Frugal Fridays - Protect and Mend Books

We LOVE to read to Miss Pear, and she loves to be read to!

We started reading paper books to her when she started feeding herself in her highchair - this would encourage her to eat more (as in eat a proper amount! She is a bit on the light side). And she still loves it when we read to her at the end of the meal, often asking for boos before she could clearly say books.

However, we are seeing age on our books! So because we want our books to last, and do not want to be replacing favorites, we have discovered the joy of clear contact paper.

We use clear contact paper to:

• Cover dust covers to protect our books
• Cover paper back books to protect them
• Mend pages that have ripped (works better than tape)
• Cover/protect pages that Miss Pear will point to stuff on so that they can be wiped clean and not stick
• Mend lift the flap and peek-a-boo books.

While we use this method primarily for Miss Pear's books, it would work for any book you use a lot and want to protect. But do not buy the expensive book protector paper!

A big roll of clear contact paper is less than $2 and covers many books which protects our investment in books! And as we all know, sometimes living frugally means taking good care of what we already have so that it lasts.

And I have to confess, I love the children's books we have found and want to read them to all our kids the Lord blesses us with, and I hope to be able, in the end, to save each child's favorites for their kids. This means protecting the books!

EEEEEEEEEWWWWWWW! GROOOOOOOOOSS!!!!!!

So this morning I drove Mr. Pear to work so that we could have the car to do a major shop so that we could do a major cook for the freezer tomorrow - the end result will be 45 meals in the fridge and numerous cups of cooked diced chicken.

When I got home I raced through my breakfast (Miss Pear and my MIL had eaten while I was gone), and raced to shower before the gardening company arrived to give me a quote - more on that in a later post.

When I got out of the shower I wanted to peak in on the cute playtime I could hear over the baby monitor, So CUTE!

And headed back to our room to blow dry my hair.

As I turned into the bathroom I felt an itch on my neck, and I brushed forwards only to see....

.....

.....a BIG BLACK SPIDER get flung from my neck to the sink!

to which I immediately cried....

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEWWWWWWWW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!'
GROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

my MIL came running because she did not hear the gross, she just heard me scream and thought I had hurt myself......

Yup, I am officially a wimp.

Saturday's Party

Saturday's party was wonderful! It ended up being very hot, so we were mostly inside, but the children ventured out to play on the slide and in the water table while Mr. Pear BBQed. It was so wonderful to see everyone, and everyone was very complimentary about our home! We did very well for having the party exactly two weeks and two days after we moved in!

It was well worth spending the entire morning in the kitchen cooking and preparing!

Cleaning Rice off the Floor

I absolutely LOVE being a Mommy. One day during the first week in our new home I came down the stairs and was hit by the sudden certainty that this was all I wanted, to stay home and care for my family. My family is little, just my husband, me, and our daughter, and our house is little too, but I love them all, and love taking care of them all - the family more than the house of course! I am also thrilled that taking care of our house is now done out of a desire to bless my family, and not paranoia (see here, and I cannot find where I talked about the desire to return to caring for our home out of a desire to bless my family, and not paranoia while it is on the market!)

One of the big challenges I face as a Mommy is managing Miss Pear's allergies to nuts and potatoes. It means we eat a fair bit of rice as side dishes! However, our daughter is 25 months, so rice ends up on the floor! And cleaning rice off floors can be a real pain!

Then we discovered the cheater method!

1. Leave cleaning the rice up off the floor until the very last part of your kitchen clean up (this allows it to dry a bit).

2. Put the broom down! Put the rag down! Pick up your dust pan!

3. Run the dust pan across the floor to "herd" the rice all together.

4. Put your dust pan right against the pile of herded rice, and use your broom to hold the rice in place while you scoop it with the dust pan.

5. Dump in garbage!


As long as you keep the dust pan right against the floor, you will have no more squished rice on the floor! And before you give me any credit, it was my husband who figured this out!

Menu Plan Monday - July 2 - 6

Our menu's are still a bit on the loose side here as we settle in, and eat the leftovers from Saturday's party, but we are getting more on track!

Monday - Taco Pie
Tuesday - Meatball subs and veggies
Wednesday - BBQ Steak, sweet potatoes, carrots, salad
Thursday - Enchilada meatballs and rice
Friday - Lazy Lasagna

This is also the week we restock the freezer so that it is in good shape, so we are doing a big shop on Thursday and then cooking on Friday. Of course, this is after doing a bunch of baking on Monday and Tuesday and then organizing the fridge freezer and the upright freezer.

We will be rewarding ourselves by going to the outlet mall on Saturday for my MIL to shop for fun, and me to get boring stuff we need at great prices.

We will also be rewarding ourselves for the gardening we have to do, and for washing the carpets which MUST be done before my MIL leaves on the 14th!

Fabulous Stuff Part 2

I know, I almost NEVER blog on the weekend, it has to be something really phenomenal to get me to blog, but I have it! In fact, I have to, because in all my preparations for our party today I completely forgot to tell you about my bloggy friend's bloggiversary! Mrs U. is hosting a drawing today for a wonderful prize package, including the wonderful book Queen of the Castle! Head over here for all the information!

Of course, Mrs. U is worth reading all the time, not just when she is hosting contests that sweet Elizabeth will be the drawing princess for! (I wonder what I can bribe Miss. E with to pick my name???)

FIF - Famous Mushrooms

Famous Mushrooms

This is the mushroom recipe that was the hit of every pot luck at the company I worked for when I first moved to the US from Canada. It is also the company that cemented in my mind that all I really wanted to do was stay home and take care of my family.

These mushrooms were always gone very early in the potluck, so if you wanted any you had to be there early! I shared the story here about how I found the recipe while putting cookbooks away.

So here is the extremely complicated recipe! :-)

Famous Mushrooms

4-5 packages of whole button mushrooms, cleaned (the white ones in the blue tray)
2 sticks of margarine
2 envelopes Hidden Valley Ranch dressing mix.

Add all ingredients together in a Crock Pot. Turn on low for about 3 hours, stirring every now and then. Mushrooms will shrink and get nice and juicy.

Serve and enjoy!


See, I told you it was a very difficult recipe! I will be making it Saturday for our Housewarming/2nd Birthday Party. Complete menu is here.

Frugal Friday - Coke $1 off coupons

This weekend, along with Memorial Day weekend is one of the best grocery shopping weekends of the year. One of the big sales will be on Cokes. In all my fliers you an get 12 packs for $2 each.

If you log on to www.MyCokeRewards.com and register, you can print of $1 off a 12 pack coupons for every 15 points you enter (printable coupons). When I did it just Coke Zero was available.

You can get the points off your boxes and bottles, or enter these promotional codes:

Free 20oz - 100084226454945

Pts - Code
25- 100084148441474
25- 100084056688357
10-100083969675326
10-100082622438433
10- 100082211832616
5 - 100082157763657
3 -100082021821624

I have seen some adds having 5 x 12 packs for $10, so you could be in great shape if your store doubles all coupons, and not just the first one of something.....

Happy 4th of July BBQing!

Head on over to Crystal's for baby cuteness and more great tips!

Housewarming and 2nd Birthday Party Menu

Housewarming and 2nd Birthday Party Menu

Appetizers: to be out when guests arrive
Taco Chili with chips, salsa, sour cream and shredded cheese
Veggies and Dip tray
Fruit tray
Grapes

Afternoon BBQ
Burgers and Hotdogs with all the fixings
Salad
Pasta Salad
Famous Mushrooms

Dessert
Cake
Ice Cream
Ice Cream Cones


We are expecting a total of 13 adults and 8 children at our party. Do you think that this might be a bit over the top?

Fabulous Stuff Pt. 1

I have been finding lots of fabulous drawings lately, and have been very remiss in sharing them with you! It is not like moving exactly two weeks ago today, having my MIL visiting and helping, and having a Housewarming / Happy 2nd Birthday Party on Saturday combined with Mr. Pear having a business trip this week (he got home safely late last night) is any reason to slack in my duty of sharing this great stuff with you! So here is the first one....more to follow...

Life in a Shoe is hosting a giveaway of Vision Forum's exciting new adventure series, Ballantyne books. While I have not read this series, it sounds wonderful from Kim's description, and I am constantly on the lookout for excellent literature!

Head on over to check it out!

WFMW - Sorting Cookbooks

I have a cookbook obsession, I love to cook, I love to try new things, and my MIL would hate me if she did not love me so much because she says that everything new I try works, and looks just like the picture in the cookbook. She exaggerates of course, but you get the idea!

But my cookbook bookshelf is FULL! (The movers even commented on the sheer number of books we own!) I buy them, people give them to me, they are fundraisers....I have a cookbook from the synod of the church denomination I grew up in when they raised money to help others, from the church my husband's aunt and uncle attend, the one my maid of honor attended, the 4-H group I grew up in, along with a whole host of others. The problem is that my bookshelf is overflowing. Alarmingly so. Plus, the file of to be tried recipes from magazines and the web is 3 inches thick. Then there is the stack of Kraft Magazines, Gourmet Magazines, Bon Appetite Magazines, Fine Cooking, and Cooks Illustrated (I just pick up the ones that interest me, usually at Costco where they are discounted).

It is time for some kind of intervention!

So here is my plan.

1. I no longer print out recipes. I can save them as PDF files to my computer. I go through my recipe file once a month or two with the "slash and burn" mentality. If it no longer sounds good, I delete it!

2. Pick one cookbook that really did not work out for me because it really only had a hand full of good recipes, that is a candidate to be passed on or put in storage because it is a great reference book and I cannot quite part with it yet. Once I have picked this cookbook I mark every recipe I want to try and work through it, trying to fit in two or three recipes a week depending on what is on sale and our schedule. If I like the recipe I type it up into the cookbook compilation I have on my computer, if not I move on and do not think about it again.

3. If it is in a magazine or online, I try it, if it is good, it goes into the computer cookbook, if not I just toss it into the recycling.

4. I try to use the slash and burn method to go through magazines and such as well to cut down the leaning tower of potential great recipes.

So far I am making some progress, but there is a long way to go yet....

....And Williams Sonoma Cakes is calling my name.....

So, getting through my "to be tried" pile of recipes and making room for new cookbooks most certainly works for me!

Work of three ladies hands...

So Mr. Pear is in North Carolina. He left Monday morning and will be returning Wednesday night. So that leaves my MIL, Miss Pear and I to our own devices in the house - always a very scary thing....

Our box count is down to three boxes and two mirror packs in the house, about 10 boxes and a crated picture in the garage.

So what is a girl to do with all these boxes and paper? Our trash company has a move in special where they bring you a dumpster so that you may recycle all your moving supplies. Our dumpster was delivered yesterday morning, and by 10AM it was very full. We even resorted to me getting the ladder and climbing in so that I could use my weight to stomp more packing paper in the open crevasses along two sides. My sweet neighbor on one side came out to chat as she was leaving to meet her mom, and did not say anything about the fact that I was indeed standing in a dumpster filled with moving boxes and paper. My other neighbor loaned us his recycling garbage bin for the week so that we could load it up with moving paper. So we are doing well.

Yesterday we also found the mystery missing kitchen box, so I made us a cake and fruit leather.

Today we are off to look for a patio table. We are hoping to have it this week for our party on Saturday...more about that in a later post!

Oh, and the Magnolia tree in the back is now pruned as well, and seeds have been ordered for my veggie garden.

We are definitely not afraid of a little hard work around here!

Ah, progress

One thing I love about our new home is the beautiful magnolia tree in the front yard. Unfortunately it is in dire need of pruning as it is rubbing against the house. I guess I should say it was rubbing against the house as we gave it a good pruning after supper!

We are definitely making progress. We found the missing box of cookbooks, and the missing bathroom box, so that was nice! Miss Pear's room is officially completely unpacked and organized with pictures on the wall! There are no boxes in the kitchen, dining room, or living room, and pictures are going up.

There is still tons to be done, but we are making progress!

Rambling all the way to coffee

I am just waiting for my coffee to be ready this morning. Our start to the morning was not our routine one. I need the car this morning, so we all got up and Miss Pear and I chauffeured Mr. Pear to work this morning. Having only made the trip once, I am very proud to say that I remembered the way there. While this may not seem like a monumental achievement, driving in southern California in a new area is tricky as none of the roads are straight, and none run north to south or east to west, unless it is just briefly. The way I learn my way around is by driving, being a passenger just does not help much, so I anticipate I will be "forced" to do the family driving for a while so I can learn my way around with the help of my navigator and walking map, Mr. Pear. If opposites attract, we are proof, I am geographically challenged, and need to constantly be referring to the map. Mr. Pear is the exact opposite - if he has been there before, even a few years ago and only once, he can get there again, and he looks a the map once, and then just drives there.

The point of that whole paragraph is that we need the car to pick up my MIL at the airport today. I kind of know how to get there as I have driven past it numerous times, but have never actually left the freeway in that area, so after reviewing the map and looking over the directions that Mr. Pear wrote out for me, I think we can do it.

Unpacking is going well. I am only missing a kitchen box, a box of cookbooks, a bathroom box, and a living room box so far. I suspect that they ended up in the garage, so looking in there will happen very shortly. I anticipate that unpacking will go much quicker with the extra set of very helpful hands that is arriving today.

Miss Pear is still under the weather and sneezing big gooey sneezes, and is lethargic in the morning, often just lying down to suck her thumb a little bit and rub her eyes. She finally slept through the night again last night - she has been waking up terribly congested. I am on the mend too, I just cannot seem to shake a very low grade fever that only bothers me when I move around too much - like unpacking 9 boxes of books yesterday.

I have found a few interesting things I had forgotten about as I unpacked boxes. One thing was the employee cookbook from where I once worked. It was assembled for a United Way fund raiser, but unfortunately no one really knew that they were collecting recipes, so it is a rather slim volume, and I did not submit anything, for which I feel very bad, but did not know about it. However, as I flipped through it, I found the famous mushroom recipe! One of the managers brought this to every potluck, and if you wanted any, you had to get there very early! Everyone raved over it! And once I read the recipe I was a little bit annoyed with myself as I should have been able to figure out the THREE ingredients in it! We will be making it for our open house party to celebrate our new house, Miss Pear's birthday, and the Lord's blessings and provision in our lives on June 30. So if it is as good as I remember it, I will post it for you!

One thing about this move, I have lots of material for WFMW, Frugal Fridays, and Kitchen Tip Tuesdays. I basically just use these fun little things so that I remember to share with you all the things that make my life easier in a more spaced out manner with some variety!

We had the ant guy out yesterday to deal with our ant problem - our flower beds around the house were infested, and they were making inroads into the house! We saw immediate improvement, and are thrilled! I have a lot of tips for dealing with ants, after all, I have lived in southern California for 8 years, but these ones were too much for me!

And just out of curiosity, did any one read the Word Studies that I posted last week? There were no comments, so I was not sure, and if nobody liked them, I will not bore you with other stuff like that.

We are home

We are finally in our new home, and we love it!

Last Tuesday we finally closed on our town home.

Wednesday was particularly eventful. We closed on our house, the movers packed us up, and I became an auntie! On Tuesday my sister-in-law (husband's brother and his wife) was taken to the hospital to be induced, after 12 hours nothing had happened, so Wednesday morning she gave birth to their son via C-section. My sweet nephew was 10lbs, 1 oz, and 21 inches of pure cuteness! Everyone is healthy and doing well.

Thursday we were packed up and moved to our new home. It was a very hot and long day. The movers were great. Our new neighbors are great! The house is great. The only thing that is not great was the condition the house was left in. I think the previous owner fired his cleaning crew as soon as we had an agreement and then cleaned nothing...for 4 weeks. I have never seen such filth. We went and bought new toilet seats that day, it was the only way, and I cleaned the bathroom for an hour before we could even shower in it. We have done the initial clean almost everywhere (there is just one bathroom that is still off limits), but I want to get in and do a deep clean everywhere!

Friday we unpacked boxes, got our cable set up so we could have internet to see pictures of our nephew, and had the gas guy come and inspect appliances (he hooked up our gas drier too).

Saturday Miss Pear and I woke up with very bad colds, but we persisted and unpacked more boxes - I finally found our plates and glasses that afternoon. Friends of ours came up to bring us stuff the movers would not pack, and to take us out for supper as a housewarming gift! It was very sweet!

Sunday was spent feeling the ick and unpacking boxes. We have a list of 3 churches in the are to check out, but were too sick to leave the house.

Monday was great - I was sick as all get out, and nothing got done, but we got to see Mr. Pear before he left for work, and his commute was only 10 minutes each way!

Today we are still feeling the ick, but I am very thankful that I can breath again (something I have not been able to do for 2 days even with taking Sudafed!). I spot cleaned the carpet in the living room (but need to really clean the carpets), and we plan on attacking Miss Pear's closet after nap time.

Fortunately my MIL is coming down on Thursday to help, so we will be cleaning, unpacking, organizing, and washing carpets like women possessed! We also plan on painting two bathrooms just so they finally feel clean, even thought they already are.

So basically, I just popped in to say we are in our new home, and surrounded by boxes (but are making progress!), and it is wonderful....