Small Successes

Does participating in small successes count as a small success?? I'm just asking...

1-
I have not lost my mind with girl scout cookies - I have gotten half of Eva's cookie orders delivered, I have been the parent helper for two cookie booths (both at the local grocery store, both an hour each) I have not lost the several hundred dollars in cash from cookie sales, booths. etc (hopefully I can make it a few more hours until Eva's girl scout meeting when I can turn it in!) Eva has now sold about 160 boxes, and her goal we set was 200 boxes, so we are almost there!

2-
I did our finances for the first half of the month. I found a free yearly budgeting template titled "Family Budget Planner" at this site. We sat down at the beginning of the year and figured out what we wanted our budget to look like for a year. Hubby got a raise of a little over $100 per month (take home) and we decided to save $300 per month in IRAs and College Savings plans ($100 per month each for retirement, and $50 each for college savings) - it has been going amazingly well! I don't really even come close to the amounts I budgeted at the beginning of the year (I budgeted too little for groceries, and too much for eating out/entertainment stuff) but we were under budget for January overall, and doing great for February. With a part of our tax refund, hubby and I are going shopping for a new dining room table set tomorrow - I am unbelievably excited about having a better table...probably because I serve 2-3 meals per day on it, and spend about 2 hours on school work at the table each weekday.

3-
I've started thinking about Lent - haven't figured out what I am going to do or give up for Lent, but at least I've started to think about it! Plus, I still have almost two weeks to figure it out! (Much better than my usual start thinking about it on Ash Wednesday plan!)

More small successes at Faith and Family!

Small Successes

I can't believe that Small Successes at Faith and Family is already at the 100th volume! It doesn't seem like that long ago it started! On to my successes for the week.

1-
I cleaned the toilet. Honestly, I am not really sure how many weeks it had been since I cleaned it - I really do mean to clean it once a week, but that hadn't been happening...and it got worse and worse until Monday when the do in "Small Steps for Catholic Moms" was "When you see something that needs doing today (laundry to put away, a bed to be made, a table to be cleared, etc.), don procrastinate and make excuses. See God's will for your day in the sight of those tasks and just do them." Thus, I finally got around to cleaning the algae ring in our toilet (gotta love well water!)

2-
I finally finished planning Eva's history class for 3rd quarter...and while I was at it, I knocked out 4th quarter planning, too. We started quarter 3 on Monday. I finished planning for it on Saturday. I procrastinated planning it since August. Of course, I currently have a ring of craft stuff around my chair in the living room because in all the planning for 3rd quarter (and doubling up on phonics so that we could catch up to where we should be) I completely forgot about all the prep work for Charlotte's Little Saints preschool stuff - so I have gotten two weeks worth of prep done, and am hoping to get 8 more weeks of prep done before I put everything away!

3-
I ordered "Learn Spanish with Grace" from someone on CathSwap, and remembered (after I paid, but before she sent the materials) that my stupid paypal account kept changing my address back to the house we sold over a year ago. So, I emailed her with the correct address, and finally (after about a half an hour of tinkering with the dumb thing) managed to change the address and delete the old address. Apparently, my problem was that in order to delete the old address, I couldn't just go in and change it (which I had tried before), I had to first go into my credit cards (of which it appears two that were listed were debit cards from our old account in our old town, so I just deleted those) and change the address there before it would let me change the address on the main page. So, when I start to get serious about buying books for next year, I won't have a problem like last year when my package was mailed to our old house, the post office in that town intercepted it, and forwarded it to our p.o. box here, and then we had to pay again for the shipping (because technically it should have been returned to sender, not forwarded...)

More small successes at Faith and Family Live!

Small Successes

Well, it's Thursday again, so it is time for small successes! There are a lot of things that haven't gotten done around here recently (like the laundry I've been putting off for three days, and the toilet cleaning that I have been putting off even longer than that...) but today I will focus on the successes.

1-
I survived two snow days...not for the little girls (they still did school), but for the exchange student. I like having her around, but early on in the snowstorm our exchange student was disappointed that we weren't going to MILs house (her exchange student had been sick) which when I pressed further wasn't because she wanted to see their exchange student, she wanted to play Super Mario Bros on their Wii...so I had hubby borrow it from his mom. Well, in two days (one day with just our exchange student and Eva playing, for the most part and the second day with both exchange students and Eva playing almost ALL DAY LONG) they got to level 8, which I guess is the highest level. They haven't beaten Bowser to save the princess yet, but they got further here in two days than they have gotten in several weeks at MILs house. When hubby and I drove to town to get pizza last night, I swear I could here the coin collecting noise rattling in my head. While they played on and on, I read all 5 Percy Jackson novels...probably should have cleaned, but oh well!

2-
I finished our taxes! (YEAH!) And we will be getting a pretty massive refund (thanks mostly to hubby's former employer's buyout that we got in this calendar year, which they withheld a huge amount from, given that we don't pay much in taxes being relatively poor with two kids. Now we just need to decide what to do with that money. I know that some of it will be going towards a new dining set (and we will say goodbye to my great-aunt's set that was made in Yugoslavia) and I know that some will be going into our emergency fund....but we are tempted to replace the carpet in our kitchen. I don't think we'll be able to afford to replace it right now, since our kitchen is huge (not well laid out or anything, but a lot of square feet of flooring involved).

3-
We got our cats spayed and neutered. In fact, I need to figure out when I need to pick them up from the vet's office. Tigger, our loud tom cat, had wandered over to the neighbor's house. She had girl kittens she was planning on taking in to get spayed. She called MIL to ask if it was her cat (MILs cats are not at all friendly) and she told the neighbor that she had a yellow and white cat, but she didn't know the gender, and good luck catching it. The neighbor mentioned how sweet and loud the tom was, which made it clear to MIL that it was our annoying (but kinda cute) cat. Well, the neighbor's son brought him home, and then offered to take him to the vet for us. In the end I had hubby call, because I wanted both cats taken care of, and I wanted them to get rabies shots as well. So, in the end our neighbor's son took both our cats to the vet for us, and I need to pick them up today.

There are more small successes over at Faith and Family LIVE!