Operation Christmas Child

I am not one to get on my soap box about many issues. But kids (anyone's kids) are very dear to my heart. I have been building shoe boxes for this cause for the last couple of years. I always say I am going to figure out how to more for this cause. But I never have come up with a good way to get organized about it. So one of my goals for the new year is to slowly purchase things for my shoe boxes and if I do it in small batches my pocketbook will never notice it. Because I budget into our plan a certain amount of money for this every year I usually spend way more on stuff to go in the box and am only able to send about 4 boxes each year because we don't have the funds budgeted to ship more than 4 after we purchase the things to go in them.

So I got started early this year. I started with the clearance section at CVS when they marked down their  Halloween stuff to 90%. True I only got a couple of things. But a stuffed animal for 10 cents is a good deal. I grabbed the only two that didn't really look like Halloween things, they were just black kitty cats. I have a couple of cute happy meal toys that the kids didn't want, a couple of shampoo samples that came in the mail, toothbrushes & toothpaste from Davids cleaning, and some stuff from Walmart/Target Christmas clearance yesterday. So far I have only spent a couple of dollars and I already have a good start to my boxes.

I have gotten a good size box and have stashed it in the back corner of my closet. My goal for the year is to find things for cheap or free and just toss them in the box. When it comes time next year to build the boxes I hope to be able to send more than 4 boxes. I would ask that you too think about doing this. It is as simple as looking in the clearance section at the stores you go to. Just think of the things you have seen there before and thought well my kids can't use that, but some kid might. I know everyone is not able to do this. But if you do it slowly you would be amazed at what you can accomplish through out the year for just a small amount of money. My husband David put it to me like this once. He normally stops by the Go Gas on the way to work most mornings to get a DDP. At the Go Gas they are $1 much cheaper that the store. If he fixes a drink before he leaves home he could save that $1 and add that to the purchase of something to go in the box. Old Navy has flip flop for like $2 every year. So in a month you can purchase 2 pair of shoes for the box. See adding up already.

So to end my "Soap Box" topic for the month, please pray about this cause and really listen to what God tells you to do about it. I know he spoke to me by me randomly finding a great website to help me with this cause. It is called www.clipwithpurpose.com . They are also on facebook. So head on over there and look at some of the cool ideas she has.

You don't need coupons to make frugal meals!

I don't know how many times in the past years that I have heard...."I don't have time to shop with coupons!". Well you know what, I don't always have time either. As a matter of fact I have not bought a paper for coupons in over 2 months. I have pulled some out of blinkies, and some off of packages, but really organizing and clipping coupons.....nope! Between taking 4 different kids to 4 different schools, 2 children playing football, Ashlee taking gymnastics, and just everyday life I have been very busy.

However just because I haven't been clipping coupons doesn't mean I have not been shopping good sales. I get emails with weekly deals from Food Lion, Harris Teeter, and Lowe's Food. I also get in the mail sales ads from Piggly Wiggly & Bo's Food. I spend about 10 minutes once a week to scan all the ads and see if anything is worth going to that store. I normally only make it to 1 or maybe 2 stores a week. I DO NOT shop at 5 stores a week to get deals. I would waste all my time & gas trying to do this. I go within 1 mile every week of all 5 stores and I just pick and choose where I am going.

So I thought I would show you a good idea of what a simple meal for my family can be and what it would cost. I stopped by Lowe's Food last night on the way home from gymnastics with Ashlee. This has started becoming a habit because I have found if I stop by right around 5:45 they are marking down bakery items for the day. My boys have been super happy about this because I can get 6 doughnuts for $1.50. Yep and they are pretty good if I say so myself.

Last night I scanned the sales ad real quick and noticed the pre-made chicken cordon bleu was BOGO. So I picked up a couple of boxes to give it a try. I thought it would be a good quick meal for those crazy days I have no time to fix a real meal. I normally have rice a roni & pasta roni in the pantry because you can normally get this on sale for $1 a box at most stores. I have also been blessed with a dad that grows way to much in his garden and likes to shares. So here is our meal tonight and the cost break down.

2 boxes of Chicken Cordon Blue-$8.49

2 boxes of Alfredo Noodles-$2

1 jar of Green Beans-Free (but truly how much can a can of beans be ...$1?)

So dinner for 6 (however the 2 teenage boys should be counted as 2 adults each)

Total cost.....$10.49. That's about $1.75 each. You can't even get a happy meal for that.

So when I say you don't HAVE to have coupons. I really mean it. It just takes around 10 minutes a week to plan your meals around the deals of the week. Good luck and Happy Savings!!

They say bad things come in three's....

As most of you saw on my facebook account we have been having a bad run with repair problems lately. It started with a couple of days before vacation. My brakes starting with a grinding sound, not a squeal, a grind. Well we called and made an appointment to get new brakes. Well if only that was the problem. Once they got the brakes off they found my callipers had seized. I had no idea what that meant, but I knew it was not good. So we went from replacing brakes to replacing brakes, rotors, and callipers. As you can imagine it tripled the cost.

Then we leave for vacation an on the way David's a/c stops working. Once we got home and he had out trusty repairman look at it, we found out it was not the a/c. It actually has something to do with the turbo on his truck and now we are looking at a couple of grand to fix it.

Then coming home from vacation we found my dishwasher not working well. By Monday it had quit washing all together. GREAT!! The third problem in a week. I made David take me Monday night to look at dishwashers. I even stopped by the ATM to get the cash out to buy one. (Because we all know Dave Ramsey says you get more with cash!!) So off we went. By 8:30 we had look at multiple appliances and I only had one more store I wanted to go too. But EVERYWHERE closes at 9PM. So off we went in a rush. We got there and I found the one I wanted. With 10 minutes till closing we went into working out the details. I had cash, I wanted that one, and I wanted to take it with me then. Notice all the "I's" in that sentence. Well that is what happens when the only thing we are thinking about is ourselves. The sales rep went to check and sure enough, there were none in stock and would not be any until FRIDAY!!! Now it is after 9 and we had to go home....empty handed.

So on the way home my husband, who had kept his opinion to himself and was just trying to make me happy, quietly said call your dad tomorrow and see what he thinks it can be. After all he is the ultimate handyman. You know that had not even crossed my mind. I was so in the "ME MODE" that my brain was not working. When I got up Tuesday I called him. He told me a couple of things to check and if that didn't work just hang on until he could get a few days to come down and look at it. I thought okay well I can wash dishes for a while if it will save me $400-$500.

He called me yesterday to say he was going to be here this morning. How is that for quick service?? He gets here this morning spends about 20 minutes cleaning it out and it started working again perfectly. Yep MY DAD ROCKS!!!

So what did I learn from this? Patience. I have none. I need to stop and really think about if going out and buying a new .....whatever.....is really worth it. In this case it was not. And last but not least ....NEVER forget how lucky I am to have a Dad like mine. He loves me no matter what I have done in my life, he is always there for me when I need him, and he ALWAYS buys ice cream when he visits. Sometimes it the little things in life. LOL

P.S. Does the description of my dad remind you of anyone??? (Minus the ice cream)

Ashlee's Bathroom

Let me start out this post by saying "I AM NOT GOOD AT DECORATING!!". I am not ashamed to admit this. It has never been a high priority to me. However after saying that.... I want my daughter to have all the things that I dreamed of when I was little. I wanted the green room with chair rail cottage trim. I wanted the white bedroom suit with a trundle bed. I wanted a purple bathroom. So if these things are within reach for me to do I don't see the harm in giving them to her. We have not broke the bank paying for them (we actually have taken 4 years to accomplish it all), we have not given her things that the other kids don't have, and we love to see her little face light up because she is the only GIRL after all!! So after posting on facebook that I now have a purple bathroom I got a lot of funny comments sent to me about "The Barney Bathroom". So I thought I better go ahead and post pics. So here they are. It's not finished, I still need to find good rugs and a couple of other things. But you know me, I will NOT pay full price for anything, so we are waiting for a good sale at Kohl's and a 30% off coupon to come in the mail. Until then we can use the old green rug ( not in the picture). So what do you think......Love it or Hate it???

our{simple}life: knot genie aka the miracle tool!

our{simple}life: knot genie aka the miracle tool!: "Seriously. This is a miracle tool. My girls hate having their hair brushed, so on a whim a few weeks ago, I purchased this Knot Genie from ..."

My friend Bethany posted this a while ago, but I can now say I am a believer. If you have a girl it is definately worth the purchase price of $14.95. I not only got Ashlee one, I bought my niece Krissy one after witnessing her trying to brush her wet hair one night. Save the tears and fighting and just get one!!!

Vacation fund

If your family is like my family we LOVE vacation. However we do NOT love spending a ton of money for vacation. Our kids live at the beach so a beach vacation is not a big deal to them. We also have to schedule vacation around 2 other families schedules (my ex, his ex), baseball games, football practice, & only God knows what else comes up along the way in the summer months. We have 6 kids ranging from 15 years old to 4 years old. Do you know how hard it is to find something that a 15 year old and a 4 year old, and everyone in between, will like to do? Well we believe in PRAYER!! We prayed that something fun would present it's self this year, and that a way to pay for it would also appear out of the blue. And what happen?

We have friends that have RV's and for years we have been looking into getting one, but it has never felt right. We still feel like it might be for us in the future, but we don't know a lot about it. I remembered that someone told me a couple of years ago about a campground for RV's that also rented cabins and it was not far from Wilmington. Well I got on the computer and started looking for it. I was guided to the website for http://www.taborcityjellystone.com/ . Well it looks like fun and if we schedule it for Tuesday afternoon till Friday then everybody (all 6 kids) can go and Austin will only have to miss one football practice. So YAY we have booked our vacation!!!

Then came the paying for it part. Yep that's the hard part. Well we had a little money in the vacation fund so we had the cabin covered. If we eat in the whole time we are there it will be no different than eating at home, so no additional cost there. Now on to the hard part. Spending money. I know to most families this is not a big deal, but when you have 6 kids this can add up fast. So we have to get creative a little. So I prayed, God you have help us so far, so now where will I get this part of the vacation fund? David & sat down and decided that we are only going to be there for like 3 days because we can't check in until 4 on Tuesday and we have to check out on Friday at lunch so how much will they really need. We are going to be camping so a lot of money should not be needed. So we decided $20 each should be enough to give them pocket money to get ice cream and maybe go to the arcade (they have FREE wifi so we have netflix, and they have 3 lap tops... we should be able to keep them busy). So okay here is what we need $120. Where can we get an extra $120 from? Well I started looking around the house to see what I can sell on Ebay. A friend of mine makes her living on there and I am a believer that you can make money on there if you have the time. Right now in my life I don't have that time, but we are talking about vacation here, so I have to do something. I then hear Ashlee & Hayden making a lot of noise in Ashlee's room (nothing new). I open the door and they both have their piggy bank's poured on the floor. They said they had LOT'S of monies. Well in reality they had a small amount, but it got me thinking. We have change everywhere. Lets gather all of the loose change in the house, car, pocketbook, under the couch, anywhere and take it to the bank to run in the big machine that counts it for you. So off we went. They LOVED going on this treasure hunt. When we were done we had a box full of change. I took a look at it and said "It has to be at least $60 in there". I got excited, we could be half way there and we only spent 15 minutes looking for loose change around the house.

So above you can see our haul. Half a box of change. My smallest two always see people use those machine in the banks and grocery store and have BEGGED to use them. I never knew how they worked so I had to have to have the lady at the credit union help. Believe it or not all you have to do is push a button, feed the change in, and press the button again. It will print you a little slip of paper to tell you how much you have. Yeah I know I get excited about the simple things in life.

So anybody want to guess how much we had in the half a box of change??

Come on guess???

You won't believe it.....

$120.61!!!!!!!(plus a couple of pesos, a couple of euro, some Canadian money, a couple of tokens to Adventure Landing, And a token to a place that is not even open anymore)

God is Good All Time.....All The Time God Is Good!!!!

I'm back....

Yep it's been 6 months since I have written on the blog. But one of my short term goals on my new goals list is to start blogginf a little agin. Wish me luck!!!

Overwhelmed

Do you ever just feel overwhelmed in your life sometimes? I do. In the months leading up to Christmas I started sliding into feeling that way. I think a lot of people feel this way around Christmas and call it the " Ba Humbug's". Well I had them this year and I am disappointed in myself for feeling this way.

I don't know exactly when I started to feel this way but I can look back now and see it was nothing specific that happened to cause it. I didn't want to decorate for Christmas this year. I got the tree up because I knew it was important for the kids, but I didn't even but the angel on top or the skirt underneath. It sat like that for 4 days before my husband kicked my butt to get me in gear. I then gave a half hearted attempt at decorating because he was outside decorating. Since we moved in the back woods 4 years ago we have NEVER decorated outside so I know he was doing this just for ME.

I LOVE HIM FOR THIS!!!

Christmas got closer and as it did I started hearing just how many people I knew were having hard times. I had friends loose their job. I had other friends that had their pay cut. I had friends with loved ones that passed away. I had friends that were sick. We had a board at church that had so many needs for Christmas that I was overwhelmed just standing in front of it deciding which gift tag to pull. I was constantly in prayer about all of these things.

David and I started praying about what we could do to help those in need. Even though we are far from "in good shape" ourselves. We decided to cut our Christmas budget for our family dramatically.We found creative was to provide for our kids. We took that money and helped a few people that we knew were in need. I thought my children would be disappointed on Christmas morning because of the lack of gifts they were use to. To my surprise I think it was the best Christmas in a long time. My kids never cease to amaze me. They were so excited about what they got. The biggest hit was by far were pictures that I framed or made into a collage from the sports the boys had played last year. They even asked to have one made every year for every sport they play. I was so worried for absolutely no reason. GOD provided exactly what we needed. I felt so blessed.

So next year I have made a vow to keep Christmas simple. I will have so much less stress and "mommy guilt" if I just remember that God will provide exactly what we need and we will be thankful for it all. Now next year if you see me stressing just remind me it will all be just fine. LOL!!