Saturday, April 30, 2011

Because I'm awesome....

Just wanted to share a couple deals I got today:


A couple weeks ago we got a coupon in the mail for $10 off at Lowe's. It was in some flyer about spring projects, and it didn't say that you had to spend any certain amount in order to get the $10 off. It expired tomorrow, so I took it in today to pick out some flowers for my bed in the front yard. I got all of the flowers in the pictures below for a grand total of four cents. Yep, you read that right. The cashier's tone was funny, because she had to double check the monitor a couple times to make sure she was right. Gotta love practically free!



Dillon's is having another 10/$0 sale, and there were a lot of really useful things this time. One of them being MILK! Milk has gotten to be so dang expensive, but $1 for a half gallon is a steal! I got three, because I knew we could go through those just fine before their expiration date. I also had a coupon for the Pringles, so the grand total for everything in the picture, after tax, was $9.82. 

Baby!!!!

My sister in law texted me this afternoon to see if I would watch my nephew Ryan for a couple hours. When I had stopped by there earlier in the afternoon, she mentioned that he wasn't napping or sleeping very well and she was getting really tired and frustrated. I said sure, as long as she came back to get him by 8:30. Raegan took a late nap this afternoon, so I knew she would be up a little later this evening, and I didn't want to interfere with her ability to go to bed.

Raegan was SO! EXCITED! because there was a real baby. IN HER HOUSE. The only problem is that she's twenty months old, so she has no clue that you have to be gentle with the baby and you can't pat the baby nearly as hard as you do the kitty. It's funny because last night her cousin Jacy (who turns a year next month) was over, and Raegan was not too keen on sharing toys with her. But she was all about giving Ryan toys to play with this evening.

After supper he got really fussy, so I put him in The Godsend Swing for awhile. He kind of drifted off, so I left the room to go put away some things from supper. Raegan came running after me fussing, saying, "Baby, baby!" She was very insistent that we NOT leave him alone for a second. She kept wanting to give him his paci and his bottle and kisses. Eventually we had to tell her to back off a bit, because I was afraid she was going to squash him a little bit. lol Raegan kept alternating between calling Ryan "baby" and "Me-dee" (Melody is the name of the baby from daycare) and we had to keep reminding her his name was Ryan. At which point she would growl his name. I guess Ryan does sound a little like "rawr." Silly, silly girl.

Handsome man!


Raegan wanted to be as close as she could possibly get to Ryan


Kisses!


"Nice" pats


Here, have your toy!


You are getting very sleeeeeepy.... :)

Friday, April 29, 2011

A few pics

Raegan loves Radar so much! Now that she's a lot nicer to him, he's pretty tolerant of her.


Hanging out with Daddy


Raegan and her cousin Jacy playing together.

Daddy's Girl

Yesterday when Luke went out to mow, Raegan stood at the door and watched for the longest time. She even brought some toys over to the door and sat and played and kept an eye on Luke while he took care of the front yard. After he moved to the backyard, we went out front for awhile. She is such a big helper, because she got out the broom to help sweep the sidewalk. It was too stinkin' cute!







Sunday, April 24, 2011

Easter

As usual, I took a ton of pictures. I mean, a lot. So, I made the Easter egg hunt ones into a collage so that you didn't have to scroll through The Longest Post Ever. :)


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I know I can get this candy out....


All the grandkids (well, the ones that are still kids). And my brother in law. :)


And commence with the mouth open portion of the afternoon. lol



Raegan was super excited about Jacy. A baaaaby!


Best buddies. :)

Saturday, April 23, 2011

Church Easter egg hunt

This morning was the Easter egg hunt at our church. I was kind of hesitant to take Raegan, because she's been stuffy and just generally under the weather since Wednesday. Nothing was making her happy this morning, so I thought we would probably skip this year, but when I mentioned going to church, she perked right up, so off we went.

They start the program in the sanctuary first, where they do a couple songs and talk about how Jesus died and rose again. I really like that they divide the hunt up by age, so that Raegan isn't being trampled by big kids. She was in the 0-2 year old group, and I was amazed at how many eggs there were. She got a bucket full, and she spent a LOT of the time just looking around at what everyone else was doing.

Unfortunately, the batteries on my camera died only a couple pictures into it, but I did get a couple short videos too.

Walking up by herself like such a big girl :)


Raegan was a little skeptical about all the people there at first.


She kept stoppig to brush the grass off the eggs. (And to ask "Candy?" a million times. lol)





I just have to point out that when I told her to look behind her, she immediately knew what that meant! :)

Monday, April 18, 2011

Just stop already!

Little girls' fashion pisses me off.

I felt this way before I became a mom, when I saw some of the things LITTLE girls in my class were wearing. Now that I am a mom, I feel that way even more strongly.

I don't want my under two year old wearing a bikini this summer. I don't want her wearing halter tops and itty bitty shorts with writing on the butt. She is still a baby, for crying out loud. Why is it okay for companies to manufacture this crap?!?!?!?!

I've been searching for a swimsuit for Raegan for weeks now. I wish I would have bought the SPF swim shirt and bottoms that I loved from Babies 'R Us a couple weeks back, but unfortunately I decided to wait and see what else there was. I have no problem with a two piece swimsuit that completely covers my daughter. Last year Raegan wore a tankini. No tummy showing. None of this baloney:



When I looked on one website, out of the 26 swimsuits they offered for toddler girls, 9 were bikinis. And only 7 were one piece swimsuits. Come on. Seriously? She's a little girl. Let her be a little girl. And don't even get me started on the fashion choices for Raegan when she gets older. Ugh ugh ugh. With Zane, we just had to avoid the plethora of t-shirts with annoying obnoxious sayings on them. You don't have to avoid sexy clothing when you have a boy. I shouldn't be having to even think about this kind of thing until she's in middle school and high school. If Raegan cares at all about clothing, I could be having the "you can't wear that" fights with her when she's in kindergarten. Or before.

This rant brought to you by my annoyance with the oversexualization of our culture.

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Miss Independent



It kind of scares me sometimes when Raegan wants to be so very independent. She's going through a stage right now where everything is "No!" as in "I can do it by myself - don't touch me, don't even think about helping!" She wants to crawl into the car and her carseat every day 100% by herself. She wants to walk up and down the stairs without crawling. She wants to carry everything herself. Thank God she knows how to put on her jacket by herself with the flip-over-your-head method so we don't have a battle there. :)

Saturday, April 16, 2011

Kitty!

We have such a strange cat. Sometimes we'll walk into a room and find Radar looking like this:

At which point, I'll go tell my husband that we have a big problem because we have a dead cat in the other room. lol



I wouldn't say that he LOVES Raegan, per se, but he does a pretty good job of tolerating her.


And finally, here's a video showing how much Raegan loves to torture loves Radar. Excuse my unmade bed. It was Saturday morning, after all! :) 


Zane's Science Fair

Zane's science fair went really well. It was a madhouse of people. I guess I should have expected that, since there's probably almost 300 students in the 6th grade, but I didn't really think about it until we got there. I was only able to get a few good pictures because there were so many people milling around, but at least I got those. Zane and his partner ended up getting first in the People's Choice category for his section of the sixth grade! Awesome!!!!


Nice smile there, Zane. lol


That's the "Stop taking my picture already" smile.


Showing the video to people.


The display. I am very pleased to say that Zane and Ajay did the whole posterboard themselves. See, when you don't do your child's schoolwork for them, they can still do a pretty good job. AND they learn something from it. :)

Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Top Two Drinks



1. Diet Dr. Pepper/Diet Wild Cherry Pepsi

I did a fabulous job when I was pregnant of giving up caffienated pop, but sometime over the course of Raegan's first year I fell back into the habit very badly. I blame it on late nights with a baby that refused to give up night nursing! :) I really need to scale back again, because I'm at the point where if I haven't had a pop by 10 a.m. I start getting a headache. Not cool.



2. Strawberry Daiquiri

I'm really not much of a drinker, but every now and then when we go out to eat I'll order one of these bad boys, and man are they good. This was actually the one and only drink I had on our entire honeymoon in Cancun. I just couldn't justify paying $5 and up for each drink, so I made do with one poolside daiquiri. :)

Sunday, April 10, 2011

Science Fair Project

Here's the video of Zane and Ajay shooting off their air cannon.:




And a couple pictures:

Putting together the cannon


Zane looks like a delinquent in this picture. Yes? lol


Saturday, April 9, 2011

Running fever!

Oooh, I almost forgot to update about myself. Ha! Typical.

Last weekend I ran the Fool's Day 5K here in town. I ran it in 34:11, which beat my time on the last one (34:57). This one had several steep hills, so I was excited that I made a new PR, even if just by a little. There's a 5K just for women in Hesston later this month that I'm thinking about doing, and a 5K/10K in mid-May to benefit DVACK. I've been running in the evenings more, because I would really like to do that 10K. If not, my plan is to shave down my time on the 5K some more. I went out last night and did 2.9 miles, and I wasn't even sore this mornng. I did another 2 today (it was pretty humid today so I couldn't manage anymore) so hopefully I'm not sore tomorrow from running two days in a row.

Here's a couple pictures that I snagged off the photographer's Facebook. :) I'm runner 113 if you can't tell.

Just making it up the killer hill. I still managed to run the whole way!


Next time = shorts! =)


Crossing the finish line - woo hoo!

Update on my smarties!

Whew! Another busy week over. Between that and no internet (or cable) from Wednesday through Friday (ugh!) I haven't had a chance to blog. Lots of updates though.

Zane finished his math state assesments this week. He did the reading ones about a month ago, and got an exemplary (highest category you can get) on those! We should find out his math score pretty soon. This week in band, his teacher told him that he had the potential to be the best trumpet player in the class. There are 11 trumpets in the sixth grade band, so that's a pretty high compliment. Zane took this to mean that he doesn't need to practice as much anymore (ha!) Teenagers and their logic sometimes....

Zane's science fair is on Tuesday. He and one of his classmates made an air cannon. They aren't allowed to actually shoot it off at the science fair (thank God!) so we have to videotape Zane and Ajay shooting it at home and then load it to YouTube so that they can play it on a laptop at their display table. I'll post the video once we take it.

Raegan still doesn't care to watch cartoons on television (which is just fine with me!) but she was absolutely fascinated when I was watching a little bit of Dancing with the Stars last Monday. She said "Whoa!" and stopped to watch, then started twirling around in circles. Twinkle, Twinkle has been replaced by Itsy Bitsy Spider as her favorite song. She does these hugely exaggerated movements for "down came the rain" and it's adorable. She also loves playing Ring Around the Rosy, especially if the whole family will join in with her.

Raegan knows many body parts now. She names eye, nose, mouth, teeth, and knee, and she can point to all of those, plus ear, hair, neck, hand, arm, foot, leg, and belly. She loves showing her belly! :) She knows the noises that a horse, bear, lion, bird, dog, cat and sheep make, and she loves reading any book that has animals or babies in it. Raegan's big obsession right now is babies. A six month old girl started at daycare a couple weeks back, and Raegan is CRAZY about her. Raegan already says her name, and Angela said that she likes to give her pats on the back and always wants to give Angela the diaper when she needs to change the baby. Yesterday when we went grocery shopping, Raegan kept asking "Baby?" and looking around every aisle we went down. We only saw one baby in the whole store, but she sure was looking.

Pictures and videos to come.....

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Raegan is a dork

A couple examples of what a dork Raegan can be. :)

My mother in law got Raegan that purse a couple weeks back. Raegan likes putting her sunglasses on and carrying her purse on her shoulder and saying "Bye" to us, but the last couple days she's been wearing it on her head like a hat.


She gets her keen sense of fashion from her Mommy! lol

Friday, April 1, 2011

Geek

Okay, this might seem kind of silly, but I'm still excited about it.

I found the USDA's Cost of Food at Home chart through one of the blogs I read. Basically, you can look at what the average cost for a week or month of food to feed a family of 2 or 4 is currently (well, as of February of this year). You can also look at the average individual costs for each family member by age. It divides the figures into "Thrifty Plan", "Low Cost Plan", "Moderate Cost Plan" and "Liberal Plan" so that you can see where your average grocery spending falls. I would take it to mean the cost of groceries (minus household supplies) plus eating out. You can check it the February 2011 chart here if you are interested.

So for my family, if we stick to our monthly budget (which we have been for almost two months now, some weeks with money to spare), we only spend $27 more a month than the "Thrifty Plan". It might be silly, but I'm pretty pleased about that. It's nice to see that all of my hard work is for something, you know. :)

Also interesting to me was looking at home much the cost of food has risen over the last ten years. Ten years ago, the "Thrifty Plan" for a family of four (in the older child category) was $445.40 a month. Today, in that same category, it's $603.10. Even just going back five years, the cost for a family of four then was $519.00. Yeesh.

***Edited to add: Well, in looking at one of the older charts, apparently this chart covers food that is "purchased at stores and prepared at home". So basically, we go waaaaaaaaaay under the monthly amount for the specific ages of our family members, because my figure included our fast food/restaurant money. Even better!