weekend we did spend an awful lot of money.
Looking over the receipt from Tesco a couple of things popped out as being very expensive.
Vanilla Essence – €6.99
1Kg Roma pasta shell – €3.79
Just goes to show that you can’t put anything into your trolley without looking which is close to impossible when you have two small children pulling on your arms.
Filed under: food, Uncategorized
I can’t give ourselves such a clean bill of waste-free health. I agree there was no waste on the food front, which I am very pleased about. What leftovers there are will be enjoyed by us.
However I did not need to spend as much as I did on party decorations and prizes. Not having run a full-on kid’s birthday party before I wasn’t sure how much we’d need, and the various articles I read did advise to err on the side of caution.
All the same, with hindsight I could easily have spent €25-€30 less without really running short on the day. I won’t add all that to the wasterous score – a bit of a margin of error is fair enough, and I have some things stashed away for future occasions, but I think I need to give a fair kick to the wasterous score. I’m going to estimate €15.
Also, I’ve done a price comparison on the vanilla extract and the one I bought was not bad value by volume, but was more than we needed.
The one I bought was €7 for 118ml, the alternative natural vanilla extract option was €2.78 for 25ml. Given that I don’t exactly do enormous amounts of home baking the smaller bottle would have done fine. I’m discounting the cheaper “vanilla essence” which contains no actual vanilla (though whether I could actually tell the difference in a taste test is quite another question).