…Christmas! We’ve got our little tree up and our cards ready to get out, and I’ve got a couple of projects up my sleeve! I’m going to attempt to make us these Christmas stockings from the fabric in the photo, and I have big plans to make fun cookies this year too. I usually feel like I don’t get into the Christmas spirit until the day AFTER Christmas, so I’m trying to get started early this year!
Hey everybody! I’m Andy and Laura’s new toothbrush holder. Laura broke the old one trying to clean it too vigorously. Oops! I came from Target and only cost $4.99. Laura liked me because I have a slot for the toothpaste….PLUS I have this adorable smiley looking face. How could she resist?!
I’ve had two problems lately that ended up solving each other! For one thing, I subscribed to the local paper via a Groupon not long ago, so we now get the Thursday and Sunday papers. (Don’t ask me why Thursday, but Sunday is for the coupons!) We can recycle the paper itself (which we honestly rarely read), but I’ve been wondering what to do with the bags. If we had a pet, they’d be perfect as pooper scooper bags….but we don’t, so I was back at square one. The second problem is that A. doesn’t like taking his lunch in an actual lunch box, preferring to just slip it in the outer pocket of his computer bag instead. I can see his point, I guess (not wanting to have to carry another bag), but when I’ve made delicious soup and want to send leftovers to work with him for lunch, I can’t! I’m too nervous that the container would leak and ruin his laptop (or even just the bag).
Enter: the newspaper bags!
I realized that, while the containers I typically use are a little too big for a ziploc bag (unless I used a gallon-size freezer bag, which seems like a waste), they slide perfectly into one of the newspaper bags, which I can then knot to trap in any rogue liquid that spills.
Even if the bag gets thrown away immediately after A. eats his soup, at least it’s lived a second life! And plus, if we remember to do it, I think it can probably be recycled at the grocery store along with plastic grocery bags and ziploc bags. So, two dilemmas solved!
Have you had any creative solutions to a nagging problem lately? What do you do with old plastic bags?
My parents made the tough decision to have this little guy put to sleep:
This is Tiger. He lived a good long life. We got him when I was in 1st or 2nd grade, which means he lived well into his teens. We lost him once, and found him again because we saw signs up in our neighborhood that someone had taken in a lost cat. It was raining when we saw the signs, so my mom drove around until she found one on which the phone number hadn’t washed away. It turns out he had been hit by a car, and the people who found him had taken him to the emergency vet and seen him through surgery for a spinal injury. The kindness of strangers is amazing sometimes!
However, whether it was due to the accident or not, the state of semi-confusion you see on Tiger’s face in this picture was typical. He was quite the fraidy cat….a nervous nelly, and all that. He never jumped very well after his accident, and he eventually developed arthritis in his hind legs. He also had a tumor growing on his chest that was the ultimate reason my parents made their decision.
Tiger was the only fluffy cat we ever had and probably the cutest! When he was a kitten he had a fascination with the Christmas tree and loved to sleep under it. Unfortunately most of the adorable pictures of him are in print at my parents’ house, so I only have these few to post.
Tiger wasn’t my best friend cat growing up, but in the past few years he seems to have grown quite attached from me when I was home from school.
(This was not staged!)
It’s always sad when a pet has to go, but his life had quickly become miserable, and he’s free of that now. My parents now have only one cat, which is the fewest they’ve had certainly in my lifetime and maybe ever! For all his quirks, Tiger will definitely be missed.
Well, the Operation Christmas Child boxes got packed up this past Sunday and are ready to be delivered! I have to figure out where exactly I am taking them (whether it will be my church or the local drop-off site), but national collection week is through Monday, so I’ll take care of it this weekend. In fact, if you haven’t made any boxes yet, you could still get involved and shop for one this weekend! However, I’m a firm believer now in making more than one. I think it’s really cost effective because you can buy multi-packs of things, which often have a much lower unit price than just buying a single item.
Here’s everything that went into the boxes, laid out ready to be packed:
The total cost came to $65.98, which works out to $10.99 per box. (Really it’s 10.996…so it would round up to 11, but it sounds crazy to say a decimal divided by 6 is a whole number. And plus, 10.99 sounds sooo much cheaper.) We had a budget of $60.00, so we went a little bit over. I must not have recorded something in a timely manner, because when we bought the last postcards I thought we were about $2 under. But, we still did pretty well.
The 3 boy boxes contained:
The girl boxes contained the same, except substitute socks for the baseball cap and a jump rope for the Slinky.
Here they are all packed up and ready to go! I had a lot of fun filling these with my dad up on the assembly line of my dining room table. Samaritan’s Purse asks for a $7 donation per box to cover postage and various other things. Normally I just stick a check in one of the boxes, but this year I donated online to take advantage of their “track your box feature!” It will be neat to see what part of the world my boxes make it to…keep an eye out for a post telling you all about it.
I think they ended up filled to a really good extent. They’re not jam-packed, but the contents definitely look substantial.
Next year I want to set a goal of maybe doing 10 boxes for around the same amount of money! I think if I catch back-to-school sales and plan farther ahead with coupons for the hygiene items I can definitely do it. I’m not being cheap; I want to provide quality items for these kids. But if I’m able to shop sales, use coupons, and economize, then I can stretch my dollar to bless even more children at Christmas. And that’s a wonderful thing.
