A little about me...

Welcome to my blog!  I am so glad you found your way here and that we get to spend some time together.

If you are new here let me tell you a little about myself...

My name is Lindsay and I am a Mom of two kiddos.  I am in the trenches of motherhood and striving to love it rather than complain about it...easier said than done sometimes :)

I am married to my college sweetheart, Nick.  An amazing man, he works really hard to provide for our family so I can live out my dream of being a stay at home mom.

We got married in college.  Three years later we had our first baby and life seemed to take off!  We had our next baby 20 months later and life became even busier.  I have a degree in Corporate Finance which now only comes in handy when balancing our checkbook or moving investments around.

We are a homeschooling family which is super expensive!  If you are a homeschooler than you can agree and if you aren't a homeschooler you may have never thought of that!  While I do it as cheaply as I can, we still have to pay for things that would be free for our kids if they went to a public school.  Because of that I also search for deals and coupons, making me a self proclaimed bargainista :)  I love finding deals and I hate paying full retail for ANYTHING! :)

Above all, I am a Christian who would be so lost without the salvation and grace God has provided me.  God has blessed our family so much and I strive to let everyone know how trusting him transforms our life!

Our life is not perfect.  But it is real.  I try really hard to not portray a life that seems all puppy dogs and butterflies but a true picture, behind the curtain of kids throwing things, a couple learning to parent, and the rawness that is why we all need grace.

I blog about a lot of things but sometimes not very consistently.  I blog about life but my life is not blogging by any means.  I blog to remember things and to share our experiences with others in an effort that we may help someone with what they are going through or planning...you'll see blogs on organizing, couponing, our journey with autism, homeschooling, decorating, vacationing...the works!

As a disclaimer please know that any meany-weeny or malicious comments will not have a welcome spot on my blog.  I know everyone has their own my opinion but this being my blog I get to make sure this blog makes peace, not war.  :)

I hope you enjoy my blog!  So glad you could stop by!  :)

Good Bye 2013 and Good Bye Debt!

Hello there!  Happy day after Christmas!  Or Boxing Day if you are reading this from Great Britain or Canada...does oh Cananda!  pop into anyone else's head when they type Canada?  No? Just me?  Well then, moving on...

I hope you had the most fantabulous Christmas ever!  The kind of Christmas where you feel joy and know how much God loves you by people around your table.  We spent Christmas running around or dragged around and I had the flu so it was fun.  ahem.  

But we felt love, we know we serve a great God and we got so many great gifts!  It was amazing! All kinds of cash and fabulous prizes!!!

We were talking and at first we were going to pool our cash (Nick and I's not the kids) to get a new faucet for the bathroom where we are trying to put a farm sink we've had for eva!

But today we were talking and since we don't have enough cash to get the whole things we'd have to spend more (cause faucets don't come in pieces, y'all).  And truth be told we've been throwing around the whole Dave Ramsey get out of debt concept for a while.  But we just haven't been very active with it.  So after a quickie conference in the kitchen (don't you just love those?) we decided to start our debt-paying snowball with that money.  We also have money in our checking that we were planning on using to pay things down so we'll use that too.  After that on a month to month basis I have no idea what we will do to pay down what we owe.  We don't have huge amounts but enough it would be nice to get it paid and just be done, you know?

I am excited to be doing this and hopefully by writing about it it will keep us a little more nose-to-the-grindstone with this.  Our hope is to stick at this really hard for 2014 and basically be done by the end of the year.  Yeehaw!

I am not sure how gung ho we are getting.  I don't know that we are cancelling cable as we are stuck in a contract, and we are in no means getting rid of our car to get a klunker.  But I do know we are planning on cutting out eating out, extra spending to try to free up some more cash to pay things down!

Can't wait!

Nine Days into December...

Here we are nine days into our "super spectacular Christmas makeover"  and so things are going well!   I must say, the 5 gifts a day thing (which means I'm wrapping 5 gifts a day...I wish I could have 5 gifts a day.  Why isn't that happening?) is going well.  Day 2, I was a gift short having only wrapped 4 so I got to wrap an extra gift the next day, which really was, no big deal.  The thing I like about wrapping 5 presents a day is that the wrapping paper situation is under control.  I mean, seriously.  I have all of my wrapping paper grouped together and when I go to wrap them I only have to grab one roll.  I have also finished off about 3 rolls of wrapping paper which is super helpful.  Usually I am rolling around in all of the wrapping paper rolls and in the process I am losing my tape and scissors and everything else.  Which by the way it is super frustrating, so this way it saves me a lot of headaches.

I also must reiterate how fantastic it is to be semi-organized this time of year because as I can attest to, things come up and when it does it is so nice to have a clear schedule.  Secret:  we are getting the kids Nook tablets for Christmas.  The Nook HD plus to be clear :)  Which this week and next week somehow turned into the "hot item" of Christmas shopping and also was the one thing we had not bought.  So we've been looking everywhere.  Nick was able to find some and buy them from a Target 2 counties and an hour and a half each way away.  Oh joy!  It really wasn't that bad and the kids had fun and I had fun...until Emma puked in the car.  Twice.  See?  I probably would have blown my lid if I was stressed with being behind and needing to shop and clean and everything else that would be over my head.  But since I am keeping everything in check and taking small bites out of my to-do's I am less stressed and able to at a moment's notice go out and help out with the finishing up!  See people?  Being organized works, I tell ya :)

I hope you all are having a great Christmas season.  I feel so blessed to have a warm home, a huge tree, and a happy family to enjoy it all with!  Jesus is the true meaning of our season :)

Cheers!  :)

The most confusing Doctor's Appointment Ever!

Sorry about the blur in this photo...I just love it and it speaks to me for some reason

Today we are leaving the house.  We have a doctor's appointment.  Well, Cal does.  With his developmental pediatrician.  The neat thing about his doctor is that she did her internship with the doctor I had when I was a little girl, so we go way back.

Tomorrow I will leave the house with a little boy with Autism.  He has either PDD-NOS or Aspergers.  I may not return with an Autistic child though.  Because of a DSM-5 change to Autism spectrum conditions, he may no longer be considered Autistic.  

The confusing part comes in that, how amazing would it be that suddenly your son is no longer Autistic?  Same problems though, so with no Autistic diagnosis that means we can't qualify for the Autism school we are on the waiting list for. 

This is a weird feeling.  This feeling of not really knowing how I want him to be diagnosed.  And I know that a diagnosis doesn't really matter...Calvin is Calvin is Calvin.  

Now onto that appointment :)

Christmas Update

 Hello my loves!  I hope you all had a fantastic Thanksgivting celebration!  Ours was fantastic...we laughed and ate lots at the Thanksgiving at my Grandma's house and then we loaded up and traveled to Illinois for another Thanksgiving, this one on Nick's side, where I was able to catch up with one of my very best friends, Lisa.  So.much.fun!!!

Black Friday we always go and find a Christmas tree to chop down.  Here we are with our tree.  I feel like I look huge in this picture but it could be because I remember wearing 3 shirts and a feather vest under my coat.  Yoink.  Look at poor Emma, she can't even put her arms down, ha! Oh well, at least we were warm.

When we got home we went to town decorating the tree.  We got everything on it and looking swell before we crashed into bed!  Saturday we went shopping on our monthly grocery extravaganza and then Sunday we stayed home from church (Cal and I were under the weather) and so we decorated, decorated, decorated.  As I write this it is Sunday afternoon...Nick is watching 'Da Bears and I am typing away during a much needed Pinterest Break :)  Hopefully tomorrow I will be at the place where I can write a post showing you everything I've decorated to my little hearts content...we will see though :)

I thought though that I would give a little update on my previous post about Christmas helps and let you know how I am doing.

*Christmas cards: they all successfully made it into the post office box Wednesday afternoon.  It was a janky looking post office box with all of the stickers and seals peeled off of it so I was a little skeptical as to if it was even in service!  But I heard from a friend that she got our card and so I knew all was well :)  Towards the end of Tuesday I was still addressing them when I hit somewhat of a wall but I just kept going.  I was thinking of how nice it would be to have them all done.  I do have a couple more to do but they are ones where I have to wait to send them due to people moving or I am waiting to hear back for new addresses.

As much of a burden it can be, don't you just love sending out Christmas cards?  There's something so wonderful about it, families growing, moving, changing.  Sending cards to Hawaii, Arizona, Florida, Maryland.  All over and it is so nice to think that Christmas brings us all together in that way :)

*Decorating: It is going pretty well.  I took out the board books and things I really didn't want them playing with and so there was no struggle when I opened the bins.  I am struggling as the weekend ends to get everything decorated.  I know if I don't finish before the week starts then everything will just sit in bins while our weekly busyness just swirls around.

*Making/Taking Food: On Saturday when we went to do our monthly shopping, I looked at everything thinking "cookie day, Christmas meal, ugly sweater party"  If I thought something would be good for one of those events, I scooped it up with the thought that it will just be less I have to go out for later on in the month.  You know, when it's all harry-scary out there with the crowds and the ice and the stress.  Yikes.

So there are my updates.  Hope you all are having a relaxing and productive weekend around your neck of the woods.  I know here I have digested WAY too much green bean casserole and cherry pie.  But oh well, it's the holiday weekend.  Tomorrow it's back to normal around here!

Much love to you and yours!  :)