Let the countdown begin!

It's December 1st! Break out those Advent Calendars!

For our calendar we number slips of paper from 1-25 (I created a table using a pretty Christmas font for ours, but that's just me). We use these slips of paper to celebrate by doing a small activity every day until the 25th. First I choose the numbers for which I know we have something already planned (eg. Christmas Parade on the 13th) I write those activities first. Then, I flip the rest over so that I can't see the numbers and I write a Christmas-themed activity, such as singing a Christmas carol, reading a Christmas story, coloring a Christmas picture, watching a Christmas movie, etc. I try to be as random as possible so that it's a surprise for me, too.

That's what we do--what do you do for your Advent Calendar?

Saving Dinner!

November is Meal Planning Month over at the FlyLady site and it couldn't have come at a better time for us. We have just finished a Once A Month Cooking (OAMC) session and the meals we prepared need to last until after the New Year, so if I don't plan well we may be out of food before Thanksgiving!

My meal planning strategy is facilitated by knowing what is in my freezer. I took the list of meals we prepared at OAMC and I printed a blank calendar from Outlook. I also opened our family calendar to see which nights we would need dinner as well as which nights we might not. I noted any evenings where one or more of us would not be home as that changes my cooking plans, and I recorded anything important on the no-longer-blank calendar. I then tried to complete the meal calendar by assigning dishes to the remaining days. A typical week looks something like this:

• Monday: Sweet Soy Chicken with Rice
• Tuesday: Mexican Torta
• Wednesday: Ekklesia (This is our church's weekly dinner--yay! No cooking!)
• Thursday: Chicken and Rice Wraps (My husband would night be eating with us that evening due to a meeting, so we would have something easy to prepare in small quantities. These are great just defrosted in the microwave like a burrito!)
• Friday: Pizza or Spaghetti (We eat this every Friday night and it is not a freezer meal)
• Saturday: Panko Parmesan Oven-Fried Chicken Salad
• Sunday: OYO (On Your Own) Night! We eat whatever we want, but it's every man for himself. Usually, this is my cereal for dinner night!)

I write any side dishes or ingredients that I need on the calendar as well as any thawing instructions, then I stick the finished chart on the freezer so that I can see it any time.

If you're new to meal planning and are unsure where to begin, may I also recommend SavingDinner.com? You'll find a link to it on the left side of the page. Leanne Ely publishes a free daily e-newsletter that provides recipes and helpful tips for feeding the family, and if you're interested she also has an enormous selection of freezer recipes for purchase that take minutes to prepare. If you need LOTS of help with meal planning you can purchase a weekly Menu Mailer where she gives you recipes and shopping lists for the entire week. Personally, I have purchased several of her freezer recipe sets including Chicken for the Freezer and Heart Healthy for the Freezer. The Moroccan Chicken with Honey Couscous is a favorite in our OAMC group. (Sorry for the advertisement, but I really do love Ms. Ely's products!)

So, that's what works for us! We eat well and we don't spend as much money at restaurants anymore...what works for you? Check out Crystal's site for more helpful hints!

Toys We Love--Maple Landmark

I absolutely love the Maple Landmark company in Vermont! They make classic wooden toys and home decor along with a slew of other neat gifts. Their products are American-Made and guaranteed safe for our little ones.

This year we are giving our son a Midget Train set and a few Scoots. Who could resist a train that's called the "Chocolate Pudding Train?"

Midget Train

Fire Truck and Police Car Scoots

We are also giving our son and our nephew one of their Semi-Trucks. Being a Kentucky girl, I fell in love with this one as soon as I saw it!

What on your Christmas list this year? Check out Rocks in My Dryer for other great toy ideas!

In the Kitchen--Organization

What I find to be the biggest hurdle to organizing my kitchen is not the cubic footage of the cabinets, but the surface area available in the cabinets.

I add shelving layers whenever possible to my cabinets (it is much easier to remove plates, bowls, and glasses this way):




I organized my bake ware and cookware in one cabinet using two chrome adjustable shelves:


My laundry area is actually a closet in my kitchen with the plastic-coated wire rack style of shelving. Before, I had to stack everything, and it always ended in an avalanche of foil and plastic containers. I took some pieces of the cubic closet organizer I have in another room and repurposed it to hold my boxes. (Instead of using the clips that came with organizer for the shelves in the middle I used cable ties to hold everything together.)


(By the way--I'm not a Ziploc hoarder nor am I an employee of the Ziploc company! I'm storing all of those bags for our Once A Month Cooking group!)

This is what works for me! How do you organize your kitchen?

Check out other ideas at Rocks in My Dryer!

If only I had known this sooner!

As you know, I am a bit of a coupon junkie. I'm learning a little bit every day about how to make saving money work for me, and there are several things I wish I had known sooner!

1. You can use a Buy One Get One Free coupon on a Buy One Get One Free sale to get both items free. Don't spend time trying to rationalize this--you'll go crazy. Just go with it.

2. Some stores allow you to use a store coupon AND a manufacturer's coupon at the same time for the same item. Recently I purchased two bags of Bird's Eye Steam Fresh Vegetables. Each was priced $1.79. They were on sale for 50% off, therefore I got two for $1.79. I had a manufacturer's coupon for $1.00 off of two bags, thus my price went down to $.79 for two. I also had a store coupon for $.55 off of two bags, thus the price went down to $.24 for two bags. That's $.12 a bag!

3. Some stores allow you to use two coupons on a Buy One Get One Free sale. Olive Oil this week was BOGO for $11.99. I had two coupons for $1.00 off of each bottle, thus my final price for two 32 oz. bottles of olive oil was $9.99--that's only $4.99 for each bottle (that was originally $11.99)!

4. Stores will gladly answer your coupon questions! If you feel hesitant about a deal, call the store first and ask anonymously. I've even called corporate offices and said, "I have a coupon question." They are happy to have you as a customer, and they will tell you what you need to know so that you can avoid any hassles when you get to the store.

There is so much to learn about coupons and rebates that I couldn't possibly fit it all into one article, but this is a good foot in the door to saving tons of money on groceries. Do you have any money-saving tips? I would love to hear them! What works for you?

Doing Laundry MY Way

Laundry...why does it have to be so much trouble? It always piles up while I wait to have a full load of a certain color, and by that time everything is dirty and we're digging through laundry baskets for something to wear!

So, I made up my mind to do one load a day. I was still sorting colors and separating the towels and the kitchen towels, and it worked for a while. The problem was, there were still all of these laundry baskets sitting around, and if I missed a day, yikes! Everything overflowed!

Well, I've started doing laundry my way, and I'm much happier because of it. We put our clothes directly into the washing machine like it is a laundry basket ("shouting out" stains as we go), and in the morning I start the wash. Once the load is all washed, dried, and folded, we start over again. I wash everything together. Even a towel gets thrown in from time to time, and guess what? Nothing happens. I've always been under the impression that the world would stop turning if towels were washed with dress shirts, but so far there have been no galactic abnormalities of which I am aware.

I have also simplified what I use in the wash. I use a detergent with color-safe bleach already added, and I only use white vinegar as a fabric softener. This way everything gets "bleached" and it doesn't matter if a shirt that requires fabric softener is washed with a pair of pants that forbids the use of fabric softener. So far, no problems there, either!

It works for me! Do you have any deep, dark laundry secrets?

Be sure to check out Rocks in My Dryer for more Works for Me Wednesday articles!

Coupon Crazed

Why I Clip Coupons:
I like to save money, and in some cases I can acquire merchandise FREE of charge (the legal way!). I believe that it is my job as the shopper of the house to help our budget by cutting costs whenever I can. Also, I actively look for deals that I can use to make contributions to our local food bank.

How I Clip Coupons:
Sunday is a big day in our household. After a great morning at church and Sunday school, we head to the grocery store and grab a copy of the newspaper. Later, usually after the rest of my family is asleep, I get to work.

I have two traditional coupon organizers, each with thirteen pockets. Before I add the new coupons to them, I go through each section to remove any expired coupons. This is also a great time for refreshing my memory as to any coupons I might have forgotten I had. Once that's done, I clip what I need and sort them immediately into my organizers.

I have changed my ways a little when it comes to what I clip. At first I clipped everything, but I didn't really understand how to make coupons work for me. At the end of the month I had stacks and stacks of coupons that were not used and then expired. I couldn't find anything I really needed because of the volume of the little pieces of paper in my organizer. It was also impossible to search for something at the grocery store without an embarrassing avalanche. I gave up because I wasn't saving much money and I was doing a lot of work in the meantime.

When I started staying at home with my son, I decided it was time to get serious. This time, I only clipped the coupons that I knew I would use. I threw away quite a few without clipping them, but the ones I kept were generally redeemed. In the meantime, I researched a little and learned how to stack coupons and pair them with store sales to save more.

Recently, after a coupon conversation with a fellow clipper, I realized that I could do more good if I would clip all of the coupons in the weekly inserts. There were many deals--most of the time for items I could have had FREE--that I wasn't getting. So, I'm back to clipping everything, but I've changed my methods just a bit when it comes to how I organize them.

How I Organize Those Valuable Pieces of Paper:
When I clipped only the coupons I knew we would use, I organized them by brand name so that I could easily find them. At the time, I was very brand specific in my purchases, so this worked well. When I started clipping everything, however, on the off chance that I would get a deal I wasn't expecting, this was no longer practical. I needed to organize by category so that I could quickly find coupons of a certain type instead of a certain brand.

I divided my coupons into categories that I created, mostly based on location in a typical grocery store. For example, one of my categories is "Cereal Aisle," and in that section you would find coupons for cereal and cereal bars. The "Bread Aisle" category holds savings for bread, peanut butter, and jams and jellies. My shopping list is also based on the layout of my most-shopped stores, so this method works for me.

My latest problem is that I have a ton of coupons and they are a bit cumbersome in the two 13-pocket organizers I use (one pocket per category). I have decided to add an index card file to my system to hold the coupons I'm really only keeping "just in case." For example, we don't have any pets, and I never clipped the pet product coupons, but I have realized that if it's a good coupon and I can get the pet products for FREE, that would be a great donation to our local food bank. I don't want to carry around a wallet full of pet food coupons that I won't use, though, so they stay at home in my card file until I find an ad that compliments them.

It Works For Me:
My organization is not a perfect system by any means, and it is certainly the product of trial and error, but it works for me. What works for you?

Organization is only the beginning! Check back soon for more coupon posts!