Tuesday, May 28, 2013

MONEY - Garage Sale

Wow, wow, wow.  What can I say?  Thank you doesn't begin to cover the gratitude I feel for everyone who helped with our garage sale this past weekend.  Even though the weather was cold and I missed the deadline to put it in the paper, we had a great turnout.  We were rarely without visitors and we met our goal plus $200!  It's a lot (*a. lot.*) of work, and our house was basically chaos for the week prior to the sale, but it was totally worth it.  Please to enjoy these basic snapshots of our festivities.

Thursday, May 9, 2013

PAPERWORK - update

Our application was accepted by the placing agency and practice application sent to home study agency.  Deep breath!  Here we go!

Tuesday, May 7, 2013

MONEY - waste not want not!

Another way we are trying to be good stewards of our money is adhering as much as we can to the phrase: "deal with it, make it work, fix it, or do without".  We all have those items - they work great for a while, and then something breaks or becomes less than ideal or starts to fade - you get the idea.  For us, we have decided that we will do one of the above things until it becomes absolutely necessary to replace said item.  Some examples:


This has to be the most extreme example.  These were Zack's glasses when we finally decided they had no more life left in them.  He fixed them over and over and over again.  Used wires from twist ties when the screws fell out, bent the earpieces over when the plastic fell off, superglued nose pieces back on, you name it.  That black band is a hair tie holding a lens in place.  For those of you worrying about his prescription - don't worry about it, it was fine.  Don't worry about his prescription, the lenses were replaced frequently, the frames were used one too many times.  There are lots of things we fix before they need replaced.  I'm constantly patching holes in the toes of jammies, sewing up stuffed animals with holes, or gluing toys back together.  Books are a big one, too.  Tape those pages, the kids don't know the difference!  Zack will wear a pair of boots into the ground until he buys another pair, or gets a hand-me-down from his dad!


Yay for borrowed things!  Thank you to my sister in law for letting us borrow a bouncer!  (This is a picture of Kian by the way, not Logan)  Hooray for sharing!  Many very nonessential items (and some essential ones) like this were borrowed or hand-me-downs.  Several examples include our infant swing, this bouncer, our grill,  lawn mower, plants, furniture (like dressers and shelves), maternity items, books, a breadmaker, most of our kid's clothes and shoes, and many of our children's toys, the list could go on and on.  Lots of their toys are actually toys that Zack and I played with in our childhood.  Talk about hand-me-downs!  (P.S.  those things were made to last!!!)

A great example of "making it work" - is our printer situation.  Our printer is about 8 years old and still prints great (along with scanning and copying), so there's no reason to replace it.  It's only mildly annoying to have to stand there so you can hand feed each page into the machine.  The little apparatus that feeds the page in doesn't "grab" it, so there we sit hand feeding the pages in.  It really is only annoying with 20-some page documents when tiny people are tugging on your leg and wanting attention, or when you're in a hurry.  Otherwise it is working just fine for us in this season of life.

All I want to accomplish with posts like this is to reassure those who are financially supporting us - that we are trying our very best to be good stewards of the finances and material things we have been given.