Miscellany Monday

1. Happy Valentine's Day

Luke and I decided not to really do anything for Valentine's Day this year. We went out to lunch, just the two of us, on Friday, but decided to leave it at that. So I was pleasantly surprised to come home this afternoon to find a beautiful vase of roses on our kitchen table. Awwwww...... :)

2. Happy Tax Day!

Even more exciting to me than Valentine's Day is the fact that today marks the day we can officially file our tax return. Stupid Congress taking so long to pass everything at the end of last year - we would have our return in our hands by now if not for having to wait because we itemize.

3. Frosting

Dillon's really makes the best frosting ever (except for the woman who made my weddin cake, but how accesible is her frosting?). I pushed myself a little harder at the gym tonight to make up for my discovery of Dillon's frosting. lol

4. Head Start

The House is talking about a 22.4% cut to Head Start for the remaining six months of the 2011 fiscal year. This is huge. According to everything I've read today, this would result in over 200,000 children losing services and ovr 50,000 employees losing their jobs (in the U.S.) I'm pretty passionate about Head Start, not just because they cut my check every month, but because I believe that it's a good thing. Study after study shows the benefits of early education, and Head Start provides this to the poorest of the poor who may not otherwise be able to afford a quality early education for their child(ren). If you feel so moved, please consider contacting your members of Congress by email and ask them to reconsider this proposed cut of funding. If you go to this link, you'll find the information you need to do so. There's a form letter you can use, or you can make changes to it to add your own thoughts.

I feel like I should add one more miscellany so that I don't end on such a downer, but I just don't have anything else. Good night all!

Playdough

Another thing that we've recently introduced to Raegan is playdough. I had some little containers left over from gifts I gave to my students for Christmas, so I brought one home for Raegan to play with. I didn't want to go to all the trouble of making a batch if it turned out she wasn't interested or just kept trying to eat it.

Sometimes Raegan's laugh kind of sounds like a fake laugh. :)

Every now and then when we get the playdough out it will somehow mysteriously drift towards her mouth....

Week 2 of shopping with coupons

So last week I was excited to lower my grocery bill by shopping sales and using coupons, and was looking forward to doing the same again this week. I ended up making a food purchase on Tuesday that bumped my total from $76 to $84, but that's still quite a bit less than the $100-$125 I usually spend, so I'm still pretty please with that.

This week I ended up spending $92. $8 more than last week, but still less than my average, so I'm still okay with it. I had a couple expenses this week that brought my total up: a refill for the Diaper Genie ($7.35 after tax!), and Pepsi and Dr. Pepper products were on sale at Dillon's again, so I stocked up on those. (Luke goes through a LOT of pop, and I mean a L-O-T, so if pop is really on sale I will always buy it!) Walgreen's had Ajax dish soap on sale for 79 cents for a 16 ounce bottle, so I bought four of those, which means we won't need dish soap for awhile. I also spent $5 on a South High sweatshirt that was on clearance at Walgreen's, because hello super cheap hoodie sweatshirt. Can't pass that up! So really, if you take out the two extra expenses of the Genie refill and the sweatshirt, I actually spent LESS on groceries and household supplies than last week ($81 vs. $86). So yay me!
I found some really good coupons in the newspaper insert for today, and hopefully my coupon booklet from P&G gets gere pretty soon. My goal is to be regularly spending only $75 a week on groceries and household supplies by March. It's kind of like a game for me (can I beat my high score from last week?!) so I bet I'll bet able to meet my goal.

I also discovered that I can save money on those dang Genie refills by ordering them through Amazon with my Subscribe & Save discount. If I order them in three packs, I'll only be paying $5.98 per refill. I'm also going to be keeping an eye on Walgreens because I have a coupon that I picked up at Walgreens today that's good for $1 off 2 Playtex products (which is what a refill is). I might be able to get a good deal if they have a sale or Register Rewards at some point.

The other cool thing that I realized just the other day when browsing Amazon (because someday I would really like to have a Kindle) is that I can use my 15% off and 2 day shipping with anything** I order off of Amazon. I only get the 30% on select diapers and wipes, but that 15% and free shipping is good for anything and everything on Amazon. Awesome!

**Well, anything that can needs to be replenished once every month or two. Obviously I'm not going to be ordering a Kindle with Subscribe and Save. Yes, please send me a new Kindle every two months. lol 

The joy of shoes!

I mentioned on here about a month ago that Raegan learned how to put on her shoes by herself. Since then, she has been obsessed with putting on shoes - her shoes, Zane's shoes, any and every kind of shoe can come across in the house. Every day our living room has at least a few random shoes of hers scattered across it. Unfortunately, I think Raegan has inherited my fashion sense. Or maybe I should lack thereof? If nothing else, she's definitely inherited my love of shoes. :D

Luke calls these her "Grimace" jammies because they make her look like a big purple blob :)

One boot and one dress shoe - that's high fashion there, my friends! 

Debt Payoff Calculator

I found this super handy Accelerated Debt Payoff Calculator last night, and I HIGHLY recommend that you check it out. It's very encouraging if you are trying to pay off debt quicker by adding more to your minimum monthly payment. If you plug in the principal balance, interest rate, and monthly payment amount into the calculator, it will show you how much longer you have until the debt is paid off and how much interest you will be paying over the life of the debt. Then at the bottom, you can plug in an amount that you would hypothetically add to your debt payoff plan - what you might choose to pay above what you have to pay. Hit calculate results, and it will show you how soon your debt would be paid off by paying that dollar amount more per month. It will also tell you how much interest you will save by paying off sooner, and how many months you have saved in paying on that loan.

I plugged in my undergrad student loans. Just the undergrad loans. I have grad school loans through a different loan provider, and the total amount is just depressing, folks. If I follow Dave Ramsey's debt snowball, then I want to start applying extra money to our smallest debt first. I guess I should consider it a blessing that as soon as I pay off the small balance on Luke's credit card by the end of this month, our next smallest debt is my undergrad student loans. Really, we don't have debt in a lot of different places. We have my undergrad student loans, the payment on the Mountaineer, my grad school student loans, and our mortgage. It's just a LOT of debt in those four payments.

So back to the calculator. I plugged in the information from my student loans, and found that if I keep paying at the rate I am now, it won't be paid off until 11 years and 7 months from now, and we'll pay $1855.11 in interest during the payoff. (Lucky me, I have a really low interest rate on this loan!) BUT, if we start paying an extra $100 a month on top of what we already pay, the loan will be paid off in 4 years and 6 months, and we will pay $702.71 in interest. For a savings of $1,152.39, along with 7 years and 1 month of being in debt to this loan.

Just seeing it all spelled out like that makes me feel like, "Yeah, I can manage to find an extra $100 a month to get that bad boy paid off THAT much sooner. That's huge. Like, Raegan would be in kindergarten instead of middle school when we got that loan paid off. Like, Zane would be in high school instead of getting ready to graduate from college. And if I could manage to scrounge up some extra money on some months, we could get it paid off all that much sooner.

So check out that calculator I linked to, plug in your numbers and see what you get. I hope it's encouraging for you like it was for me!

A little different this week....

I've decided to do things a little differently for the writer's workshop that I've been participating in for about a month now. Normally, I write the blog, then link to it on Mama Kat's website. I'm not going to this time, to keep it a little more private, since it's kind of work related.

5.) Read the following quote and respond: “Sometimes you have to break the rules around you to keep the rules within you.” -Martha Beck (O Magazine)

This is the prompt that stuck out to me immediately. I wasn't going to blog about it, but I decided to just go ahead. I absolutely agree with this quote, even though I'm a rule follower. I think that there are rules in place for a reason, and I'm not someone to flout them because I think I'm above rules or anything of the sort. But there are certain moments when you have to go with what you know in your heart is right, even if it contradicts a rule that is in place in a setting you are in. Immediately when I read this quote I thought of a particular instance in my own life that I felt like it really applied to.

I've had an employer with a lot of rules about fraternizing with parents. There was a long line of rules about what I should and shouldn't do when it came to mingling with the parents I worked with. One in particular was always a source of contention for me. Teachers were not supposed to receive gifts from families. Big huge no no. I guess if a parent were to present us with a gift at Christmas, or during teacher appreciation week, we were supposed to suggest they donate it to the Goodwill or take it back because I just couldn't accept it.

I broke that rule to smithereens. And not for a half a second have I ever felt bad about it. Because how can I, while professing to care about this student of mine, look that child in the eye and tell them that I can't take their gift? Explain to me how that fosters my relationship with the parent or the child, please. I've never gotten an expensive gift. I've never felt bad about taking a gift, like I was taking away from the family's ability to provide Christmas for their own family. I've taken every gift with gratitude. And not an ounce of guilt for breaking a rule. Because it was more important to me to feel good about how I was treating a family or child than it was for me to be a rule follower.

Snow Day, Part...um.....five?

My diapers came this afternoon. I think I would be a little more excited about this if the freakin' UPS delivery guy hadn't rang the doorbell when he put the package on the porch. It didn't need a signature, so I'm not really sure why he did that. Naptime, interrupted. Thanks. I need to put a "DO NOT RING THE DOORBELL EVER, UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES, EVER!" sign up by our doorbell. Grrrr.

Our school district called off school again for today. Honestly, I wasn't very excited about this at all. I mean, yeah, sure, I enjoy being paid to spend a day at home with the kids. But I had parent teacher conferences to do this evening, and it's just that time of year when I have a lot to get done at work. We've had five days off since January 10th, which means that we'll have to make some of them up at the end of the year now. No thanks. At least this time it was a really good snow - good for snowballs and really deep. According to the news, Salina finished out at 11 inches. Yowza! The orignial forcast was for 3-5, which usually means next to nothing, so this was a big surprise! And it wasn't as brutally cold this time, so the kids and I went outside for awhile this afternoon.