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?

seven things

1.  On this lovely Halloween weekend, I have Christmas stockings in mind.  I bought this pattern last year, and made Mono a stocking, but my sewing has come a long way since then and I'm thinking I'm going to re-make it, and make stockings for the rest of the family as well.  Does your family do matching stockings?

2.  All of the sudden, Baby Bear (almost 5 months) has refused to go to bed at night.  He falls fast asleep, then wakes up a minute or two later and is completely inconsolable.  Tonight we are on our fourth round of this!  I have no idea what the issue is.  A week ago he had no problem with bedtime.  Welcome to the wonderful world of parenthood I guess.

3.  My latest netflix obsession is White Collar.  Oh my goodness, how come nobody told me how good this show is?

4.  Monkey Boy is in need of some winter boots.  I have my eye on these.  Cheap enough to justify, but nice enough that they should hold up until he grows out of them (in two weeks).  Also, no laces.  Nothing worse than trying to hold down your two-year-old long enough to tie his shoes.

5.  I'm trying a new meal planning strategy for the month of November.  I'm a little nervous about it, but the idea is that it will cut down our grocery budget.  Stay tuned...

6.  Currently reading this book.  If you read it, what did you think?  I loved it at the beginning but I'm about half way through and starting to get bored.

7.  I am so ready for bed.  BUT.  I want you to know that I almost have picture of me (and the family) ready to put up on the about page.  No more ghost posting!  Okay.  Peace out.

toddler play: pipe cleaners and straws

There are some days when getting dressed and leaving the house are just too overwhelming for me.  It's fine and dandy for me to stay home all day, but it makes Monkey Boy crazy.  He has so much energy, so on days when I don't take him outside to run around and be free, I try to come up with a new activity or game for him to play with me inside.  With winter coming on, there are more and more fowl-weather days and I know we are going to be stuck inside much more often! I'm working on coming up with new activities that promote play and learning.  As I scour the internet, I'll share my favorites here with you!

This week is an activity that I like to think I invented- straws and pipe cleaners.  I'm sure someone else has thought of this before, but I'll take credit for it anyway.

Set up is super easy.  I keep pipe cleaners in different varieties on hand, and all you need to do is cut up straws into varying sizes.  The bendy part of the straw was really fun for Mono.

I usually put the straws in a container to keep them from rolling all over the place while he plays.  Of course, they end up getting dumped out.

For a little while, Mono enjoyed trying to thread the straws onto the pipe cleaners.  When he got frustrated with that (it takes alot of focus!), he wanted me to thread them so he could pull them all off.

Obviously, threading the straws is great for fine motor practice and teaches patience.  For younger kids this can get really frustrating, and until now (20 months), Mono hasn't really tried threading the straws.

 When he was done with the threading, he had alot of fun dumping the straws out and picking them up.  Whatever keeps you occupied, kiddo!

What do your kids do with pipe cleaners?  I've seen so many ideas, but I'm looking for something new.  We've done pipe cleaners in the colander about a million times!

confessions of a formula mom

This post was originally written on my personal blog in May 2014.  I had to give up nursing for medical reasons relating to the baby.  I want to share my feelings to hopefully help other moms in similar situations feel more accepted and less alone.

I loved this article.  It made me think.

It absolutely killed me to have to give up breastfeeding after only 4 weeks.  I had plenty of milk and I had a lot of determination.  I'd almost lost breastfeeding when he was in the NICU, so I really cherished being able to nurse him.  Before we permanently stopped, I pumped for almost a week to keep up my milk, just in case TJ could nurse again.  I worked for it.


Giving it up made me feel like a failure, even though it was nothing I had done wrong.  In fact, stopping may have saved TJ's life.  But we live in a weird climate where there is a huge backlash against formula feeding. The media all says, "breast is best, and if you love your child you'll breast feed."  I'm afraid people will think I'm a bad mom when they see me using a bottle.  When I hear people giving the breastfeeding propaganda, I feel guilty because I don't breastfeed anymore.

I see other mom's slip out to nurse and feel jealous.  I miss having those moments with my son.  As stupid as it sounds, it makes me sad that he doesn't need me now.  Anyone could give him a bottle.  I miss the way he watched me while he ate, the way he snuggled up to me when he was finished. Bottle feeding just isn't the same.

As if the emotional pain of giving up nursing wasn't enough, the physical agony was awful.  I don't know if my pain was necessarily worse than women who slowly wean, then stop nursing.  But going from feeding about four ounces every three hours to not feeding at all was sure not fun. 

On top of all of it, we were putting TJ on nasty, smelly, hypoallergenic formula that he did not like.  He cried and cried and missed meals...  It just shredded my heart, because I had what he wanted and I couldn't give it to him.  It's not so bad now that he's used to the formula.

I just have to remember the good things.  I don't have to get up with him every night.  Tyler and I trade off his midnight feeding, so every other night I get a full nights rest.  That wouldn't be possible if I was nursing him.  I don't have to cover up to feed him, or go somewhere private.  I just pull out a bottle and get to it. 

I wish I was still nursing him, but I'm not.  We were told we couldn't return to nursing until he had a diagnosis. It's been 6 weeks now.  Sometimes I wonder if I should have kept pumping, if I'm a bad mom for not being dedicated enough.  Ultimately, I think it was the right decision.  There were just too many things out of our control.


I'm a formula mom, and that is okay. 
-Mrs. Smith

costume inspiration 2015

I love seeing all the amazing, creative Halloween costumes up on pinterest this time of year!  I can't bring myself to buy the horrible, cheapy costumes made in bulk, so this year I'm on the lookout for some adorable DIY options for my boys.  Here are just a few of my favorites so far!

(Click photos for links)

The House that Lars Built posted a TON of cute book-themed kids costumes this year. 

 Seriously, these would be SO easy to make!

I'm so impartial to the little lumberjack look.  Another one that would be oh-so-easy.  By Oh Happy Day.

I couldn't pass up a tribute to one of my favorite shows...this Call the Midwife costume is perfect if you have a newborn this Halloween!  Done by Sarajolie.

What are your Halloween plans?