Top Ten Best Things of a Staycation

We are having a staycation this memorial weekend, partially because we aren't quite sure how the girls are going to adjust to sleeping in such close proximity in the Camper, mostly because I completely forgot it was a holiday weekend...

So I figured I would compile a list of the reasons staycations are just as great as vacations...

1. The price of $0.00 per night fits right into our budget

2. Little or no gas needed to get where we are going since we are parking in the yard

3. Day trips consist of discovering new places right where we live

4. Always close to the restroom (no getting lost in the dark in the wee hours of the morning!) and there is always a free shower with hot water

5. "Free" electric hook up

6. Plan B available in case one or more of the girlies don't take to well to the sleeping

7. Completely Pet friendly

8. No need to miss classes/lessons/practices which you have paid for and haven't been canceled due to the holiday

9.(although this is technically cheating) no need to worry if we forgot anything since everything we own is right here.

10. You aren't looking out the window at the closed up sad looking camper thinking "man I really wish we were getting to go camping this weekend".

I'm kind of excited to see our little camper all popped up in the yard and to get out there again. We never got to winterize it last winter thanks to the fiasco with the bank and the house so who knows what we will find out there, but it just adds to the adventure :)

And can't wait for the first S'more of the season, even if we have to cook the marshmallows over the grill :)

Family Movie Night

For the last couple weeks we have been having a family movie night, hopefully we will be able to keep up the tradition it's been lots of fun!

Last Friday the movie was the Princess and the Frog. A pretty fun movie!

The Little Miss even watched some of it!

Our menu consisted of english muffin pizzas which we all ate on the floor. Daddy and I got to drink out of the sippy cups since even we are prone to spill, especially with the dogs, cats and toddlers milling about on the floor :)

Since the little miss is still a bit young for popcorn yet, we *settled* for some black raspberry ice cream...

Which apparently the little miss found to be no fun at all.

Even Sirius got some :)

And the littlest Miss? She was content just sleeping the whole time :)

It was an excellent time for all!

Oh so exciting

Yep in our little life its the little things that are exciting :)

First thing...Last night I purchased the supplies are we are set to attmept our green/frugal cleaning! Going to start out with the simple stuff today to clean the Windows, Living room, Kitchen and Bathroom. This weekend I am going to attempt making some laundry detergent.

And next up... I ordered a table yesterday for Cassie to craft on :) so far I have just been putting down a huge blanket on the living room floor and letting her have at it, but I think now we need to start having her contained a bit more to a creative space. I didn't want to put her in her high chair or at the kitchen table simply because that's where we eat...or TRY to get her to eat anyway, don't want to confuse her by trying to teach her to NOT eat the art supplies :)

So I ordered her this table. . .

We will set it up in the living room sans umbrella and make a little crafting center for her. Can't wait to get it! (though will have to wait a bit, I ordered it on Walmart.com and had it shipped to the store for free to save the $10 shipping fee...)

But anyway... during my grocery shopping excursion last night I bought some crafting supplies :) bought the supplies to make some playdough (Kool Aid and Creme of Tar Tar!) and to make a dry erase coloring book. And bought some water colors, can't wait to see what she does with the paints!

Also over the weekend we finally bought the rocker/recliner and dresser for Alli's room! We don't have room for it yet, but it should be getting here early next week (around the same time the craft table will get here). We should have the recliner in time for me to start taking Alli's monthly pics!!! (yes, yes I know, I seriously need to update the monthly pics for Cassie still, I'll get to it lol)

Reader Mommy

1. Awakened (House of Night book 8) ~ PC and Kristen Cast

2. Storm Front (The Dresden Files Book 1) ~ Jim Butcher

3. My Fair Lazy: One Reality Television Addict's Attempt to Discover if Not Being a Dumb Ass is the New Black, or, a Culture-Up Manifesto ~ Jen Lancaster

4. Songs of Love and Death - Various Short Stories

5. A Game of Thrones (A song of Ice and Fire Book 1) ~ George R. R. Martin

6. Queen of Babble - Meg Cabbot - Very cute book excellent choice for book club! It's kinda like the Shopaholic series but better :)

7. Bloodfever - Karen Marie Moning

8. Faefever - Karen Marie Moning

9. Black Heels to Tractor Wheels - Ree Drummund (excellent book!! I never read her story online so I'm not sure if its the same or not but I loved this! and now I must get her cook book...)

10. The Twilight Saga (counting all 4 as 1 since I read them so many times :) and it was all considered one book borrowed...)

11. Wicked Lovely - Melissa Marr - Book was okay...everything was very nicely tied up at the end so I'm not totally sure how there are 4 (I think?) more books in the series. I'll wait for the library to get the 2nd in the series (they have the 3rd...) before reading any more, definitely wont buy any of the series though.

12. Dreamfeaver - Karen Marie Moning

13. The Host - Stephenie Myer

14. My Horizontal Life - Chelsea Handler

15. Shadowfever - Karen Marie Moning

16. I am America and So Can You - Stephen Colbert

Currently Reading

13 Little Blue Envelopes - Maureen Johnson (gotta love Nook's Free Fridays! excellent for my reading budget)

Water For Elephants - Sara Gruen (Never thought I would get off my library's waiting list for this one...came soooooo close to breaking down and buying it. Glad I held off!)

Let's get a routine down...

All right, I seriously need to get a routine down...this randomness (and all the mess) is pretty much killing me so here we go...

Sunday ~ Menu Plan and Coupon Clipping

Monday ~ Laundry, Grocery Shopping and Budget/Bill Paying

Tuesday ~ General Cleaning - Kitchen, Bathroom and Living Room

Wednesday ~ General Cleaning - Bedrooms

Thursday ~ Clean/Wash floors

Friday ~ Touch ups, Errands out and Lunch with Daddy

Saturday ~ Free Day

Of course it is going to take me a while to catch up with everything cleaning and budget wise but at least I have a course of action. I feel so much better having a game plan!

I wonder now if I should put up a calendar and give myself a gold star for each task completed LOL...

Now I just need to get back on track with the activities and crafting and general learning with Cassie!

An Attempt at Frugality

I went to Walmart the other day just to get some diapers, wipes and bottles...I ended up getting a frozen dinner in there too but regardless the total came to $88. EIGHTY EIGHT flippin dollars ~ just not cool in my book. Especially when we have 3.75 people, 2 dogs and 3 cats in this house living off of one income.

Back a few years ago, maybe 7 or 8, Matt and I had a weekly grocery budget of $50 and that suited us just fine. Not even any need to clip coupons. Granted we were only two people back then and let's face it groceries cost less...AND we could get away with bread, cheese and Ramen Noodles, but still...

So that got me thinking...we REALLY need to find a way (or few) to cut costs around here.

Plans so far include

~ Find "recipes" for Laundry detergent (at the rate we have been doing laundry lately we are going through it like water)

~ Purchase some wool dryer balls

~ Put up (and use!) a clothes line outside

~ Find recipes for cleaning supplies. works on three levels...better for environment, better on the budget and they wont be toxic so if one of the girls somehow gets into the cabinet we wont have to worry about them getting into the cleaning stuff.

~ Clip AND use coupons

~ Get in the habit of checking Groupon, Living Social and Seize the Deal on a daily basis.

~ Make reusable cloth wipes. We would go with cloth diapers as well, but we just don't have the start up for it...

~ Shop at Farmers markets over the summer, we have a couple near us so we will have to see if it is actually less expensive to get our produce from them. It would be awesome to be able to get everything local, but we are going to have to do what is best for the budget! Plus our CSA starts up next month (? I think as long as the growing has been going good!) so that will help a little (can't wait to see what we start getting!)

So I think that's a good start, we will see how it goes!

Mother's Day 2011

Mother's Day 2011 turned out to be such a nice day, didn't quite turn out how we had planned, but nothing ever does lately :)

It began in the morning when Matt and Cassie gave me my gift. It's a Kwanzan Flowering Cherry Tree. Unfortunately I lost all the pictures I took of Matt and Cassie planting it, but I will be able to see it all the time and watch it grow!

It doesn't look like much right now, but in a few years it will look alot like this.

It's the absolute perfect present! It will add some color to the yard and where we planted it I will be able to wake up in the morning and see it from bed AND two of the trees that we have in the front yard will have to come down so we can put in solar panels so it will keep the yard from looking to bare. Plus I get to watch it grow just like I get to watch my baby girls grow up here, it makes me so happy.

Next we headed out to the Albany Tulip Fest. and for the first time I took NO pictures of the tulips, I took pics WITH the tulips but not of them. I just sort of wanted to enjoy the day today.

Here I am with Cassie smelling the flowers...she is becoming such the little copy cat, I would sniff the flowers and she would copy me, even though I am pretty sure she had no idea what so ever what I was doing.

Cassie was on the go from the second we got there (it was her first real festival type outing so she was VERY excited...)

So we decided to sit down for a while and let her just go...Daddy chased after her while I sat and relaxed and fed Alli

Once we were done we had a chance to take some family pictures!

Notice the cloudy sky in the background?? Yeah all of a sudden the perfect planned day went down the tubes. It got cold and pretty windy and We really didn't want to get stuck in the potential rain so we decided to head back up to the car and get some lunch.

We went to Friendly's and ran into a couple of friends, so cool how that stuff works out like that sometimes!

Basement Progress

It's been a while since I posted any updates on how the Basement renovation progress has been coming...

If you need a refresher on what we have been doing I refer you to This Post or This Post or This Post :)

Guess we will start with the biggest project first...we now have an outside door downstairs!

It looks pretty darned awesome (it will look even better once we get it dug out and get a patio put in...) I'm kinda jealous (okay, maybe a bit more than kinda LOL) that the door is so good looking...we needed a new one before but now we REALLY need a new one for our main entrance!

Next up...Matt flipped the stairs around and to get around the radon remediation pipe that the remediation guy was sooooooo kind to put directly in the way of the staircase he did some custom work with the final steps. It looks awesome!

Sub flooring is down in the kitchen and bathroom...

Which paved the way for the plumbing to start going in...

And FINALLY we have some sheet rocking going up!!

And I got a pantry in the Kitchen now!!! and I don't have to be worried about Cassie getting the door that used to lead to the stairway open and stepping off into noman's land...

Speaking of Cassie ~ She was a very helpful little girl, handing daddy supplies.

And decorating the shelving :)

In other news down stairs...all the plumbing is at least stubbed out if not hooked up and running, Matt is 95% finished with the insulation of the entire basement (Grandma's side and the family entertainment side), and heat is running on grandma's side. Soon we will be looking for paint and flooring!

Can. Not. Wait. To be done with this. We so seriously need to get Grandma her place so we can get Alli into her room! And it will be awesome to do things as a family on the weekends again and not feel guilty about not getting work done downstairs.

Welcome To the World Allison

Well, she is HERE! After causing some issues for the past couple weeks, little Miss Allison Rose decided to be a good girl and wait a) until she was technically full term at 37 weeks (on the dot) and 2) until my doctor got back from vacation before making her entrance into the world :)

So it started Monday 4/25 @ about 6:30 when I sneezed and my water broke...yep a sneeze started it.

I didn't want to call the doctor right away, because I was pretty sure I would still get routed to the on-call doctor (turns out I was right on that count...) so I got all our stuff together and we headed out to get some breakfast first. Yep I made sure to eat first this time...it was only French Toast sticks, but it was still something in my belly.

So we got to the hospital at about 8ish got all checked in and got down stairs in bed and got settled in for what would be a pretty long wait. What was great about this time though was that since my water broke on its own I didn't have to be hooked up to the IV right away and I got to walk around and what not.

Another cool thing?? We have a Dish Network Slingshot at home so Matt set it up so we could watch our DVR on the TV using his phone at the Hospital :) wasn't the best quality but it was better than hours and hours of HGTV lol.

A couple of hours in, Cassie and grandma came over unexpectedly, Cassie had just gotten done at the Doctor and she needed our prescription card to go and pick up her antibiotics. It was a nice little visit though!

Shortly after that they started me on a pretty slow drip of the Pitocin, after a few hours of that not working they kicked it up and things really started happening much much quicker! I don't know what time it was, but I FINALLY gave in and asked for the epidural. While we were wasting for the anesthesiologist to get down to the room I asked if I could head to the bathroom one last time but the contractions were so on top of each other I could barely stand, I made it back into the bed and had a pretty strong feeling that she was ready to come out then and there, but I let them give me the epidural anyway (chicken that I am lol) so they gave it to me then went to hook me back up to the monitors they had a bit of an issue finding her heart beat again. But find it they did, my Doctor got there about 5 minutes later, and 5 minutes after that I was laying there with my littlest girl on my chest :) the epidural never had a chance of taking full effect, BUT it did help with the worst of it.

Here she is...7 lbs 14 ounces, 20.5 inches of pure sweetness

Another great thing about going on my own this time was I got to EAT! Right after Alli was out they sent me some food, it was reheated and dry but it was wonderful :) AND I got sent upstairs to the recovery rooms that night instead of having to spend extra time down stairs.

Wednesday Alli got released first thing in the morning, but my doctor had some emergencies pop up so I didn't end up getting released until about 4:30 but FINALLY we got to go home.

Such an awesome feeling having our little family complete.

Wordless Wednesday - *Pretty* Easter Pics