Million Dream Mom

Keep Things Spooky!

2012-01-12T23:52:00.001-06:00

Hey friends. It's Friday the 13th... well, it will be in 20 minutes... and I want to devote today's blog entry to a friend of mine. My friend Red Clark is an amazing person. He's funny, he's creative, he's talented, and he's one of the nicest, most genuine people I've ever met. He's also a huge horror fan and aspiring filmmaker. He's really active in the Chicago horror scene and he's always coming up with fantastic ideas and projects.

If you follow me on Facebook or follow my horror blog, you may recall me crowing enthusiastically about a cool and creepy little video we did that won third place in a Midnight Syndicate video contest. Red was pretty much the mastermind behind that, and he did all the filming and editing. The end result was incredible. AND HE THREW IT TOGETHER IN LESS THAN 48 HOURS. You can now find it on the DVD for the film The Dead Matter.

I'm telling you about Red because he has a new project in the works. It's perfectly suited to his unique talents and I really think his passion for old school horror and his keen eye will make this into something great, but he needs just a little help to get it off the ground. Stephen King (yeah, that's right) has given Red permission to make a non-commercial short film adaptation of his story Gray Matter, from the collection Night Shift. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and would be a great stepping stone for Red's career! I truly believe that the horror world needs more filmmakers like Red, with original ideas and a driving passion for the genre. Red is funding this project through Kickstarter. He's 8 days out and $1,100 shy of his goal right now. If you can find it within you to celebrate a little spookiness this Friday the 13th and lend a hand... whether it's through a donation OR just by spreading the word... it would be much appreciated.

Thanks, everyone!

Wonders of Nature

2012-01-09T22:50:00.000-06:00

Oksana saw kitten and puppy birthing today, thanks to Milo and Otis. Which I'd seen once long ago, but only retained a memory of "OMG CUTE KITTEN AND PUPPY ADVENTURE!". I forgot there was birthing involved. Not that I have a problem with it, I think it's right to raise your kids to view birth as a perfectly natural process, not something taboo. I would even let them be present at the birth of my next baby if they wanted to be there.

At the same time, though, while I believe it is wonderful to treat it as a natural process and really, I applaud the movie for doing so... at the same time, when you randomly encounter something like a BIRTHING MONEY SHOT when you're watching TV with your kids, there's always an internal part of you that is completely caught off guard and totally squirms, like 'oh. OH! well. um. that's happening. My kid is now seeing this. ohhhhh.... kay. Here we go!' and you have to steel yourself for questions and reactions all while keeping yourself calm, collected, and NATURAL. ACT NATURAL. ACT NATURAL SO THEY'RE NOT SCARRED FOR LIFE DAMNIT!

My daughter's reaction? "Oh. EWWWW."

Two minutes later: "OMG THEY'RE SOOOO CUTE!"

The end.

you know you wanna see it.

Bedtime Conversation: 5 Year Old Edition

2012-01-09T21:02:00.000-06:00

Sonic

Oksana: "I don't like when Sonic catches bugs. Well, I like when she catches OTHER bugs, but not when she catches moths."

Me: "Why is that? You like moths?"

O: "Yeah. They're little and cute. Do you remember that one time when Sarah was over and she found a REALLY BIG moth?"

Me: "I sure do. It was big!"

O: "Yup. And part of it glowed red."

Me: "uhh... I... don't remember that part."

O: "it did! It was on the tail. Well not like a tail like Sonic has, but you know. Maybe that's it's butt."

Me: "Could be."

O: "And if it was a girl moth, it would have little boobs too."

Cecropia moth in our yard!
Not pictured: glowing red tail. Or tiny boobs.

Sarah and the giant moth.

Moving On

2012-01-09T13:39:00.000-06:00

Christmas vacation is over! The kids are back in school today. I enjoyed having them home with me the last two weeks and I am kind of sad. Everyone's adjusting back to going to bed early and waking up early. Somewhat reluctantly, on all our parts, I might add.

Things are coming along in all the other areas of life. Financial Peace University starts tomorrow. I picked up our kit yesterday and I'm really looking forward to it. We have something of a working budget hammered out for now. We're so far behind on the house that for now we've decided we're not paying the mortgage. We are in communications with the mortgage company and have tried several angles to get assistance, to no avail. Right now what we will probably do is wait until they start foreclosure proceedings and then see if we can turn it into a short sale. That will, hopefully, buy us the time we'll need to get everything together to move somewhere else.

"Somewhere else" is looking like it'll probably be North Carolina. I'm open to it and OJ is really interested. We love Boone but employment opportunities are slim... so it'll probably be either Raleigh or Charlotte. He has friends in both cities, and I have a cousin in Raleigh.

On our radar is also Austin, Texas. We have friends there, and OJ's brother lives there. Neither of us have ever been though, and OJ is really not keen on how hot it gets (whereas I LOVE it!).

(And of course, lest we forget, we're probably going to spend about a year in Park City, Utah after I win my beloved HGTV Dream Home.)

It is our hope to visit all of the places on our list sometime this year so we can truly decide on our favorite and start looking for work. And of course, despite which one ends up being the 'favorite', it'll really depend on jobs. OJ's going to try to get a job and stay with friends while he finds us a place to live, I think. We'll just have to see how it all plays out.

I'm still working on the house. Getting lots of stuff purged. Which reminds me, I have a trunk full of stuff I need to bring to Kara, the lady that sells my stuff on ebay. She does an awesome job! She has an ebay store and does online consignment for several people, so she always has a nice variety of merchandise. If anyone is in need of stuff, and wants to help out me, or her, or any of the rest of us local moms that need money, you can find her store here: The Sweet Buy And Buy.

I've also started working on my health a bit more. I had stopped taking everything but the absolute necessary medications while I was having all my stomach trouble last year, and while that hasn't completely cleared up (the endoscopy showed nothing but some inflammation, biopsies of which gave us no information), we're chalking it up to stress/anxiety pain and acid reflux. So I'm easing my way back into my other medicines and vitamins, starting with my metformin, which is causing a little bit of stomach upset but is also bringing my blood sugar down to more acceptable levels, so yay. I'll do most of my health and weight loss blogging over at my blog, The Big Fat Breakup, if anyone wants to follow along.

one of my favorite recent pins. Are you on Pinterest yet? Follow me!

After Bath Goodness

2012-01-07T15:04:00.001-06:00

A fluffy, slightly disgruntled Patches G. Pig after a bath last night. Curled up in towels on my bed, soothing his frazzled nerves with a delicious salad!

IUD-Day

2012-01-06T13:37:00.001-06:00

Had my IUD removed yesterday. My five years were up and it was time. You all know I've been wanting another baby anyway... I'm still in the "yay babies!" boat. OJ is in the "baby in a year or two" boat. I'm putting him in charge of birth control for now.

Is this an ideal time to have a baby? HELL NO. Are there things I want to do to improve our lives before we have a baby? ABSOLUTELY. All the same, would I be thrilled if I got pregnant? You know it!
Life's funny that way. Things tend to work themselves out as they should.

We're working on our finances. Financial Peace University starts next week. We have hard decisions and even harder work ahead of us.

I'm continuing to get the house in order. Purging even more than before since it looks like we'll be moving in the next 6 months - 1.5 years. However we decide is best to approach the house issue, we're going to try to stay here as long as we can to get into the best financial position possible for moving somewhere. Right now we're leaning towards waiting until foreclosure starts and then seeing if we can get into a short sale. We need more information overall though before we really decide.

My health needs work. I need to eat better foods, have lower blood sugar, and exercise more. I should also work on some meditation / stress relief exercises to help with the anxiety. If I get pregnant I won't be able to take my anxiety medications so that's something I'll really need to work on.

Those three things remain my biggest priorities right now.

you can wipe your ass with my damn house

2012-01-04T23:28:00.000-06:00

welcome to my life right now.

Aside from starting the day dealing with FECESCAPADE 2.0, it was a relatively normal day. Did lots of laundry, cleaned in the kitchen, cleaned more in Oksana's room (found more hidden pockets of cat pee, and lots more toys that need to be cleaned thanks to that), took care of animals and kids. Talked to OJ about our 2012 budget and wrote out a document that lays out where the money should go from each paycheck. Butted heads a couple times over how to best deal with money. Agreed to start taking the Financial Peace University class that starts next Tuesday. I'm sure we'll butt heads some more, but I think the group support will be good for us.

Right now our financial strategy consists of figuring out which steps would fuck us over the most for the longest, and then taking what appears to be the best path in that minefield. Walk away from the house? Short sell? Declare bankruptcy? Can we declare selective bankruptcy and keep some of our accounts out of it? Just stop paying some of our credit cards and wait until they sell them to collections and settle then? Pay off all the rest of our debt? Keep deferring things like student loans for the rest of our godforsaken lives? Decisions like that, where none of them are any good but some are (I guess) better than others.

I was surprised today when my mother told me that one of my cousins, whom I've always considered very savvy, thinks that the best thing for us is to walk away from our home. I know some of my other relatives think that's the case, but to hear that someone who is wealthy, intelligent and well-informed on a lot of matters like this agrees kind of surprised me. It's still hard for me to wrap my mind around. I mean, I understand that our house is worth about $100,000 less than what we owe on it... and that there's a good chance we'd never even get back to up to amount we owe on it in our lifetimes. But it was a risk we took, an obligation we signed up for, not to mention an emotional investment as well... and it's just hard for me to say 'ok, time to walk away'. Part of it feels right, but a lot of it feels wrong. I hate welshing on obligations and I hate the idea that my decision will make the overall economic climate worse.

Waking Up Is Hard To Do

2012-01-04T00:39:00.000-06:00

I have a devil of a time waking up anymore. No matter when my morning comes, no matter how many hours of sleep I've gotten, it still feels like I'm drowning in sleep, swimming my way up through mud, trying to break through to the surface of wakefulness. I don't know what is causing it... I'm blaming general health issues, because it could be anything from my diabetes (high blood sugar) to my anxiety medications to my lack of activity to sinus infections to poor sleep to god knows what. It makes it REALLY hard to get moving for the first few hours of my day though, and I'm ready for it to change. I'm just a little befuddled because I don't know exactly HOW to make a change. There are a lot of health changes I need to make, that is, and it's a little overwhelming to know where to start. Especially when the house keeps screaming at me to clean it and just finish PURGING already!!

So I got a slow start today. Other than that, I spent a bunch of time working on Oksana's bedroom; it got a little messy around the holidays again, and of course, Casey started peeing on things again. I'm battling that crazy mess (AGAIN) right now. I'm also battling giant mounds of laundry, BAGS full of laundry, and a lot of that has cat pee on it too (because that's another thing she pees on if it's on the floor; dirty laundry). Which means that each load takes twice as long because I do extra rinses and vinegar washes on top of the regular washing.

A friend posted a great article on Facebook today: Why Lying Broken In A Pile On Your Bedroom Floor Is A Good Idea. It made me feel stronger, having read it. The author shares some insight gained from a Hindu goddess. Here's an excerpt:

"Akhilandeshvari:
“Ishvari” in Sanskrit means “goddess” or “female power,” and the “Akhilanda” means essentially “never not broken.” In other words, The Always Broken Goddess. Sanskrit is a tricky and amazing language, and I love that the double negative here means that she is broken right down to her name.
But this isn’t the kind of broken that indicates weakness and terror.
It’s the kind of broken that tears apart all the stuff that gets us stuck in toxic routines, repeating the same relationships and habits over and over, rather than diving into the scary process of trying something new and unfathomable.
Akhilanda derives her power from being broken: in flux, pulling herself apart, living in different, constant selves at the same time, from never becoming a whole that has limitations.
The thing about going through sudden or scary or sad transitions (like a breakup) is that one of the things you lose is your future: your expectations of what the story of your life so far was going to become. When you lose that partner or that job or that person, your future dissolves in front of you.
And of course, this is terrifying.
But look, Akhilanda says, now you get to make a choice. In pieces, in a pile on the floor, with no idea how to go forward, your expectations of the future are meaningless. Your stories about the past do not apply. You are in flux, you are changing, you are flowing in a new way, and this is an incredibly powerful opportunity to become new again: to choose how you want to put yourself back together. Confusion can be an incredible teacher—how could you ever learn if you already had it all figured out?"

I highly recommend checking the whole thing out.

Other than that... I got pretty loopy / dizzy after I took my anxiety medication tonight (that happens sometimes) and ended the evening playing Skylanders with Oksana.

Speaking of anxiety. The Bloggess shared a post yesterday wherein she talking about her battles with depression and anxiety and admitted publicly for the first time that sometimes she self-harms. I'm really proud of her for talking about it and for standing up for herself and all the other people that fight their demons daily. I don't suffer from depression, and I don't self-harm, but I do suffer from GAD - generalized anxiety disorder. I was diagnosed about a year and a half ago. The symptoms had been creeping up on me for probably a couple of years before that, but I didn't recognize them. I had no real context for anxiety disorder. Sometimes it is hugely disabling, especially when other things in life are hard. It's harder to take action on many things in my life right now, for instance, when so many huge issues are crushing down on us right now. It's hard for me to explain to people why I don't just go get a job and make more money, because it's just not that simple for me. That's not all due to anxiety, but a large part of it is. I worry that people won't understand. I struggle with explaining my thoughts and feelings to people because without an understanding of how terrible anxiety can be to someone fighting it daily, I fear judgment. Scorn. Dismissal.

I fight anxiety every day. I take medications to help me deal with it. I see a therapist and a psychiatrist. These things have all helped immensely... but some days, life is still a huge battle.

Through it all, I do my best to figure out what I can do to make myself and my family happy. Sometimes that means compromises, BIG compromises. Even compromises on my own principles / morals at times. Because I'd rather be happy than right all the time.

Financial Peace

2012-01-03T01:12:00.001-06:00

I've always been a fan of Dave Ramsey, but I've never really put effort into following his ideas... or much of any ideas about finances, really. I'd dabble in fixing our finances but never really committed for more than a short while. Good intentions, bad follow-through. After reading about a friend's experience with Dave's Financial Peace University (and her recent encouragement to check out one of the local FPU classes that will be starting soon), I convinced OJ that we should take the class. It's $100, not very much to spend on one's financial future. I think taking it together, spending dedicated time for 12 weeks talking about our finances and ways to make things better, working together and finally building a solid partnered financial foundation in our marriage, is a good idea.

OJ is skeptical about the fact that it is a Christian-based program and that it is held at a church. He's become very atheist over the past year or two. I told him there was no way I was entertaining the idea of moving to the Bible Belt (North Carolina) with him if he wouldn't even take a class because it was held at a church. I'm sure we can filter out any God messages and apply them in our own spiritual / ethical / moral way. He also doesn't love the idea of paying someone (AKA making THEM rich) to give us 'financial peace', but I maintain that people's time and efforts are worth paying for if we learn something / get value from it. AND, as I said, $100 is not that much for two people to invest in a 12-week class.

I don't know which class we will be taking yet; I have sent an email to the most likely one with some questions. Hopefully we'll be able to start soon.

I wonder if there's a way to take these methods and convert them in such a way that they could be applicable to weight loss and clutter management. I could become the next guru of fixing up your life!

Daydreaming

2011-07-22T17:43:00.001-05:00

Wow, I haven't posted since March? AMAZING. I post other places... I guess I just haven't been sure what I'm doing with this blog.

I'm daydreaming right now. I suppose it's only fitting I felt the pull to post on my million dreams blog when I'm daydreaming about things I want / want to do.

I want...

a beautiful vacation cabin in the mountains of North Carolina so my family can spend chunks of time playing in the wilderness together (and then we can rent it out during the times we aren't there)

a decluttered house with all this stuff finally sold and out the door (there's a LOT to go through still... this is no short task... and so I dream of it just being DONE already)

living a life with enough money to make ends meet AND having all our debts paid, living credit card free

being a foster parent (I just discovered the fairly new, yet entirely awesome, blog Backwoods Mom... reading through her blog isn't helping me quench my desire to be a foster mom OR live in the wilderness)

Having a million dreams is hard because I often don't know what I want to do for a living. I'm happy doing so many things it's hard to focus on one; it's hard not to get swept up in the excitement of a new idea (or the rekindling of an old idea that's been loved and shelved for a while). Even thinking about "what would I do if I was rich?" doesn't help, because I think if I had the money I'd do ALL these things. I'd raise billions of kids and spend lots of time being an awesome mommy but I'd still start up Spookytown, I'd just have the money to hire people to work in the businesses I started there rather than having to build it from the ground up...
I'd also own rental properties and vacation properties all over the place, and would rent out the vacation properties when we weren't using them, and would spend lots of time traveling from spot to spot.

Sometimes I wonder if I should focus on one VS the other (family's not optional; it's coming along with the ride. The only question is how BIG we let the family get, I guess), or if I should keep trying to have both. They're certainly not mutually exclusive but splitting our attention and goals means everything grows a bit slower. The spooky side VS the vacation side. And of course, since I'm NOT rich, building the spooky side is going to involve a whole lot of blood, sweat and tears from us, which means that we will have a lot less time to go on vacations for a while and will be paying a lot more in vacation property management fees once we start accumulating said property.

And since we don't have the money to buy ANY properties right now, what do I do for money in the meantime? How much of myself do I want to invest in working VS spending time with my family?
I decided recently to start selling Pure Romance (click the link to visit my personal Pure Romance by Kristi website if you're interested). I believe I can work that business part time and make the money we need while still being able to focus on my family. I believe I will ENJOY that business too, which is very important to me.

Sometimes I worry I'm going to enjoy it so much that it'll become a full time thing for me and I will find myself putting my spookytown dreams on hold to pursue this career.

Then I laugh and say to myself, oh, what a TERRIBLE dilemma to have, having to choose between two things you'd love to do.

Life's funny that way sometimes. You think you're going to open a haunted bar, only to find yourself selling sex toys from a mountain cabin several states away.

HEY Y'ALL (dialect vlog)

2011-03-03T09:30:00.007-06:00

*I do not say "hey y'all" in this video. I am not from the south, much as I may want to be.*

This vlog was inspired by my friend Natalie over at Mommy Boots, who also did one of these vlogs. I think they're fun, so here's mine. See below the video for the words, the questions, and a list of other folks who have done this too! If you do one, please leave me a comment with the link and also tell me where you're from; I love to hear how other people pronounce things.

I noticed one error when I watched this after recording it; when talking about what I called my grandparents, instead of saying "my mother's parents / father's parents" or "my maternal grandparents / paternal grandparents", I TOTALLY referred to them as "my mother's grandparents" and "my father's grandparents". I really WAS talking about THEIR parents, MY grandparents. Durrr. Sorry. LOL.

Here is the list of words, and also the list of questions :

Aunt, Route, Wash, Oil, Theater, Iron, Salmon, Caramel, Fire, Water, Sure, Data, Ruin, Crayon, Toilet, New Orleans, Pecan, Both, Again, Probably, Spitting image, Alabama, Lawyer, Coupon, Mayonnaise, Syrup, Pajamas, Caught
What is it called when you throw toilet paper on a house?
What is the bug that when you touch it, it curls into a ball?
What is the bubbly carbonated drink called?
What do you call gym shoes?
What do you say to address a group of people?
What do you call the kind of spider that has an oval-shaped
body and extremely long legs?
What do you call your grandparents?
What do you call the wheeled contraption in which you carry
groceries at the supermarket?
What do you call it when rain falls while the sun is shining?
What is the thing you change the TV channel with?

Other people that have posted a dialect video:

Mommy Boots (from Chicago, now living in Chattanooga)
Ashley Getting Dressed (from a rural area about an hour north of St. Louis, Missouri)
Pickles & Paisleys (from Charleston, SC)
She's Mommafied (grew up in Boston, now lives in New Hampshire)
Bravo Charlie Sierra (from Pittsburgh, PA)
Sara Kaisenberg (moved to Texas when she was four, but learned to talk in New York)

And just for fun, here's a dialect video my husband and I made TWO YEARS AGO, together, with a different list of words! (He's from Miami, FL; I'm from Chicago, IL; we're both living in Chicagoland at the moment.)

My Girl Likes To Party All The Time, Party All The ZZZZZzzzzzz....

2011-01-28T13:04:00.000-06:00

I have been nothing short of exhausted lately. Bone-tired, brain completely fried kind of tired. It just seems to keep getting worse, it's interfering with my ability to get anything other than 'basic tasks of the day' done (I do manage a few extras here and there, like the monster cake pops I made for my son's class the other day, but it's with extreme effort and sheer force of will).

There ain't no second chance against the thing with 40 eyes, girl.

What's the reason? I'm not entirely sure but I really think it's lack of quality sleep, and I think there are several things that have been affecting this. (Which makes it much harder to fix!)

Problem #1: My teeth hurt, and they tend to hurt more at night for some reason.
Solution: I get my permanent crown on February 4th, and I'm hoping that will fix this issue. In the meantime, I am turning to drugs. Advil manages to work most of the time, but usually when the pain gets worse the Advil doesn't help or it wears off in the middle of the night and the pain wakes me up, thus interrupting my sleep. I took Advil PM a couple times but we're out of that now, and we do have some Codeine left still. The problem with the drowsy drugs is that it's hard for me to wake up in the mornings, which I need to do in order to take care of my family. This leads to...

Problem #2: I am not a morning person. Even in the face of sheer exhaustion, as soon as the sun sets I am wide awake, and find it hard to go to bed or fall asleep any earlier than midnight. I have school-age kids so we're up early to get off to school five days a week, and don't usually get to sleep in TOO late on weekends either.
Solution: Go to bed earlier? Yeah, not gonna happen. I've tried this off and on my whole life. My body is just programmed to be up at night. I can't seem to help it. And I ENJOY it. I just don't enjoy the 'getting up in the mornings' part. It would be easier if the world would just start conforming to my schedule. I know I'm not the only night owl out there.

Problem #3: We recently moved into the basement and have been sleeping on the futon down there. It's a fairly decent futon mattress, but it's not the most comfortable thing in the world and I don't feel that I'm sleeping very well on it at all. Not only have I been increasingly more exhausted every day since we moved down there, but I also wake up every day with a new ache somewhere in my body. Back, shoulders, and neck seem to be the most affected. I'm pretty sure that this 'bed' is not at all good for me.
Solution: We've talked about several options, ranging from getting a new mattress to getting a foam memory topper. None of them are particularly cheap, and while some aren't terribly expensive either, we still have to save up for them. I'm starting to be so tired that I kind of just don't care though and am almost willing to just charge it. Which we're trying not to do, but when you're tired and delirious you don't always make the best decisions.

Problem #4: We just got two kittens. Nighttime is playtime! Wheeeee! They run over us, they jump, the mock fight and growl, they wake us up for petting and purring and love, they roll around in the (dry) bathtub and clunk into things. It's ridiculously adorable, but it also wakes us up about 50 times a night.
Solution: Kinda just have to wait this one out, I think. Eventually they'll grow out of it, and they'll be used to the house and the dogs enough where we will be willing to leave the door open and let them roam all over the place while we sleep. Right now, we just have to put up with this one. It's like having a baby, only instead of needing to feed it or change it, it runs all over the place and makes a bunch of noise.

We are wine botttleesssss!

I think the bed is the biggest problem. Being uncomfortable all night long, every night, is awful. So I think I will focus on solving that problem this weekend and see what a difference it makes. Because I'm really having trouble functioning lately. And I can't spend the rest of my life sitting around like a zombie, watching reruns of Roseanne.

But hey, I got new glasses, and I think they're pretty spiffy. So life's not all bad.

I Thrill When I Drill A Bicuspid

2011-01-25T21:57:00.000-06:00

I had my first major dental work done last week. I grew up with fairly healthy teeth, yet somehow managed to develop a healthy fear of dentistry anyway. I never even had to have my wisdom teeth pulled because I DON'T HAVE ANY. I was born with no wisdom teeth! Since they only seem to cause problems for pretty much everyone, I can't help but feel I dodged a bullet with that little congenital defect.

So with healthy teeth and an unhealthy fear of people hurting me in my mouthal region, I pretty much avoid the dentist. As an adult, eventually the guilt of 'I should really be responsible and take better care of myself' creeps up on you, and finally in 2007 I decided, after AT LEAST ten years of having avoided them, that I really ought to visit the dentist. I had lost a tooth somewhere in that time period; I knew it was coming because I was also born missing that adult tooth (FIVE teeth congenitally missing! go me!), and my childhood dentist had warned us that the baby tooth would eventually wear out. They're just not made to last that long. So it did, in pieces, and it was gross, but it didn't hurt, and it seemed to have all fallen out, and the tooth is kind of on the side of my mouth so I figured I didn't really look like a gap-toothed crack whore or anything so why bother with an expensive repair (though I always thought it would be kind of awesome to get a gold tooth, and maybe someday I will; I'm classy like that).

Hi, my name is ChaCha; for $15 bucks I'll blow you in this port-a-potty.

But eventually I started to worry that maybe the RIGHT thing to do would be to have someone official check it out and just make sure all the pieces, you know, came out and whatnot, and maybe they should look at my other teeth too and tell me everything was OK. My husband happened to go to this great dentist in Roscoe Village (this was back when we lived in Chicago; it's Perfect Smile Dental Spa, if anyone local needs an awesome dentist! Tell them Kristi Dorson sent you! Dr. DeMars is great!). They tend to cater to dental wusses like me. They'll give you massages if you have to wait for your appointment, they're very nice, they have foot massagers in the waiting area, it's comfy and cozy and they'll give you laughing gas and goofy pills if you're very anxious about seeing the dentist, and they'll give you headphones to listen to the radio or watch movies if you prefer, and they're very thorough. Perfect for someone like me. So I went, they cleaned my teeth and fixed a tiny cavity (the first in my life) and gave me my first dose of laughing gas and it was actually kind of fun.

And then we moved an hour away and I didn't bother going back. The thought of trying to find another dentist, a local dentist, kind of terrified me, especially after dealing with such nice people who understood what it was like to fear the dentist. I just wanted them to move their offices to ME. Of course that wasn't going to happen, so I just didn't go. Then I was diagnosed with diabetes, and strongly encouraged to see my dentist (and EVERY OTHER MEDICAL SPECIALIST ON THE PLANET) twice a year because diabetes basically fucks up your entire body, and it tends to do it kind of silently at first so if you don't have an entire team of professionals working on your tired old carcass year round you just wake up one day and your foot is gangrenous and they need to amputate, and your liver is shot, and you're blind and your teeth have all fallen out, and then you die from kidney failure. My future's so bright, I gotta wear shades! Ahem.

So I still avoided the dentist for a couple years. This year I vowed to take better care of my health overall. Also, one of my back teeth cracked in half last month. I figure hey, they're probably not supposed to do that, are they? Whoops, time to go to the dentist. By this point I decided that if I was really happy at Perfect Smile, it was worth the damn one hour drive to go rather than deal with the anxiety of having to find a new, equally awesome dentist.

As it turns out, at no great surprise to me, cracked tooth=bad. It was a hair's breadth away from the nerve, so I was really lucky it didn't hurt like a bitch; possible root canal needed, definitely a crown. I also had two other cavities that needed fixing and some majorly swollen gums. Higher blood sugar levels from diabetes apparently leads to some KILLER gum disease. So they had lots of major work to do on me! I got some Super Valium to take before the appointment, and then they gave me more at the appointment, AND they gave me the happy gas, AND the radio headphones, so it was a pretty happy experience overall. Except now I have a temporary crown on the cracked tooth and I can't eat on that side of my mouth because it's really tender and keeps hurting when I chew and I'm taking lots of advil and wondering when it will STOP hurting. I get the permanent crown next Friday. I'm hoping that will be the end of my dental miseries for a while.

Taking better care of myself sucks. Or maybe it's diabeetus that sucks. Or maybe it's avoiding taking care of myself and then having to pay the piper when I finally give in and make the effort that sucks. Whatever; my mouth hurts and I'm grouchy.

Hey, let's end on a happy note! We got two new kitties last weekend! Here's a picture of Hannah stretching after one of her many naps.

(Sorry both my pictures are from my camera phone. I know they suck. I've become really lazy with my camera lately; that's another thing I need to work on this year.

Also, I probably should note that this is NOT a sponsored post or anything. That's probably obvious because I swore a lot and made jokes about prostitution. I just really love Perfect Smile and Dr. DeMars. AND the drugs they give me. I DO get a referral bonus if you go to them and say I sent you though. So you should do that.)

ECIA: Ultra Foods - The Results

2010-12-06T15:56:00.000-06:00

Welcome to day two of Extreme Couponing In Action! We continue our journey by hitting the local Ultra Foods for a few items I needed as well as a few things I wanted to grab based on price.

Yesterday I estimated that I would spend about $50 after coupons.

I missed five things on my list and added two extra at the store. My final result?

Spent: $34.32. I am guessing that if I had stuck completely to the list I would have been right at about $50 still, so pretty much on the money.
Bonus: I received a "$1.00 off your next visit!" Ultra Catalina at the register (from the Pillsbury deal)! Didn't know about that!

How did this all work out? Here's the list I made prior to shopping, with notes from the actual store experience beneath each. If you don't want to bother with reading an in-depth analysis, and just want to know the outcome, here's what I saved (according to my receipt) AND a short list of important things I learned during this trip:

FINAL SAVINGS OUTCOME:
My Ultra receipt tells me I saved $13.11, and I'm not sure where it's getting that number from! My coupon total appears to add up to: $11.99
My sales-price savings appear to add up to: $5.91
For a total savings of $17.90
Which would make my savings percentage: 34%

The register doesn't appear to count the sales price on meats into savings either. If you consider that about half of my purchase was meat, with NO coupons, just meat at a decent price, the savings percentage should be a little higher, even.
(These numbers do NOT account for the $1 Ultra Buck I received this week. I will count that on next week's write-up.)

AAAAND, I just noticed that I was charged twice for my pork chops. GO FIGURE. Even when you're watching the register pretty carefully, things slip past. I will have to go back in and take care of that at my next trip! That's $3.53!! (Totals above are pre-extra pork chop removal!)

THINGS I LEARNED:
1) Ultra puts their weekly sales fliers coupons out by the service desk. This was important because the sales flier I got was missing the pop coupon I needed.
2) There were a TON of coupon tearpads and even a small coupon booklet right by the front door. I don't know if that's normal or not but I will be scouting out this area diligently next time I go!
3) Ultra does rain checks. They were out of the oil I needed, but gave me a rain check good for the next 30 days.
4) DON'T FORGET TO BRING YOUR OWN BAGS. I forgot mine again. Ultra is supposed to give you .05 off for each reusable bag you bring in (just like Target does). Every little bit helps, AND it's environmentally friendly too.
5) I was told Ultra's produce is kind of sketchy, and ended up not buying my two produce needs there because the zucchini was all really SOFT. I was wary of it.
6) Check your receipts, check your receipts, CHECK YOUR RECEIPTS! I try to watch my items as they ring up and make sure it's all correct, and somehow my cashier still managed to ring my pork chops twice. Not even right in a row either! It's pork chops - pork roast - pork roast (yes I did get two pork roasts) - PORK CHOPS AGAIN.

Now, here's that detailed analysis I promised:

Things I needed:

parchment paper (found a $1 off Reynolds parchment paper coupon!): cost ??
- was on sale for $2.99! .20 off with the sale plus $1.00 off with the coupon. Nice!

zucchini: cost ??
-it was very soft. I don't want my zucchini to be that squishy. I didn't get it.

onions: cost ??
-since I didn't get my zucchini here, I didn't get my onions either. I need both items to make these zucchini-potato latkes I promised my husband I'd make for Hanukkah. So they might not make it on the table DURING Hanukkah, but if not they'll be close! I'll probably get these things tomorrow so we should be all right.

Deals I wanted:

Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Select Pepsi Brand Varieties - $.99 WYB 5 (With in ad coupon)

-the in-store coupon did limit me to 5 bottles. I actually grabbed six because I had the 3 $1 off 2 coupons. So I paid .99 for my first 5, $1.50 for my sixth one, and got $3.00 off. Worked out to .56 each.

Pillsbury Ready to Bake Cookie Dough - 4/$10, In ad coupon for free Dean’s milk WYB 4 packages of dough. I've got 2 - $1.25 off 2 coupons! So my cost for four will be $7.50, or $1.88 each, AND a free Dean’s Milk!

-SUCCESS! Extra bonus in that buying four Pillsbury refrigerated dough items is triggering a $1.00 Ultra Buck Catalina at the register. AND there was a hangtag on my milk for .55 off. They wouldn't let me use it at the register today because the milk was free, but I've got it for a future milk purchase!

Sanderson Farms Split Chicken Breast, Price: $.98/Pound

- I skipped this. It's a good price but I remembered I don't like dicking around with whole, bone-in skin-on chicken breast. LOL.

Bone in Pork Sirloin Chops, Price: $1.28/Pound

-SUCCESS!

Whole Pork Butt Roast, Price: $.98/Pound

-SUCCESS! I bought two. I am going to feed my guests BUTT at our holiday potluck this weekend. Heh heh. Heh heh. BUTT.

Crisco Vegetable Oil, 128 oz. $4.99 , use $.55/1 from RP 11/07/10, Final Price: $4.44 each

-this must be a hot deal because they were CLEAN OUT of this stuff. So I got a rain check! My coupon is good for at least another month!

Hershey's Chocolate Milk $.79 ,I have 2 .35 off coupons. Cost will be $.88 for two, or $.44 each!

-Success! These will be a nice little treat for my kids!

Things I added while in the store:

I count the sixth bottle of Pepsi as an 'addition' because I really only wanted to buy ten total; either ten here or five here and five at Strack's (which is also running the same deal this week). Now I need to buy 11 to get the deal, but that's OK. I got my six here, and I'll get my five at Strack tomorrow, and we'll be more than set on pop for the party.

I also count the second roast as an 'addition' to my list, because I was planning on buying only one. But at the last minute, as usual, I got panicky about not having enough meat for our guests this weekend, and I grabbed a second roast. I would much rather have too much food than not enough. We will definitely re-use the leftovers if there are any, and at this price it's hard to beat!

BONUS FUN:

Did I mention the $1.00 Ultra buck that printed at the end? That was a nice little surprise!

These sales run through Thursday December 8th, so if any of them appeal to you, you can run to your local Ultra Food and take advantage of them too! Let me know if you need help tracking down any of the coupons. If you're a new EXTREME COUPONER and you haven't yet subscribed to the Sunday paper or started saving all the coupon inserts, DO IT. You could be saving a LOT of money!

FINALLY, don't forget to call the feedback number on the bottom of your receipt(s) when you get home! You only have a few days to do it, it's a short survey, and you get entered in a drawing. Ultra's drawing this month is for a $500 gift card. That's worth a couple minutes of my time, for sure.

Extreme Couponing In Action: Ultra Foods - The Plan

2010-12-05T23:20:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow I will be heading out to our local Ultra Foods to see if I can score some deals. I haven't been there in, oh, probably 15 years or more (I know I haven't been there since they became Ultra; they were still Cub Foods last time I went!), so I'm a little nervous about tackling a new store. However, I hear they have good deals and I have to admit: I'm a natural-born skeptic. Even though I've seen some great results with our Extreme Couponing, I have this burning need to figure out if I really am getting the BEST deals in my area. Which means doing a lot of extra research and work, hitting a lot of extra stores, and even keeping a price comparison spreadsheet (which I started today). Over time, I'll be able to share with all of you the fruits of my labors, and you'll be able to benefit from my hard work. Theoretically, anyway. So, my pain is your gain! Enjoy!

Here's my plan, after looking at the weekly deal matchup One Year To Disney put together (side note: there really aren't many Ultra Foods matchups for our area, it seems! Mummy Deals does them sometimes but she's very pregnant and thus gets a pass on keeping up with everything for a while, lol. Does anyone know of other deal blogs that do matchups for Ultra?):

Things I need:

parchment paper (found a $1 off Reynolds parchment paper coupon!): cost ??

zucchini: cost ??

onions: cost ??
Deals I want:

Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and Select Pepsi Brand Varieties - $.99 WYB 5 (With in ad coupon)

I have 3 $1 off 2 coupons, and one $1 off 4 coupons. I don't know if this is a limit of 5 or not. I'm hoping I can get ten (we are having a party this weekend) and use all my coupons. Assuming I can, that would make my net cost $5.90, or .59 each.

FYI - Strack & Van Til is running this exact SAME DEAL WITH IN AD COUPON THIS WEEK

Pillsbury Ready to Bake Cookie Dough - 4/$10

In ad coupon for free Dean’s milk WYB 4 packages of dough

I've got 2 - $1.25 off 2 coupons! So my cost for four will be $7.50, or $1.88 each, AND a free Dean’s Milk!

Sanderson Farms Split Chicken Breast

Price: $.98/Pound

Bone in Pork Sirloin Chops

Price: $1.28/Pound

Whole Pork Butt Roast

Price: $.98/Pound

Crisco Vegetable Oil, 128 oz. $4.99

use $.55/1 from RP 11/07/10

Final Price: $4.44 each, or $.03 per oz

(Crisco oil is on sale at Strack & Van Til this week for 1.99ea, 48oz size; it's the same price per ounce so I'm getting the bigger one.)

Hershey's Chocolate Milk $.79

I have 2 .35 off coupons. Cost will be $.88 for two, or $.44 each!

Deals I was interested in but ultimately nixed:

Palermo's Pizza - 2/$8

$1/1 - Click here

Final Price: $3/Each WYB 2

I nixed this for two reasons:

1) California Pizza Kitchen pizzas are $1.50ea at Meijer this week

2) Palermo's Classic Pizzas are on sale 4/$10 at Strack & Van Til this week; I can use my coupon there

Contadina Tomato Paste $.59

Use $1/3 from RP 09/26/10

Final Price $.77/3 or $.26 each

1) I nixed this one because I don't have coupon fliers going back that far, and I couldn't find any Contadina coupons online.

I also am hoping that either my mom has the Ultra sales ad and I can snag it from her tomorrow, or that they have copies of it in the store, because I need those in-ad coupons for this to work. I don't get the Sunday paper yet; I signed up for the 2011 deal the Chicago Tribune is offering (Sunday-only paper delivery $20 for the whole year! GREAT price!), but that doesn't start until next year. Until then, I keep stealing my mom's papers. I'm sick and I forgot to go over there and get them tonight. So tomorrow morning I will go and hope she has what I need!

Final analysis: I'm guessing this trip will cost me a total of $50. I don't know the cost on a couple of the items, and I don't know exactly how much meat I'll be buying, but I'm hoping for a decent size roast at the very least. We're having a potluck this weekend and we are providing the main meat dish; $.98 per pound pork roast would be AWESOME. Here's hoping for decent meat tomorrow!

Walgreens: The Results

2010-12-05T18:09:00.000-06:00

Based on the plan I meticulously crafted, I estimated that (not counting prescriptions) I would spend about $70 after coupons and would receive $9 in Jingle Cash plus $6 in mail-in rebates.

I ended up missing one product on my list and adding a couple more in-store, but my final result?

Spent: $70.16 RIGHT ON THE MONEY, BABY!
Mail-in rebate: didn't print! BOO! I may have picked up the wrong item. Probably will return it.
Jingle Cash received: $26!! JACKPOT!

How did this all work out? Here's the list I made prior to shopping, with notes from the actual store experience beneath each. If you don't want to bother with reading an in-depth analysis, and just want to know the outcome, here's what I saved (according to my receipt) AND a short list of important things I learned during this trip:

FINAL SAVINGS OUTCOME (not counting the prescription counter):
Wag Coupon Savings: $14.18
Wag Advertised Savings: $30.73
Mfg Coupon Savings: $35.69
My Total Savings: $80.60
Percent saved, based on that number: 54%
(That number takes into account the $11 Jingle Cash I redeemed from the previous week but does NOT account for the $26 in Jingle Cash I received this week. I will count that on next week's write-up.)

THINGS I LEARNED:
1) Prescriptions don't create Jingle Cash
2) Pay attention to your prices. Just because the card is sitting in the .99 section doesn't mean it's in the right place.
3) Know what triggers your deals well and pay attention / make sure you pick up the correct item. (Cortaid, possibly the greeting cards.)
4) Jingle Cash prints based on the pre-coupon price of your merchandise.
5) Many of the little free flyers in the pharmacy area have coupons hidden inside! I picked up free informational packets on things like 'vitamins and supplements', 'digestive health', 'sports medicine', and 'blood pressure', and they all had coupons within.

Now, here's that detailed analysis I promised:

Things I needed:
Neilmed Nasaflo Neti Pot solution packets - cost ??
-a 100-packet refill was $9.99 at Walgreens.
-I found a $2.00 off Wags coupon in the Dec booklet
-there was a $3.00 off manufacturer's coupon on the box!!
-total cost? $4.99 for nasal health! yay!

Peppermint mocha coffee mate - cost?? (but I have a $1 off coupon!)
-$2.49, not on sale
-buying the Peppermint Mocha variety makes my husband happy AND it keeps him out of Starbucks during the holiday season, so it is well worth it to me to buy even when it isn't on sale!

Prescriptions - cost $60 (I THINK)
-Actually $58.50. Close enough.

Dayquil - cost $8.99, get $2 Jingle Cash
- this was actually a 2-pack of Dayquil / Nyquil together

Christmas lights - cost??, on sale BOGO 100 pack
-$3.99 for two

file folders - cost ??
- $6.99 for 48. Probably overpaid. Needed them though.

Edy's Ice Cream - on sale BOGO, I think the cost was $3.49
-actually $6.29 for two. OUCH. But my husband promised ice cream to the kids, so...

Deals I wanted:
Cortaid Cream .5oz free after rebate - cost 5.99 (I think)
- my rebate didn't print. I actually saw this listed on a blog somewhere as costing $3.99, so I grabbed the tube that was on sale for that price (original Cortaid cream, 1 oz side). So I paid $3.99 and got nothing back. I will return this, and also see if I can find out which product WAS supposed to print a rebate form.

Skippy peanut butter, 2 (on sale 2/3), coupon .75 - cost 2.25
- Success!

V8 Fusion, 2/5 with in-ad coupon, man. coupon for $1 - cost 4.00
- success!

Crisco shortening sticks, $1.99 in-ad coupon, coupon for .50 - cost 1.49
- success!

Toll House morsels, in ad coupon 1.79, coupon 1.25 off 3 - cost 4.12
- success!

ziploc bags, 1.99 in ad coupon, coupon $1.00 off 2 - cost 2.98
- success!

revlon top speed nail color, $5 Jingle Cash - cost 5.99
- could not find this in my store. Throat was too sore to ask an employee for help. Just skipped it. May search it out later if I go back this week.

Wisk 48 loads, $2 Jingle Cash, $1.00 coupon - cost ??
- on sale for $6.99
- success!

Nyquil, on sale $8.99, $1.50 off coupon plus buy 2 get free Puffs (buying Dayquil above) - cost 7.50
- I only needed to buy two Nyquil's to a) stock up for the winter and b) get my free Puffs. So instead of buying the $8.99 pack from above twice, I bought a bottle of Nyquil that was on sale for $6.99. Used my coupon AND got the free box of Puffs for $1.69 value.

Welch's Sparkling Grape Juice - Wags coupon $1 off 2, Man. coupon $2 off 2 - cost ??
- original cost 2/$7, final cost after coupons 2/$4

L'Oreal Lipgloss, on sale 2/$13.49, coupon $5.00 off 2, $4 off from Wags Dec coupon book - cost 4.49
-success!

Things I added while in the store:
4 Hallmark cards
-I read right before I left that cards were on a Jingle Cash special this week: buy 2 cards, get $2 back. Buy 5 cards, get $5 back. I was going to ignore this because cards are usually expensive and I don't really need to stock up on them, UNTIL one intrepid person pointed out that Walgreens has an entire section of cards for .99! Which would mean that you could stock up on cards a couple different ways:
1) buy 2 at $1.98, get your $2 Jingle Cash
2) buy 5 at $4.95, get your $5 Jingle Cash
3) do the "buy 2" in multiple transactions, buy 6 (or more!) at $5.94, get $6 Jingle Cash back
-Since I had to do two different transactions anyway (one at the pharmacy and one at the front counter), I figured I'd pick up four cards for the heck of it and stock up on kids' birthday cards for next year. So I did.
-I rang up 2 cards at the pharmacy counter along with my prescriptions, and received my $2 Jingle Cash for them. (I also learned that prescriptions don't count for Jingle Cash, which will be relevant in a little bit.)
-I rang up my other two at the front counter with the rest of my groceries and did NOT receive any Jingle Cash for them. BOOO. I also accidentally, in looking at my receipt, picked up one card that cost $2, even though it was in the .99 section. DOUBLE BOO. So I paid a net of $2.97 for four greeting cards I didn't need. Contemplating whether or not it would be tacky to return two of them (since I'm going back to return the Cortaid anyway). Are you allowed to return greeting cards?

BONUS FUN:
This week at Walgreens it's SUPER JINGLE CASH week! You get $5 in Jingle Cash for every $25 you spend, up to $100 (or a printed return of $20 Jingle Cash) per transaction! Good thing I had a big week there, eh?
-This is how I learned that prescriptions don't create Jingle Cash. I spent $60 at the pharmacy counter but did not get cash for that, though I DID get the Jingle Cash for the greeting cards, so the pharmacy counter DOES print Jingle Cash. And yes, I asked the pharmacist if prescriptions counted, and she said no.
-I also learned that evidently Jingle Cash is triggered by the pre-coupon amount you spend because... I GOT $20 JINGLE CASH AT THE FRONT REGISTER! My pre-coupon total was $110, and even though I brought it down to $70 with coupons, I still got the full amount of Jingle Cash. Next week at Walgreen's is going to be super fun!

These sales run through Saturday December 11th, so if any of them appeal to you, you can run to your local Walgreen's and take advantage of them too! Let me know if you need help tracking down any of the coupons. If you're a new EXTREME COUPONER and you haven't yet subscribed to the Sunday paper or started saving all the coupon inserts, DO IT. You could be saving a LOT of money!

FINALLY, don't forget to call the feedback number on the bottom of your receipt(s) when you get home! You only have a few days to do it, it's a short survey, and you get entered in a drawing. Walgreens' drawing this month is for $3,000 cash. That's worth a couple minutes of my time, for sure.

Walgreens Plan

2010-12-05T13:46:00.000-06:00

I am sick like woah today; stuffy and full of drainage and my throat is so hoarse I can't speak above a whisper. Joy! So what am I doing? GOING SHOPPING AT WALGREENS! I need some medicine and I have a few prescriptions to pick up, so I figured I might as well drag my ailing carcass out and just get the Walgreens part of the week over with since I need to go anyway.

So here's my plan, after looking at various weekly deal matchups:

Things I need:

Neilmed Nasaflo Neti Pot solution packets - cost??
Peppermint mocha coffee mate - cost?? (but I have a $1 off coupon!)
Prescriptions - cost $60 (I THINK)
Dayquil - cost $8.99, get $2 Jingle Cash
Christmas lights - cost??, on sale BOGO 100 pack
file folders - cost ??
Edy's Ice Cream - on sale BOGO, I think the cost was $3.49

Deals I want:
Cortaid Cream .5oz free after rebate - cost 5.99 (I think)
Skippy peanut butter, 2 (on sale 2/3), coupon .75 - cost 2.25
V8 Fusion, 2/5 with in-ad coupon, man. coupon for $1 - cost 4.00
Crisco shortening sticks, $1.99 in-ad coupon, coupon for .50 - cost 1.49
Toll House morsels, in ad coupon 1.79, coupon 1.25 off 3 - cost 4.12
ziploc bags, 1.99 in ad coupon, coupon $1.00 off 2 - cost 2.98
revlon top speed nail color, $5 Jingle Cash - cost 5.99
Wisk 48 loads, $2 Jingle Cash, $1.00 coupon - cost ??
Nyquil, on sale $8.99, $1.50 off coupon plus buy 2 get free Puffs (buying Dayquil above) - cost 7.50
Welch's Sparkling Grape Juice - Wags coupon $1 off 2, Man. coupon $2 off 2 - cost ??
L'Oreal Lipgloss, on sale 2/$13.49, coupon $5.00 off 2, $4 off from Wags Dec coupon book - cost 4.49

And I have $11 in Jingle Cash to redeem.

So this trip should cost me $100 plus the cost of neti pot solution, coffeemate, christmas lights, file folders, Wisk, and sparkling grape juice. I'm going to guess, oh, a total of $130. If you don't count the prescriptions, that would be about $70. And I should get $9 back in Jingle Cash and $6 back from rebate.

Let's see how I do. I'll figure out the actual savings amounts on my follow-up post!

Rockin', Tootin' Holidays

2010-12-03T18:45:00.004-06:00

Every now and then I spend an inordinate amount of time playing around with videos over at JibJab. They have given me great joy over the years. It's things like this that make me love the internet. My kids love creating videos too, naturally. We spent several hours making videos today. Here are my two favorites.

WARNING: 12-year-old boy humor ahead! This never fails to make me laugh. From L to R is my daughter, my husband, our friend Justin, my brother, and me. I helped her pick 'farty' faces, but for the most part my daughter picked the people and put them in their places.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

I made this one. My friends and I have taken far more "metal face" pictures than your average person probably does, and it really paid off here. I have probably watched this 20 times today and it just keeps bringing joy into my life.

Personalize funny videos and birthday eCards at JibJab!

lead singer - my friend Justin
guitars:
me - red hair
my friend Red - black hair
my friend Sarah - brown hair
drummer - my husband

Pay It Forward: Coupon Edition

2010-12-01T09:56:00.000-06:00

Facebook keeps telling me that today is 'pay it forward' day. While I personally think that every day should be 'pay it forward' day, I'll honor the spirit of the idea by sharing my own little couponing 'pay it forward' that is still warming my heart.

When Leslie and I were shopping the other week (the day that we were photographed for the paper), and we were shopping the great toy deals at Target, we gave away a lot of coupons. I had printed a lot of toy coupons because I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to get for the kids; once I'd picked out our gifts, I just started giving my leftover coupons to folks that were looking at those items in those aisles. One lady almost started crying when I gave her a good coupon off the FurReal friend in her shopping cart! The lesson here is that we're ALL really broke this year (and often, many other years too), we all want to do the best for our kids that we can, and we all appreciate saving money.

When I ran out of people, I left the rest of the coupons on the shelves in the toy section. I didn't do any of this specifically to pay it forward; I wasn't thinking about other people doing the same thing and benefitting from it myself at some point in the future. I just did it because I wanted to help people. I did it because I've been amazed at some of the great deals I've been able to score using coupons, and I want other people to be able to do the same thing. Money is really tight for us at this time and I keep running into more and more people that are in the same boat as us or, unfortunately, an even worse one. I feel extremely fortunate to have the time right now to explore couponing, learn all the tricks, and be able to provide more for my family. If I can share that with other people, and help them even a little, it's worth all the time I've invested in the process.

Yesterday, Leslie and I were shopping at Jewel. One of my Avenu deals was .40 off 3 cans of Pringles. Pringles are something we love, but don't buy very often because a) it's junk food and b) it can be pricey. Definitely a treat item. I thought I'd check and see what the price was just in case it was worth a buy for us. We stopped in the aisle and Pringles were on sale, 2 for $3. With my $.40 off 3, I'd be paying 4.10, or $1.37 each. Which may not sound like much but money was really tight this week and this definitely wasn't a need, so I was going to pass them up. Then Leslie spotted three little pieces of paper on the shelf. Coupons. PRINGLES coupons. They expired that day. Some intrepid couponer obviously had decided not to use them, and rather than just toss the coupons later, they were kind enough to leave them for someone else to use. I snagged a $1.00 off 3 cans coupon. Now my 3 cans of Pringles would cost $3.10, or $1.03. Again, it's just a small amount, but it brought the price down just enough to justify a little treat for my family. (As a bonus, I had a $3 off your next shopping order Catalina in hand from a previous Jewel trip, so my Pringles were virtually free!)

I actually bought original, salt and vinegar, and EXTREME sizzlin' sweet BBQ. Which ended up being DELICIOUS. And also fairly spicy. But really good!

So thank you, anonymous coupon benefactor, for helping me treat my family yesterday.

For all you couponers, if you don't already do this, please consider paying it forward by leaving your unwanted / about to expire coupons on the shelves in the store for others to take advantage of. You might just be able to help someone give their kids an extra special Christmas. Or give their family a special treat they wouldn't normally buy. Or even help feed them milk, or eggs, or bread. It's a little thing that might just mean a lot to someone out there.

I know I'll be paying it forward this way from now on.

15 Minutes Of Fame

2010-11-25T13:47:00.002-06:00

That's me, Leslie, then me again!

Leslie and I made the front page! BOTH 'front' pages! Holy cow! You can read the accompanying newspaper story here (where you can see a picture of my hands and Leslie's profile, heh).

A million thanks to Leslie for taking the initiative when she saw that the Southtown Star was looking for super shoppers, because this was a really fun experience. We had a great time going around with Joe (the photographer), snagging and sharing deals.

I hope everyone is enjoying a happy, healthy, safe Thanksgiving holiday with their loved ones today!

Build Your Stockpile Slowly

2010-11-24T15:10:00.000-06:00

One of the things that new couponers seem to be most concerned about is the part where building a stockpile at the beginning can cost quite a bit of money, especially if you're like me and get carried away by all the Shiny Deals! What if you're on a limited budget and don't HAVE a larger initial output of money to spend? How can you become an Extreme Couponer then?

My advice would be to start small. You don't have to get $300 of groceries for $100 at first, and as a matter of fact, you're not likely to! What you CAN do easily though is start making small changes to your shopping habits and slowly build a stockpile. You may not save as high of a percentage on your total grocery bill at first, but you will begin seeing small savings as you make change after change, and soon you'll see a difference.

One of the first things you need to realize is that Extreme Couponing isn't solely about coupons. It's also largely (possibly primarily) based on SALES PRICES. Start changing your habits to shop based around the sales prices and you will start seeing differences. My advice would be to pick a coupon blog that posts the weekly 'best deals' in your area and see what they recommend, and then pick one or two deals that appeal to you each time you shop to start building your stockpile.

For example:

At Jewel-Osco this week, one of their deals is the "Instant Savings Spotlight: Save $5 when you buy any ten participating products in a single transaction!" (This is listed on the back of their current sales flier if you have it, OR you can simply shop the store and look for the little orange "save an additional 50 cents" tags hanging below products all throughout the store.) This week it covers items like Ragu pasta sauce, Green Giant frozen vegetables, and 3 General Mills cereals (Honey Nut Cheerios, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, or Lucky Charms), amongst a variety of other things. All potential staple items for many people.

If one of those items is a staple item in your household, this would be a great time to stock up on it without spending a lot of extra money! You can mix and match in this deal (which is what I did), but I'm going to focus on building a stockpile one item at a time for our purposes here. This is what it would cost you if you picked one of the items listed above (prices and sale valid only through TOMORROW, November 25th 2010):

Ragu pasta sauce, 26 oz jars, select varieties:
Step one is to check the shelf in this section and see WHICH varieties have the little orange tags on them, then select ten Ragu jars from amongst those. These individual jars of sauce are on sale this week for $1.49 each. When you buy ten in one transaction, the price falls to $.99 each. A total cost of $9.99 added to your grocery bill (tax not included) to stock up on ten jars of Ragu.

This deal gets even better when you add coupons. In the 11/14 Red Plum coupon circulars, there was a coupon for "buy 2 Ragu, get 1 pasta (up to $1.25 value) FREE". It just so happens that Barilla pasta is on sale at Jewel this week ($1.29 a box), AND it counts in the "buy ten, save $5" deal (dropping the per-box price to $.79) at Jewel too. If you have multiple copies of this coupon (either by getting multiple Sunday newspapers, as some of us do, or by asking friends you know to give you their coupons (my Mom gives me her circulars, for instance)), you will do better and better!

With ONE coupon, you could:
a) Buy ten jars of Ragu for $9.99, get one box of pasta (Barilla or any under $1.25) for free!
b) Buy nine jars of Ragu for $8.91, get one box of Barilla pasta (MUST be Barilla in this scenario because you need it to be your tenth item to get the sale price) FREE!

With TWO coupons, you could:
a) buy ten jars of Ragu for $9.99, get two boxes of pasta (Barilla or any under $1.25) for free!
b) buy eight jars of Ragu for $7.92, get two boxes of Barilla pasta (MUST be Barilla in this scenario because you need it to be your ninth and tenth items to get the sale price) FREE!

And so on. Just keep couponing!

Green Giant Frozen Boxed Vegetables, 7-10oz, select varieties:

Step one is to check the shelf in this section and see WHICH varieties have the little orange tags on them, then select ten from amongst those. These individual boxes of veggies are on sale this week for $1.00 each. When you buy ten in one transaction, the price falls to $.50 each. A total cost of $5.00 added to your grocery bill (tax not included) to stock up on ten boxes of frozen vegetables.

This deal gets even better when you add coupons. In both the 10/03 and 11/14 General Mills coupon circulars, there was a coupon for "save $.60 on 3 boxes of Green Giant frozen vegetables". Again, having multiple copies of this coupon will make this deal even better.

With ONE coupon, you could buy ten boxes of frozen vegetables for $4.40.

With TWO coupons, you could buy ten boxes of frozen vegetables for $3.80.

With THREE coupons, you could buy ten boxes of frozen vegetables for $3.20. That's only $.32 a box!

At this point, you would either want to stop OR you would want to buy TWENTY boxes of frozen vegetables to save the extra money. Jewel does allow you to repeat this "buy ten, save $5" multiple times in the same transaction, so you could buy 20 of the applicable items in one trip and save $10. And, of course, keep couponing!

General Mills Cereals, select varieties:

Step one is to check the shelf in this section and see WHICH varieties have the little orange tags on them, then select ten from amongst those. These cereals are on sale this week for $2.49 each. When you buy ten in one transaction, the price falls to $1.99 each. A total cost of $19.99 added to your grocery bill (tax not included) to stock up on ten boxes of cereal.

This deal gets even better when you add coupons. You can find cereal coupons all over the internet (go some google searches, check some couponing blogs, or wait a bit, I'll talk more about coupon sources in the future), as well as in the weekly circulars. Let's say you have the "save $1.00 on 2 Honey Nut Cheerios" coupon from the 10/31 circular, and your family REALLY likes Cheerios.

With ONE coupon, you could buy ten boxes of HN Cheerios for 18.99.

With TWO coupons, you could buy ten boxes of HN Cheerios for $17.99.

With THREE coupons, you could buy ten boxes of HN Cheerios for $16.99.

With FOUR coupons, you could buy ten boxes of HN Cheerios for $15.99.

With FIVE coupons, you could buy ten boxes of HN Cheerios for $14.99. That's $1.49 a box!

At this point, you would either want to stop OR you would want to buy TWENTY boxes of HN Cheerios to save the extra money. Jewel does allow you to repeat this "buy ten, save $5" multiple times in the same transaction, so you could buy 20 of the applicable items in one trip and save $10. And, of course, keep couponing!

So there you have three examples of ways you could spend a mere (maximum, often less with coupons) of $20, $10 or $5 on your weekly shopping trip at Jewel and stock up on a bunch of cereal, pasta sauces (possibly with pasta), or frozen vegetables for your family.

Playing the sales is what will save you money; adding in the coupons is what will REALLY start making your savings spectacular!

Pick one deal like this per week and start building your stockpile that way. I'll try to post individual super deals like this each week to help you decide which ones might be a good buy for your family!

As a final note, if you're not already getting and saving the coupon circulars, I highly recommend you do it now! You don't have to clip ANY coupons, just save the circulars in a folder or bin somewhere. Write the date on the front of each circular when you get it and keep them in date order. Most coupon blogs will tell you where to find coupons each week and you only need to clip the ones you need. Saves a TON of time. There are even searchable coupon databases online (Coupon Mom has one). But to take advantage of it, YOU NEED TO HAVE THE COUPON CIRCULARS. And many of them have coupons that don't expire for up to a year. So start collecting and saving them now!

Welcome New Readers + A Speedy Stocking Stuffer!

2010-11-24T12:40:00.000-06:00

Yesterday Leslie and I spent a very long day doing some Extreme Couponing. We had a BLAST! Not only did we snag some really great deals (which I will talk about in the near future), we also spent a lot of time in the morning with a photographer from the Southtown Star (rumor has it we will be in tomorrow's paper, so watch for us!) talking about our super shopping habits, we were able to share many coupons and tips with random shoppers we met along the way (welcome, if you're one of our new friends from yesterday!), we just about finished Christmas shopping for our kids, and we just had a lot of fun overall. It was great to save money and really see the results of couponing and planning, and it was truly rewarding and heartwarming to be able to share even just a small fraction of that with some of the people we met along the way.

If you haven't checked out Leslie's blog, One Year To Disney, yet, make sure you do because she's running a great contest featuring FREE Culver's custard! It ends today (at 11:59pm central time) so don't wait!

I'm working on a list of tips for new couponers, based on our recent experiences, and I will post it soon. If you're a coupon shopper who has some tips for new couponers, I'd love to hear them!

Finally, I am going to watch for stocking stuffer deals over the course of the next few weeks. I'd like to feature stocking stuffers that are a dollar or less, so as I come across them I will share them with you. Here's one I came across yesterday:

In the Walgreen's ad this week, there is a coupon for Speed Wheels (off-brand die-cast metal cars, Matchbox / Hot Wheels size). $.49 each, limit ten. My kids LOVE playing with cars and as long as they aren't terribly cheap looking, we're not picky about brand! That's a pretty good price on individual cars. My Walgreens had a great selection (lots of variety in types; they even had Hummers, race cars, school buses and ambulances). Grab the coupon out of the Walgreens paper and pick up a few this week! Sale ends Saturday.

Jewel-Osco: A Very Time Consuming Lesson, Part One of Two

2010-11-21T11:37:00.000-06:00

Boy, here it is the start of another week and I'm still blogging about my shopping experience from last week! Analyzing this is really helping me sort out how it all works though, so even if it isn't helping any of you (or worse, is boring you to tears), I'm going to keep at it because I do believe this will become easier as I learn more about it.

Using Jill Cataldo's great site again, I checked out the deals available at Jewel last week. Jill, by the way, recommends changing the way you shop: you don't shop based on what you 'need' for the week. You shop based around the best deals available and build a stockpile. Sometimes you'll even end up buying things you don't need (aforementioned moneymakers), which you can always donate to charity. My family is pretty malleable in terms of what we will eat (we like food), and I like to cook so I'm more than willing to change up my order. In the past I would look up recipes I liked for the week, make a list based on those ingredients, and then go shopping - and spend a ton of money buying everything I needed! Now I will go shopping based on deals and coupons, then see what I have in the house, and then make up the week's meal plan based on that stuff. Just a change in habits, that's all.

So I was most interested in the following deals:

JEWEL TURKEY DEAL - On page 9 of Section 1 of the 11/14 Chicago Tribune (the actual newspaper part) there's a coupon for $10 off any Jennie-O, Farm Fresh, Perdue or Butterball fresh OR frozen turkey with the coupon and a separate $20 purchase. This is a pretty good deal, particularly if you want a smaller bird. The ad shows sample prices with coupon:
16lb. frozen Jennie-O turkey - $6.24 after coupon (.39/lb.)

"Buy 10, Save $5" Instant-Savings sale
Buying any ten of these items, mix or match, will result in $5 worth of instant savings. Prices shown are AFTER "Buy 10" discount. Remember, you must buy ten items in the same transaction to receive the discount.
Jill lists all of the items in the sale on her site; I wrote down the ones I was most interested in on my list. There were a decent amount of baking supplies on there as well as some instant foods we would eat, and some of them were on sale and/or had coupons that could be applied to them as well.

Jewel is running a Catalina sale involving Kellogg's products. Buy any 10 participating Kellogg's, Keebler, and/or Sunshine products and get a Catalina for two free movie tickets plus $10 Concession Cash by mail (to be spent in the movie theater.)
Here are your products and matchups. (A UPC list is here.)Note that if you have the $50 Kellogg's Your Ultimate Holiday Guide coupon book, you'll do very well here. Also, Coupons.com has a link to $10 worth of Kellogg's coupons on their site, and here's another link to print $5 worth of Kellogg's coupons to use with this deal too.
Again, Jill lists the products on her site, and the provided UPC list is great too. Lots of cereals, crackers and snacks.

"No Coupon Needed" Deals:
Homelife toilet bowl cleaner is $1.69 for a 24oz. bottle
(remember where I said the other day that I have no memory at all for numbers and prices? Yeah, that applies to cleaners too. If she tells me this is a good deal, I'm all for it. We always seem to run out of toilet bowl cleaner for some reason.)

Coupon books currently found at Jewel:
Share Something Delicious - here's what's inside.
$50 Kellogg's "Your Ultimate Holiday Guide - here's what's inside.

Jewel meat deals:
Jewel chicken drumsticks or thighs are $1.49/lb.
Jewel Stockman and Dakota roasts are on sale B1G1F this week (these are pricey at $25.) This Sunday's Chicago Tribune has a coupon for $5 off the roast on page 9, near the $10 turkey coupon. If you buy two roasts, use the $5 coupon on one and get the second free with the B1G1F, paying $20 for both, or $10 each.

Jewel produce deals:
1lb. bags of Jewel frozen vegetables or 12oz. Steamy vegetables are .69 each
Red seedless grapes are $1.28/lb.
Anjou, Bartlett, Bosc or Red pears are $1.29/lb.
Farm Stand baby-cut carrots are $1.29 for a 1lb. bag

Jill says: Anytime meat is under $1.99 a pound (no matter what it is -- beef, pork, poultry) it's a buy in my book, because $1.99 is a cycle low and a good benchmark for meat prices -- ditto for most produce. Seafood, by its nature, is more expensive per pound, but a good "buy" benchmark is $4 per pound or less for fish or shrimp.

Wow. A lot of deals at Jewel already, some of them pretty complicated for a newbie (the two "buy ten of the listed products" deals were making me quite nervous, because the PLAN was to try to find the best deals for me within those listed items, AND match my coupons to all of them. It was definitely in the 'intermediate-to-advanced' coupon category, heh, but I was determined to give it a try!), and I hadn't even checked Coupon Mom or Avenu yet. (I'll get to the Avenu thing in my next post!)

However, I have promised my son I would play some video games with him today and it is time, so I will continue this post a bit later!

Target: Things Were A Little More Complicated

2010-11-19T18:33:00.005-06:00

After CVS, I headed to our local Target. Target's a dangerous store for me because I LOVE IT SO MUCH. I walk in and I just want to spend money.

Thanks to Jill Cataldo once again, I was on the alert that Target's coupon accepting was all kinds of screwed up, but after reading the post on it I'm still a bit confused so I just vowed to be careful and make sure everything rang up as it was supposed to. Yes, I decided I'd be one of those slow old ladies who watches the register and double-checks everything. Annoying, I know. It sucks double for me because I am not used to doing it, and it's hard! Things ring up really fast. Luckily I had a really friendly checker, so that all went pretty easily (couponers suggest going for the younger cashiers, they seem to be more tolerant of our couponing ways).

Using Jill's deals of the week, I had my eyes on:

"No Coupon Needed" Deals: One-dozen Grade A large eggs are .99 a carton.

Deals continuing from previous weeks: Buy any 5 Glade Holiday items and get a free $5 Target gift card. This sale runs through December 26th, and many Glade items will go on and off sale prices during that time. UPDATE: This deal got more interesting this week, as aerosols, candles, candle tins, candle refills, and plugins oil refills are all on sale for $2.50. DEAL SCENARIO: Buy any 5 products priced at $2.50 each ($12.50 total) that you have $1 coupons for. Use a $1 coupon on each item ($7.50.) Pay $7.50 and get $5 back, which knocks the price of each to .50 each!
There were a variety of coupons available for the Glade items as well; I didn't list them all here, but they're on Jill's site.

Target meat deals: Archer Farms spiral-cut honey hams are $1.99/lb.
Target produce deals: 5lb. bags of russet potatoes are $1.99.

I have to take a moment here to confess that I have a TERRIBLE head for numbers. TERRIBLE. They just don't stick in my brain. Which means that I have pretty much no concept of whether or not something is at the high end of its price range or the low end. This is why I was tracking all my spending on my own grocery spreadsheet when I tried to do this myself - because despite the fact that I'm 32 years old now and have been an adult for quite a few years (no matter how often I don't FEEL it), and despite the fact that I have been a grocery shopper on my own for more than a decade now, I STILL just can't remember how much groceries cost. The odd item will stay with me for a while, but mostly I couldn't look at a loaf of bread and tell you if it's a good price or not. Even milk, and we go through 2-4 gallons a week in my house! It just doesn't STICK in my brain. So if these websites are going to tell me that meat or produce or eggs are at a great price this week, I'm probably just going to listen to them without question. I'm not doing any better on my own!

I also knew that I would be perusing the dollar section for holiday gifts for my kids. Christmas is looking like it'll be pretty lean this year, and I'd like to make the most of whatever I can. The Target dollar section is always enticing and gives me a few great stocking stuffers. I was not disappointed, and left with 12 $1 stocking stuffers.

Per my friend Leslie's suggestion, I also used the free website Coupon Mom to check Target's deals for the week, and was informed that I could take advantage of:

click to enlarge

I was most interested in the Suave deodorant as well as the Friskies treats and the Beggin' Strips.

I cut out the required coupons from my 11/14 papers, and I checked Target's website for the recommended printable coupons. (It's under the 'see more' section at Target.com, in case that link is personalized. I'm not sure if they do it based on IP's/areas or if they're all the same for everyone.) I could not find the russet potatoes coupon mentioned by Coupon Mom, but I did get Target coupons for Friskies, Beggin' Strips and Suave.

In case you didn't know it already, it is important to have both the Target coupon AND a manufacturer's coupon for every item you're getting because you can use one of each on EVERY purchase. Meaning if you have a Target coupon for $1 off X ITEM and a manufacturer's coupon for $1 off X item, you can use both those coupons on ONE package of X ITEM and get $2 off. That's called stacking in Extreme Couponing. Most stores will accept their coupon AND a manufacturer's coupon on every item.

So I got my potatoes, my ham (which we cooked last night and IT IS DELICIOUS, we love ham so much, I'm so happy about it), my eggs, and I threw in a thing of madeleines for good measure, because they're delicious and also because it was getting late, I'm diabetic, and for some reason I always get low blood sugar when I'm grocery shopping. The excitement of it all, I guess (har). I was starting to feel a little shaky and decided to head that off at the pass. MMM, cookies.

Oh, and the Glade deal? I didn't end up with any Glade products. I brought coupons and picked five out, but while it is true that they WERE on sale for $2.50 a piece, the "buy 5, get a $5 Target gift card" deal was no longer going on, and I decided it wasn't worth it. And honestly, I thought most of the scents smelled pretty fakey and not all that delicious. So the Glade stuff went back. (I would have lived with the fakey candle smells if I had gotten the $5 back though, lol!)

At my Target, the Beggin' Strips, Friskies and Suave were not on sale. I hadn't brought a copy of Coupon Mom's list though, so I just remembered that I had coupons and the deals were supposed to be good, and I forged ahead anyway.

The Beggin' Strips were $2.49 a bag. My coupon was $1.50 off 2, and I had a Target coupon for $1 off 1. I picked up two bags for $2.48. Not 66% like Coupon Mom proposed but not bad either.

The Friskies cat treats were $1.42 each. I had a $1 off 2 Target coupon and a newspaper coupon for $2 off, I think, if I'm reading my receipt correctly. So I spent $2.48 and got $3 off; that's what's known as a MONEYMAKER item in Extreme Coupon lingo. You have to have other stuff to get the 'extra' money off your total though, which I did, so this one worked well for me. I actually did better here than Coupon Mom's suggestion of FREE! I think I got a better coupon somehow though.

The Suave deodorants were .99 each. I had a Target coupon for $1.00 off 2 and a manufacturer's coupon for .75 off one. I spent 1.98 and saved 1.75, so my two deodorants cost .23. Not free as Coupon Mom suggested, but I think I can handle two deodorants for less than a quarter.

THEN, and this was awesome, I brought my own bag into Target for my purchases. Why was this awesome? Well, not only am I helping the environment by reusing bags, but also Target gives you 5 cents off your total for EVERY REUSABLE BAG YOU BRING IN.

My percentage savings at Target was considerably weaker than my CVS savings. For one thing, Target doesn't list the 'regular' price of sales item on their receipts like many other places do, so I can't calculate how much I saved by picking up the potatoes, ham and eggs on sale. For another, some of the things that were said to be on sale actually weren't (though I don't think I did too badly on them with coupons anyway). My pre-coupon total was $48.99; I actually spent $40.49. A savings of only 17.4% off the total.

Here's why you can't always go by just the numbers though:
1) I bought a ham for $18.71, almost HALF my total spent. That ham will feed my family of four for 3-4 days. That's $1.50 a person or less for those meals.
2) I got 12 stocking stuffers knocked off my list for a very minimal price.

Those two points also make up the bulk of my receipt, at $30.71. Given what they were, I still feel that my Target experience was an overall success and provided me with savings. (Especially since I saw some hams at Jewel later that were over $3.50 per pound!)

After checking out, I also received a Catalina (one of those coupons that prints at the checkout) - $1.50 off Pup-Peroni. I may or may not use that in the future, depending on how the deals go, so we'll see if that ends up being useful or not!

Lesson from this time: I will write down or print a copy of the supposed sales prices (from Jill's site or Coupon Mom or anywhere else I may come across them) and bring that with me next time so I can compare the actual price at my store to what was listed on the internet. That way I can decide on the spot if the deal is still good for me or not!

Even though my couponing percentage was much lower here, I left my second store still feeling like I was getting pretty good deals AND getting things my family would use.

Experienced couponers, how do you think I did? Would you have done anything differently? Have any other lessons to impart for me?

CVS: I Got Things For Free!

2010-11-19T11:11:00.001-06:00

The first store I went to on my Extreme Couponing trip was CVS. I'd personally never shopped at a CVS before; the one in our neighborhood isn't particularly close (there are at least three Walgreens in between us and CVS), but it's not terribly far away either, and I keep reading about all these great free things people get at CVS using their Extra Care Bucks (ECB) program.

Jill Cataldo posts what she considers to be the best deals of the week on her blog every Monday. She recommends shopping on Sunday, Monday or Tuesday because the deals overlap at your typical stores - grocery store sales cycles typically run Thursday - Wednesday, and pharmacy type stores typically run Sunday - Saturday. So if you go on one of those days, you can do all your shopping at once and hit both kinds of stores during the cycle. These were the CVS deals she recommended for this week.

I only had coupons from the 11/14 Sunday paper since I just started this journey, so that's primarily what I focused on. The two that applied to me were:

Herbal Essences shampoo, conditioner or stylers is on sale for $2.99. Buy one bottle and get $2 back in Extra Care Bucks! Use the .50 coupon from 11/14 RP, pay $2.49 and get $2 back... making this .49!

Oral B Rechargeable Vitality toothbrushes are on sale for $23. When you buy one, you'll get $13 back in ECBs. Use the $10 coupon from 11/14 RP1, pay $13 and get $13 back! It's FREE!

Now, $.49 name brand shampoo is pretty awesome, but I wouldn't have driven out to CVS just for that. However, FREE fancy toothbrush that typically retails for over $25? I was SOLD!
As a bonus, when I went through my coupons to find the one I needed for the toothbrush, I had TWO OF THEM. Which just so happened to be the limit at CVS. One for me, one for my husband!

Having never been to a CVS, I first needed to get an ECB card (you only get the bucks if you have their membership card), so I went to the counter right away and signed up for my card. Then (also thanks to Jill Cataldo), I had learned that CVS has coupon scanners that will print out extra coupons for you if you scan your ECB card. So that was stop number two. I got three coupons, all for candy that was already pretty expensive, so I ignored them this trip. (Does anyone know if these coupons become more tailored to you after you've shopped there for a while? Or are they just random?)

I picked up my Herbal Essences easily, but they were out of the toothbrushes. BUT! CVS does rain checks, AND you will get the promised ECB bucks from the deal. So I got a rain check for two of the toothbrushes, and my coupons for them are good for a month or so.

As you can see from my receipt, I also picked up a pair of fuzzy socks. Impulse buys are NOT the way to save money, but I'm a huge sucker for fuzzy socks. I always buy a pair or two every winter.

Since this was my first trip to CVS, I had no previous ECBs to redeem, so I did have to pay $2.49 for my Aussie (and will have to pay $26 for my two toothbrushes, minus the $2 ECB I now have from the Aussie), but I got the $2 back and I will get $26 back from the toothbrushes. Moving forward, now that I have ECB bucks accumulating, I will be able to take advantage of more super CVS deals without paying anything, because I'll be using the ECB's I get back.

Counting my socks, my total pre-sales and coupons at CVS would have been $7.62. I saved $1.30 by taking advantage of the sale, used a .50 coupon, and got $2.00 ECB bucks, making my post-deals total 4.26. A savings of 56%. (It would have been even better without the impulse-buy socks!) AND I got the raincheck for the two free toothbrushes.

I left CVS feeling pretty good about this whole couponing thing.

Experienced couponers, would you have done anything differently? Were there some deals I missed? Please share your tips with me!

Extreme Couponing! EXTREME!!

2010-11-18T16:56:00.000-06:00

I've always been fascinated by stories you'll hear about extreme couponers; you know, the moms who go shopping armed with coupons and knowledge of great sales, and come home with a carful of name-brand groceries for negative dollars? It's the soccer mom's 'get rich quick' scheme, a suburban myth that keeps getting passed around in hushed tones of awe and wonder; can it really be done? Can WE do this too? Well, this year I decided to find out.

Before you get excited, I don't know if it can be done yet. I have just begun to venture into this intimidating and sometimes time-consuming world. The internet has made this grocery game so much more accessible, with website after website devoted to the art. However, that massive influx of information also creates entry barriers for people like me who are just trying to figure out how to start. The couponers are deadly serious about their business. They all have their own methods, they've developed their own lingo, and they're throwing out a TON of information. It's overwhelming. I started looking into it a few months ago, couldn't get a handle on a good website or two to just guide me in the right direction, and tried to do it myself instead - by cutting out every coupon I could get my hands on and then trying to match them all up to the sales in my area, and creating a spreadsheet to track prices of all the items I purchased at different stores so that I could figure out when prices were GOOD. It was, quite frankly, a TON of work. After I spent a few hours at it, I was too overwhelmed and frustrated to continue, and I went back to couponing the old way - the way most of you probably do it, if you do it at all. Clipping coupons for products I decided, somewhat arbitrarily, that I 'needed' for that week, and redeeming them, saving a few bucks here and there. Ultimately I decided that my best bet was to just make a list, shop at Aldi first for everything I could get, and then pick up the few things Aldi didn't have at my local 'cheaper' grocery store (Strack and Van Til, for those of you in the area). That's been my strategy for a few months, but I'm still spending more than I'd like. My grocery budget continues to get out of hand, and the hordes of happy and successful couponers still taunt me with whispered stories of their mythical savings. I WANT TO JOIN THEM, BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW.

Well, the other day my friend Leslie (who is also dedicated to saving her family money, and writes about the many ways she finds to save / get free stuff at her blog One Year To Disney) took a Jill Cataldo couponing class. By sheer happenstance, we ran into her and her husband at our local Jewel-Osco the day after her class, where they were piling a cart high with groceries while studiously checking their list and comparing prices. It looked like SERIOUS BUSINESS. She told me the coupon class was amazing and she was trying out some of the strategies right then and there to see how well she could do. We had run into Jewel to pick up a few things we 'needed' that night.

After getting the stuff we needed, plus throwing in a few more impulse buys, we left Jewel with maybe half a cart's worth of stuff and spent $107 (confirming my belief that Jewel is the 'expensive' grocery store, and that there's no good reason for me to shop there).

I talked to Leslie the next day to find out how she did that same night. Leslie and her husband left Jewel with two grocery carts full to the brim with name brand items... and paid $105. They paid two dollars less than we did for quadruple the stuff. I believe her total, pre-couponing, was over $200, so she basically cut her bill in half. 50% savings her first time out of the gate after Jill's class.

So I went over to Leslie's house the very next day, while our kids were at school, to pick her brain about this amazing class she took. We talked for about an hour, and then watched some youtube videos, and then I went home and scoured Jill's website and a few others and watched a few more videos.

This is a preview of Jill's Super Coupon class, with some tips to get started.

Then I spent a few hours going over lists of the best deals for the week, trying to find all the coupons I've been collecting and tossing haphazardly around my dining room, and went out to four stores last night armed with my new knowledge and a determination to succeed at this extreme sport.

How did I do? Overall, I felt it was a success; enough so that I plan on continuing and trying to do better and better at this couponing thing. I will write about it along the way. I think each store deserves its own post because there's SO MUCH to learn, so I'll catalog it all separately. Consider this post my entry story; I'm becoming an extreme couponer.

If you're like me and are new to coupons and want to learn more, I highly recommend Jill Cataldo's website and blog, even if you're not local. If couponing is old hat to you and you have any tips you'd like to share with a newbie, I'd love to hear them. What do you wish you had known when you first started playing the grocery game?

Thank You, Ford!

2010-10-28T18:06:00.000-05:00

So, just for being a blogger, Ford gave me a car!

Not for forever though. Just for a little road trip my husband and I are taking this weekend. It's pretty awesome. They brought a candy-red 2011 Taurus SHO to my doorstep today. Let me tell you, I've only driven it for about five minutes but I'm already in LOVE with this car. I want one. THIS one. In this exact color. It's faaaabulous. And SO different than the old Tauruses! We used to have a 1999 Taurus and while it drove nicely, it just was never a car I liked very much for a number of reasons, starting with the way it looked. Just wasn't my cup of tea. THIS Taurus? Is GORGEOUS. Look:

Isn't it beautiful?

When I got in the car and started it up, the radio sprang to life. It was on the Sirius "80's on 8" channel, and it was seducing me with 'Tempted' by Squeeze. Oh, I AM tempted. SO tempted. I drove around the neighborhood a little bit before I had to come back and get the kids from school. I hopped in my old car, tuned it on, and sighed. I love you, old car, but suddenly I don't quite LOVE you anymore. My old car's radio sang wistfully to me, "I can't live... with or without you... and you give yourself away, and you give yourself away..." I took it as a sign. Our relationship will never be the same again.

I can't wait to fully explore the Taurus and tell you guys what I love about it, and I'll even see if I can get my husband (who is much more into cars and the technical aspects of them than I) to write up what HE thinks of it for any car-techies out there, but from the little bit of playing around in it, so far I love:
the backup camera with proximity detector
the fact that the pedals are adjustable
the nav and Sync systems
the big, easy to use touch-screen with a million features I haven't figured out yet

and pretty much, you know, the whole car.

This weekend, we are driving to House On The Rock in Spring Green WI (just about my favorite place on earth!) to participate in the American Gods / Neil Gaiman event, and we will be driving there in this awesome car, and I will be updating with plenty of pictures and news throughout the weekend. If you're not a fan of this blog on facebook, now is the time to like us so you can see all the fun!

Can't wait to share it all with you!

I was not monetarily compensated for this post, nor was I required to write about any of this. Ford simply contacted me (as well as, I assume, other bloggers) a few months back and said "We currently have a number of very cool opportunities to give bloggers the chance to take a Ford vehicle out for a road trip, weekender or just out for a spin in the neighborhood. The vehicle would be yours for up to one week to go wherever you choose within US borders. You will have free range to test out off the technology, quality, safety and green sustainability the vehicle has to offer." I wrote back and said 'HELL YES, FORD!" and that was that. All opinions expressed in these posts are our own!

Go Win Free Love Stuff!

2010-10-26T09:16:00.002-05:00

We're having a contest over at our Dirty Old Moms blog - you could win a Durex Love-Box, some condom and lube samples, a koozy (heh heh), and more! Go check it out :)

Dirty Old Moms Durex Contest

Hall And Oates - They're Bed Creepers

2010-09-03T11:15:00.001-05:00

I was looking at the Google Analytics strings of keywords that have brought people to my blog earlier today. It seems most people coming here trying to find out if Chiro One is a scam. I hope the two-part blog series I wrote about our experience with them is helpful to people considering whether to use them or not. It didn't surprise me at all that a large number of people are Googling to find out more about them; that's the first thing I did after I encountered the sales rep from the company.

What DID surprise me, or rather I should say what made me laugh (because precious little actually surprises me about the internet anymore), was this page of searches:

I didn't realize so many people wanted moms with young boys, and I'm not sure why they're ending up here, but I suspect that they're not getting exactly what they want. I DO have a young boy, a young cook at times even. He's six, and he's my son, and he's a great kid. I highly recommend having a kid like him.

The thing that really made me laugh though was the third one down. MOM! THERE'S HALL AND OATES UNDER MY BED! I didn't realize there was a BLOG dedicated to this phenomenon. It's certainly never happened to ME, although I did have one particularly traumatic experience where my MOM hid under my bed and scared the crap out of me. I suppose I'd be more likely to be shouting "HALL AND OATES! Mom's under my bed!!"

I just didn't realize this Hall and Oates problem was so prevalent. I guess they have a new song (to the tune of Man Eater): wooooah here we come... watch out boys, we'll chew you up... woaaahhhh here we come... we're bed-creepers!

Up Your Nose With A Rubber Hose!

2010-09-03T10:43:00.001-05:00

Let's talk Neti Pots. From the first time I heard about them, I was intrigued. I completely buy into the idea that flushing junk out of your body is a good thing. WebMD backs me up too.

What is a Neti Pot, you ask? It's a magic-lamp looking thing with a long spout; you fill it with a lukewarm saline solution and pour it in your nose. In one nostril, out the other; instead of a genie that grants you wishes, you get nasal irrigation. It's supposed to help tremendously with allergies and sinus conditions.

This is the one I have. They make ceramic ones too.

I have suffered from seasonal allergies and sinus issues my entire adult life. In my early twenties, I went through two years of chronic sinus infections, constant stuffiness, antibiotic after antibiotic after antibiotic. I forgot what it was like to have a sense of smell, and that is not an exaggeration. I eventually ended up having sinus surgery to clear it out, remove some polyps, and correct a severely deviated septum; when that didn't entirely clear up the problem, six months later I had a tonsillectomy, and that made a huge difference.

I still suffer from seasonal allergies though, and each year they seem to get a little worse. I get hit in the spring AND the fall. I usually have at least one sinus infection a year.

So the Neti Pot has always intrigued me, but also weirded me out a bit; pouring water into my nose just doesn't seem natural, and I know I HATE getting water up my nose while swimming, so why would I want to do that? Americans who use Neti Pots seem few and far between, and while I talked to a lot of people who were interested in them, I never found an actual person I knew who had used one. Everything I read claimed it shouldn't feel like like much of anything, that the 'getting water up your nose while swimming' feeling would not happen. I remained skeptical.

I finally broke down and bought a Neti Pot early last spring, while I was on vacation in Utah, of all places. Then I left it sitting in my suitcase for two months, until I was beset with a godawful, unexpected late-spring sinus infection. One of the most painful ones I'd ever had. At some point in my misery, while waiting for the medicine to kick in, I remembered the Neti Pot and frantically dug it out. I didn't even CARE if it felt like poolwater-in-the-nose at that point, I just wanted some relief.

It's probably not recommended to start using a Neti Pot when you're stuffed up like crazy, and at first I wasn't even sure it would WORK, but it did. And it helped clear me out. And the next day, and the next. It helped me feel better and I believe it helped me recover more quickly.

It DOES have a little bit of that 'water up your nose' feeling, I won't lie. But it's not as bad as it can be while swimming and you can adjust the tilt of your head and the angle of the water to minimize it. I don't find it particularly PLEASANT (as some people claim to), but it isn't so bad either, and I think the benefit outweighs the weirdness of the experience.

You can find a lot of videos of people using Neti Pots on youtube and it's kind of interesting to watch. I like this one from Howcast:

Since then, I haven't used it regularly (I have an irrational fear of running out of the little packets of saline solution it came with; this is stupid because a) we could buy more and b) YOU CAN MAKE YOUR OWN SOLUTION) but I have used it when I've had some stuffiness, and it always helps.

It is now edging towards fall, and with the appearance of the cooler weather comes crazy allergies. I can feel the pain and pressure in my face already. I am making a vow to use the Neti Pot daily this fall and see if it makes a difference with my allergies this year.

Do any if you use Neti Pots? If not, are you willing to try? What's your thought on them?

Point And Click

2010-08-30T13:19:00.001-05:00

I love when I give my kids the camera and tell them to take some pictures. It's fascinating to see what they capture. With digital cameras, 'trash' pictures are easily deleted and there's no film-development expense to worry about, and they can snap to their hearts' content. Photography is a hobby I have always enjoyed and it pleases me to see my children so enamored with it as well.

At 3 and 6, one thing we DO have to worry about is the camera itself. We've had several cameras bite the dust, often quite literally, due to the kids' manhandling them. I have to give a huge shout-out to our current camera, the Casio Exilim, made for sports enthusiasts but also perfect for families. It's 7-foot shock resistant so if my kids drop it, it's highly likely to survive. There is no lens cover, and even when you zoom, the lens never moves, so they can't break the shutter or snap anything off. It's also waterproof so we've been able to take it to pools, splash pads, and lakes without worry. Furthermore, it takes great pictures. (As a bonus, it's red, and I feel sassy when I whip it out.)

Last weekend, we spent some time in Wisconsin with friends, and I let the kids have the camera on a couple different occasions. Here's a few of the shots they captured:

At the Cost Cutters, waiting for Daddy to get his hairs cut (yes, all of them, har har). I love how my 6-year old captured his 3-year old sister studiously writing in a journal. She's all legs and creativity.

My 3-year-old likewise captured her brother, waiting impatiently for me to finish a ride at the Bristol Renaissance Faire. Up close and personal.

She also got a good shot of our friend Ihor. It wasn't so long ago that she couldn't even manage to get a person framed in the shot at all. Now she's using backlighting and soft colors and everything. OK, perhaps I'm attributing too much to her burgeoning photography skills, but I still rather like how this shot came out.

I hope they continue to enjoy taking pictures and capturing family memories. It is, in my opinion, an invaluable hobby.

I Am A Recovering Hoarder

2010-08-05T22:50:00.000-05:00

This is the area I've recently spent the most time on in my home. I've been, quite frankly, dreading showing these pictures to the world at large. It's no secret to my family and friends, and while everyone chides me from time to time about being messy (except for my brethren-in-chaos, who sympathize with my plight), it's just sort of an accepted fact.

When I'm showing the world at large though, or even when I'm sitting privately in a room talking to my new therapist about some of the possible OCD tendencies I have, and I'm trying to describe my problems and really face up to them so I can fix them and move past, it sort of stares me right in the face: I have hoarding tendencies. I may, in fact, be a hoarder.

I might be something of a hoarder in recovery, because getting rid of most things has become much, MUCH easier for me over the years, BUT it's an overwhelming task to accomplish on my own. It's an overwhelming task to accomplish while struggling to learn how to organize things that I keep, balance housework, tending to a family, working (in whatever form it may appear in my life; nowadays that's primarily writing), having hobbies, having a social life, and just generally feeling overwhelmed and anxious almost all of the time. I'm trying to take it day by day and do my best.

I was, am, horribly embarrassed to share the before pictures with the world. This was my dining room. This is the room people see when they come to my house. This is what greeted anyone that happened to look through my GIANT GLASS FRONT DOOR. This is one of the rooms we tended to use the most. How did we ever function around all of this?

This isn't even the worst of it. That's the part that really embarrasses me. Just one room, eh, everyone's life can get a little out of control from time to time. But this was our most LIVABLE room. So, yes, there's more to come.

But for now, I will revel in the accomplishment I have achieved over the past week, and enjoy my peaceful, organized, clean dining room.

This is directly across from the front door; that's our dining room table, piled high with god-knows-what. We generally just ate all our meals on my bed, in front of the TV.

Now, a peaceful oasis! The file cabinet will not be living there permanently; I just happened to acquire it from a friend moments before these pictures were taken. Its new home isn't quite ready for it yet. Also, I need to pretty it up a little bit.

I couldn't get the exact angle at my computer desk corner because there was too much stuff in the way.

Now, it's like my own little office in the corner! All of the boxes / bags to the right are where the file cabinet is living now; they were full of paper. Now the file cabinet is full of paper! It still needs to be sorted through and organized but I kind of need more therapy for that. I have a real big problem with paper.

Facing the front door. I didn't take a before shot UP the wall because there was no real reason to; the focus was the floor. All that laundry! You might think I sorted it all out there to make it look worse, but in actuality I had sorted it out there a week or so prior, and the dogs went tearing through and mixed it all up, and feeling defeated, I just... left it there. For a week or so.

But it's gone now! Sorted in the basement and DONE, even. In its place is that great entryway organizer from IKEA. We'll be bringing it a little lower on the wall; it's a bit awkward in its current placement. Eventually the cedar chest will be going where the kids' desk is, but that won't be until we finish the basement, allowing us to move down there and give the kids their own bedrooms (they currently share one now).

More of Mount Laundry. All of those boxes, they're mostly empty in that picture; they were full of things I had packed when I thought my husband and I were getting divorced and I was going to move out (that kind of throws a big wrench into life plans and 'getting things done' too, let me tell you). They ended up turning into 'purging and garage sale' boxes. The cedar chest, which you can barely see there, is where it actually BELONGS, but we moved it to the other wall temporarily to make space for the kids' desk.

The currently-finished area with the kids' desk and art supply box. Yes, it's the first thing you see when you walk in the door, but it's a heck of a lot better than Laundry Hill and Box Mountain! It will eventually live in one of the kids' rooms, once we're able to GIVE them separate bedrooms, but for now I can live with this arrangement.

It can be really hard to get a feel for a room based on pictures. What I love most about this current arrangement is that it feels like the room is divided into sections. We have a small two-bedroom ranch house with four people, two dogs and a cat; we really need every room to be efficient and, often, multipurpose. This way, it feels like the room has a separate entryway, a dining area, and a small office / social area. (My desk cabinet can easily be closed to look like a nice piece of furniture, and the chair turned to make this area a small seating nook when friends visit.) It's clean, it's attractive, it's welcoming and it's PEACEFUL.

It gives me hope for the rest of my house.

living in a VAN down by the RIVER

2010-07-24T00:00:00.000-05:00

I would consider today a moderate success.

Yesterday, after meeting with my therapist, I spent most of the afternoon / evening being thoroughly unproductive, feeling anxious about everything we had talked about and trying to figure out how I was going to get everything done when I was only allowed to focus on ONE thing on my list (of probably 12 different things, easy). I let the worry gnaw at me and wash over me and tried to figure out how I might be able to 'cheat' and justify it.

In the end, the product of all that worrying (and talking to my husband and a good friend about my options) lead me to the conclusion that focusing on the house was the best thing for this week. I still feel a little bit like the world might explode if I don't focus on the other things, and I have no idea what's going to happen financially, but if I can actually make this happen and get the house in order for once and for all, I might have a chance at being more productive and getting things done and making money and saving us from financial ruin. Of course I've said this before, and of course I'll spend plenty of time second guessing myself and trying to slowly work all those other things back into my life. But for now, it's just one week. One week and I can go and talk to my therapist and if I'm ready to freak out about not doing other things yet, hopefully she'll be able to help me.

My morning routine:

I got it all done. It took a while, and I hit some stumbling blocks, things I find particularly distasteful, I delayed, I experienced anxiety, but I got through it. I wrote in my personal journal a lot today, trying to make note of all the things that were particularly rough for me, times I felt anxious about things, times I was resistant to doing things. I'm still very time-focused and it all took me longer than I think it 'should'. But it got done.

My One Task:

I don't have a good name for this task, but it involves cleaning up, decluttering, and organizing my house, and boxing up things to sell / get rid of. Making The House A Home And Maybe Making A Little Money In The Process? Yeah, it's a pretty clunky title, I know. I finished three rooms today - our bedroom (which I'd worked on some a day or two previous and was already well on its way), our upstairs hallway and the upstairs bathroom.
Once I got in the groove, I was pretty happy to be working on this stuff today. Of course, I didn't get to any of the really horrible rooms yet, and I will admit that once I finished the bedroom, the temptation to stay in my clean, peaceful bedroom and pretend the rest of my house didn't exist was pretty strong.
Halfway through the day I caught myself trying to focus on the TIME it would take to complete the whole house decluttering process and setting goals for myself again. Setting goals in and of itself isn't a bad thing, it's obviously something I believe in and do with regularity; the problem is that I tend to set pretty lofty, unattainable goals. Or rather, the goals aren't unattainable, but the time I give myself to complete them is. I'm never content to just trust the process and believe it will happen if I keep working. it always has to be done by a certain TIME, and when I catch myself falling off my self-imposed timeline I get frustrated, I feel defeated, and I often give up. So I made note of that in my personal journal and will take that to the therapist next week. It's one of those things about myself where I just can't really fathom HOW it could be any different. But maybe it should be, and maybe it could be.

Here's some pictures of the progress in my house (taken with my phone, so I apologize in advance for the quality)!

Our Bedroom ( I have no befores, only afters):

from the doorway

our view from the bed. the computer has since been moved to the center bookshelf.

my bedside table, and Feona

The upstairs hallway:

before

after

before 2

after 2 (dog butts!)

The upstairs bathroom:

before

after (reorganized baskets)

before 2 (yes the dogs follow me everywhere)

after 2

I do not know how to fix ANY of this picture formatting. This was a very frustrating post, in terms of pictures. A blogging design genius I am NOT.

Unemployment:

I don't know what's happening. I got my full unemployment check this week. By my calculations, I either have one week left, or two weeks left. I'm not sure. I understand that a new extended benefits bill was just signed in but I do not understand how that affects me. Illinois Unemployment hasn't updated their website with new information pertaining to it, and often they seem to leave these things vague anyway. So I don't know if we're running out of money soon or getting a temporary reprieve. I intend to act as if we are running out of money soon and that I need to find a way to come up with that $1650 difference each month as long as I am out of work (and that if I find a job, the take-home has to cover at LEAST that much PLUS full time childcare). However, I am trying not to think about any of this until my next therapy session because it just leads to panic and will render ineffective anything my therapist is trying to accomplish with me. I know my family and friends will never let us starve or go homeless, and I guess that's what I should focus on, that even if we are destitute and lose everything, we will still have a roof over our heads and food in our bellies. That is a far cry from what I WANT, and I will certainly do everything in my power to keep it from happening, but it's better than living in a van down by the river.

Tea With The Dead

2010-07-23T22:56:00.000-05:00

When someone you love dies, it leaves a scar somewhere deep inside. A huge, twisted, knotted, UGLY scar. The immediate pain might fade over the years, but the scar never really goes away. Sometimes, when the weather is right and the rain comes a’callin and you pass by that Place You Used To Go or hear That One Song on the radio, the scar twists and an ache takes hold of your heart and the pain resurfaces.

When my good friend died, we were so very young. She was not quite 25. I was 23. She was in my dream the other night. I used to dream of her frequently, but not so much anymore. I like to think that those dream appearances are visits from her, wherever she is. I don’t remember what we talked about during our visit. I didn’t even really remember that I dreamt of her until I heard a song on the radio today, not even a song I associate with her specifically, but she came to mind, unbidden, and there it was, a wisp of a memory of a dream. And I reflected, as I sometimes do, on our friendship and what it meant to me, and what it may have meant to her. We were young; we didn’t think so at the time, but we were. Looking back on my early twenties now, we were so very young. Still figuring out where we were going in life, what kind of people we were, what kind of adults we were going to be. Still grappling with insecurities and jealousies and friendships gone awry and all of the drama and trappings of post-high school, new-adult life. I think about things I heard after she passed away, worries I never knew she might have had, issues I had no inkling may have existed. I like to think that, if she had lived, those worries and issues would have been laid to rest over time and our friendship would have endured. Thrived. That we would have grown together, through marriage and parenting and friendships and loves and life. I like to picture us sitting together in a cafe now, looking back on that time in our lives and laughing over how silly we were to get worked up over so many things that seemed so large but were really so very insignificant.

I like to think that somewhere in the universe, a version of She and a version of Me are having a good cup of tea and a great conversation.

Even if that somewhere is only in my barely-remembered dreams.

Scam Report On Chiro One, Part Two

2010-07-22T17:19:00.003-05:00

Last Wednesday, my husband, mother and I reported dutifully back to Chiro One to be coerced into giving them all our money get our health reports. In a group setting. Where we instructed to bring our spouses and a big fat check.

We were greeted enthusiastically again, and our names were up on the white board once more. We received name tags and were encouraged to make friends with the other folks that were waiting to receive THEIR health reports. We spent most of our time debating which Hall & Oates song is their best instead (it's Rich Girl. It's TOTALLY Rich Girl). Eventually everyone arrived and we were ushered into the main treatment area, where a small grouping of chairs were arranged in a semi-circle around a whiteboard with some writing on it. The doctor, the same one who had helped examine my mother and I on our previous visit, gave the 8 of us a presentation about spinal health and how we were going to die if we didn't receive chiropractic treatment for the rest of our life. Seriously. It took her about half an hour to go through the whole presentation, and it was very interactive (she called on us frequently, asked us lots of questions, and she kept calling my husband out on his snarky whispered comments to me), but this is what I took away from the presentation:

From this site.

1) spinal issues, called subluxations, compress our nerves, which are supposed to be carrying all the important messages from our brain to the rest of the areas of our body, and when these subluxations compromise the nerves, it can lead to dysfunctions in the body, which will cause diseases in us, and eventually will kill us. Or we'll kill ourselves, because subluxations can also cause us to be severely depressed.

2) Getting the proper chiropractic treatment, for the rest of our lives, will take us out of the cycle of "medications and surgery" that the rest of the health world wants us to be in, will fix the dysfunctions (which can take YEARS of treatment, if our backs are bad enough) and keep us healthy and happy.

3) Seeing other chiropractors will only mess up our backs further. This was illustrated by showing us xrays of a man who had been seeing a chiropractor on his own for 15 years before coming to Chiro One. I'm not sure how they GOT his 15 year old x rays, but they showed us what were supposedly his xrays before he started treatment with his previous chiropractor (bad), his xrays from near the end of his treatment with that chiro (worse), and his xrays when he came to Chiro One (so bad they needed to refer him for surgery, they couldn't even help this poor soul, his other chiropractor had worsened him so!).

you ever see the results of a neglected mouth?! THIS COULD HAPPEN TO YOU!

Call me a skeptic, but in my mind, they were just weaving the perfect setup to alarm and disarm us before taking us back into individual rooms and trying to sell us a huge treatment plan.

Toward the end of the presentation, my mom asked about genetics. Something like "do you really believe that subluxations cause ALL diseases and disorders in the body? What about genetic factors and predisposition to certain conditions?" To which the doctor replied that she DOES believe subluxations cause all of our bad medical stuff and that she doesn't believe genetics play a part in it at all. Because she had scoliosis and severe depression and some other things, and as soon as she started receiving regular chiropractic care at Chiro One, all of that was cured and she's a True Believer now. My mother mentioned Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and how, when she was diagnosed with cancer, she said something like "I don't understand how this could have happened, I've always lived such a healthy life." The doctor replied "was she getting chiropractic treatment? Because I would bet you that no, she was not."

DO YOU HEAR THAT, JACKIE O? IF YOU'D SEEN A CHIROPRACTOR REGULARLY, YOU WOULD NEVER HAVE DIED OF CANCER!

So. Make of that what you will. Obviously we're in the 'skeptic' category.

Shortly thereafter, they took us back into the private rooms to discuss our personal health details. A blond doctor took my mom back, and the same doctor who gave the presentation took OJ and I back into a room. She showed us our back xrays (both of us having some decent misalignments, of course) and noted that it would probably take several years to treat us. She showed us the treatment plan and paperwork she'd written up on us and said they wanted to start out seeing us three times a week for 3 months.

Here's the kicker. They want you to pay up front. That's the big sale. You have to COMMIT. Oh sure, if you decide you don't like the treatments or want to go somewhere else, they'll return a prorated amount to you, but they won't treat you unless you pay for a big block up front.

For the two of us, that meant $1800. $900 a piece ($25 copay each visit for 12 weeks times 2 people). And of course they had three easy payment options!

Oh, and the orthotics for our feet. Those weren't covered by our insurance. So add another $400 a piece to our cost, because we really SHOULD have orthotics, you know.

We thanked her and respectfully declined. We both believe in chiropractic care (though perhaps not quite to the somewhat fanatical level that these people profess to believe), but we don't believe in paying up front for 12 weeks of medical services at a place we might not even like, for treatments we might not even need.We'll go to my husband's previous chiro instead, where they do much the same stuff but in a private setting and don't charge you an arm and a leg or tell you you need to see them three times a week for the rest of FOREVER or you'll get cancer and DIE.

After we regrouped with my mom, she told us that her doctor wouldn't even TELL her the cost of the treatment plan for her until she agreed to commit to the recommended course of treatment! (Which was also three times a week for 12 weeks.) So she doesn't even know what they were going to try to charge her. They also tried to sell her orthotics, and when my mom told the doctor she already HAS a pair of orthotics from her podiatrist, the chiropractor told her "well, we want you to have the SOFT ones".

Needless to say, my mom didn't give Chiro One any of her hard-earned dollars either.

don't be fooled! "free" medical care is generally NOT.

My take? The word "scam" is relative; they ARE charging for a service and they do provide said service, and it may even have health benefits for you. But it's definitely a BUSINESS first, caring health company second. It's full of manipulative sales techniques and methods used to get you emotionally involved and committed. I would recommend that anyone considering chiropractic care steer clear of Chiro One and find a reputable local chiropractor in their area instead.

part one of this series:
Is Chiro One A Scam?

OCD, Or How I Learned To Stop Worrying... That's A Lie. I'm Worried As SHIT.

2010-07-22T15:57:00.001-05:00

I saw my therapist this morning. This was my second appointment with her, and I can't tell you how glad I am to be seeing someone again, AND to have it be someone that I feel actually, oh, maybe knows how to do something besides just let me talk at her? Someone who might actually have some ideas and guidance and maybe, oh, KNOW a little bit something about mental health?

*cough* Sorry. I might be just a little bit bitter about my last experience with a therapist. The last lady was... well, she was very nice. But I probably would have done better paying one of my close friends $100 to sit with me for an hour and listen, for all the good she did me. My friends would have slapped me around a little bit more. (with LOVE, of course.)

So. When I met this therapist last week, the session was me just trying to remember everything I wanted to tell her about in my life that I feel gives me trouble or that I'd like to work on. HUGE list, but a lot of it is interrelated, so I am hoping that as we get some of it sorted out, all of it will start just falling into place.

This week, given the magnitude of the financial crisis we just 'discovered', it was pretty much all about that and how I processed the stress over the weekend (by obsessing and thinking in circles and living on the sheer edge of panic, why, how do YOU deal with your personal crises?) and where I'm at now and what I'd like to accomplish.

At some point I brought out my list. You all just KNEW I made a list, right? Maybe I told you I made a list in my last post, I can't recall. But even if I didn't, I know you know how much I love lists. This particular list has a morning routine consisting of everything I think I SHOULD do in the mornings, an after dinner routine of everything I think I SHOULD do in the evenings, and a giant list of all the things I think I should do in between during the day to make the money I need ($55 a day! my brain keeps screaming at me. FIFTY FIVE DOLLARS A DAAAAAY!). Not on the list are the parts where I have to break for meals, spend time with the kids and the husband, and maybe occasionally stop and enjoy life. Because when you're in panic mode, YOU DON'T HAVE TIME FOR THOSE THINGS.

Panic also makes your hair change color. It's true.

I started explaining the list to her, starting with the morning routine. It's a lot of stuff. She stopped me early on and asked if I thought I was setting myself up to do too much. "Not really," I replied uncertainly. "I mean, look at the stuff that's on there. Each item really shouldn't take all that long, you know? I get frazzled because the past few days I've done it, it's taken me much longer than I thought it should, but these are all things I HAVE to do, and so I do them, but then I don't have time for anything else, but look... this one should only take five minutes, this one's only about ten, I cut this other thing out because I felt like it was taking too long..." She asked if I had trouble with any of the tasks, or if I thought it would be beneficial if I stuck to my routine for a week and identified what parts work for me, what doesn't, what I dislike. "I can do some of that already!" I said. "For instance, feeding the pets and cleaning the litterbox. It NEEDS to be done. I love my pets. But I really dislike those tasks. Probably more than normal. I don't know if anyone LIKES doing them, but take the feeding for instance - ever since I was pregnant with my second daughter, I never really lost my Dog Nose (you know, that mega enhanced sense of smell you get while pregnant), and the smell of even the dry food makes me gag now. It's awful. But it has to be done." She asked if I could give some of these tasks away, for instance to my kids. "Sure! I mean, they're capable. But here's the thing. I have... um... some anxieties about that. Pet food is kind of gross, right? And I have to, HAVE TO, wash my hands after I touch it. My husband, he could feed them and then go make us dinner and never see a sink in between, but it makes my skin crawl. And the thought of my kids touching the pet food really squicks me out. I know it shouldn't be a big deal, they can just wash their hands, and I don't want them to be freaked out by it, but it BOTHERS ME."

She asked if I thought we should test me for OCD. Heh. MAYBE! Maybe just a LITTLE!

So, next week that's ON like donkey kong. My husband told me I was gonna ace that test. I'm not sure what he means by that, exactly.

It runs in the family too, apparently. I picked my kids up from my mom's afterwards and was talking to her and learned about some funny OCD-style quirks she has that I wasn't entirely aware of. And my brother came home from work in the middle of our conversation and he's got some too. It's a family affair, oooo, a family affair...

It would be really nice to get some of my anxieties under control. I'm looking forward to this, believe it or not.

In the meantime, she tasked me this week with just doing my morning routine every day. Good or bad, stick with it. We're going for CONSISTENCY. I am to make note of anxieties I feel, perceived roadblocks, dislikes, issues, whatever. She asked me to ignore the rest of my list for the week. IGNORE MY LIST?? 'Can you do that?' she asked me. "Umm... I don't know?" I said sheepishly. "Can I focus on just ONE thing?" "OK." She said. "But just ONE. Nothing else. I don't want to give you too much this week. I think that's plenty."

But I WANT to do the whole list!!

So that's my assignment.

On the drive home, I was thinking about all the other things on the list and trying to figure out what I can 'outsource' to my husband so more things get done.

I suspect that's probably something like cheating.

So I've done nothing this afternoon so far but think about it and feel anxious because the world is going to BLOW UP if I can't do EVERYTHING on my list RIGHT NOW.

This is what happened to me last time I ignored my list. True story.

Surprise! This is turning into the CRAZY BLOG! Bet you didn't see that coming!

Step One of my financial repair journey: stop worrying and being so anxious about so many things. It seems this might be a much bigger process than I had suspected. Until I started examining it recently, I hadn't quite realized how badly anxiety has permeated my life over the past few years. I walk around in a near-constant state of anxiety these days, even when I don't have something specific to be anxious about. Even though I am just starting to work on it, I can't tell you how relieved I feel to be addressing it. I am looking forward to feeling better.

Also, I should really see someone about that eye wound.

you might also enjoy reading:
Penniless
So Basically I Live In A Constant State Of Anxiety No Matter What
Lead Me Not Into Temptation... I Can Find It Just Fine By Myself

penniless

2010-07-21T23:01:00.001-05:00

Hi. We're broke.

Yeah, hell of a way to start a blog post. I had no other idea what direction to go with this introduction.

As some of you may already know, I am unemployed. I lost my job the beginning of last September. I've been on unemployment, which has been keeping us afloat; my original unemployment claim ended last spring and I was granted an extension. Now, as far as I understand it, there are currently no other extensions to be granted (unless Congress votes otherwise soon... I believe they're voting on Tuesday? I'm not sure), and I am expecting to run out of my extended benefits... very soon. I'm not sure exactly when, because I get a little confused when I try to navigate the world of unemployment benefits. I suspect they make it deliberately confusing so no one questions them. Not that it matters, because they don't answer their phone anyway; if you REALLY wanted to go and question them, you'd have to go sit in their hellhole of an office all day and wait to talk to someone who doesn't actually have answers for you anyway. Not my idea of a good time.

But if I read the website right, I will be running out either after this week's check or after the following check, and the following check (if I get one) may only be for one week's benefits, not two, because my starting check was only for one week. This is all conjecture, I really don't know. That's what I'm guessing at though.

Back when I lost my job, we looked at our budget to determine if we would be able to live on OJ's salary alone, if ever it came down to that. At that time, it was tight but manageable. We would have had to give up pretty much every expenditure that even resembled excess, and I might have had to scramble to bring in a couple hundred bucks a month from home somehow, but that seemed like something we could deal with if that ever came to pass.

Well, since it appeared that WOULD be coming to pass soon, we sat down last week to take another look at our budget. Everything and nothing has changed since last September, when I lost my job. We got a 'new' (to us) car. We went on a large vacation that we absolutely could not afford, and borrowed / charged most of it. I'm sure we charged other things. We intended to pay off most of our debt with my unemployment money, since we were no longer paying for daily childcare, and instead somehow we managed to not only NOT get out of debt, we incurred more. We went through a very traumatic time where it looked like our marriage was going to dissolve. We're still dealing with the emotional consequences of that and every other stressor in our lives as well. The short of it is, LIFE happened. We didn't manage a lot of things well at all. And somehow, when we sat down and looked at our budget last week, that couple hundred dollars I would have needed to bring in each month had blossomed. Grown into a massive BEASTLY intimidating number.

Somehow, we ended up over $1600 short each month. Or rather, we will be as soon as my unemployment officially ends.

Quite frankly, I've been sick since we discovered that number. Reeling. In shock. Completely and utterly stressed out. Pretty much panicking.

There is no telling if I will even be able to find a job in this market, at this point, where it's been almost a year. And if I DO, am I likely to make what I was making before? I'm guessing not. When I was working before, after we paid our childcare, we had only about $1600 a month left over. Some of it, obviously, was used to pay the rest of our expenses beyond OJ's check. Some went to debt repayment (and a fat lot of good that did). Most of it got blown on living beyond our means. A LOT got blown on food; groceries and eating out are two of our biggest expenses. Or WERE. We obviously can't do that anymore. (By the by, that "$1600 over" does NOT include going out to eat at ALL, and only allows us a $400 grocery budget each month. I was trying to live on a $300 budget the past few months and failing miserably, so we upped it a little. We may not have ANY money for groceries though, if I can't come up with that money, so it might be irrelevant! I just wanted to point out that we didn't BUDGET for extraneous living.) Assuming I even find a job, I'll be paying for childcare and working and STILL might not clear what we need each month just to pay the bills. That thought is incredibly depressing.

What happened in the past, the details of it, don't so much matter now. What matters is that we made irresponsible decisions, we counted on our future selves to clean up the mess we were steadily making, and our once-future, present selves are paying a heavy price right now. Oh, how we are paying. Or will be.

I'm not sure how to make up a $1600+ difference from home each month. I'm really, quite frankly, completely overwhelmed at the thought. I have a lot of ideas. I've gleaned some pearls of wisdom from friends, and of course OJ and I have been putting our heads together over it too. Despite how it may sound, that budget really doesn't have much by way of entertainment expenses in it. There's not much else we can cut. We downsized our cell phone plan as much as possible. We don't have a land line. We don't have cable TV. (We have an $8 a month Netflix account and we do streaming video and Hulu and ripped movies pretty much exclusively.) Internet is non-negotiable, until I'm living in a box, heh. (Not just for fun, but because most of the ways I CAN earn money from home are internet-related, as is any job hunting; it's kind of a necessity.) After that, it's mortgage, utilities, groceries, household and child items, pet expenses, vehicle expenses. We did throw in $100 a month each for OJ and I for 'mad money' - that covers ANYTHING extra we'd like to do. For ourselves, for the kids, as a family, with friends. And if I can't somehow make up the $1600 a month, it's the first thing that gets cut. We just threw it in as a wish list budget item, because it's awfully hard to live without SOME outlet, occasionally. The last big chunk of our monthly expenses, obviously, is debt repayment. We spend $850 a month on debt repayment. The only item I kept separate from that is our mortgage because even though it's debt, it's in the 'way long term debt pay off' category for me. So that's just credit cards and vehicle payments. We both have student loans that aren't even INCLUDED in that monthly payment number because we keep deferring them.

In other words, we're just a big financial mess here.

We've been talking about getting out of debt for a LONG while, and we even made headway a time or two in the past, but we've really dug ourselves into a fine old hole here now. We're screwed. I don't know what to do.

As I mentioned, I have ideas, and I have made a pledge to myself to not only work on putting these ideas into play every day (some of them, at least), but also to write about how the day went each night. To talk about what worked for me, what didn't, and share any gems I may uncover on the way.

My husband makes a decent amount of money. We're well above the poverty line. He has a full time job, we have insurance (thank goodness, especially with my diabetes). Thanks to our insurance, we can afford my monthly medications, doctor visits, and even therapist visits to help me manage my stress (MEGA overload here! heh). And yet we might not be able to afford things like groceries. We can't refinance our mortgage because it's upside-down since the market turned bad. With our debt load (total owed is around $28,000) we are extra screwed, but even if we didn't have that debt we'd still be about $800 a month short. Without many extraneous expenses. If we spent NOTHING on fun ever and just did our best to keep our house, pay the bills, and put food on the table, we'd be about $600 a month short (without debt).

So is this the plight of the... what do they call us? Am I middle class? I've always just assumed I was, but I really don't know what the parameters of middle class are. Let's assume I am. The middle-class poor? Is that what we are? Too poor too afford to live, too 'privileged' to get any aid from the government, forgotten and left to flounder? Maybe that sounds dramatic. I'm certainly not one to run to welfare the second the chips are down. But it's not even an option for me anyway. We're too 'rich' for welfare.

So what do you do, in a situation like this? What is the answer? Maybe I'll find it. Maybe some of you have it. The answer, my friends, is - no I'm not going to say 'blowin' in the wind'. The answer is DIFFERENT for all of us, because different people are willing to do different things, and even when the similarities are eerie, your situation is still going to be unique. Each of our financial crises are personal to us and our set of circumstances. But I'd love to hear what you have done to save yourself from financial ruin, if you've ever faced anything like this. I'd love to know what sorts of things you've done to make money from home. I will be sharing what *I* do to both shave money off our expenses AND make money from home. Maybe it will be enough. Maybe my experiences will help someone else out there, someone who is stressed and crying themselves to sleep just like me. Maybe I'll make changes and clean everything up and serve as a good example to others who find themselves in the same boat.

And you know what they say... if I find that I'm not able to be a good example, perhaps my purpose was merely to serve as a horrible warning. DON'T LIVE BEYOND YOUR MEANS, KIDS. Eventually you really DO have to pay the piper. Save those pennies for a rainy day. All that stuff they told us back when we were kids that we ignored.

Being an adult sucks pretty bad sometimes.

image repost from Stardust and Peanut Butter

you might also enjoy reading:

Living Simply

I Don't Even Know Where To Start...

A Weight On My Mind

Is Chiro One A Scam?

2010-07-13T14:33:00.000-05:00

Last Saturday, my mother and I spent the day in Tinley Park at a Rubber Stamp / Scrapbooking Expo that we enjoy going to each year. Held at the Holiday Inn Convention Center, it's not a huge show, but they usually have one or two nice things. This year, we were a bit surprised to see that it seemed to have been combined with a small Women's Expo. The first vendors we encountered upon arriving, instead of selling stamping and craft supplies, were offering bedsheets. Jewelry. Purses. Lotions. Coffee and tea (at THIRTY DOLLARS A BOX OMG, but that's a story for another time). And wellness services. Such as chiropractic care.

I have to admit, every time I see a vendor booth hawking medical care at a random expo that isn't, say, a health fair, I'm a little skeptical. Why do they need to try to draw people in? It just seems odd to me. At the same time, I'm also something of an Easy Mark because I am a believer. I believe chiro care works. I believe massages are good for your health. I'm curious. I've never actually BEEN to a chiropractor, but that's largely because I have so many things on my plate at any given time that it's overwhelming to add another. I've always wanted to go though, much the same as I'd love to be able to get a massage once a month; I have chronic pain, especially in my shoulders and arms, and it's gotten worse since I've been diagnosed with diabetes too. I also sometimes get nerve pains running down one of my thighs. I've long suspected I might do better with chiropractic care, but it just hasn't bothered me ENOUGH to take the time to make an appointment. Also, there's been a part of me that, for years, has told myself ALL these things will improve when I lose weight, and since I've been convinced I am going to drop the weight for years, I've put a lot of stuff off for "after I lose weight". But that's not helping me live well NOW, is it?

So when the lady from the Chiro One booth asked me if I'd like a free consultation, and the other lady offered to occupy my three year old daughter while I went through the questionnaire, I said sure. She had me fill out a "where do you have pain and what illnesses do you have" type form. While we were talking, my mom wandered over and started listening in. She's had chiropractic care before and felt that she received some benefit from it, and she has chronic pain too, and has been thinking about going to a chiropractor again. The lady went through a spiel about how chiropractic care could help relieve my pain and maybe even assist with my diabetes, and while I'm not sure that I entirely buy the belief that bad spinal alignment (or subluxations or whatever they call them) can CAUSE diseases like diabetes, or cancer, I've got just enough New Age Yo-Yo in me to believe that maybe having a perfectly aligned spine and uncompressed nerves might help with my overall picture of health. More accurately, I am of the "can't hurt, might help" mindset with regards to chiropractic care and diseases.

She offered us a full evaluation for $20, telling us we would get "over $400 worth of services". I'm not sure how much your average chiropractor charges for an initial exam and xrays, so I don't know if that statement is bunk or not. What I DO know is that I have a $25 copay for doctor visits, and that $20 is cheaper than $25, and since I'd been considering seeing a chiropractor anyway, it seemed like a good deal to me. My husband has also seen a chiropractor in the past, and benefited from it, so I called him to see if he was interested. He was, so the two of us (as well as my mother) booked initial evaluations for Monday afternoon, paid our fees, and continued to shop.

My mother and I went for our initial evaluations yesterday. We booked our appointments at the same time and went together (my husband was scheduled for two hours after us). The Chiro One office we went to is in Lansing, our hometown, in a strip mall on Torrence Avenue. When we walked in, our first impressions were that it was very BUSY and NOT very private. I've been to a lot of doctors in my time, and even if the waiting room is busy, it's usually got an air of comfort, of privacy, and there's generally a bit of a hush in the air, as if everyone is doing their very best to mind their own health business. Here, the place was very OPEN; just beyond the desk were a variety of strange chairs that leaned way back, and people were sitting in them, bent backwards, wearing weighted contraptions in their heads. There were several adjustment tables out in the open. There were three rows of chairs with strange wobbly seats upon them, and a number of people were sitting on them, rocking back and forth, staring straight ahead. Beyond this area were a couple of cubicle-type offices. A large whiteboard was behind the desk with our names, as well as several other names, listed, welcoming us as new patients and thanking the events / organizations that referred us. As first impressions go, it wasn't a great one.

The lady behind the front desk greeted us warmly and went over our initial evaluation health forms with us, chatting the whole time. She was very open and friendly and made us both feel a little more at ease. Shortly after she checked us in, another lady (a chiropractic assistant? I'm not sure what her role was) greeted us and gave us a little tour. She explained that all the treatments take place in an open setting, largely for educational purposes - if any one of the patients has a question or something, all the other people can benefit from it. The weird leaning chairs were to put curvature back into the neck. The funky butt-exercisers were to strengthen core muscles, because they believe that people who spend time strengthening their cores after their adjustments will hold those adjustments longer. That all sounded good to me, except for the part about HAVING the adjustments done publicly. I COULD do that, sure, but even though I'm not the world's most private person (come on, I share my life all over the internet in a million public blogs), I don't love the idea of having medical / health treatments done in public. Going to a chiropractor isn't quite the same as going to a gym, after all. And I wouldn't want acupuncture or anything else done in front of a bunch of lookie-loos either, not unless I'm getting paid or getting it for free, anyway.

She took scans of our feet (in the public area) and showed us how much pressure we're putting on the different parts of our feet when we're standing. Then she took us back into a private room and went over extensive questionnaires with us about pain we experience, past falls, car crashes, traumas, etc. Then she did some examinations of us as we stood and moved in various postures. After that, she left for a bit and the actual chiropractor came in. She was also very nice, warm and friendly; asked us some more questions, had us lay on a table and palpated our spines, had us stand and examined our postures. She recommended a variety of xrays for us (two more views for me than my mom got), and a different tech came in a few moments later and took us to another room to take our xrays.

We made appointments to come back on Wednesday to get the results of our exams. They asked us to bring our spouses with so they could 'fully understand' what we were going through. My spouse was coming for a checkup after so I just scheduled him to come back for his results at the same time. My mom snorted and noted that my dad could care less, and besides, who would watch our kids if he came too? We were told that we would all be coming back at the same time and that it would take 90 minutes to receive our results; the first 30 minutes or so would be the doctor talking to us about diseases that are caused by subluxations and how chiro care could benefit us, as well as showing us pictures of normal VS abnormal spines so we would better understand our results. Then we would receive private consultations where the doctor would go over our personal results, and would receive recommendations for treatments.

We asked several times about payments and whether or not insurance would cover the treatments. We were told it would, and that they would discuss what insurance would cover and what our portion would be as part of our results. They then all mentioned 'payment plans' several times. My mother and I both have copays for visits so we weren't exactly comfortable with this, but we're hoping it's a generic thing they tell everyone until they've verified insurance for each individual.

Afterwards, we discussed our feelings on the whole thing. Overall, we were impressed at how thorough they were, how friendly and open everyone was, and had a good feeling about the people. And, personally, I liked all their chair contraptions and such. I just like that kind of stuff. I asked my mom if her past chiropractor had all those things, and she said no, she just had adjustments done and that was it. I asked my husband later if he'd done that stuff at HIS chiro, and he said he'd done core-strengthening and therapy-type exercises. I know I'd like to try some of those things, and I'd like a chiropractor that offers such exercises. We believe we would benefit from chiropractic care.

The cons are, none of us are particularly crazy about the open-care concept. We all agree we COULD do it, and would be willing to give it a try if it doesn't end up being some sort of scam, but we don't really like it very much. As my mom pointed out, it feels kind of like a farm; they're a chain, and they're trying to be efficient and process the most people and make the most money. Plain and simple. That's how it comes across, I don't care WHAT they say about educating patients. It also feels very much to me like I'm being set up to be SOLD something. There's plenty of classic signs. I've been to timeshare presentations and vacation-property sales before, and it FEELS the same. They offer you something of benefit to you for free or for super-cheap. They get you to come see them once or twice. You spend time with them. You get INVESTED in the process. It's harder to say NO once they've used up so much of your time. There are scare tactics involved. (Bad spines cause DISEASES and you could DIE if you don't see a chiropractor!) They put you in a group setting, where you feel pressure NOT to say NO. It's all classic setup. I don't love it at all.

I googled "Chiro One" and the first thing Google tried to populate my search with was "Chiro One Scam". That didn't bode well. but the only article I actually SAW on them on the first page was this one from the Chicago Tribune, talking about their ideolody. The 'scam' discussion starts in the comments, with a lot of people complaining about it. Sounds like there IS going to be a sales pitch after we get our results, and I'm curious to see what they ask us to pay. Knowing I have insurance and knowing what my insurance covers, I really wonder if they're going to ask us to commit to a certain number of visits or pay a certain amount up front. because if so, well, EFF THAT. There are also several people weighing in who have used them and have been very happy. Like anything in life, your mileage will vary.

Luckily we're broke, and my mom and husband are both MUCH better at saying NO than I am, so I'm not worried. I know I'm going to get chiropractic care because I really DO think I'll benefit from it. I'm just not sure if we'll end up going with Chiro One or not.

Has anyone else been to Chiro One? What was your experience?

BAB Project: Week 3 (But Really It's My First Post About It Here)

2010-07-05T11:24:00.000-05:00

We all know I'm working on losing weight, that indeed I have been working on losing weight for years now. My youngest 'baby' is three and a half! And I was 'working on' losing weight even before I got pregnant with her! Heck, I can't remember a time in my adult life when I WASN'T working on losing weight, come to think of it.

I buckled down at the beginning of June and got really serious. Set new goals of five pounds a month down, thought out the things I really want (I have some life items I'd like to achieve that my weight is hampering now, not just material goods), wrote out a rewards chart and all. Started counting my calories FOR REAL, instead of just talking about how I KNOW I should count calories but I hate doing it. I even exercise sometimes, it's true.

Given that weight has been a ginormous struggle for me for more than a decade, I am definitely the type of person who needs all the motivation, encouragement, and help I can get. I use sparkpeople.com to blog daily about my weight and frustrations and accomplishments on this journey, because while I want to acknowledge my progress here (my weight, after all, is one of the Big Three roadblocks that I feel hold me back from achieving some of my dreams), I really don't think this blog is the place for me to be talking constantly about my thoughts on weight and food and exercise. I've been posting pretty much daily over there, and sometimes more than once a day. If you're on SparkPeople too, you can find me here.

It was around this same time that Natalie at Hope Springs Eternal started her Body After Baby Project and invited her readers to join in. I could, as I just mentioned, sure use the help and support of a community of people that are losing weight. And it's motivating to see other people losing weight. And sometimes, it's a bit of a challenge to keep up with everyone. This isn't a contest, but I tend to personally challenge myself a lot to get things accomplished. ;)

I haven't talked about the project here before week three because I'm a lazy blogger. But I did sign up on her first page, and I will endeavor to stick to the weekly check-ins and let you guys know how things are going with me from now on!

So it's week three and I have lost four pounds over the past week. It's sort of magical, I don't really know how I got FOUR POUNDS off exactly, but I will say that the entire month of June was a big struggle for me, HUGE struggle, I won't recount it all here because it's all over my sparkpeople blog if you really want to know, but I persevered through the frustrations and kept doing my best to count calories and get in some exercise when I could and make small changes and I feel like this is some of the payoff from all of the changes I've been making over the past month.

I hit my first five-pounds-down weight loss goal during the past week. I am rewarding myself with a pedicure (tomorrow!).
I have a goal to lose my SECOND five pounds by the end of this month.

My program is primarily counting calories. I have intentions to exercise too but don't always manage to get that in there. Calorie level is my number one goal right now. I am also diabetic and on insulin injections, and I struggle to make sure I have the right amount of insulin in my body without it being TOO much, because not only can I get low blood sugar, but also excess insulin makes you gain weight. I've been diabetic for two years now and trying to lose weight since my diagnosis has been SO MUCH HARDER than it ever was in the past (and it was NEVER easy). It's a challenge, and I will keep fighting!

Current daily calorie level: Last week (and month) it was 1700 calories. I am adjusting that slightly because I'm a tad off my target for achieving my goal this month. So this week it will be 1650 (if I exercise, I allow myself to add half the calories I burned that day to my calorie total for the day)

Exercise: Mostly not scheduled; I have intentions to get out and take walks with my kids but haven't managed to pull that off yet. I did help a friend move on Saturday, and yesterday we walked to our town fireworks show (and then home after, obviously). Tonight I have my local TOPS (Take Off Pounds Sensibly) meeting, and if it doesn't rain I will walk there too.

Weight changes: Since last Monday, I have lost four pounds on my home scale. I am down 4.5 pounds total from my all-time highest weight.

Seuss Area At Islands Of Adventure

2010-06-30T00:50:00.001-05:00

Trying to decide which Universal Studios theme park would appeal most to my kids, at ages 3 and 5, was kind of difficult for our Florida trip. We knew we only had time for one of them, and both of them had things that would appeal to kids as well as to adults. Both would also hold some challenges for adults who like to go on all the rides but who have kids who aren't quite tall and/or brave enough to accompany them. In the end, we decided on Universal's Islands of Adventure park, mainly because we knew both our kids would be interested in the superhero section in a big way. (And when we found out that The Wizarding World of Harry Potter was at the same park, well, it was really a no-brainer; come on. HARRY POTTER?!)

Yes, the superhero area was a big hit, but the place we started the day was equally popular, for kids AND adults: the Dr. Seuss area. It was just incredibly charming, with quite a few rides based on some of his most popular books (a dark-ride type Cat In The Hat attraction that takes you through the whole story, a One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish flying-style water ride, a Sneetch tram, and the most delightful carousel I may have ever seen, for instance). The parks down there do not slouch on theming, that's for sure. Everything is decked out to the letter of the place, including the workers in each area; they have specialized outfits and everything. Even the restaurants get into it, it's great. Utterly charming and a great way to visit your old childhood memories, as well as make new ones with your children.

Oksana and OJ by the Green Eggs And Ham stand.

Our group (sans me, the photographer) by the Sneetch tram entrance. Note the worker in the delightful Seussian conductor's outfit, complete with a "star upon thars".

The "Car-o-Seuss-el" may have been my favorite there, even though I didn't ride it (because I wanted to take pictures). All the different critters are Seussian creations, and they all do something special for the rider. Even the bench that Oksana and Aunt Ali are on above had a horn Oksana could honk, and the inside layers would come bulging out when she pushed down on the honking button. Some of the creatures had cowbells the riders could clang; Drake could raise and lower his creature's head; OJ could turn his creature's head from side to side. Little touches, but they really made the ride special and extra charming.

The story of the Sneetches is one of my favorites.

And later, when we ate our Dippin' Dots inside Circus McGurkus, the Sneetch train would snake in and out of the building, transporting riders through the delightful circus tent. And we would wave and holler at them "What up, Sneetches?!" It never got old. (And by "we", I mean "my husband and I", naturally.)

A Family Dinner

2010-06-28T10:10:00.000-05:00

Last week we had a family reunion with my dad's cousins. We all met in Orlando, Florida to spend a few days visiting and having fun. The first night of the reunion we gathered for a large dinner at the Lone Star Steakhouse and Saloon. Pictured above are three generations of Nommensens and their descendents.

Gosh, I Love That Kid.

2010-05-14T16:56:00.001-05:00

This year is the first year Drake is old enough for Tee Ball. Tee Ball, in case you're of a non-athletic persuasion (like me), is an intro to baseball for little kids. They get to hit the ball off a tee instead of having someone pitch to them. In our town, the kids have to be 5 before they can begin playing. I know this because my Dad and brother are very into Little League, have been for years (my brother is a coach and my Dad is the freakin' President of Little League), and they have been counting the years until Drake is old enough to play.

Unfortunately for them, neither my husband and I are very sports-oriented... I can't really speak for my husband's athletic ability since, you know, we don't really play sports, but I can tell you that when athleticism was handed out, I was one of the last in line. I'm somewhat uncoordinated, I'm slow, I'm not all that great with hand-eye coordination or with learning to move my body in new and interesting ways. I'm much more suited to cerebral tasks (like writing, or sitting at a desk and dicking around on facebook).

Case in point: I was out the other night with my friends Red and Sarah. We had dinner and then we decided it was such a beautiful night, we were going to go to the beach. The Chicago police, however, generally frown upon nighttime strolls on the public beaches, and as such we had to be sneaky about it. Stealth-like. We park near the beach and head out on foot, keeping an eye peeled for the po-po. Down the beach a stretch, we see a van that may or may not be an Official Vehicle. "Let's run!" one of them whispers, and they take off towards the nearest bit of shadow. The two of them bound effortlessly across the sand like nimble gazelles, their lithe bodies and long legs made for the task. I heave myself into action but quickly fall to the back of the pack, the sickly one, sides heaving, body jiggling with effort, sand sucking at my feet, trying to drag me to the ground. They wait for me in the shadows. "It's the shoes," I gasp out as I join them, thinking my sandals are hindering my progress. "OK! Let's run to the next one!" they say. They take off; sandals now in hand, barefoot, I follow. The sand sucks ever more insistently at my feet and I wobble around, faltering, the beached manatee. I haven't made it two steps and they're halfway down the beach, making it Look Easy. Eventually I join them and we stand on the glorious shore, under the full moon, taking in the night. After a few minutes Red asks, somewhat dreamily, "have you guys ever successfully run away from someone that's chasing you?"
...
Did you not even SEE me back there?? (Luckily, I've never been SERIOUSLY chased.)

Watching my son play baseball is like watching me run on the beach. It's painfully obvious that he inherited my athletic 'ability'. The difference between me and my son is that he operates under a blissful delusion, one in which he is The Best At Everything. It's kind of awesome to have a totally confident kid, and I know that one day the world will knock him off his pedestal so I'm certainly in no hurry to do it. Let him keep thinking he is Totally Awesome for as long as humanly possible.

What I DON'T like is that he doesn't take it seriously at all. I DO want him to have fun, but I want him to listen to his coaches and at least pay attention and be a little disciplined about it, and he's terrible at that part. He doesn't follow directions, he plays around, he wanders off, he bothers the other kids... THAT is the part that is cringe-worthy to me. I don't care if he's athletically talented or not; what matters is that he goes out, has a good time, tries new things. He's got a LOT of talents; baseball doesn't have to be one of them. But listening skills and teamwork and obeying when you should be obeying, those ARE important.

When their team shirts came in, his coach offered him a choice. "Which one do you want, Drake? 2, 8, or 11?" "Two!" Drake shouted. Later in the car, he starts telling me "I'm number two because I'm the SECOND BEST PLAYER on our team!"
"No, Drake, that's not what it means. Your number isn't a ranking of who is the best and who is the worst; your number is just an identifier. That's why your coach let you PICK. If they were going to order you by who is best, they would have tested you guys at running, and throwing, and batting, and stuff like that. They didn't do that."
"Oh."
"Besides, if they DID rank you, you wouldn't be number two. Do you know why? Because teamwork and listening are VERY important out there, and you haven't been doing a very good job of either. In order to play your best game, you have to listen to your coaches, you have to pay attention to the game and to your teammates, you have to follow the rules of the game, and you have to PRACTICE, and STOP bothering the other kids on your team. You'll never be the best if you can't do those things. And you know what? You may never BE the best, and that's OK because there can only be one person who is the BEST at anything; being the BEST isn't what's important. What's important is that you do YOUR best, and that's all anyone can ask of you. But you can't do your best if you don't listen."
"OK. But I'm still the second best on the team!"
I shake my head.
"Drake, what do you think Uncle Matt and Grandpa would say if they saw you at practice, goofing off and bothering the other kids and not listening the way you do?"
Drake considers this question for a moment, thoughtfully. He answers, "They'd say, 'GOSH, I love that kid!'"

Drake's first official game was last Saturday. And of course after about two weeks of sunny days in the seventies, the day of his first game is grey and in the forties. My dad said he would have cancelled the games if it wasn't opening day, and if all the kids weren't looking forward to them so much; he was afraid he'd get lynched if he did. And indeed, the kids WERE excited. Running around without a care in the world, thrilled to be out there for their first games. The parents and siblings, less excited. Those of us that actually showed UP huddled together for warmth in our portable chairs, inadequately dressed, cramming on all the extra outerwear we could find in our cars (good thing the kids' costume box was still in my car from when we shot that movie!), huddling under blankets.

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a mixup on the times; we were told to be there at 9AM for practice, and that the game would start at 10AM. We show up at 9AM and there's no one there. We sit in the car for a while. Eventually about 9:30 we see some people on the other side of the park so we drive over there. A few kids and the coach are there. The kids run around while the coaches set up the 'fields' and get things together. Eventually it's determined that practice actually starts at 10, and the game starts at 10:30. By the time they figured this out, it's 9:45; we've already set our chairs and everything up outside by the field, we're all freezing, the kids have been running around for a good twenty minutes and are now starting to get chilly. And it's 15 minutes until practice even starts, and another 45 until the game starts. Off to a great start!

By the time the game starts, the kids are good and cold. The sun breaks out of the clouds for a little while, and it helps a bit, but if it ever got over 50 degrees that day, I'm a monkey's uncle.

Grandma putting Drake's jersey on over both jacket AND sweatshirt.

Our team is up to bat first, and since my son is number two, he goes second. Most of the kids, even with several weeks of practice under their belts, are still deep in the throes of "I have NO idea how to play this damn game". My son is no exception.

But batting, and running the bases (watching them all run in was a real treat; at some point we ended up with three kids on third base at the same time, and watching them all run pell-mell towards home base, arms and legs akimbo, was hilarious), that's a thrill. Sitting on the side waiting your turn, NOT so much.

Especially when it's freezing and windy. Eventually the teams switch and Drake's team takes the field. Where do they send Drake? Left field.

My son, ever so dedicated to his craft (as I'm sure you gathered from the earlier section of this post), is cold.

Tired.

Bored.

He's been outside for a LOOOOONG time and ...

aw, fuck this. Just fuck it.

He's cold, he's tired, he's miserable, and he is DONE WITH THIS NOISE.

Grandma attempts to give him a pep talk.

And by 'pep talk', I mean, snuggle him in a blanket. Then it's Auntie Denise's turn.

You can't hear it over the sounds of Uncle Matt's outrage (especially when some other kid actually HITS the ball INTO left field, the very position Drake just abandoned, lol), but Aunt Denise's pep talk involved bribery. $5 if he stuck out the entire game.

Unfortunately, it was around this time that OJ and I had to leave. We had scheduled a counseling session that morning and because of all the time mixups earlier with the game's start time, we couldn't stay for the whole thing. The kids went home with my parents, and I am told that Drake DID finish out the game... though at one point he brought a blanket out there with him and was rolling around on the ground in it.

My son has a great career in baseball ahead of him, I can feel it. GOSH, I love that kid.

Why, What God Do YOU Worship?

2010-05-14T09:55:00.003-05:00

Scene: We're in the car, heading towards Drake's school, passing a local church.
Drake: "First Baptist Church... what's a Baptist?"
Me: "Baptist is a type of religion."
Drake: "What's a religion?"
Me: "A religion is a group of people that come together because they have the same beliefs... the same faith. They share a set of beliefs and values and come together to worship, to pray."
Silence from the backseat.
Me: "You know how we've talked about God? Most religions center around God. There are a lot of religions, and each of them has their own 'rules' about God, they all believe in a slightly different version of God."
Drake: "I believe! I believe in an angel type of God!"
Me: "Oh?"
Drake: "And he has a lion's head. And the tail of an eagle."
Me: o.0 "Uh. OK. Cool!"
Drake skips off into school.
End scene.

The Perfect Storm

2010-05-13T01:17:00.000-05:00

We are having the loveliest thunderstorm right now; the first really GOOD one I think we've had down here this year. Or at least, the first one I've been awake for. Pattering rain, near-constant thunder, frequent splashes of bright lightning. Right smack in the middle of the storm. I love it. I love listening to rain and thunder, curling up in my bed and staring out the window and daydreaming. It's soothing and oh so mellow. I wish I could stay up all night and listen, but I've been battling a painful sinus infection the last couple days and though I'm not feeling tired right now (the storm is soothing yet invigorating), I KNOW it's going to be tough to get up in the morning if I stay up much longer. Especially with being sick. And tomorrow's a school day for Drake, so I really ought to be the responsible mom and get him up and out to school, shouldn't I?

The worst thing about being a parent, so far, is that no one told me that when my kids went back to school. *I* would have to relive school too, heh. Specifically, the getting up and getting TO school on time in the mornings part. I was NEVER a big fan of that. Oy. I take a very cavalier approach to schooling, I'm afraid. Not to LEARNING, mind you, but to schooling. That's a totally different post though.

These grey and rainy days of spring sure make me want to cuddle up in bed with my kids and listen to the sounds of the world outside and not leave the warmth of the blankets though.

Compassion

2010-05-09T20:58:00.000-05:00

I know it's Mother's Day, and I apologize in advance, because I'm about to talk about and share something that no parent - no human being - really wants to think about. I was catching up on a friend's blog last night (Hope Springs Eternal) and she talked about this article. The article is... devastating, and yet it's something I feel compelled to share. I thought about posting it to Facebook last night, but my thoughts on it were longer than a simple Facebook status message would allow, and somehow sharing it on Facebook just didn't feel SERIOUS enough. So I'm sharing my thoughts here.

The Washington Post article, Fatal Distraction, can be found here. I urge you to read it before you continue reading my post. It's about parents who forget their children in the backseats of their cars, leaving them to die in the heat, and whether or not these terrible tragedies should be crimes. I warn you, the article is graphic. It's lengthy. At times I felt like it might tear me apart to read it. But it is incredibly well written, compelling, and thought provoking.

...

Before reading this article, I had heard news stories like this from time to time. I reacted to them much like you probably have. "How terrible." "What is WRONG with those people?" "How is that POSSIBLE?" "Those people should be locked in a car to DIE just like their children."

One of my biggest goals in life is to remain, above all else, understanding of other people. To seek to understand, and to be compassionate. This article helped me to realize that I was rushing to judgment without seeking to first be compassionate, to understand. It's hard to understand a tragedy like this; it is still difficult for me to think about this scenario and really believe I COULD forget my baby in the backseat of my car. It is difficult for me to understand how someone DOES that. You forget cell phones, wallets, sunglasses; you don't forget BABIES.
Yet the parts of the article where memory experts talk about the science behind remembering; the parts where they earnestly express that it's not even a matter of FORGETTING their children, really, but of FALSE memory - these people really and truly believe they have dropped their children off with the sitter, or at day care - send chills down my spine. Haven't you ever been utterly convinced that you did something, or said something, that it turns out later you hadn't? Have you ever left the house utterly convinced you shut the garage door, only to come home from work and find it's been open all day? Have you ever been totally sure you put your house keys in your pocket, only to find yourself locked out of the house? These things happen to us all, albeit likely on a much smaller scale.

That's as close to understanding as I am able to get, really. It's nothing like leaving a baby in the backseat of the car, and while I may not be the most religious woman on the planet, I pray to god I never, EVER get to a point in my life where I NEED to understand this. There but for the grace of god go I. I am still convinced that 'this could NEVER happen to me', if only because the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.

But what I took from this article, most of all, is that there are still times in life when I am lacking in compassion. And I believe that one of the failings of my beloved Internet is that it too often allows us to lurk in anonymity, to encounter bits of news and stories from all over the world, and to sit behind our computer screens in judgment of others. Without ever knowing the true stories. Without ever having to face these people that are in terrible pain. The internet is a great dehumanizer, and I don't believe we are the better for it in that respect.

It is rare that a story comes along that gives a true human face to tragedy. It is a rare article that serves to remind us of the necessity for compassion for our fellow human beings. These people have suffered huge, terrible losses. These people will punish themselves for the rest of their lives. Nothing any of us can do or say could possibly make things any worse; the punishments they will inflict on themselves will be more terrible than most of us can imagine.
But our attitudes, our thoughts, and our mercies MIGHT be able to make things a little better. I believe we would all be better off if we took the time to remember that the people behind these kinds of stories are people just like us, with real lives and real traumas; that but for a few slightly differing sets of circumstances, WE could be the people in these stories one day. I believe we would all be better off if we just took the time to show a little compassion, even if we cannot truly understand.

Reading this article changed me, and I believe it was for the better. On this Mother's Day, I am sending out a simple hug to all of the parents that are enduring the unendurable.

When Dreams Die

2010-05-09T03:28:00.000-05:00

I've been avoiding writing here a lot lately because, frankly, I don't know what to say. I have a sort of diarrhea of the mouth, you see; I open it, and things come out that I never intended. This is true in my writing too (what is that, diarrhea of the fingers?). Due to the somewhat delicate nature of things in my life right now, I've been trying to avoid saying anything at all.

But writing is my life. Avoiding it feels unnatural to me. Moreover, I feel STIFLED when I don't write; things feel more and more wrong, until one day I'm crawling out of my skin for lack of expressing myself.

Writing is also a form of therapy for me. It helps me work things out, work out feelings and thoughts so I can move on with my life. Blogging helps me feel less alone. And I've not felt this alone in quite a long time. I'm at a loss. I've written five mostly-private entries in my livejournal in the last 24 hours, and yet this feeling still grows. I think my small group of friends there is largely at a loss as to what to say to me anymore. So I write here, in the hopes that maybe someone out there will understand, and maybe have some words of comfort. Or maybe in days or weeks or months to come, my words will touch one of you who is going through this, and you will feel less alone. No one should have to feel this way.

This is a blog about my life, and more than anything, a blog about my dreams. I've been married for six years; I'd always wanted to find a partner and fall in love and get married. A large number of my dreams have been built around the belief that I would have a partner in life; many of them were built after I met my husband, with a vision of us doing these things together.

When you're a dreamer, one thing you inevitably have to come to terms with is the knowledge that not all of your dreams come true. Sometimes they fall by the wayside in lieu of other, bigger, better dreams. Sometimes your priorities in life change. Sometimes they aren't as timely as they once were. And sometimes, sometimes they die in a fiery, burning, painful crash, and you are left to pick up the pieces of your life and start all over again.

My husband and I are going through a rough patch in our lives together right now. We're separating. I don't know much beyond that at this point. I can't do much but deal with the day to day right now, or it feels like I'm going insane. As this is a public forum, I don't really want to get into the details here; it's not fair to either of us, and it's not likely to be helpful. Though most of the people in our lives already know it, admitting it in public is still painful. But I'm reaching a point where NOT talking about it feels worse, and I don't want to go on avoiding my blogs, my writing, my lifelines anymore.

I am, possibly understandably, having a lot of trouble sleeping lately. I toss and I turn, I'm plagued by nightmares. I feel like I'm sleepwalking a lot while I'm awake. We're still living in the same house, just sleeping apart; we're trying to get the house packed up and fixed up to rent so we can get separate apartments in the city. I am praying this all works out, that this house will rent and rent for the amount we need, because we can't afford to sell it and neither of us can afford to stay here either. Furthermore, I WANT to get into the city, where I have a good support network and feel like I have a much better chance of moving on with my life. I try to focus on the work I need to do, and tuck the emotions away, and just tackle one task at a time.

I'm having trouble with that today. It's Mother's Day, and it's killing me this year. For a number of reasons. He asked me earlier this week if he could take me out somewhere. "You're still the mother of my children, no matter what happens between us, and I'd like that very much," he told me. I said it was OK. The closer it comes, the more I am dreading it. I know he has something planned, I have no idea what it is. He and the kids are both excited about it. I'm not. I want to spend my day with my children. I want to have a husband who wants to treat me like I'm special on Mother's Day. It's never happened before, really. We've had some 'ok' Mother's Days, and we've had some downright shitty ones. We've never had a really GOOD one. I don't know what he's planning this year, and I just feel like it's all overshadowed by the pain of the past. The more he tries right now, the more it hurts me, because none of these things seemed important to him before, back when it mattered to me. Now it just brings me pain. Mother's Day feels terrible to me this year. Worse than it ever has, possibly even worse than our first one together, which was AWFUL, though I won't get into that here. It feels terrible because being a mother means you are also a partner; also a wife. To me, Mother's Day and Father's Day are days to celebrate your PARTNER, the person you picked to be the other parent of your children, because they are special and beautiful and wonderful to you, because you can't imagine anyone else raising your children. Since our first year of marriage, I've never really and truly felt like he looked at me that way, exactly. For a few years I was certain he didn't. The last couple of years have been a bit better, but I've never fully regained my confidence in that arena.
And this year, well, I'll be with him... but really, I'm alone. I have no partner. I have no hope for being a mother AGAIN, to more children. Which brings me to the other reason this day is particularly hard for me this year:

I am mourning the loss of my next baby. Or babies. I had gotten to a point where I had decided that yes, I did indeed want to have a third baby. I was back to thinking that maybe, if health and money allowed, I wouldn't even mind trying for a fourth or a fifth again some day. That maybe five kids WAS what I wanted, just like I used to back in The Day. (You know those days, The Days before you ever had kids and you dreamt about what your ideal family would be like? And then reality hit and you realized you were fucking nuts? Yeah, Those Days.)

Maybe four or five was out of the question, but three had come to seem like a definite possibility. In a year or so. When the IUD was ready to come out, when I had my diabetes under better control, when we had a bigger house and hopefully a slightly better income. I have been dreaming about being able to have a much better pregnancy experience this time around, one where I am not a slave to someone else (an employer, I mean) and one where my husband is much more supportive and kind and loving, and I could get excited for the baby and maybe, MAYBE, even plan a REAL nursery. One where I could stay home with the baby afterwards and wouldn't have to stress about breastfeeding and having only six weeks to DO it before having to go back to an office for TWELVE HOURS A DAY, where I could take all the knowledge I've gained from having two babies already and apply it to baby number three for a much happier, crunchier, babywearing experience. (I don't say 'natural' because HELLO EPIDURAL YOU ARE STILL MY BEST FRIEND.) I was doing that thing I do so well... dreaming. I was allowing myself to indulge, privately, in a dream that was growing to epic proportions. Oh, I know I've made some noises here and there about considering wanting a third baby, in time, but I really haven't let on to ANYONE, not even my husband, exactly how large I'd let those dreams grow. How out of hand they'd gotten. I thought that as the circumstances towards the goal improved, I'd open up slowly with them. No sense in sharing TOO much when it's not a possibility right now, is there. But in my heart of hearts, this desire firmly took root and I began making plans. Lots and lots of plans. I began to dream. More than that, I began to HOPE. I began to hope that everything that was difficult the first two times around might be different this time. I EVEN began to hope that maybe, just MAYBE, this third time, maybe my mother would finally tell me "CONGRATULATIONS!" when I shared the news, instead of "OH NO!" (or other general sounds of dismay). That maybe THIS time we'd have enough money and a big enough house and the right, well, everything to make her finally just be HAPPY for me. And maybe that last little bit of the dream was too much to ask for, because I doubt she'll ever be the kind of person who DOESN'T find SOMETHING to worry about immediately, but I had even grown foolish enough to hope and dream for a loving reaction from my mother too.

And it's all a moot point now because I can't even fathom how any of this could possibly be now. My marriage is falling apart. My LIFE is falling apart. When things started to go south, so many weeks ago, this dream rolled around and around in my head for a while. When I was first thinking about whether or not we should stay together and whether or not it was right, I gave a lot of thought to finding some other man to love me, to raise my children, to have more children with. It's a thought that was difficult to fathom. I couldn't even COMPREHEND having children with another man. I don't WANT my children to have half-siblings and step-siblings. Not because it's BAD, but because I married my husband out of love, out of a desire to have children with him and only him. Because we MEANT forever when we made our vows. Because we made such beautiful, wonderful, smart, crazy-special-unique-wonderful little people already. I couldn't imagine making children like this with anyone else. My children were one of the things, early on, that gave me the strongest sense of hope for my marriage. We couldn't have made children like this together if we didn't have something good going on.

Things have obviously disintegrated over time. Some truly terrible shit has happened between us. I'm facing, now, a terrible feeling that I will never be able to trust and love this man like I did, like I wanted to, like I MEANT to. With that knowledge, and the knowledge of things that have passed between us, I am faced with a terrible grief; I can't imagine having more children with this man. I can't imagine ever getting to a point where I trust him enough to believe he will give me what I need to feel safe sharing a pregnancy with him, sharing another child with him. This feeling brings a terrible grief, more than perhaps anything else in this process has so far.

Likewise, I cannot imagine being with someone else and having children with them. My own self esteem problems prevent me from believing that I will ever find a man who really wants to be with me again; I worry that I won't be interested in the ones that might be interested in me, and I am certain that the ones I become interested in WON'T be interested in me. I literally can't fathom it, and it's largely a looks-based issue. I've let myself go terribly, and I hope that I do regain confidence as I regain a thinner, healthier body. But right now, I can't imagine being with someone else in an intimate fashion. It will take at least a year to get myself back into something resembling decent shape. Which is probably at least as long as it will take to separate and divorce, if we go that route. This is assuming I am able to keep up an exercise and healthy eating schedule on top of the stress of getting divorced and being a single mother and working who knows how many jobs to support my family.
Assuming we scale THOSE hurdles, then I have to deal with the daunting idea that not only does a future man have to be perfect for ME, he also has to be perfect for my kids. He has to be good to them and love them as a father and be a good fit for our family. I can't even... I just can't imagine this happening. I know it DOES happen, to other people, but I can't imagine it happening to us. And I won't sacrifice on this point. Anyone I date with anything resembling serious overtones MUST be an excellent fit for my children, or it isn't even a possibility in my mind.
And THEN there's the time factor... meeting someone that is a good fit for me, and THEN a good fit for my children, and dating them long enough to be sure, and getting married, and then BEING married for a while before children are even a thought, because LAST time I was pregnant before I was even married and I saw how much damage THAT did to my relationship, I am NOT doing that again; it will be years before we are anywhere near a place to have children. YEARS.

I know there is no telling what will happen in the future, and worrying about something like this might sound stupid, but it's something I am mourning nonetheless. Right now it feels like I am setting myself out on a course to grow old and die alone. I am mostly OK with that part of it, it's not what I wanted certainly, but I DO have family and friends that love me, and I DO have two beautiful children who bring me immense happiness every day. I DO have dreams that I can pursue on my own and that will bring me great fulfillment. I may never have a loving partner to truly share my life with, and that makes me sad, but I can deal with that. I AM dealing with that.

But having to give up my dream of the large family, or even the 'slightly larger' family? The dream that was slowly growing within me, every day? I am mourning that loss heavily. It's hitting me really, REALLY hard.

It feels like so many of my dreams are crumbling to dust around me, and I'm having to sift through the detritus, pull out the ones that are salvageable, and tend to them all alone.

This day is so much harder for me than I ever imagined it would be. I feel a bit like I've been sucker-punched.

Drake Dorson VS The Right

2010-04-20T12:20:00.000-05:00

Random after school conversation with my 5 year old:

"Mommy, it was wrong to make brown-skinned people sit at the back of the bus and only let white-skinned people sit at the front, wasn't it?"
"Yes, honey, it was."
"Martin Luther King Jr was a good man."
"Yes, he was."
"Why did they arrest that lady that sat at the front?"
"Rosa Parks?"
"Yeah. Why did she get arrested?"
"well, honey, there was a law against what she did, and when she refused to move, they arrested her because that was the law at the time."
"That was a silly law. A MEAN law."
"yes, it was. But thankfully that law is gone now, they changed it. There are still some silly laws though. Do you remember the other day when we talked about how boys can't marry boys and girls can't marry girls?"
"Yes."
"That's because that's still a law."
"There are some really mean laws."
"Yes, honey, there are. But hopefully that law will be changed soon."
"Yeah. By a man named DRAKE DORSON!"

thoughtful little things

2010-04-19T23:11:00.000-05:00

Both my children get so excited when they find money. At 3, Oksana just knows that money buys stuff. She has a play cash register but still doesn't exactly 'get' that each coin is different, each dollar is different; she doesn't know how to relate them to merchandise (in her world, everything costs TWENTY CENTS). At 5, Drake knows the units of money are different; he can add and subtract some of them; he can perform rudimentary financial transactions, with some adult help. But their monetary skill levels don't really matter; what matters is that money brings TOYS and CANDY and LETS THEM PICK THINGS OUT THEMSELVES WHEN WE GO TO THE STORE. Money is modern-day treasure, and every time they find a coin they squeal in glee, pick it up, examine it, marvel over its shine, pocket it, can't wait to get it home and deposit it in their counting bank. It's a HUGE thrill.

Today I was cleaning in my room and I found a dusty, dirty old penny. I was making piles on my bed, so I made a 'change for the counting bank' pile with that one penny. A short while later, my son wanders in. Children naturally gravitate towards anything you are working on (the better to make a mess of it all!), so he starts checking out the stuff on the bed.
"ooh! Mommy! A penny!" He examines it suspiciously; it's pretty dirty and worn. "Is this a REAL penny?"
"Yes, honey," I say, somewhat wearily, from my position on the floor (I was digging things out from under a dresser). "I was going to put it in your counting bank when I finished here."
"oooh! Can *I* put it in the counting bank?"
"Yes, honey."
Drake wraps his fingers tight around the prize and starts skipping out of the room. He's all the way out the door when I hear him stop, turn around, and walk back to the doorway.
"Mommy?"
"Yes, honey?"
"Will it make you sad if I put this in my counting bank instead of you? Because you sounded sad about it." He holds out the coin to me.
"No, sweetheart, I'm not sad. You go ahead and do it. I just must have sounded funny because I'm tired."
"OK!" he skips off with his treasure again.

It just touched my heart so much that he is thoughtful enough to recognize that I might be sad over not getting to deposit such a treasure myself, and that he was sweet enough to offer to let me do it, even though it would cost him the thrill of it. When he came back in the room, I had to give him a big hug. My sensitive little man.

living simply.

2010-04-19T12:47:00.001-05:00

"Really and truly live more simply, at least for now; go through things and SELL THEM OFF, make it hurt, make a real concerted effort to pay off debt and get in a better position. don't incur debt like this again. make lists of things you'd like to purchase WHEN YOU ARE OUT OF DEBT AND HAVE THE MONEY. Prioritize it. You can always get the 'stuff' later. And 'stuff' is just for fun, it's not that important anyway."

That's a goal that I just added to my Million Dreams list. For a number of reasons, living more simply is heavy on my mind right now. There are a number of things falling apart all around me and this is one way I feel that I can take control. It's something I can take control of that will, I believe, HELP me in the long run, help make at least some things better. I would like to start going through the things I have and selling them, many of them. A step outside the normal decluttering I've been working on. A step where it will sting a little to get rid of some of these things. I will not get rid of items that are truly meaningful to me, of course. I'd like to:
*make a list of things I am willing to spend a little extra money on (such as weekly Global dinners with friends, or family reunion vacation this summer)
*work over my budget and pare out anything that isn't absolutely important to me
*impose a moratorium on buying anything frivolous until we are out of non-mortgage debt
* start a list of things we would like to purchase once we have achieved the debt-free goal; keep it prioritized and not purchase any of those things until we've not only achieved our goal but also saved the money to purchase them with cash
* try to get as many of the things we want as we can for free - through freecycle or borrowing or bartering, for instance
* if something comes up that we decide is worth the money to do and we can't make it be free, evaluate it ahead of time and try to make it as cheap as possible. bring sack lunches, for instance; carpool; order cheap food; drink water, not booze; that sort of thing.
* put every extra cent we have into debt payment and just FUCKING GET RID OF IT

That's kind of what I'd like to do right now.

It's a necessary step, getting rid of debt; it's something I want to do anyway, I've talked about it here before. But this isn't about getting rid of debt so much as it is getting rid of baggage right now. I just need a fresh start. I need to look at things with fresh eyes. I need to cut some ridiculously loose ends. No matter what direction my life takes from this moment forward, I don't think doing this will hurt; I think it will only help.

So I think I might actually DO this. This time. (Yeah, I've talked about things like this before, but never done it. Maybe this is my time.)

Casa de Spooks

2010-02-11T13:29:00.000-06:00

I'm dealing with the issues inherent in being an overachieving dreamer with a variety of interests right now.

I'm struggling, specifically, with the idea of whether or not I should focus all my energy into writing, or if I should keep up with both writing and Heritage Makers (or, as I mentioned the other day, whether or not I should replace Heritage Makers with Pure Romance).

They all have merit. If I gave up on Heritage Makers it wouldn't be because it's a bad business or a bad company - quite the contrary, I like them and the products quite a bit. I believe in what they're doing quite strongly and I think more people should be storybooking.

The trouble is, I have too many passions. That's not a secret. I also love to write. That's not a secret either. I keep coming up with more and more writing ideas and I could conceivably spend all day every day writing or researching things I want to write about. Obviously I have a family to care for and a house to maintain too, but aside from that... I could write. A lot. I want to write. A lot. I'm hindered by time.

One thought is to scale back on the time I've scheduled for Heritage Makers, and add in a bit more writing time to my day. I may try that simply to see if I feel like I'm getting more writing done, and if that satisfies me.

The thing is, I'm not sure how well the two things go together. On the surface, fine. But the majority of the things I enjoy writing about - halloween, horror movies, the strange and unusual, and Adult Topics - don't necessarily fit in with "family values" and "scrapbooking". Yes, you get your weirdos who like to scrapbook from time to time (HELLO, you're looking at one right now, heh), but for the most part my target audience for Heritage Makers is family matriarchs. And a lot of them are more... normal?... than I am. Since I've been working in offices for the past decade or so, I look pretty vanilla most of the time. But now that I'm working only for myself, my wardrobe is slowly changing back to my preferred 'jeans and t shirt', horror shirts, goth-y type stuff. I'm feeling the freedom to be able to do whatever the heck I want with my hair. I'm not sure that the hot-pink hair and the "wolfman's got nards" t-shirt look fits in with the majority of the folks I'm trying to sell scrapbooking stuff to. Yes, I'll always have a small audience and I am happy to work with anyone (I don't judge because other people aren't into the same things I'm into, it's more that I'm worried I'll scare people away, like the one Pampered Chef consultant who wouldn't come out and have a party at my house because she was religious and she found out that I LOVE Halloween). I'm just not sure that it's worth the time and effort for ME to continue. And I guess that sometimes, when I'm trying to market to people that I know will think I'm one of the weird ones, I feel like I'm trying to force myself into a place I don't belong. I'm trying to wear those business clothes that, once again, just never fit quite right, while all the time thinking that I should be able to BE in business but still look however I want. I know that the world doesn't work that way, but I think it SHOULD; I think if you're good at something and passionate about something, it shouldn't matter if you like to wear jeans and tshirts instead of suits, or that your hair is pink instead of brown, or that you have piercings or tattoos. Those things don't mean you aren't the best damn candidate for the job. But, unfortunately, some people can't get past those things.

And yet, I harbor guilt over the thought of quitting too. Heritage Makers, more than anything else I've been involved with, is a repeat-business company. People buy credits for their projects and then you work with them to get those projects completed. People's lives go on, and there are ALWAYS new stories to tell. I have a number of customers with outstanding credits right now. And my upline is all in Utah, so it's not like they're nearby for easy customer service if I jump ship. I don't want to leave anyone hanging. And, like I said, it's a business concept that I truly do believe in - I believe people SHOULD be using their credits, SHOULD be making books about their lives.

But at the same time, I could happily spend all day writing scary stories, watching bad movies and reviewing them, working on my halloween display (yes, I know it's February, hush, I'm already three months behind!!), and just living a Spooktacular life in general.

And this is, really, the issue with my entire life. I LOVE doing stuff. Lots of stuff. Much of it is at odds with the other stuff I like to do. And I just plain don't have time to do ALL of the stuff I want to do. Choosing between things, and making decisions about what dreams to give up and what dreams to pursue, is one of the hardest struggles in my life. It's perpetual, because my dreams never seem to end. I will go through this cycle again and again, and I don't think it will ever get any easier.

At the same time, I'm blessed to have the imagination and life that I do. I am NEVER bored. I don't think I will ever GET bored. And I wouldn't give up my dreams for anything. I lead a fascinating life, even if it is only in my own mind. :)

I don't know what direction I will ultimately end up going with these things. I do believe I am going to rewrite my schedule slightly and devote less daily time to Heritage Makers, more daily time to writing. That's just where more of my passion lies right now.

I'm not giving up on Heritage Makers but I am having what I guess you could call a small crisis of faith, heh. So if you've got outstanding credits with me, let's get together and get them finished and published!

And whatever may happen... here's to the future.

Working Hard For The Money

2010-02-09T21:56:00.000-06:00

It is true that I didn't hit my self-imposed cleaning goals for January. However, I came very close. I built in cleaning AND decluttering time into my February work schedule, and moved ahead into following this new schedule when the month started. So far, a week into February, it seems to be working pretty well. There have been some challenges, and there will be some tweaking as time goes on (indeed, there already has been some tweaking)... but for the most part I think that what I came up with is pretty sound. I will have to see, as the month goes on, how much I have gotten accomplished and how well I think the schedule is really working, and decide if major changes need to be made at that point.

To that end, and I didn't plan on talking about this right now but it seems to fit... I need to decide if it's a good idea to try to add one more thing to my plate. Off and on, over the months, I have considered becoming a Pure Romance consultant. If you don't know what Pure Romance is, it's one of THOSE home parties. You know, the happy-fun-time ladies-only parties? Yeah. Those. They're lots of fun, and they seem to be very popular, and they're right up my alley, and I like home parties, and folks that do them consistently seem to make decent money doing it. Those are all pros for it. The cons would be - I have to spend time on yet another business, AND I have to build in time for having home parties. That's a fully hands-on (heh heh) business. You pretty much don't make the cash if you aren't out selling the goods. I have a couple friends who are consultants, and there's a sale on the consultant kits right now, and I was talking to them tonight and getting myself all revved up - until I looked at my schedule and realized that having parties doesn't exactly fit into it. You see, I pretty much work until 11 pm each day. My time is scheduled from the moment I wake up until the moment I go to sleep, and while some of that 'work' involves things like cleaning my house, making dinner, and taking care of my children, the rest of it revolves around Heritage Makers and writing. Those are the two things I decided to focus on right now, the two businesses I decided to build. It's hard for me to reel in my enthusiasm for my other ideas... I want, for example, to start building my Not House On The Rock house, or to open my B&B, or to start selling Pure Romance, or whatever. Most of my other dreams can be built on the success of these first two though, which is why I've been able to reel myself in and try to be patient on those other fronts. The Pure Romance doesn't exactly fit in with everything else. It's a separate dream, one of those "this would be totally fun!" dreams.

So, in looking at my schedule, something would have to give in order to accommodate it. Do I want something else to give? I'm not really sure. I don't want to give up my writing; I love it, and I'm excited about it, and I wish I had more time to do it. I love Heritage Makers, though that's been really slow going (largely because I haven't, until this month, really put time aside for it or really had a concrete plan going in order to promote it and work on it with my customers). I think that if I was going to do Pure Romance, I'd have to give up Heritage Makers. I'm not sure that's what I want to do. I don't want to do it to replace anything, I just want to do it because it would be fun. But I think a lot of things would be fun, and I just don't have time to do them all. That's a tough reality for me. I'm going to have to spend some time thinking about which of those I really want to do, and which of them I think has the most long-term potential for me.

So, aside from that tangent... I've been working pretty hard. I made a deal with myself that I would treat these things like a regular job and stick to this schedule Monday-Friday. If I need to take a night off, then I have to pick it up over the weekend. So basically I'll give myself two days off a week, and I'm aiming for Saturday and Sunday, but since I work for myself I can be flexible.

Now, as to the 'money' part of my post - yeah. I'm not actually making any yet. :) Well, I do get a commission from Heritage Makers, so that's not entirely true - if I'm selling things, I'm making money. But as far as the writing goes yet, my payoff is merely your love and adoration. I'm hoping to see some money from it in the near future, but for now I'm still laying the foundation. Building fans (i hope!), getting my name out there, blogging, networking, all while I work on short stories and novels, in the hopes that one day they will be published. It's been a while since I sat down to work on stories, and I have to say I'd forgotten how much harder it is (at least for me) to write fiction than to write about whatever's on my mind. Blogging, for me, is EASY. I just sit down and words spew from my fingers. I can write about what's on my mind for hours. Crafting a good fiction story is a lot more work! I have great ideas, I have ideas ALL THE TIME, but turning them into something cohesive and fun that other people want to read is another matter. I'm not complaining, I love it, all of this is great practice and it's fun and this is the best job I've ever had (it's also currently the worst paying job I've ever had, but I'm confident that will turn around one day). It's just a bit amusing to me, how easy it is to write like this and how much harder it is to make things up.

So, that's my story for now. As far as the house goes, we're in the process of tackling the laundry room right now. I've promised myself a horror movie marathon as soon as the basement is clean, so that's good motivation. Oh! I've built exercise into every day too. I'm hoping to see some health payouts from that soon. The one thing I'm struggling with, health-wise, is calorie tracking. I'm terrible about doing it. So if anyone wants to bug me daily, or even several times a day, to keep track of my calories, please feel free. I definitely need to make that a habit. Money, we're just trying our best to pay down debt. We took a somewhat impromptu trip to Memphis in order to pick up a car my husband bought last weekend, and that was a little bit of a hit in the pocketbook, even though it was fun. We still struggle with impulsiveness and with making good FRUGAL financial decisions. The old "two steps forward, one step back" method. The eternal optimist in me keeps whispering that I'll sell some bestsellers this year and none of that will matter. The realist's voice gets overshadowed pretty frequently. I need to work on bolstering my inner realist. :)

But overall, we're in pretty good spirits most of the time, things are moving along quite nicely, and life is good.

Mom Need Young Cook. Pool Boy Too.

2010-02-01T20:31:00.002-06:00

So someone found my blog by using the search term "mom need young cook". I don't think my kids are quite ready for their first official job yet, but I'm sure they'd give it the old college try! Just give us a holler, we'll see what we can work out.

My son actually told me today that he's getting a job when he turns 18. I said "aren't you going to go to college?" "No!" he tells me. "That's too much work!" I told him that, depending on what he wants to do when he grows up, he might HAVE to go to college to learn the job he wants to do. Or that he might need to go to a specialized school to learn his trade. Or that he might not NEED to go to college, but that it's generally a good idea to go to college no matter what because you learn more and you usually make more money at your job if you have a college degree. "Well I'm going to need to go to pastry school," he tells me. "Because I want to make cakes for a living when I grow up!"

So, my intrepid googler, you may have come to the right place.

crushing graham crackers for cheesecake crust

Kids' Room! Still Clean!

2010-02-01T18:08:00.001-06:00

So Leslie took up my invitation yesterday and asked to see my kids' room. The trouble there was that I promised to post it after 9pm last night... and my kids were already in bed. Going in and turning on lights to take pictures and video wasn't exactly an option! Today was crazy-busy and I'm just now getting to the pictures and the posting, but I promise that this is how the room looked when they went to bed last night. I am pleased to say that they are STILL cleaning up their toys every night before bed - we've turned it into part of the routine and it just hasn't been a problem. Yesterday some of Oksana's toys ALMOST went in the garbage (yeah I'm THAT mom) because she wouldn't come away from the computer and clean up when I asked her to... some things actually went into a garbage bag before she rescued them and put them away, so I'm hoping that's all it will take for them to know I am serious and that won't be a problem again.

As I've mentioned before, it's a small room, and with two of them AND all their toys (since we don't have a separate play area either) in there, organizing it has always been a challenge. The key was finally finding the right combination of kid-friendly storage bins to hold the STUFF. And also building an extra shelf on the wall (we already had one, but needed two). And, finally, GETTING RID OF STUFF. We still have a LOT of toys; probably too many - but I got rid of excess, of stuff they have grown too old for, of stuff that I decided was dumb, of stuff that we just didn't have room for. If you're afraid you're going to purge a favorite that you didn't KNOW was a favorite - bag the stuff up and put it somewhere unobtrusive (a closet, the basement, the garage) for a week or two. If the kids don't miss the items during that time, they're probably never going to notice the stuff is gone. And off to Goodwill it goes!

Moving forward, my plan is to purge the bins when they get full - but I'm going to have the kids purge them. Stuff is limited to the size of the bin in which it belongs - if, for instance, their dress-up bin overflows, it's time for them to decide which items they want to give away. If they HAVE to keep it all, then they can designate a second dress-up bin, BUT that will mean some of their other toys have to go. That's my plan, anyway.

And now, a photo tour!

The view from the doorway:

To the right is the shelving unit holding all of the larger stuffed animals. Directly across from the doorway is the dresser; clothing inside, books and games on top. Across and to the left is their bunk bed. Directly to the left, almost invisible from this angle, is one of the Sterilite-drawer towers I put together.

Next to the door:

The stuffed animal shelving unit and the other Sterilite-drawer tower. Every drawer is labelled; every toy category gets its own drawer, and every item they own has a place. This has proved crucial in keeping the room clean.

The dresser:

Clothes and pull-ups inside. Books and games on top. Oksana's dollhouse on the floor. It is an awkward place for it; it works for now but I have to move it every time I want to get a pair of pants for her. I'm hoping to find a better place for it once we move the kitchen out of their room.

The bed:

Their bunk bed is from IKEA. I love it; they love it. It's not as tall as a traditional bunk bed and I feel safe having them use it. Oksana's mattress is on the floor so we don't have to worry about her falling out of bed. Having a bunk bed is a HUGE space saver in the room; I really love it.

The kitchen:

Big, awkward, but it's a really nice set and they and their friends play with it all the time so it stays. I'm going to move it downstairs soon. It's one of the most awkward elements to their room right now. It's double-sided so I can't even push it against the wall.

The closet:

Drake's stuff on top, Oksana's on the bottom. Shoes on the floor. Shelves below each hanging rod so each kid has a place to store long toys (like foam swords) and their multitudes of bags and boxes.

The last wall:

A small toy chest that came with the house, and we still use it; a hanging IKEA dragon that holds small stuffed animals (beanies and the like); our reading chair; the other Sterilite-drawer tower. Two more bookshelves high up on the wall.

And... looking out the door from inside the room.

That's Pepper. Pardon her glowing eyes; I'm not a very good photographer (yet, anyway). My dogs follow me from room to room, expectantly, all day, every day. That's why you see them in so many of my pictures.

A video tour, if you'd rather watch that instead. I struggle taking pictures of our rooms because they aren't very big and I don't have a wide angle lens or a fisheye lens or whatever lens people use to get a good view of rooms. I always feel like the pictures just look really awkward. Which is why I always do video too. But I don't plan out my videos so my narration is, well, awkward (lol). Don't miss the part where my mom calls me in the middle of filming, that was great. I'm such a pro.

I'm in a hurry because I'm going to be late for TOPS, so I didn't proofread this at all, so if you see anything that doesn't seem right or sound right or isn't spelled right, be a doll and let me know? Or just ignore it politely, whatever you prefer! Thanks!

One More Day Of Heavy Cleaning

2010-01-31T09:42:00.001-06:00

Today is my last official day of full-time cleaning before I start work tomorrow. And by 'start work', I mean 'actively spend a large portion of the day focusing on writing and Heritage Makers at home in an attempt to make money'.

Upstairs is looking pretty good. Downstairs is in deep peril of not being finished. The laundry/craft room, for instance, hasn't been touched at all. Cleaning out the downstairs closet left A LOT of messy boxes all over the (formerly fairly clean) bar area and family room, and I'm still sorting through the debris. I'd LIKE to have those areas completed by the end of the day, but I've also made peace with it if they're not, because I built time into my work schedule for both maintenance cleaning AND 15 minutes of continued decluttering every day for the areas I didn't finish. It's a small time slot, sure, but as I know from formerly following flylady (don't you love alliteration? I do!), 15 minutes a day can add up to real results sooner than you'd think.

original image by Anne Taintor

So that's my plan. Is there an area of my house you'd like to see? Either to see what kind of progress I've made or to see if I accomplished my goal downstairs? Ask in the comments today and I will check in at 9pm CST... whichever area has the most votes will be photographed and posted tonight.

As a reminder, 'areas' of my house are:

dining room
kitchen
hallway/pantry
upstairs bathroom
kids' room
master bedroom
stairway
bar area
family room
downstairs closet
downstairs bathroom
laundry/craft room
garage

I suggest you don't ask about the laundry/craft room again simply because you'll get the exact same pictures I posted last time. Seriously, it doesn't look different AT ALL. (Also, I won't be touching my garage until after the laundry/craft room, but since I don't think I've posted pictures of it, if you want to see it, that's your call.)

Anything else is fair game!

Cooking With Kids

2010-01-27T22:04:00.001-06:00

Try it some time. They're delicious!

No, no; I jest. I've never tried children. ("It's a cookbook! A COOKBOOK!")

I HAVE, however, had children assist me with cooking - many times. I've mentioned before on this blog how much my kids like to help me in the kitchen; my daughter in particular. They've been doing it since they were able to pull themselves up on the kitchen stool, and truth be told they're still wee little bits - at 5 and 3 years of age, cooking with my kids is often a challenge. They can't do many of the tasks yet - chopping, dicing, touching raw meat, measuring, pouring correctly, stirring anything that requires precision or actual WORK, putting things in the oven, taking things out of the oven, slaving over a hot stove - yeah. There's not much they CAN do safely or accurately yet. Even the tasks they ARE able to accomplish - pouring in certain ingredients, light stirring - often result in spills, slops, dumps, and extra things (dish soap, anyone?) being added when my back is turned. Cooking with kids is often a supremely frustrating experience.

"helping" me bake the lamb cake last Easter (ages 4 and 2). They could still both share the stool. Barely.

Despite the added hassle, I believe it is a very valuable experience for them. Of supreme importance in their young lives, even. And that is why I keep doing it. That is why I set that damn stool up in my tiny, tiny kitchen over and over, knowing full well I'm going to trip over it 50 times, every time they come running in and squeal "Mommy! Are you cooking? I want to cook with you!" Here are just some of the benefits of cooking with your kids:

1) They learn, from an early age, that food is not 'magic' in that it does not appear out of nowhere. This is an invaluable learning experience - teaching them about the individual ingredients you're using, where they come from, how they got to you, and how they change as you combine them with each other IS a sort of magic.

2) Being able to cook for themselves is a valuable life skill. Have you ever dated someone who lived on take-out or macaroni and cheese and PB&J's? Would you rather date that person or the one that can whip up a mean lasagna and garlic cheese bread on the fly? My kids will never have to rely on other people to cook for them, or rely on bland processed foods as dietary staples.

3) Kids want nothing more than to spend time with you (at least, when they're young). Cooking together will build lifelong memories of good times with Mom (or Dad) in the kitchen. I still look back fondly at Sunday "pancake" mornings with my Daddy. Create cooking rituals with your kids. You won't regret it.

4) Kids are naturally curious and creative. Cooking gives them an outlet and allows them to explore their passions, safely, with your supervision.

5) When you have to make dinner, and you're the only adult home, it's much easier to involve your kids than to send them off to watch TV or entertain themselves... it might make your job a little harder, but they're WITH YOU and not off, say, pouring water into the computer. (My son actually did that. He doesn't have a computer anymore.)

There are other reasons too, that's just what I came up with off the top of my head. I just think that food created with love and laughter tastes better. There are times when I am in a hurry, or I'm making a precise dish, and the kids are underfoot and I get frustrated, and I kick them out. It's true. I'm not perfect. (You're shocked, I know.) But more often than not, I include them. And I try to make it a positive, fun experience. And more often than not, I find that not only are they having fun... I am having fun too.

Today Oksana and I cooked dinner. It was a "take things in the house, combine them in some fashion, hope it tastes good" dinner (another valuable thing to teach them; you don't always have to follow a recipe to create something fantastic. Cooking is all about experimentation, and often it's more forgiving than you'd think!). We combined chicken, mushrooms, bacon, feta cheese, garlic, and some liquids (cream of mushroom soup, chicken broth, butter) and baked them all together. (It was delish, but I'm not posting the recipe yet because it needs a little tweaking.) She helped me wash the mushrooms, put them in the pan after I sliced them, and sprinkled the feta cheese. She ate her first raw mushroom (ANOTHER reason to include them - exposure to new foods, AND they're more likely to try them and get excited about it if they helped create the dish).

As we were getting started, shortly after she climbed up on the stool, she asked me what we were making and I told her what I was thinking about doing. "Doesn't that sound yummy?" I asked her.
"Yeah!" she exclaimed. "I love cooking with you, Mommy! I'm gonna do dis when I have babies. An' I'm gonna make dis, dis chicken and mushrooms and bacon, when I'm a growed-up."

And THAT is why I cook with my kids.

It's Almost Here...

2010-01-25T10:09:00.000-06:00

So, a (group) great idea (actually a couple of great ideas combined) last night has lead me to being ridiculously overexcited, once again, about launching a new blog and I want to zOMG GET STARTED RIGHT AWAY! But I want to really be COMMITTED to the new blogs I launch (as well as my blogs currently in existence), and as such I am waiting until February to get them going. It's only a week away but boy howdy is it ever hard when you're overexcited!

In other news... February is only a week away?? Holy chips! I thought about my cleaning goals last night and have come to accept that I'm not likely to reach them. I was overambitious. I always am. The good news is that I know I can get the 'house' clean (the laundry/craft room is, sadly, a room I sort of don't even consider part of the 'house' since we don't use it hardly at all, and haven't for years). I am reasonably certain I can even make good headway in the laundry/craft room. I do not think I'm going to get to the garage. Not only is it a NIGHTMARE out there, worse even than the laundry/craft room... I only have a week to get the rest of this stuff taken care of, AND it's JANUARY. In CHICAGO. And my garage is OUTSIDE. (And detached, which makes it even colder.) I'm not saying I'm going to ignore it completely... but I won't be heartbroken if I don't hit my self-imposed time limit either. I'm not giving up, mind you! But I know it's going to be rough. Especially since I have a PTA newsletter to write and publish, some work to do on the family reunion I'm planning this year, and we're having a play date this Saturday, then going out with friends, so pretty much all of Saturday is lost.

I need to take a little time to think about how I'm going to schedule my days once February starts. I need to make time for my maintenance cleaning... I will need to make a little time for further decluttering of the laundry/craft area and garage (I may adopt the Flylady technique of '15 minutes decluttering a day'... slow and steady)... I want to make time for Heritage Makers, for writing (blogs AND my novel), and for spending time with the kids / family. That may not sound like a lot of things, but I can easily spend a LOT of time on any ONE of those items. Scheduling and time management has always been tricky for me.

It's almost February! Be on the alert for some exciting new things from me in the coming weeks :)

Craft Room? More Like CRAP Room!

2010-01-24T10:52:00.000-06:00

I knew when I opened myself up to scrutiny that some things would be painful. But I promised full disclosure, I did! I also knew that when I invited you to ask me to see some of my rooms, inevitably the ONE room I hate/fear the most, the one room that is going to be most difficult for me, the one room that I haven't even attempted to tackle in years - THAT would be the room you'd most want to see.

My laundry / craft room is the room that, assuming I stick to my schedule today, I will start tackling tomorrow. This room fills me with anxiety not only because it is so full of stuff that the task is daunting, but also because I have a real phobia about spiders, and i KNOW there are some lurking in there. Of course the weekend is over after today, which means my husband is back to work tomorrow, which means I am all alone during the days. No one to help me battle this complete and irrational terror. It's going to be really hard, and people, I've only given myself three days to complete this room. This will require Herculean effort and strength of will on my part. So, feel free to ask me again mid-week to see this room, and we'll see where I'm at.

In the meantime, here it is. Photo AND video.

When you first walk in, you can see the washer and dryer. We've talked about moving them over to the far right wall and making a better working area for the laundry, but then my 'craft' area would be here, and I just don't know which is better for me yet. I guess cleaning out the room is the first step, then finishing it off, and then we can figure out placement of everything.

To your left, we have: water heater. Furnace. Cat litter box and food area. Fridge/freezer we haven't opened for a long time. White shelving units that have been piled up with crap. Laundry sorting bins.

I have a dream of maybe making this my 'disaster preparedness' storage area, for extra food and supplies, so we will be ready to face the Zombie Armageddon when it comes.

To the right, we have my 'craft' area. There's a desk in there, somewhere. And lots of craft supplies. In boxes and bags. There's also a whole lot of... crap. I don't even know what's in half of these boxes. This stuff piled up during many 'hide that shit, people are coming over!' cleaning marathons over the years, until it pretty much got full, and then we've just... left it.

More of that crap to the right, and another shelving unit that's full of crap.

And if the pictures weren't enough... here's a video tour for you to, erm, enjoy.

Like I said, feel free to ask me about this room mid-week, or a week from now. Hopefully the situation in here will be VASTLY improved.

What Do You Want To See?

2010-01-23T22:54:00.000-06:00

So I've been thinking about offering up an extra 'feature' (heh) on my blog. I'm still struggling with disorganization, but lately I've been treating 'getting the house organized' as a full time job (more or less), and I've set a lot of self-imposed deadlines that will, if followed, ultimately get me to a clean and organized home by the end of the month.

We've come pretty far. I'm actually, at this moment, on track and on schedule. Tomorrow's tasks are going to be a little dicey, time wise, but I'll give it my best effort.

At any rate, in the interest of complete disclosure, and as an additional incentive to clean my house and KEEP it clean... I'm inviting you all to be drop-in guests, anytime, as it were. Anytime you feel like it, drop in on my latest post and ask me to see a certain room / area of my house. When I get the comment, I will comply with a picture and/or video post of said area WITHOUT CHANGING THE CONDITION OF SAID AREA FIRST. Hopefully it'll give me a little incentive to keep up with the work I've done and to finish getting everything organized too! And if it's been a while and you've been wondering 'hey, did she ever finish that laundry room?' (NO) or 'hey, I wonder if they can finally use their downstairs bathroom?' (YES) - just ask!

So here are the 'areas' of my house. Some have been tackled, some are in progress, some haven't been touched in months, maybe years.

Dining Room
Kitchen
Upstairs Hall / Pantry
Upstairs Bathroom
Master Bedroom
Kids' Bedroom
Stairwell / Back Entry
Bar Area
Family Room
Downstairs Bathroom
Laundry /Craft Room
Garage
Yard

Tonight I invite you all to vote on which area you'd most like to see, and I will post it in the morning once we're all up and moving (so probably lunchtime. We're not exactly morning people.).

And in the future, feel free to comment spontaneously and say "Hey, show me your ____ (room, people!)".

storage solutions

2010-01-22T10:37:00.003-06:00

It's "show us your..." day over at Saucy Dwellings, and today it's saucy storage solutions! How coincidental; I've just been working on storage solutions for my home myself. I don't know if these exactly qualify as 'saucy' but this is what I posted in the comments on their blog:

Storage and organization is a HUGE issue for me, I'm terrible at it. I'm in the process of trying to give my home an organizational overhaul right now, actually. We're a family of four in a small 2-bedroom ranch house, AND I'm a packrat (*cough* slight hoarder *cough*) so I really need creative storage solutions. Here's a few things I've come up with so far.

I like things that have dual purposes, so that's what I'm really trying to look for when I pick storage containers.

My bedroom:
This is my bedside table. It's an old school desk I had when I was a kid; you can still see remnants of the Pac-Man and Flintstones stickers I used to 'decorate' it long ago! I repurposed it to be a nightstand / jewelery / dressing table. My jewelery box and a few larger accessories are perfect for displaying on top...

... and all those little boxes and large pieces fit perfectly inside, yet I still have enough room to peer in and find what I'm looking for. Though I may get some dividers in the future (I just set this up two days ago, heh.)

Kids' Bedroom:
Stuffed animals are the bane of my existence, I swear! but the kids are really attached to them. This old shelving unit (that previously housed a big stereo system and CD's for us) ended up being perfect for the critters, which previously lived in my children's beds. Which meant my kids were sleeping ON animals all the time, and it was really immensely difficult to change the sheets.
I also went out last weekend and bought a bunch of those plastic Sterilite stackable drawers at Target, because we were overrun with toys. There's another 'unit' just like this on the other side of the room. They're colorful and sturdy, perfect for kid-stuff storage. They're also a pretty good size, and only $8 a piece! I used my labelmaker, labeled each drawer with a category of toy... and so far, the kids have been REALLY good about keeping their room picked up (they are 3 and 5). I've also found that they are PLAYING with their toys a lot more, and they seem to have a lot more fun when they can find the toys they want. They've thanked me no less than ten times in the past week for doing this. I guess cleaning really IS a good thing! LOL As a bonus, I get to store stuff on top of these 'units' that I don't want my kids playing with quite yet.

Our Dining Room / Entryway:
Unfortunately our front door comes right into the dining room. No foyer, no mudroom, nowhere convenient to put hooks or coatracks or anything. Enter my grandmother's cedar chest.

Not only is it nice and deep and perfect for holding all our winter gear, it also provides extra seating for the room AND it's the perfect place for the kids to sit and put on boots / shoes.

It actually has some really gorgeous copper 'buckles' but they are currently being stored in my closet because I don't believe they'd outlast my kids and dogs, heh.

And so that's it. I'm still doing some major overhauling of the house, things are looking good, and I've been trying to work up to a post about all the work I've been doing. Unfortunately I'm also on a tight (self-imposed) schedule so I haven't exactly made the time to sit here and update in a while. (But expect more house posts in the near future!)

ALSO-also, we just got a new camera and I'm still trying to figure out how to take good pictures with it. And the self-imposed tight schedule hasn't afforded me a whole lot of time to read up on it OR play around with it.

Tonight is Oksana's preschool 'winterfest' program; you know, the thing all preschoolers do around the holidays (or not, this year, since they wanted to be PC I guess) where they get together and sing cute songs and all we parents go and ooh and aah at our little stars and starlets? Yeah, that. Wish me luck that I will have mastered the camera enough to get some decent pictures tonight!

Death Spasm Party

2010-01-16T00:22:00.011-06:00

I don't often videoblog, largely because I tend to be much better at writing stories than relaying them orally. However, my friend Melly videotaped me telling this story that I LOVE when we were at the Golden Nugget the other day. So I stole the video from her and am uploading it for your viewing pleasure. Prepare to be horrified at the terrible state in which I let myself leave the house.

This story took place in the summer of 2003. For a long time we referred to it as the Jackopede of DOOOOOM story, so named due to the Michael Jackson Thriller-esque dance moves that Caitlin and I would bust out whenever we tried to explain the frantic spasms of the millipede. I was seated during this performance of the story, so there was less frantic spasming on my part; let's just title it Kristi And Caitlin VS The Thousand-Legger.

And just because I can... here's a photo of Caitlin re-enacting the Jackopede Dance of DOOOOM a few months after the original event took place.

The smackdown took place in that very living room, just a few feet from where Caitlin is standing. Back in my Apartment of Solitude, the only apartment that was MINE ALL MINE (even though I had three different friends pass through as short term 'roommates' throughout the time I lived there, and it was wonderful to have their company for as long as they wanted to stay!). God I miss that place sometimes.

Onions Don't Make My Girl Cry!

2010-01-11T20:11:00.004-06:00

Me: chops onions for dinner.
Oksana: "Mommy are you making dinner? Let me see! Let me see!"* drags chair in from the dining room so she can stand by the counter; climbs up to put her face right by the onions.
Me: "Honey, back up a bit. These onions are going to make you cry."
Oksana: "what? what you say?"
Me: "I said, the onions will make you cry. They do that."
Oksana: incredulously: "onions? Make you cry?" Oksana rubs her eyes. "No they won't!"
Me: "Yes, baby, they do. Well, they make your eyes water anyway." Oksana rubs her eyes again, at the same time shaking her head 'no' like I'm totally making this up in some elaborate plot to get her out from underfoot. "They have a chemical in them that is released into the air when you chop them, and it irritates your eyes and makes you cry."
Oksana shakes her head and rubs her eyes again. I can see from the side that they're getting pretty red.
Oksana: "uh uh! They DO NOT!"**
Me: "OK baby. Whatever you say."

She's NOT crying. Not one little bit. :P

*This is a common occurrence in our home. Both kids like to help cook but Oksana is FASCINATED by it. I can't even make a sandwich without her dragging in a chair or stool from some other room of the house so she can watch and ask a million questions about the process. It wouldn't surprise me at all if this kid became a master chef.

** Yes, she's in the F-YOU three's stage.

Things Kids Do When No One Is Watching

2010-01-05T22:43:00.002-06:00

My five year old son, Drake, got a hold of Photobooth on my Mac the other day when I wasn't around. Here's one of the videos he took of himself. Clearly I am not schooling my children properly in the horror genre - someone needs to tell this kid that zombies eat brains, not ghosts. :)

I love this kid!

happy new year :)

I Need A Spark

2009-12-28T12:49:00.004-06:00

It's been a while since I posted. I've been having a lot of issues with my diabetes, I spend most of my days feeling pretty under the weather, and it's kept me from getting a lot of things accomplished. I'm on insulin shots now - two different types, four times a day. My blood sugar numbers are excessively high, even with that. We keep adjusting the dosage but it hasn't helped so far. I'm starting the South Beach diet today, in hopes that this will help me. I'm dusting off my old profile on SparkPeople.com to chronicle my health and weight issues there. Feel free to find and friend me there if you're interested in following along.

I'm tired a lot. It makes it really hard to get things accomplished. Right now I'm really trying to just focus on my health, get that back in line at least a little bit, and then let the rest fall back into place again.

Pronunciation Station, What's Your Motivation?

2009-12-15T21:24:00.005-06:00

Regional dialects are funny things.

My son, a kindergartner, occasionally brings home word lists as his homework. The word lists are comprised of 10 two or three letter words; we, the parents, have to read each word to him, and he has to listen to what we say and then write the word down on a separate sheet of paper. He's pretty bright and is already ahead of the curve as far as reading goes, so up to this point we haven't had any trouble with the word lists. Tonight, though, we hit a minor snag.

Me: "on"
Drake: "on. O. N."

Me: "men"
Drake. "men. M. E. N."

Me: "bun"
Drake: "bun. B. U. N."

Me: "leg."
Drake: "lehg?" Drake gives me this funny look, like, 'what's a LEHG?' "LEHG or LAIG?"
Me: "LAIG. Except it's really LEHG. I mean, we say it LAIG, but it's actually LEHG."
Drake: "LAIG? or LEHG?"
Me: "LEG. LEHG."
Drake: "leg. L. E. G."
Me: "and what is a LEHG?"
Drake points to his leg (LAIG!) and rolls his eyes at me like DUH MOM.

LAIG. Rhymes with AIGG. That's how we roll up in Chitown.

Parenting Lessons From Bing

2009-12-03T21:31:00.005-06:00

It's been a hectic couple of weeks, what with trying to get my house fully decluttered by next weekend for this holiday potluck we're hosting, and with lots of crafting for the several craft fairs I'm in, and with lots of exciting things going on with Heritage Makers and my new clients, plus all of the usual craziness which abounds in my life. And don't forget it's the holiday season, and the kids are old enough to start hitting that CRAZY-EXCITED level... but then the weather is also turning colder, and everyone's stuck in the house, and boredom sets in; especially when mom's attention is otherwise occupied. And my attention has been everywhere but on my kids lately, thanks to the factors I mentioned mere moments ago. So they've spent a lot of time behaving exactly like you'd expect a 3 and 5 year old with limited parental interaction to behave; which is, to say, like a pack of wild animals. I do a lot less intervening and a lot more yelling than I'd like. As a result, I set myself down yesterday and had a nice chat with myself, at the end of which we decided that we... I mean, I... would make a concerted effort to banish yelling from my repertoire of disciplinary actions. After all, Michelle Duggar never seems to speak above a whisper, and look at how well-behaved those kids are! The crazy baby-making homeschooling mom hiding inside me wants so badly to emulate her family at times, you see.

The problem is, I'm not sure I'm wired to be a Michelle Duggar. Yelling is something I grew up with, something that seems to come naturally to me, a family trait, if you will. Most of the people in my family communicate primarily with raised voices; I'm not sure some of us know HOW to talk softly. Whispering is a lost art amongst my clan.

Then comes problem two: if I can't yell at my wild beasts, how DO I discipline them?? Beat the hell out of them? That doesn't exactly fit the vision of "kinder, gentler mother and happier family" that frolics in the fragrant meadows of my brain. This is how it's SUPPOSED to work: I stop yelling and communicate with them by speaking gently and politely requesting things of them, and they immediately appreciate my soft demeanor and pleasant tone and behave like lovely little Duggar clones.

This is how it works in reality: I politely and softly ask my children to do something, say, be quiet and occupy themselves at my parents' house while I finish the last bit of crafting I need to do for the craft fairs this weekend. They don't even acknowledge that I was speaking to them, and immediately start getting into things. They chatter nonstop and bicker and nitpick and knock the Christmas train off its tracks and we've been there five minutes and I have an hour's worth of work to do and already my parents are asking me pointedly "um, SO, how long are you staying today??" with a 'please get the hell out of here with your demon minions' tone to their voices. I am growing exasperated when, like magic, the kids settle down for a little while. I start working frantically and suddenly they want snacks, everyone wants snacks, multiple snacks, hot chocolate and ice cream (the MOOOON one!) and peanuts and rolos and pudding and kit kats and naturally, Grandma has all of this, and it's all stocked within easy reach of my children, who are adept at helping themselves. But they are NOT so adept at remembering that they now have to eat in Grandma's kitchen and can no longer eat downstairs while watching TV because Grandma has a new rug. AND IT'S WHITE. So then I find myself repeatedly asking my darlings to eat at the kitchen table, and I check on them periodically and all is going well until I realize that the plate of Cheetos, BRIGHT ORANGE PUFFY CHEETOS, that I just made for them a second ago is NO LONGER AT THE KITCHEN TABLE, and neither are my angels. "ARE THOSE CHEETOS DOWNSTAIRS??!" Crap. I just failed my self-imposed 'no yelling' rule. But I knew it would take work to break a lifelong habit, and the good news is I caught myself and remembered that I was making a concerted effort to be MLM (More Like Michelle). I correct my children, more gently this time, and the Great Cheetos Crisis of 2009 is successfully averted. But Drake is eating a giant grape Tootsie Pop (yes, at the same time as his Cheetos), and for some reason Grandma allows him to finish it downstairs. 'OK,' I think, 'it's HER rug after all.' But then a few minutes later Grandpa catches him wandering around on the new rug, dropping sticky grape sucker-bits all over, and nearly blows a gasket. Grandma quickly advises that she allowed this to happen, but clearly it was a bad idea, so Drake is ordered back upstairs. By now my stress levels are rising, all I want to do is finish my damn craft tiles so I can get the hell out of here, and my children are getting antsy again. My son wanders into the kitchen for yet ANOTHER snack and I tell him no, NO MORE snacks, you've had plenty and we'll be leaving in about half an hour and it will be dinnertime, you don't need anymore snacks. He argues with me and though I'm not yelling yet, I can feel the tension in my jaw and the snap in my voice as I begin to contemplate, once more, exactly HOW one is supposed to discipline children that never listen, and that argue and beg and whine and plead, if you can't scream at them when you've finally reached the point where debating with them is no longer an option. As he's arguing with me, he pulls a bag of marshmallows out and asks me if he can have some, and AT THE EXACT MOMENT I AM TELLING HIM 'DRAKE, NO, I TOLD YOU NO MORE SNACKS', he DUMPS A LARGE PILE OF MARSHMALLOWS OUT ON THE KITCHEN TABLE. The kitchen table, unfortunately, is where I am super gluing ribbons to the backs of my craft tiles, and he dumps the marshmallows RIGHT ON TOP OF SOME FRESHLY GLUED TILES. I fly into a rage, screaming at him about how I JUST TOLD YOU NO GODDAMNIT AND YOU DID IT ANYWAY, and in the process I inadvertently glue two of my fingers to the bottle of super glue.

My first day of MLM training is NOT going well.

We managed to get out of there relatively unscathed, although I AM missing a few layers of skin on some of my fingers now. In the car I decide that fast food is the dinner option for the evening, and I let the kids decide where we'll feast tonight. They are both unanimous in their choice of the Golden Arches. Hooray, no fighting, I think. Oh, how stupid of me. For when I ask them each what they want, they start fighting about EACH OTHER'S choices. Drake wants apple dippers instead of fries; Oksana wants fries. She screams at me, or him, I'm not sure which, "NO APPLES! FRIES!" Then she wants chocolate milk, but he wants apple juice, and they begin bickering about their drinks, and it doesn't stop even when i REMIND them that they both get to choose whichever they want and they don't need to have the same thing. Then she's trying to talk to him and he's making monkey noises over her, which prompts her to scream at him, and I lose it and scream over both of them. We've become one of those "she who screams loudest, wins" families. It's god awful. Time outs aren't even an option when I'm driving. At home, I can just send them to a time out whenever I'm about to lose my cool. At Grandma's, when I'm involved in a project, that's less easy, but still doable. On the road, or when we're out and about (for instance, when my daughter screams at me at the playground by my son's school for no good reason), time outs are not exactly feasible. Screaming at my children isn't always the best option either, especially when it's in public, but I'm at a loss as to how 'normal' parents discipline their children consistently. Yelling has become a good friend to me, but it's a bad friend, an unhealthy friend that runs with a bad crowd, and pretty soon I'll be chain-smoking and wearing hoochie clothes and riding home after curfew on the back of an older man's Harley, and then where will my children be?

I am contemplating the discipline problem as I drive home from McDonald's, my children still sniping at each other in the backseat, 93.9 (the Christmas Lite!) playing merry holiday tunes that I surreptitiously turn louder and louder so as to drown out the din from the backseat, when it happens. "You better watch out... you better not cry... you better not pout... I'm telling you why..." HOLY CRAP. I am missing out on a GOLDEN OPPORTUNITY here. My children are now, finally, both old enough to understand that Santa only brings presents to GOOD girls and boys! I haven't been making use of the time-honored holiday gift that Santa brings to parents every year: the gift of FEAR. It may be cliche to threaten your children with a lump of coal, but with god as my witness, I LIVE MY LIFE BY CLICHE. Thank you, Bing Crosby, for teaching me how to discipline my children this month. If anyone is qualified to give parenting lessons, it's you.

Post-Christmas, I will once more be struggling with the best way to discipline my darlings, and endeavoring to follow in the Duggar's footsteps. Until that jolly day, I will be using the big fat man with the long white beard as a tool of guilt and fear - just the way my parents, and their parents before them, did.

By God, I love the Christmas season.

Heritage Makers Digicrop, Events, and Specials

2009-12-02T22:34:00.004-06:00

Man, there is a LOT of exciting stuff going on with Heritage Makers right now. I'm thrilled to share it with you! Here is what's happening this week:

1) There is still time to send out your custom holiday greeting cards - even easier using DIRECT SHIP from the website! Contact me if you are interested!

2) Our month of Holiday Hits specials keep coming! This week it is buy one, get a second half price on our GORGEOUS canvas posters. See this link for more details: http://www.heritagemakers.com/comm/go/2009/holidayHits/week3.html (If you've been coveting our posters, this is a great price!)

3) I will be exhibiting at a couple of holiday bazaars this weekend. If you're in the neighborhood, please feel free to stop by and see me!

This Friday evening from 5PM-9PM, I will be exhibiting at Art 4 Soul in Homewood IL, during the Homewood Holiday Lights festival.

Art 4 Soul
18135 Harwood Ave.
Homewood IL. 60430
708-206-1026

And on Saturday from 9AM - 2PM I will be at the Welch Tiger Bazaar and Kids Holiday Shop in Naperville, IL.

Welch Elementary School
2620 Leverenz Road
Naperville, IL 60564

4) Finally! I am hosting a digicrop out of my home in Lansing this Sunday from 10AM to 2PM.

RSVPs are necessary, especially if you would like to reserve one of our two computers. First come, first served so call me as soon as possible if you need one!

Cost for the event is $5 if you will be bringing your own laptop; $10 if you are reserving one of our machines.

If you have never attended a digicrop, it is the perfect opportunity for you to work on your projects (and finish up those holiday projects! Ordering deadline is next week to have them by Christmas!) AND to share ideas with other participants AND to get all your questions answered. I will be here to assist all of you the entire four hours at an extremely low cost! Snacks and drinks will be provide as well. Please RSVP to me via email or phone (both available on my Heritage Makers website) if you plan on attending. (At which point, if you need my address, I will provide it to you!)

I hope to see some of you this weekend! Please contact me if you would like any assistance with your holiday projects!

Holiday Hits, Week One

2009-11-22T20:35:00.006-06:00

The holiday season is starting to get into gear, what with Thanksgiving this week and all, and it's about time you did your holiday cards, isn't it? ME TOO. Heritage Makers' fabulous sale on customized greeting cards ends tomorrow at noon (MST)! You can get your fully customized, personally designed greeting cards for as low as 79 CENTS if you order through me before then!

You do not need to have the cards CREATED by then; you just need to purchase the credits. They will be active on your account for a year, so even if the 100-card pack is most attractive to you but you don't send 100 holiday cards, you can still use those card credits throughout the year for birthdays, anniversaries, thinking of you's, get wells, sympathies, or any other occasion. This is a GREAT DEAL; don't let it pass you by!

(If this is your first purchase, remember that I can also get you a free month of our premium artwork, which means you can make your holiday cards EXTRA gorgeous at no additional cost!)

Call me before noon MST tomorrow to place your order! 773 860 1108.

Some folks have asked me what the cards look like... since they're completely customizable, they can look like anything you want! But if that's a little overwhelming and you prefer to work from a template, here are just a few examples of the MANY templates you will find in our gallery. Just drag and drop your photos in place, change out any elements you don't like, put in your own text and you're done! (Also, don't forget you can always call on me for assistance.)