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Living on One Income
May 19th, 2012 | Author: Suellen
When we made the decision for me to become a stay at home mom we new it would make things tight at home. We weighed our options and decided there were some things we could cut from our budget to make it work.
Aside from cutting the budget we knew that the days of eating out nightly were over. I began working on meal planning and comparison shopping to see what would work best for us to stay within our monthly food budget. I was surprised to find that the best method for staying within our budget meant shopping locally and making multiple stops along the way. Now instead of hitting the sale at the big supermarket I go to the butcher, a local farmer and a local vegetable store. I was even more surprised to learn that this was much cheaper then going into the supermarket as well as providing us with much fresher meals and snacks.
A side benefit of not going into the big store was I didn’t pickup a bunch of non-essentials. You know what I mean ~ the junk food that sneaks into your basket while you are shopping for healthy foods? Those junk foods were no longer finding their way into our home and guess what? No one missed them!
Next on my budget hit list was our cable bill. Spending almost $200.00 a month on just cable and internet was definitely not in our new budget. So I began searching around for options. My husband often does work from home so we would need high speed internet still. So I called our cable company to cancel all except the internet package. They offered us free basic cable for a year (by basic they mean only the three major networks and PBS) but still it was free so we said yes. Our bill went down $150.00 per month. A yearly savings of $1800.00! I was happy with that!
We have two kids ages 7 and 5 so they missed some of their shows but got to know some new favorites on PBS as well. Next we set ourselves up with an apple tv to allow streaming of movies and tv shows from online and subscribed to netflix for $7.99 per month. Again, not all our favorites but we all found some new shows to watch. Aside from the obvious savings we really found that we watched less television in general and the time we spent watching was commercial free ~ even better!
We still have a long way to go but we are making it on one income. Our next goal is to start saving some money!
The Itinerary
May 19th, 2012 | Author: Suellen
What report of a trip is complete with out the day by day details? So we fly out of PWM late on Wednesday night arriving at WDW probably early Thursday morning. Right now we have the following line up set up: Thursday AM: AK PM: MK
Friday: DHS ~ Late lunch at Sci Fi drive in
Saturday PM: Epcot ~ Late lunch at Via Napoli
Sunday AM: Epcot PM: MK ~ Girl Scout Event in the morning followed by Girl Scout breakfast) ~ Late Lunch at the Plaza
Monday: PM: DHS
Tuesday: ~ O’hana’s hang out by the pool before leaving for home
GoGo Squeez Giveaway!
May 18th, 2012 | Author: Suellen
The Many Versions of our S.W.A.P.S.
May 18th, 2012 | Author: Suellen
So if you don’t know what S.W.A.P.S. are then you were probably never a Girl Scout. When I was a kid the big thing was friendship pins… do you remember those? Here is a picture of them in case you don’t.
We often traded these though they don’t really meet the qualifications of a true swaps!
Here are the facts if you missed it in yesterdays post: http://www.girlscouts.org/who_we_are/facts/swaps/
So now we thought we would make shrinky dink Maine license plates with the tag “GSME100″. All four of us agreed on this and then I suddenly realized one night (like sit up in bed out of a sound sleep style) that we have two girls and other girls aren’t going to want TWO of the same swaps but each of our girls will want one of theirs. Lucky for Jen I didn’t call her that moment but waited until I next saw her. We regrouped and thought maybe we would do a our spring registration patch shrinky dink. Here are the license plate and the patch:
Okay that is not a great picture of the patch. I’ll try to get a better one later. So I started playing with the license plate image and realize we would only be able to get two to three per sheet! At 12.66 for 6 sheets and we need at least 75 sheets that got a bit pricey for us. So we went back to the drawing board. I had this wonderful image in my head that involved a small Mickey Mouse head, a 100 confetti and a lobster confetti hanging from a gold pin. I called Jen and found out she had a Mickey cartridge for her cricut (super impressed with this machine by the way! I must live in a cave because while I’ve never seen one I emailed our swap to a friend and she asked if we used a cricut to make it!) So in addition to Scouts ~ our girls also dance together a couple of days a week ~ while the girls danced we set up the cricut and played around with sizes and ideas. Of course we could not find a lobster confetti…. which is too bad because in my head it totally existed! This is what we ended up with:
The girls LOVED them when they saw them and will be making 200 of the this weekend! Jen and I will hotglue them to a pin and they will go in a baggie with the girls contact information on them.
I also later had an epiphany that it won’t matter if the girls have the same SWAPS because most other people there will be in troops anyway and will likely all have the same SWAPS. Problem solved there.
So above you see the prototype… the end product will have the Mickey head made from Mickey Mouse/Disney scrapbook paper ~ and the letters in GSME will all be different colors. I’ll double my efforts to remember to get the camera out and take pictures of the girls putting them together this weekend!
Our Traveling Group ~ A Brief Introduction
May 18th, 2012 | Author: Suellen
There is me! Your tour guide extraordinaire! I was a Girl Scout as a kid and made it up through Juniors but didn’t go on. Some of my favorite memories of being a Girl Scout include spending my summers at Camp Pondicherry in Bridgeton Maine. I’m super excited my daughter will be spending her first week there this summer! I was reintroduced to Girl Scouts when I emailed to find out how to sign my lovely soon to be a kindergartener up. The email I got back included what I would need to do and an inquiry if I would be willing to volunteer to help out. I thought help out sure! I can do that! Next thing I knew I had a co-leader and a group of 4 and 5 year old girls in my care every other week. We plucked our way through the first year and our group grew, and grew and grew! By this year we had 14 registered girls!
So I am the leader of my girls troop ~ in addition I am a SUPER Disney nut. I would go every day if I could. My first trip was when I was six months old and it started a lifelong love!
There is my Mimi ~ she is now 6 (she will be 7 in July). She LOVES being a Girl Scout! She loves all her sister Girl Scouts and learning about her community and the world around us. She is also a Disney nut ~ though she didn’t have a lot of choice! She is a bit unlike most kids her age (always has been) when at WDW her favorite thing to do is wander around the countries in Epcot and talk to the people from each country, look in all the stores at the local merchandise and color at the Sharpie Kidscot stations.
Here are a couple of pictures of her:
At a Girl Scout tea party with Hannah
Playing flip the Pancake
Epcot at night posing with her Duffy bear from the Kidscot station
Next up is Hannah ~ she joined our troop late last year. She missed the cookie sale in January so it was probably February when she joined us. Over the year she and Mimi have become close. She is already 7 and has been to Disney exactly one time. We are looking forward to showing her Disney how we do it! She is an avid dancer and competes (and wins) several times a year in addition to Scouts. That is her in the picture with Mimi at the Tea Party.
Hannah’s mama Jen is coming with us as well. Here is the thing about Jen: she has NEVER been to Disney! This will be a first for her, so we are looking forward to making it super special for her. She volunteered to do all the leader training for our troop since we had so many girls registered and is at almost all our troop meetings and events. She really is a super mama and super friend!
We will also have another traveler with us but I don’t have the details on her yet ~ I’ll know more on Monday and will share who she is and what she is all about then!
Bridging into the Next Century at Epcot
May 17th, 2012 | Author: Suellen
If you didn’t already know ~ Girl Scouts are celebrating the 100th year of Girl Scouting this year. Girl Scouts has dubbed it “The Year of the Girl” There are so many events going on during the year to celebrate that it was hard to choose which to participate in. THEN! Along came the event that really got our attention! Disney! What could be better then a long weekend with my Girl Scout and a huge event with 5000 people in attendance to Bridge over into the next century of Girl Scouts? I played with all the pricing and got it to a place we could swing and booked our trip. One other mom and daughter in our troop wanted to go as well so I passed the information along to her and she booked the exact same trip as us ~ so you will meet her along this journey as well.
I talked to our wonderful membership manager about our trip early in the planning stage and she reminded me we would need to make S.W.A.P.S (for those that don’t know what S.W.A.P.S are: http://www.girlscouts.org/who_we_are/facts/swaps/ ). I had not really thought about this and then she dropped the number we should be prepared to have! 100! Oh my! This got our minds turning and our S.W.A.P.S have gone through many, many variations until we landed on the perfect one. I will share this a bit later in the journey!
Through this blog I will document with words and pictures our journey on this trip! Next up I will introduce the characters joining us this trip!
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