Wordless Wednesday

I WON!!!

I won this great set of mixing bowls from a giveaway that Kimmie @ Over the Moon with Joy did.  They were donated by http://www.cookware.com/.  I was so excited!  But you need to hear why...

At Christmas time we always get a real tree.  This past Christmas was no exception.  So, we all go & pick out our tree, come home and set it up, only to find out our tree stand has a crack in it.  Well, it was late on a Sunday night, so....What do you do???  Well, if you're my husband, you go into the cabinet and pull out my largest mixing bowl.  Then you shove it in the tree stand (after all you can't hold up a tree with just a mixing bowl you know!).  So we used the stand to support the tree, but used my bowl for the water.  Needless to say, the bowl cracked.  I was not a happy camper, until I realized (and told my dear hubby), "Hey, now I get to go buy new mixing bowls!"  Well, I'm not a huge fan of shopping, so I never got around to buying myself some new ones.  Then along came Kimmie's giveaway.  And, well, the rest is history.  I now have a brand new set of PINK mixing bowls.  My girls were thrilled.  You see, in their minds, there is now one mixing bowl for each girl in our family :)

I should have posted this a couple of weeks ago.  Thanks, Kimmie & Princess Sunshine for pulling my name!

Sell It - Frugal Friday

I recently heard on the radio that the average household has $25,000 worth of "stuff" they either don't want or don't use!  Are you serious?  All I could think was, "WOW! That's a lot of money!"  So, here's my Frugal Friday tip.  Start spring cleaning and get rid of what you're not using. 

I'm a huge eBay fan.  At one point, years ago, my husband used to tell me he was going to have to start nailing things down if he didn't want me to sell them :).  But in all seriousness.....Why do we keep things that aren't being used?  If we sold the items that are just hanging around, for even 1/4 of their worth, we would have over $6,000!!!  This makes me want to re-evalute what I keep & why I keep it.  Some things may have sentimental value, etc. but if they're just collecting dust.....

If there is something you want to purchase, and can't afford to, this may motivate you.  I tend to use the money I make selling items to purchase my homeschool curriculum for the upcoming year.  I don't like it to come out of our living expenses, so this works perfect.  It does take some effort to sell your items, so if you don't want to take the time, by all means you can donate it too.  You'd still be organizing and decluttering while helping a good cause.

Earth Day Giveaway

Enter to win this great Earth Day package. Go to Readers Are Made On the Lap of A Parent to enter. Here's a picture of just one of the items you can win....

Wordless Wednesday

My newest pattern that is for sale in my etsy store.

Want More Comments on Your Blog?

More and more I'm noticing I can't leave comments on some great blogs!  If it's someone that I do not know personally - outside of the blogging world - I have no way of letting them know I think it's great.  So, I decided maybe I'd post this and see if it helps.  If you wish more people were responding to your posts, try this and see if you start getting more comments.

Go into your 'Settings' tab
Click on 'Comments'
Third section down is 'Comment Form Placment'
Make sure it is 'Full page' (not embedded below post)
Go all the way to the bottom & click 'Save Settings'

Try it and let me know if you see a difference in the number of comments you're getting.

Wordless Wednesday

Dan & I celebrated our 9th anniversary last week.

He got me this Judas tree (also known as a Red Bud).  They are absolutely beautiful.  The bark flowers purple buds and then the buds turn to leaves.  I was so excited.  

I've admired these trees for a long time and now I have one :). 

I've Been Featured!

I know this is my personal blog, and not my crochet blog, but I'm so excited!  Julie, over at RedHenStudios, had a blog entry today that included one of my afghans, which made my day :). I think this is a first for me and I'm honored, considering it's my own design. Here's the design she featured, but go over to her blog and check it out.

Thanks again, Julie!

Wordless Wednesday

The babies are here!

(No, we don't have cows. It's the farm down the street.)

The Missing Socks

I always heard that the washing machine eats socks and leaves you with all these mismatched pairs. Well, don't throw them away until you read my story.....

My girls socks started disappearing about the time they turned 4 and 5 (maybe a little younger). Because they wear the same size, they share clothes, so it was hard for me to 'point the finger', so to speak. After all, no one was really admitting to their disappearance. lol So, I just went out and bought more. Well, let me assure you, this gets old fast. How many times a year should I need to replace socks? Then daughter #3's socks started disappearing too. Maybe it's a conspiracy. Then, I started to think that maybe my machine was eating them after all. When we had depleted our stock of matching socks I would go out and buy more, with growing frustration every time.

Then I started noticing something. About a month after throwing away a sock its match would appear, out of nowhere, in the clean laundry. hmmm.....That's odd. The more I paid attention, the more I realized the socks were showing up at a later date. Obviously I could no longer blame the washing machine, so I turned to my beautiful girls for answers. After many shrugs of the shoulders, and "I don't know"s, I decided to play Sherlock Holmes. Once I started paying attention to their behaviors it all started to make sense. Their socks weren't making it into the dirty laundry. I was finding them in the shoe basket near the entrance door, stuffed between the mattress and the bed, in the bookcase....you name it.

Now that I knew I didn't have to throw away the 'extras' I started saving them. At one point I literally had half a laundry basket of unmatched socks. I was still listening to "I don't have any socks" all the time. I was frustrated.....to say the least. How was I going to get them to actually put the socks in the laundry, so I could wash them. Then an idea hit me. Make them match up the socks! Maybe if they saw how much work it was to sift through half a laundry basket full of them to find a match they might think about where to put them when they take them off.

That was a few months ago. Now, I match up the socks that come out of the laundry in pairs. Anything that doesn't match I give to them. They now have a laundry bag I keep all the mismatched ones in, instead of the laundry basket (we're making progress). It is then their job to match up the extras. It isn't 100% but it's so much better than it was a few months ago. We've gone from 1/2 a basketful to this....

Happy Sock Hunting!