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Oct 31, 2008    |      1 comment

Happy Halloween!

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I look forward to Halloween every year. It’s the one day that I have an excuse to dress up and for a little bit be another character that isn’t “me.” Don’t get me wrong, I like being me, but an escape from reality is nice every now and then.

Our son was so excited to go trick-or-treating, but he soon got tired of his costume. I think his full costume lasted about 30 minutes before he started getting annoyed with parts of it. By the end of our trip, he no longer looked like he had a costume on at all. Mom started to feel funny when because she was dressed up more than her son LOL.

He surprised me a little bit when we got home. There was still about twenty minutes left for trick-or-treating and he said he wanted to give out candy. I told him that we didn’t have any to hand out and he suggested using the candy he just got. We flipped on our porch light and I fired up our pumpkin and waited. No one came. He was a little bummed.

I asked him if he wanted to stay home next year and give out candy. He surprised me again when he said that he would like to give out candy rather than get it. That made me a little proud, since I’ve been trying to show him that it’s not always about what you get…but what you give. I have a feeling we will have a great time this year shopping for Toys for Tots 🙂

I hope all of you had a wonderful night!

Oct 27, 2008    |       17 comments

One of the Best Free Places Out There

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Our family has discovered one of the best free places out there – the public library. Many of you probably know about this. It’s not anything new and public libraries are talked about often when it comes to saving money. My work schedule used to overlap the library’s open hours so we never checked it out.

My hours are a lot more flexible now so I was able to stop in the library one morning while out and about running errands. It had been a while since I stepped foot into a library. Boy, have they progressed with the times. I couldn’t believe the vast amount of videos and dvds available at my fingertips. I saw many of the movies we have rented in the past at the video store.

A little sad, I know. We weren’t practicing one of the biggest tips in frugality – use the public library! Oh, the money we could have saved! They even had Star Wars on DVD. You should have seen the smile on my son’s face when he saw that they were there and they were free to borrow. He knows that means no more paying to rent them from the video store and he was really excited.

In the past, I headed to Amazon.com or eBay when there was a book I wanted to read. Lately I’ve been doing some research on learning styles. Our library is a small one and didn’t have a book I was interested in. I requested an interlibrary loan and in a few days I received a call that the book was in. That was faster than an order from Amazon with free shipping. And the price was unbeatable.

I feel silly mentioning this, but maybe there are others out there who haven’t yet checked out their public library. Even if you happen to work during the library’s open hours (like I did), maybe you can stop by during a lunch break. I should have done that and I regret not making the time to at least stop by for a few minutes to check it out. Our public library really is a treasure. I feel like we hit the “saving money” jackpot.

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