Homeschooler by day, ninja by night

Next week is the NCHE conference.  I'm really looking forward to going as it's been awhile since I've been to a homeschool convention.  I'll just be attending one day due to Adam's work schedule and the fact that we have company coming in that weekend.  I still haven't registered...not sure why not.  I really want to make sure I get to go.  I've picked out which workshops I want to attend and looked over the list of vendors to be sure I get to check out a few I wanna visit.  

After we moved, Adisson started up on a computer/online based curriculum.  It's been a lifesaver.  It's our core curriculum and I add in the other things he needs.  I wish I had more time to sit with him as he goes through his assignments.  He really likes the work (well, as much as I expect he'd like any school work) and he does well with independent work so that's good.  I'm just hoping that next school year I'm able to do more "on purpose"...but it will be tricky as it will be my first year officially homeschooling two kids.  

In the meantime, I get to think about a whole, entire day of homeschool info. and books.  Sounds sooo good to me.  :)

Out of this world amazing kids...

I'm still up, waiting for an apple pie to finish baking.  Pretty sure my husband scored me an old iPhone for the price of an apple pie. :)  That would be super awesome.

Adisson's last baseball game was tonight.  It was the first tournament game of a single elimination round.  And obviously they lost.  They tried so hard and played so well, but they were up against the best team in their age division, and it just didn't work out for them.  Honestly, I was so sad for them that I cried a little.  They worked so hard and I just wanted them to feel what it was like to win...against that team.

Immediately after the game, Adisson and Adam headed to Adi's Cub Scout meeting.  Only to find out that the Rain Gutter Regatta was tonight and no one told us.

I know my children will experience disappointment and sadness in their lives.  It's just how it is. But that doesn't make it easier for me to feel ok about it.  I hate when my boys are disappointed and sad, about things that they care about.  You know, you wanna be sad because you have to clean your room...whatever.  You wanna be disappointed that you can't have ice cream for dinner...whatever.  (oh, btw...we definitely indulge in dessert only dinners occasionally)  But to have someone else or something else to be the cause of disappointment, just makes me so sad...it just breaks my heart.  I have such amazing children, just really out of this world great kids, and I hate it when things seem to all go wrong at once.

Anyway, I think tomorrow we're heading out to Trader Joe's.  I really wanna see what it's all about (we've never been) and I wanna get outta the house.  If we stay here, I'm gonna get sucked into the 900 things that we have to do around here.  I just .... I don't know.

"So are you the dog's fake parents?"

It's been a few days! :)  On Friday, we were "on call" for when our friends got the call to go to the hospital to have their baby!  We were keeping their other kids during that time.  They finally got the go ahead to come in around 7:00 or so in the evening so the kids came over.  We headed out to catch the end of Adisson's baseball game (he was already there with Adam).  They lost but Adisson stole home and scored the run, so not much else mattered to me!  After we got home in the evening, the kids stayed up for AWHILE playing with their friends.  C. and E. (not my kids so I'm not using their names) are such great kids and my guys had so much fun playing with them.  They are a homeschooled family, too, and it's so so so very nice to meet other kids that have that in common with my boys.  They stayed up super late, but were back at 'em early in the morning. :)  Zander had his t-ball game in the morning but got back in time to play around before the kids left.

The rest of the weekend was nice.  On Saturday, we went shopping to pick up a few things for our new foster dog.  We picked her up today.  She's been interesting.  I'm fairly certain she's never been inside a house.  She was absolutely not interested in walking up the three brick steps leading to the front door.  Her name is Penelope.  She's a good dog, just been dealt a crappy hand in life.  She was rescued just days, if not hours, before literally starving to death.  Adam wants her to be a permanent member of our family, but I'm not convinced that she's the best fit for us.  We'll see how things progress as the days go on....

Mr. Momentum has changed his address...

So last night was a meeting at Adam's work. We're still relatively new so we went over information that we needed to know.  It was very informative, but my thoughts were very occupied with how well Jaxon was or wasn't behaving down in the childcare room.  I worried for all 90 minutes.  :)  Fortunately, he has the best big brothers in the world and they kept him very busy so he was pretty good.  Also, some new friends also had their kids in childcare and they helped keep all of my boys busy!!  I was just so happy Jax was good!

Tonight is a another baseball game for Adisson.  I'm hoping the boys try as hard as they did the other night.  They didn't win, but they gave it a great effort.  I also wish they had a few more games left this season.  If they had enough time to practice and play, they might actually be a pretty good team.  Unfortunately, this team seems to be full of new-to-baseball kids while another team is full of kids that have been playing since they were in diapers.  But anyway....

I've been letting the craft juices stir around in my brain the last few days and I'm hoping we have some time this weekend to do some things I'd like to try and to make a few things I'd like to make.  I'm pretty excited, but not overly so because I know that I can get craft burnout pretty quickly!! :)

Anyway, off to clean...

Then everyone is happy!

I finally went to the grocery store tonight.  Thank goodness as the food was getting rather scarce!  The good news is that for the first time since we got here, I feel like I finally did a good job saving money.  It's hard to feel like I'm doing the best job with my coupons when I shop at a store that doesn't double (oh, I miss Giant Eagle) but I finally saved 40% on my total for the first time in NC.  And managed to buy some higher ticket/non coupon items.  It's weird to come home and feel so excited about grocery shopping, I guess.

Since I don't work outside of the home (as an at-home mom, I'm sure I could help argue the case that I do lots of work inside the home, but that's neither here or there), I feel like it's my job to do the best I can to save money when we shop.  I'd like to get better with our budget, moving is such a huge change and adjustment, that it seems like it takes awhile to get things back into some kind of order.  :)  One of my fave ways to save money is to coupon.  When I am prepping my coupons, it feels like I'm physically doing something proactive to be helpful to my family.  And when I'm matching my coupons to the current sales flyer, I feel like I'm working toward my goal.  And then, when I hand over my coupons and watch my total drop lower and lower, it feels like my efforts have paid off.  And I get pretty excited!

I'll never be one of those extreme couponers, and that's ok with me.  I don't have the time to spend to do that kind of shopping, I don't have the money to wrangle that many coupons (because there is NO WAY every single person on that show gets ALL of their q's for free), and I don't have the space for all those products in my home.  Clutter is costly!!  My goal in couponing is to get the items we already use (or something similar) at a reduced cost.  And I achieve that.  So I'm happy.

And when Mama is happy.....

Thank goodness that's over!

FINALLY!  After several hours, I FINALLY got my coupon binder organized.  It's been awhile since it's been so neat and tidy!  And I'm so excited about it!  Now to plan my grocery list and menus for the week.  Ok, I have more to write later, but I was so excited about coupons and had to tell someone.  Or no one as the case may be here. :)

I heart coupons!

After we moved to Maryland, I was blessed with a HUGE assortment of grocery stores.  In Kentucky, we had just one...a Super WalMart.  And that's where we did *all* of our shopping.  So moving to MD was so exciting!  We did our grocery shopping at Giant Eagle where we'd earn $0.20 off of each gallon of gas for every $50 we'd spend and at the gas station, we'd earn 1% off of our groceries for every 20 gallons of gas we'd pump.  So we really earned a lot of benefits!  And Giant Eagle doubled all my coupons up to $0.99!  I became a coupon queen!  I'd been couponing a little before Maryland, but after I realized how amazing Giant Eagle was...I was hooked on coupons.

And then we moved to North Carolina.  And my coupon dreams crumbled.  :)  We are so blessed to have a brand new Food Lion about a mile from the house.  It was just built last summer and while it's not huge (read: lacks some variety), it's so nice to have a decent grocery store so close.  But Food Lion doesn't double coupons.  And because they don't have the variety of larger grocery stores, I have lots of coupons that don't get used.  

I could shop at a bigger grocery store up in Sanford that I found online that looks super great, and doubles coupons, but it's nearly 40 minutes away since it's on the north side of town.  Driving so much with gas so expensive would quickly cancel out any grocery savings.  Darn it.  

I miss couponing.  I miss the excitement of saving money.  I recently signed up through a really great company to get my coupons delivered to me in bulk once per month.  This saves the huge hassle of trying to find the newspaper on Sunday.  It seems the Sanford paper doesn't carry all of the inserts and neither does Fayetteville...so I have to find the Raleigh paper and they seem to sell out and/or aren't carried in my closest gas stations.  Plus, it gives me coupons that are better in value than I would get just buying my local paper.  

Tonight, I went through 6 weeks of coupon inserts and cut out the ones I'd need.  I still have to sort through them and organize them in my binder, but it definitely reinvigorated my love for my q's and I'm hoping that I can get better at using them...even if I won't be saving quite as much money as I was before.  :)

"I WON SOMETHING!!"

Soooo, my oldest son has his own laptop.  It was his Nana's old one and given to the boys for Christmas, but he's the only one that has any interest in it.  He's frequents Boy's Life (it's a Scout site) and when he's there, he enters just about all of their MANY ongoing contests.  He always gets very excited about it and more than once he's been CONVINCED he would win this super great prize.  :)  He was disappointed awhile ago when he realized he was not the winner of a Nintendo 3DS.  Anyway, tonight I was downstairs with the other kids when he starts yelling for me in a way I know he needs something.  Turns out, he finally did win a prize from Boys Life!  He won a set of autographed books about baseball!  I was very excited for him, though I couldn't help but think about how cool it would be if he won something he truly had his heart set on and it didn't take long for him to express that sentiment to me as well.  But we were both very excited about the prize!  I hope that there's a way the books can get here soon (I'll be grateful for them whenever they arrive, of course) as his baseball season is winding down and I know he could use the inspiration.  It's been a tough season and sometimes, a Mom isn't quite as encouraging as someone else who's actually played baseball.  :)

This weekend we have a baseball game and a few baseball practices.  Fortunately, there's about 27 hours between the two so we can do something else for a change.  :)  I'm voting for staying home and getting stuff done around the house and I'm sure the boys wouldn't mind a break in being busy but they'd also like to get out and do something, too.  We'll see what option wins out.

I've mentioned to Adam more than once that I'm having a hard time finding my place here in NC.  Things are different for us and I guess it's just taking me awhile to get settled.  But I can't really blame him if I'm not doing anything to make myself feel at home here...because it's gonna be home for us for awhile.  A very long while.  I guess I need to work on that instead of blaming him...shhhh, don't tell him.

Anyway, off to watch HOP with the boys and work on my newest yarn project...a baby blanket for a baby on the way (definitely not mine...that ship has sailed!!)...I just love new babies!!  :)

Puppies need to eat!!

Over the weekend we participated in a Cub Scout Camp-o-Ree.  It was so much fun!  We got there on Friday night and got our stuff set up.  It was pretty chilly (and really just cold overnight!) but it's nicer to camp in cool weather as opposed to smoking hot weather.  Saturday was filled with cub scout competition activities.  Adisson's pack did pretty well, gaining trophies in nearly half of all events!!  We left early on Saturday to run home, shower and clean up so we could attend a cook out thrown by Adam's coworker.  We had a great time there (and we got to see our lone NC friends!) and got back to the campsite right on time to see the Order of the Arrow ceremony.  Wrapped things up on Sunday and made it home with a few hours to spare before we had three hours of baseball practice.

Adi had a game on Monday night (loss...again) and we were supposed to have scouts last night but it was cancelled because we just had the camping trip.  So we mowed the yard instead (ok, I say we because I actually did help...I mowed the part of our neighbor's yard that meets ours, it's not much but I hate to leave it undone...he's mowed our entire front yard before!).  It DEFINITELY needed it, so I'm happy about that.

Tonight is another baseball game.  Woot. (not really)  Tomorrow night, we volunteered to take a donation of dog food to an animal and rescue organization.  I've been looking for a service project for us to do as a family and I think I might have found one.

A few weeks ago, we took Buddy in to the animal hospital for a check up and some shots.  He also had to have some blood work done because he is considered a "senior" dog due to his age.  He has a clean bill of health!  He has some arthritis in his knees and in his hips (which we knew about) and due to his discomfort in moving around a lot sometimes, he's put on some weight, but it's still in the healthy range.  We have a joint supplement for him now, too.

While we were there we saw a dog that had been brought to the animal hospital due to severe neglect.  She'd been so starved that when rescued, they estimated her being just hours or a day or so from death.  And for Adam it was love at first sight.  I'll save more of a discussion about her on another post but since then, we've been very animal aware around here.  When a local no-kill shelter posted on their facebook that they were running out of puppy chow, I thought that buying food and taking it there would be something that my boys could understand in regards to charity.  It's hard to find a charitable act that I can explain to my kids so they comprehend it, but little boys understand puppies and that puppies need to eat. :)

Anyway, today we have lots to do.  We're working hard on some scout stuff for Adisson and stuff to do around the house and school stuff....the list goes on and on!! :)