seven things

1. We are considering moving to a smaller apartment. Right now, both of the boys has their own room, but we are thinking they could share.  Financially, we don't need to move, we are just thinking of ways to save more money.  But the boys nap at different times, Oso still wakes up at night, and I just don't think we can fit two boys and all their toys in one room.

2.  I recently re-discovered how delicious nachos are.  Gained two pounds this week.

3. I am IN LOVE with this paper boxwood wreath from Lia Griffith.  I need to buy some green paper and whip it out with my cameo one of these nights.

4. My husband and I went and saw a Norman Rockwell exhibit last weekend.  It was not our usual scene at all, but we totally loved it.  The stories that each piece tells totally enthralled me.  He is one of the few artists I would buy an original of.  Whose original art would you buy?

5. I am browsing apartments while I type.  Why are apartments in Provo so dumpy?

6.  Dinosaurs are all the rage at our house right now.  We got a big stack of dinosaur books from amazon to read, and Mono got a very cool walking-talking dinosaur toy from his aunt.  We even went to the natural history museum a few weeks ago and everybody loved it.  Museum lighting is weird.

7. I am taking a few classes online right now and I hate them.  People who go back to school full-time are amazing.  

welcome 2016

Some years, when I look back over what my goals were, I am wracked with guilt!  Not so in 2015.  Hooray!  I had two major goals for this past year.

1. Take control of our budget
Man, we killed it in budgeting this year.  A HUGE step for us was moving from monthly to weekly budgeting.  We have an entire year of finances in our excel spreadsheet.  We know where our money goes, and so we always know how much we are spending.  We went from almost always being $200 or more over our budget to being under budget more than half the time.  We started a teeny, tiny retirement fund and purchased a life insurance policy for Tyler.

2. Plan meals
This was to help with our budget, and it made a huge difference.  We ate out significantly less when I didn't have to think of something to make every night.  At the beginning of the year I planned a month at a time, but now I only plan a week at a time and we waste a lot less food and have cut about $50 out of our grocery budget.

I'm not sure I want to make goals, but I want to have a new attitude as a mom.  I've been marinating a couple of phrases and here is what I am down to:

I call these my "mom rules."  It seems like a lot, but they all contribute to the overall attitude and spirit I want to nurture in our home.  

Lighten up is the big one - to me, it means let things go.  TJ spills his cereal?  Say uh-oh, clean it up, and let it go.  Don't lecture.  Don't let it make me super mad.  Because he is little and that is okay.  

Right along side that, I want to take more time to play with the kids.  I want to be present and enjoy my kiddos - stop to play, go outside, and do it now because maybe he won't want to play with me later.  

Last but not least, if  I am happy and if I have fun, my family will too.  I am a firm believer that if mama ain't happy, ain't nobody happy so I need to set the tone for everything from family interactions to discipline.  

I am so excited to work on the "spirit" of our home this year, and I hope I can be as successful as I was in last years goals.  Wish me luck!

I did think of one GOAL goal I want to have - return to writing.  I am a huge journal-er, but my entries are getting farther and farther apart.  I love, love re-reading my journals and I don't want to miss anything from this time in my life because I was too lazy to sit down and write once a week.  I guess this falls right in with my mom rule - do it now!

Do you set goals or resolutions?  How do you stick to them?

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!