Life on a Budget

Yesterday I stumbled upon a post from Dave Ramsey's blog, I guess there was some conversations taking place on his Facebook page, basically it was "You know you are on a budget when...".  Reading through those comments I was cracking up, because most of them were true to me and my family!  So I decided to make my own list of "You know you are on a budget when..."  So here it is

You Know You are On A Budget When...

1)  Asked if you have seen the latest movie you and your hubby look at each other and state, "What IS the latest movie??" or "What is a theater??"  Since its been about 9 months since have been to one!

2)  Redbox is your best friend!  Because you have a $5 a month budget for movie rentals and that lets you rent one move a weekend!!

3)  You cringe when the grandparents buy the "cheap junk" toys instead of something that is really needed or useful!

4)  Goodwill and garage sales are your new shopping mall!

5)  You make your kids buy their own Halloween costumes! (Which by the way, drastically changed what they wanted to be!)

6)  You refill the bathroom soap dispenser with half soap and half water so it lasts longer!

7)  Walking down the laundry isle at the grocery store to buy your one box of super washing soda (for the homemade laundry soap that costs a total of about $3 per batch) and you think "Suckers" when others are picking up their $15 bottle of Tide!

8)  You get excited when hubby's shirt get holes because that means more "paper towels"!

9)  Every time you put a cloth diaper on the baby you think, that's $.15 saved!

10)  When everything in your cart says "Great Value" on it!


Those are my top ten!  Quite frankly living on a budget is REALLY hard especially when the budget is really tight!  BUT its so worth the effort to know that we will soon be living a debt free life!

On my blog I have posted a few of the ways my family lives frugally.  You can check out my homemade laundry soap recipe here.

The first week of Soccer

Last week was the first week of soccer for us, man I do not know what we were thinking!!  Two playing soccer is going to make for a busy couple of weeks!  When we got their schedules I was surprised at the amount of games that will be over lapping!  Thankfully they are all in the same park and we are not going to be across town or something.

This is Little N's first year playing and it was so funny to watch those little 4 year olds "play" a game.  Not too many of them on Little N's team have played before, so when the ball comes to them they don't know what to do!

For Big E this is his third year playing (he missed last year because Baby had just been born!).  He is really catching on this year and going after the ball.

We didn't get too many shots of their games but here are a few we did get:

Little N in the blue sweatshirt.

Yeah not sure what to do with the ball!  

Baby Z being so patient playing in the stroller.

Now I think he had had enough

Yup not getting any more patient!

Big E, not sure what he was doing, obviously not going after the ball!

Isn't this a cool picture of the moon!??  

My Baby is ONE!!!

Yesterday was a big day at our house, we had a birthday!!  My little Baby Z turned one!  I can not believe its been a year, the time has gone so fast!  His birthday theme was Monkeys, because, well he is our little monkey!  Here is a little flash back of where he started:

The Baby Z was born

A few weeks old

Also a few weeks old

 And now a look at Party Central for this little guy!

The Highchair all decked out

His Monkey themed cup cake cake

The only picture we could get of him in his birthday hat

With all of his loot before opening them

In the middle of opening

At the end of opening, yeah look at his face, a little overwhelmed I would say!  

Digging into his cake!!

Yummy, yummy....

Look at that messy little boy!!

I think he had a great time, and he loved his cake!!  

Happy Birthday Baby Z!!!

Summer Fun Part 2

JULY....  July here was H.O.T.!!!!  That made me very unnerved, I was running out of ideas for my kiddos!  We have pools set up in the back yard but by lunch time it was just dangerously hot for them to even be in the pools!  So that led to LOTS of TV for us,  I am sad to say, but that is what we did for most of the afternoons in July.  Anyway I was able to connect with my inner artist and found some great art projects for my kids.  We painted rocks and made our own water color paints.   We also did some baking, and some cleaning and organizing too.  I know so fun right?!!

Little N painting one of his rocks

Working so hard to get that yellow paint on there!  

Big E working on painting one of his rocks green.  

I think he was making a turtle.

We made homemade water colors, this is Little N testing them out.

Big E trying to not smile for the camera, but I caught him!

In the middle of July we took a little day trip to Legoland, it was Star Wars Weekend!  My boys were in heaven!  Note to self about future trips...ALWAYS make sure you bring extra batteries for the camera!  YUP, they died before we got any pictures of the Star Wars characters!  Here are the pictures we did get:  

Since the boys got to go to Legoland they took mommy to IKEA!  AHHHH heaven!  Unfortunately no pictures to prove that I actually got to go!  :)

July also brought Nana and Papa to town (finally!), my boys had not seen them since Thanksgiving.  They were super excited to have them here for a few weeks.  

Our Homeschool Name Announced

Our homeschool finally has a name!! After months of brainstorming, we finally narrowed it down to two yesterday on a 3 hours road trip for a family reunion.  We are so happy and proud to announce our homeschool name:


Freedom Knights Academy!!  :)

If you saw a few days ago I had the tab "Adventures in Homeschooling" at the top of my blog.  It didn't occur to me to search and see if that was already taken, so today I did that search.  As it turns out someone else already has that as a title for their blog, so I decided to change that tab to our homeschool name.  So if you are interested in finding out more about our first year in homeschooling, you can click that tab and it will take you to my new blog.

This blog I will keep as a family blog and try to keep the homeschooling stuff on the Freedom Knights page.

Summer Fun Part 1

This has been a crazy busy summer!!  Not really sure what we have been doing, but its been busy!  We started off June with really nice weather.  So that allowed us to get outside into our pools!!  We did make it to a few parks in our area.

We made our own little water slide!  

Baby Z's first pool experience!

Big brothers were so excited for Baby to be in the pool with them!

We worked on a Ten Commandment Study this summer this is one of the crafts.

Big E with his craft.

Baby Z learned to pull himself and stand!  He was so proud!

Learning to protect his toys with the Light Saber

He really loves his swing!

Unfortunately June turned into BLAZING HOT temps and this momma had to get very creative!  There has been lots of indoor activities and homemade products.  We have made homemade water colors, painted rocks, and got our home organized for homeschooling!  :)  

My next post will cover our July Summer Fun!

The Beginning...

Well its that time!  Time to start our homeschooling adventure!  I will be documenting the trials and triumphs of our first year homeschooling!  You can see that through the Adventures In Homeschooling tab.

Ready, Set, Here We Go!!!!