Where's Ellie?

I sent Ellie to clean her room last night after her bath.
Five minutes later I walk in to find this:


Look a little closer:


Hiding in her toy box reading. She is totally my kind of kid.

The Decade

I was thinking about this past decade the other day and I realized it has been the most amazing, eventful, emotional, and wonderful ten years of my life. I rang in the new decade while I was in the MTC training to be a missionary for my church and since then things have just gotten more and more exciting.

Here is the best decade ever as recorded in numbers:

18 months on a mission in South Texas for me
24 months in Honduras for Rob
208 letters between us over the course of 24 months
3 weeks apart in getting home from our missions
1 year, 1 ring and 2 proposals later we got married
8 years of marriage
6 years of school
3 college degrees between the 2 of us
13 moves
1 house
3 apartments
2 kids
2 miscarriages
1 dog
5 jobs
21 camping trips
1 happy family

Budgeting Advice

So I'm not great at managing money. I don't totally suck at it - I haven't put us in major credit card debt or anything. The only debt we have is our student loan debt from law school that we're trying to pay down as fast as possible. But I need advice on writing up and staying within a budget. I've written up several budgets but I never look at them again. Rob and I have already sat down together to plan our expenses and I'm really really committed to making it work this time. I did find this great budgeting site called Pear Budget and I love it. It's really simple which is great for me. I think it's really going to help me plan where our money will go each month.

So I'm asking you:
How do you stick to your budget? Do you do cash only? The envelope system? Excel spreadsheet? Do you review it all the time or once a month? Do you record all of your receipts somewhere? Do you have a category for random stuff that comes up during the month? How do you handle irregular expenses like doctor visits, birthday presents, impromptu road trips?
I've also noticed that I have a hard time staying within my grocery budget. How do you eat well and cheap? I've tried doing that turbo couponing where you combine the coupon with a sale plus some sort of promo where you get things dirt cheap but honestly, it took tons of planning and organizing and I soon realized that everything I could get on an awesome deal was total junk food like sugary cereal, cookies, granola bars and all kinds of processed stuff and let's be honest, if I want my family to eat empty calories I would rather make the goodies myself.

Any advice on budgeting you are willing to give me would be very much appreciated :)