Unsolicited Advice

I am in no way whatsoever in a position to give marriage advice, but here are two new things that have been working well for us lately:

{amy jo photography}

- Sharing a holy hour. This summer, one of our favorite priests gave a homily about how married couples should really try to make it work for each spouse to get an hour of adoration to themselves each week. Well, we have found that sharing a holy hour works better for us in our current stage of life {new parents, new job, new city, etc} so every Sunday night one of us gets to spend some time with the man upstairs while the other holds down the fort. And the next week, we switch!

- Weekly budget meetings. When we were first married, we used Mint.com for our budgeting purposes, but we quickly found that it didn't meet our needs exactly, so we came up with a way more complicated system. Let's just say that system basically flew out the window when a baby arrived on the scene, so we turned to Mint.com once again. It's still not perfect, but they've added a few new things {like the ability to split your transactions into different categories} so we're pretty happy with it. Since I do most of the shopping and am better at remembering when bills are due, I am in charge of the budget and sit down once a week with our receipts to make sure everything is categorized correctly. But, Adam is better at actually sticking to the budget, so we spend a few minutes together every Wednesday looking over our spending and talking about an upcoming events that need to be budgeted for.