how I earned $150 for christmas

Everyone loves the holidays, but nobody loves the pinch that comes from buying gifts and traveling.  Christmas always feels really tight on our student budget.  We take out a small amount every month so that we have a little money to spend on birthdays and holidays, but I'm always looking for ways to stretch our budget.  Using all my tricks this year, we pooled over $150, which I'm planning to spend on gifts for the kiddos during black Friday next week.

Most of these rewards programs allow you to redeem your points for lots of things, but mainly gift cards and merchandise.  Depending on the site, using the points for merchandise may be a better deal than redeeming for gift cards.  Because I already had a shopping list, I redeemed all of my points in Amazon or Walmart gift cards.

Swagbucks | $30
Swagbucks pays you rewards for shopping through their links, completing surveys, answering daily polls, and watching sponsored videos.  I usually pull up an nGage video set whenever I'm online and click through it for 2-4 points.  They also reward for searches, and the rewards are pretty big, but they are totally random, so I generally prefer to use bing.  The surveys are really hit or miss, but the shopping rewards are great.  Whenever I book flights, hotels, shop on amazon, I go through swagbucks.  Usually, the rewards are about 2 points per dollar spent.  They have most major retailers (Old Navy, Walmart, Target), so that is my big earner.  I've heard of people earning that much every month, but I'm pretty laid back about it and only get really active in the fall when Christmas is coming.

Bing rewards | $20
To earn with bing, you can do daily challenges or just use bing when you search!  Every two searches earns you one point.

Huggies rewards | $30
Really, the rate of rewards here is terrible.  This was our points collection after an entire year and a half of buying Huggies diapers, and for half the year we've been buying for two!  The moral is, if your diapers have a rewards program, just do it.  Entering all the little codes was super tedious but worth it for the extra few bucks.

Shopkick | $5
I just hopped on the shopkick bandwagon in October, so I'm barely earning my first gift card.  So far I love the concept though - you get points for walking into stores in your area.  You can get additional points for scanning items in the store and, if you link your credit card to the app, buying items.  I'm nervous about that so I haven't linked my credit card.  Sometimes the app can be a little glitchy, and not recognize the store I'm in until after I've left.  It's frustrating, but it still works often enough that I use it anyway.

Credit card rewards | $75
We get 1% cash back, but we just opened a new card that gets special rates for gas and travel so I'm hoping for even more rewards next year!  If you don't have a rewards program on your credit card, switch now!

Walmart Savings Catcher | $12
Android | Apple
I always scan in my Walmart receipts.  I try to do price matching on my own, but this catches little things that slip through the cracks.  It doesn't seem like much ($12 in about 6 months) but every little bit helps!

Miscellaneous | $100
My husband is a law student, and some of the law databases (Nexus and Bloomberg) offer rewards for anyone with a subscription (so, mostly lawyers).  Obviously these won't be available to all, so I did not include them in our grand total.

I'd love to know how you earn a little extra for the holidays!  Let me know in the comments.

fall color walk

Oh man, fall is my secret love.  Secret because, being named Summer, summer is supposed to be my favorites season.  It's great, but I love the cool weather and the vibrant colors that make up autumn.

It is imperative for my mental health to get out of the house each day, and it is super good for the boys too. Today we got to combine our walk with a color search!  Fall is perfect for this since there are SO many colors to see.  Mono always likes to collect treasures on our walks- rocks, sticks, and berries are among his favorites.  I can't even tell you how often I find his treasures in random places in our home.  Anyway, he thought it was so fun that mama was collecting treasures with him today.  He helped me look for all our fun colors, and it was the first time I heard him say many of the color names!  It was a great activity.

He also loved helping me arrange our colorful leaves and berries.  We sorted by color, size, and shape.  But his favorite thing was putting the leaves all in a bowl, them dumping them back out.  The white poster was the perfect background, since it brought out the vibrant colors!  I'm thinking tomorrow we will collect leaves again, then I will color the poster different colors to help Mono figure out the sorting by color a little better.

 Aren't these colors just amazing?  We didn't go anywhere special - just our usual walk around the neighborhood.  My favorite leaf is the second from the left in the picture below- the green and yellow combination is so vibrant!

Do you do a color walk or drive?

toddler play: milk cap treasure chest

Hoarding milk caps is old news- there are so many awesome things to do with them.  Most of the ideas I've seen before revolved around cutting holes out of plastic lids.  I had saved up a huge collection, but when I did my lid-cutting it came out super awful and a little sharp.  In the end, it was not a huge hit.

However, a few weeks later, I finished up a box of pampers wipes.  I prefer huggies wipes, so I was going to toss the box but Monkey Boy was fascinated with it.  After watching him play, a light bulb clicked and I ran a grabbed our milk caps.  What do you know?  They fit perfectly into the wipe cap opening.

Mono played with these pretty often.  He loved that he could dump them all out and make a mess.  Some of the lids were juice lids, and the milk lids were smaller and could be snapped inside the juice lids.  He loved that.  After a few weeks my hubby had the idea to paint all the lids like coins.  So I whipped out my gold and silver spray paint (actually, he did it) and spray painted the lids.

It was like a brand-new toy.  Monkey boy thought the lids were SO cool and is playing with them all over again!  Amazing what a little spray paint can do.  Now all I need to do is grab some brown and we can paint the box like a treasure chest.

 Do you save your milk caps?  What do you use them for?