Staying on tasks

I don't know about you...but I love having a set of tasks written out before me and seeing them checked off one by one. I have tried dayplanners for this purpose, however, it was cumbersome to carry them around and hang onto them. The ideal solution for having tasks laid out would be an iphone....but alas...there is no room in my budget for such a luxury:(

I have recently discovered a neat little program that is doing the trick perfectly for me. I am on my mini dell computer quite a bit throughout the day checking email, researching things for homeschool, checking the news, and just surfing the pf blogs. So it is ideal for me to use something on my computer. This program is a free shareware program called Desktop Reminder. This program is simple and easy to use. One simply downloads it and she is ready to go. I now just type in tasks that I wish to accomplish..along with the dates I hope to have them done by. The moment I turn on my computer it opens up immediately widely on my screen and the tasks list are staring at me in the face. The perfect reminder! I downloaded the program about a month ago and I love it! I also love the feeling of marking things as completed :)

Feeling accomplished is important to me as a homemaker. Most people take for granted that little satisfaction that get from a job where a task is completed or done and overwith.

This can be a challenge for a homemaker, because we all know that housework is never always done or completed. Yes, I may get one load of clothes washed, but there is another one right behind it:) Not to say that does not happen to those in a regular job. But you get what I mean. Housework can be such a thankless job.

I am now using this program to keep track of my goals for becoming debt free so I thought I would blog about it to you all:)

Snow much fun!

Our afternoon would have been spent at our local homeschool coop, however, snow came our way and it was canceled. Our afternoon was free to tackle a project so I chose to get started on our homemade valentine cards. I searched the web and found a few ideas I liked and we went with it!

I went grocery shopping Monday night and picked up (out of my grocery money) $3.00 worth of gum and made these cute little guys with my kiddos.


Ours were a little different. I have a cricut machine so I had it cut out 100 hearts and 100 question marks. I taped the gum together with the question marks sticking out of the top...as antenna. This is cheaper than the suggested purchase of twizzler candy. You could use pipe cleaner if you had that, but I did not :( I then just taped my hearts on and my kids drew smiley faces on the gum. We were given some stickers from my mom so those were used as well, but cost me nothing. So for the price of gum $3.00 we made 50 valentines. We are attending a homeschool valentine party this Friday and there will be a lot of kiddos there!

Power Outage

Last night we were hit with a ferocious storm. It wiped out electricity in most of my town. Having no lights made for an interesting night for a family with 4 boys! They loved lighting all the candles and having their flashlights in hand. The excitement started to wear off after about an hour.

I suggested we work on their school work so they could enjoy the the next day without any....they were all for that! So we sat up reading our history and science lessons. The boys worked on their copywork, spelling words, and creative writing.

One good thing was that I had our dinner nearly cooked right before the lights went out. Well, it least the main dish was done....we had meatloaf and applesauce. It least we did not have to run out somewhere to eat! Not sure that would have worked anyway, since most places were in the dark just like us!

Our $2.97 date night!

I thought I would brag a little about our past weekend. My husband and I have our birthdays back to back. We are 9 years and 364 days apart! Anyhoo, we were given a great gift at Christmas time. A certificate for free babysitting along with a $50.00 gift card to a favorite seafood restaurant. Earlier this year we were given some free movie tickets. Then on our date night some grandparents dropped by and surprised us with more certificates for the theatre. It was their way of paying for our snacks at the theatre.

So on our date night. My brother-in-law and his wife showed up with pizzas for our kids and shoved us out the door. Well, they did not have to shove us....we practically ran! We went out to eat first, then we ran around to a few stores window shopping. We did go to a book store and I got a book. We used a gift certificate that was given to us plus a 30% off coupon I had at this particular book store. The book was like $4.00. The gift card is a $25.00 one, so we still have some money left one it. then we window shopped some more. It was really cold out and we had another hour before the movie, so we headed through a Tim Hortons drive through and bought hot chocolate---thus our $2.97 price. We went to see the film where we enjoyed popcorn and soda. We made it home close to midnight and gabbed some with the awesome sitters. Our boys always have a blast with Uncle D!

Ohh, it was so nice to have a night out, but even better knowing it cost us virtually nothing!

The best Christmas present ever is free babysitting! Be sure and give that to someone you know next year!