Goals for 2011

I don't really like making resolutions because I often fail. And, if today's date says anything I would have already failed for this year. However, I do think it is important to set goals. Without goals to strive for we will simply be sailing through life, not accomplishing much. Or we will be so bogged down because we are trying to do too many things. If we have set goals we can always go back and check our activities and see if they are helping us reach our goals. If not, well they can wait for another day. So, here are a few of my goals for the new year!

1. Have a deeper relationship with my Lord and Savior. Since having Michael almost a year ago I have let this slide in a big way. I want this to be the year I get back on track. So, I am going to memorize 1 verse/week and be more consistent with my daily quiet times.

2. Be physically fit. Also since having Michael I have let exercise go by the wayside. I would like to return to exercising 3-5x per week. We have re-joined the YMCA and I also am going to run a 1/2 marathon!

3. Eat more organic foods. I have been reading a few books and have decided I would like to eat more natural and less processed foods. I am going to go to the Farmer's Market when it starts back up and I am also going to buy more meat and produce from a local farm. I am interested to see how this will affect my grocery budget.

4. Form a deeper relationship with my husband. I think since having kids (see a theme here) I have been slacking on staying connected with my hubby. I am so tired of being clung to all day that I just want some alone time. Or I just have so much to do that I don't see how I can take a night to just relax with my honey. I am going to have 1 date night per week, go out 1x per month, and take 1 weekend away with my hubby this year. I am also making a goal to "flirt" every day ;)

5. Focused time with kiddos every day. I am going to keep plugging away with Tot School with both my kiddos, especially Moo-Bear. I am going to make this a priority to do educational activities every day. I am also going to do one fun thing per week with my kiddos (library, water park, zoo, museum, etc.). We are also planning on attending the Homeschool Convention this April.

6. Recycle. I have been wanting to start recycling for awhile now, but never got started. So, I am going to research some things a get this started. The hardest thing is we don't have pick-ups so I will have to take it every week or so. Also, our recycling center doesn't take plastics, so I will have to look into that.

7. Make my own food and cleaners. I already make my own laundry soap and baby food, but I would like to expand that and start making more things from home. I found this great site for making my own yogurt and I can't wait to try it out.

8. Time Management. I would like to get a little more organized and make the best use of my time. Mostly I would like to get a better schedule in place so that I have more time to spend with my kiddos and husband. I feel like I always have so much to do and I don't take enough time to just relax and enjoy my life.


So, I think that is plenty for me to focus on for the new year. There are other things I would like to accomplish, but I don't want to overwhelm myself so I will just stop here. Hopefully next year I will be able to look back at this and see how much I have accomplished!!

2001 Walgreens $100 Challenge- Week 1

My friend over at Our House of Fun is hosting a Walgreens challenge this year. The idea is to see how much you can purchase at Walgreens in one year and spend $100 or less using sales, coupons and register rewards. I have been couponing for a while now, but I tend to get sucked in to all the great sales and deals so I thought this would hold me accountable to not spending a ridiculous amount of money trying to get all the deals. I will really have to decide which deals are the best and which ones I should spend my money on. So, join in if you would like!

This week I spent a lot OOP because I only had 2RR to begin with and most of the great deals to earn more RR's were like $10. So, here was my week!

1 Pill Glide

Price: $5.00

Mfg coupon: none

Store coupon: none

Final price: $5.00

RR earned: $5.00

(2) Oscillo Child Homeopathic Flu Med (purchased in 2 transactions to get both RR's)

Price: $8.99

Mfg coupon: (2) $2.00

Store coupon: none

Final price: $13.98

RR earned: $18.00

1 Finish Dish Detergent

Price: $3.49 each

Mfg coupon: $2.25

Store coupon: none

Final price: $1.24

RR earned: $1.50

(2) Chloraseptic Spray

Price: $3.99 each

Mfg coupon: (2) $1.00

Store coupon: none

Final price: $5.98
RR Earned: $5.00

1 Omega Factor 3

Price: $10.00

Mfg coupon: none

Store coupon: none

Final price: $10.00

RR earned: $10.00

RR Used: 10 Omega 3, 1.50 finish, 9 Oscillo, 2 ? (last week)

Subtotal before coupons: $45.12

Subtotal after coupons: $14.37

Sales Tax: $3.92

Savings Percentage: 68%

(Note: Since I have no control over the tax rate in my city, savings percentage are calculated prior to tax.)

RRs in hand: $5.00 Pill Glide, $5.00 Chloraseptic, $9.00 Oscillo

*****

Yearly Totals

Amount Spent (including tax): $18.29

Amount Remaining: $81.71

Amount Saved:

11 months

Well, better late than never. My little man is getting so close to being the big 1!! I just can't believe how fast this year with him has gone. He is such a joy and delight to my heart. We are having so much fun watching his personality start to show. He is such a fun, laid back little guy. He has started waving by-bye and blowing kisses this week. He also has begun to share his disapproval with his sister when she does something he doesn't like, such as steal his toy. My life would not be the same without my little buddy! I am so blessed!!

Christmas Fun!

We have been in Indiana for almost a week now and someone has been sick the entire time. My hubby started getting sick on the drive (poor guy) and was finally feeling better on Sunday. My brother was also sick on Christmas. Then my mom got sick. Now, my sweet girl has bronchitis, strep throat, and a double ear infection. Hopefully we are all on the mend and will be better by the time we leave for home on Friday!

Other than all the sickness we have had a great time. I wish we lived closer to my family so that we could spend more time with them, but since that is not the case we will just have to make the most of our time together.

On Christmas Day we had our family celebration. My sister works at Walgreen's and unfortunately had to work at 3 on Christmas Day so we had a morning brunch for our meal. We had bagels, waffles, egg casserole, and lots of fresh fruit! Then we had a great time giving and getting gifts! My kiddos got a ton more toys and my hubby and I got some stuff for our new dog (which I will be blogging about when we bring him home in Feb.). It was a super fun and crazy morning! That afternoon my SIL and I spent some time playing kiddie games like Don't Break the Ice and Ants in the Pants.



My dad and Moo-Bear enjoying waffles and marshmallows!

Yes, my brother received a superman snuggie for Christmas...love it :)

My little buddy! I couldn't find him a Baby's First Christmas Outfit big enough to fit him, so we just went with the bib. He couldn't have cared less about the presents, but he had a great time playing with all the paper, bags, and boxes!

My sweet Moo-Bear! She had so much fun this year opening gifts. I absolutely love watching her face light up with pure joy!


On Sunday we took the kiddos to the Botanical Gardens, which they had decorated as Candyland! It was ok, but we were all glad that it only cost $1 rather than $5 to get in (they have a special on Sunday afternoons).

My nieces with their little cousin posing as gingerbread men. You can sort of see Moo-Bear in the far right. She wasn't really wanting to stick her head in the circle.


Most of our family. We left Buddy at home because he desperately needed a nap.

This wasn't part of the Christmas display, but they had fun anyway. You crawl through this tunnel an d pretend to be an earthworm and at the end is a slide. It was a huge hit with Moo-Bear!

Grandma and her girls!


So, that was a glimpse of our time with my family in Indiana. We had plans to do some more stuff, but with everyone being sick we ended up j ust spending a lot of time relaxing at my parents' house. Hope everyone had a Mery Christmas!!!

Slacking

32 months

I have really been slacking with the whole tot school/blogging thing lately. I guess it just kind of takes a backseat to other things (the blogging, not tot school). We haven't done much "formal" tot schooling the past couple of weeks. I had all these great plans and even printed off a ton of stuff to use, but alas we have gotten busy. I usually do tot school in the morning when bud naps, but when we are gone in the morning it just never happens. We usually have MOPS every other Monday, Tuesday Moo-Bear goes to a mother's day out thing, and Wednesdays I try to get together with other mom's to get to know them better and let our kiddos play. So, since we do tot school in the morning there are often 3 days in a week where we don't get anything done. I don't know if I need to try to do stuff when he is awake or just fit it in when I can. We do our "games" daily, but we don't always get to any theme/letter of the week stuff.

We spent a lot of time in the kitchen baking this week. I like to make goody bags for our neighbors and for Moo-Bear and Bud's teachers at church. I had Moo-Bear "help" this year. She really loves "helping". I put that in quotes because she really isn't much help. For example, we made chocolate covered pretzel rods and then rolled them in mini m&m's, crushed candy canes, and crushed heath bars and I think most of the time I was trying to keep her from eating all the candy ;) But, she has a blast and even "helped" clean up, and by that I mean play in the sink while I tried to wash the dishes. I really want to encourage her helping though so I try to involve her in what I am doing.

Here are a few pictures of the Christmas festivities at our house!




Moo-Bears wonderful present. I bought the materials to make the tee-pee and my MIL sewed it for me! Moo-Bear loves it. I wish we could find a place for it downstairs, but it is just too big. It is in her room and she doesn't play by herself in there yet so she doesn't get much use out of it, but I am sure she will!


We got her a Dr. kit and she loves it!! She likes to "check our beep" (listen to our heartbeat) and check our ears :)


The kiddos playing with Buddy's new ball toy. The lid loves balls, although he wasn't really impressed with Christmas this year!


Moo-Bear helping mommy bake and I think she enjoyed licking the spoon.



She really enjoyed rolling the chocolate pretzels in the M&M's and she loved giving them to her teachers at church and telling them that she helped make them :)

For more ideas check out 1+1+1=1.

I hope you all have a safe and wonderful Christmas. We will be traveling to Indiana to spend Christmas with my family for the first time since I was pregnant with Moo-Bear so we are really looking forward to it! Hopefully I can do better about keeping up with Tot School! Merry Christmas!!

Tot School

30 months

We are back doing our Tot School time for a few weeks, at least. We had family here for Thanksgiving so last week Tot School went right out the window. We still did fun things, like paint, but no pictures and nothing planned.

We did an early Christmas with DH’s parents since we will be with my family for Christmas this year! Moo-Bear got a tee-pee for her room and she loves it!! I bought all the stuff to make it and my MIL sewed it up and put it together. I think she will get lots of good play from it!

This month we will be doing all Christmas and Jesus activities. I love this time of year and it is so fun now that Moo-Bear is really starting to get things. I really want to make sure that we emphasize doing things for other people, especially this time of year. So, in future weeks I plan to have specific activities for us to do for people around us

We always have fun coloring with markers!

You can also never go wrong with gluing! She loves to do anything with glue. This is actually a Thanksgiving activity. Also, when grandma was here she made a cute Christmas tree, but I haven’t taken pictures yet. We just made a tree shape and then tore small pieces of paper for ornaments, which she then glued on the tree!

I got this game from COAH (I think). Moo-Bear is so good at matching colors. I think it is getting way to easy for her, but she loves it!

I am so impressed because this is the 1st time that Moo-Bear has actually put the dots in the correct places! Once she finished she did end up putting dots all over the place, but I was so happy she started doing it right even for a little bit! We got this page from COAH, also.

We also did this page from COAH. She matched the letters to spell Jesus. She was able to match and identify all the letters. Yay!!

Moo-Bear just wanted to get out our huge tub of pom-poms to play with for a few minutes.

I bought this tree and some small ornaments from a garage sale a few weeks ago so that Moo-Bear could have her own little tree to decorate.

I got this game from Big Lots, I think. It is Candyland Bingo. We just used the spinner to pick a color and put the gingerbread man on that color. We didn’t actually play Bingo, though

Ok, so that was most of our week of Tot School. We didn’t get much done b/c we left Thursday to go to Little Rock to spend the weekend with friends (well all the guys went backpacking). Check out 1+1+1=1 for more great ideas!!

Tot School

30 months

We had another slow week over here. Mommy hurt her back on Wednesday so I spent most of Thursday and Friday sitting on the couch with a heating pad and reading books with the kiddos! They were both rainy, dreary days so it was wonderful for snuggling and reading books My back is feeling much better now

Fun with magnets VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I got out some smiley face magnets and the whiteboard and let Moo-Bear go to town. I think she got these out every day!

elephant play VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I had these foam elephant stickers and I cut a slit in the lid of a container and she put them inside. She wasn’t too enthralled with this one!

color and shape sort VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

She loves this! When we were playing I would put the shapes on the wrong spot and she would tell me no and put it in the correct place

word color sort VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I got out our colored word tiles and colored buckets again. She really just liked dumping out the tiles and making a big mess

elephant dot art VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I got this “E” do-a-dot page from COAH! She loved it, as usual!

elephants and peanuts VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I printed off these elephant graphing pages from COAH. We used some peanuts as our counters and she did a great job. When she was finished we got a little snack!

elephant clips VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

I also got these from COAH. They were elephants with numbers on them and we clipped the correct number of clothespins on each elephant!

fall bin VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

This is our fall sensory bin. She likes it ok, but I am beginning to think Moo-Bear is one of the few 2 year olds that doesn’t really care for sensory bins

So, that was most of our week. This week we are just going to be having fun talking about Thanksgiving! For more great ideas check out 1+1+1=1!