I'm Baackk! ;-)

Whew that was a whirlwind of excitement! We spent some time with my family over the Christmas holiday and are trying to get back into our routine. Boy that can be quite exhausting. I am trying to catch up on laundry, get together with family for more Christmas celebrations and ring in the new year. Whew!

Here are a few shots of our wonderful week recently.
Boo Bear shares some of his favorites from Mommy, Daddy and his favorite Uncle:

This is one of my favorite gifts. My lovely mother made this for me:

Checking out what Santa brought:

I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that you have a wonderful and happy New Year! Be Blessed!

What was your favorite time during the holiday this year?

Friday Finals... Blog Hop Fun

We took a break from school this week and have really enjoyed it. So I thought we would link up to some wonderful blogs this weekend! Check them out and find some more wonderful blogs to link up with. Happy Blogging!







Do you have a favorite blog hop you like? Let me know! I love finding new blogs to read and join with. If you are stopping by from a hop let me know and I do follow back!

Mother's Homeschool Journal #1- First Week

Well this was our first week of homeschool "officially". We are rejoining the Homeschool Mother's Journal back over with Sue at The Homeschool Chick.




In My Life This Week... I started reading the Bible in 90 days plan. I keep seeing this hopping around the blogosphere and just felt the draw to it. It is amazing how God speaks through the Word...

In Our Homeschool This Week... Our curriculum arrived!!! We started doing a few things here and there this week and trying to get on a regular schedule. We worked on many different items and I am so proud to see him developing. Our curriculum is so exciting. More so to me than him I think. We are using the Connections Academy through our public school. Since it is our first year I really felt that this would help me to know which direction to go and help me to figure out how to balance all this together. It is also a great curriculum that we received and I can't wait to dig in!


I am inspired by... All the homeschooling Mama's out there. This week through my Twitter connections I have gotten encouragement and tips that I never even imagined. I thank you all for the support that you give! You guys Rock!!


Places We're Going and People We're Seeing... This week we had to go to Boo Bear's eye doctors appointment. He has Duane's syndrome so we had to do a follow up. We also are going to hang out at the mall. ;)


My favorite thing this week... Has to be getting our curriculum in! :) 


I'm Reading... A couple different books. One for review that I will share later and I am also finishing up a book called Wicked Appetite by Janet Evanovich. Boo Bear and I are reading a few of The Magic Treehouse Series together too.


I'm Praying for... Our Homeschool Journey. I am excited and nervous all at the same time. I feel this is the best place for him and I but I have also had panic this past weekend. Now that we have started it is easing up. God really spoke to me through my bible reading this week. When Sarah laughed because she was told she would bear a son God asked her Is anything impossible with Me? Wow... Talk about Him smacking me in the face. :) LOL I love it when He does that. :o)


A photo of this week...








Friday Finals: Stuff...

It is hot.. just dog gone HOT!! It has been such a miserably hot week here. I know it has been worse in other areas but plhhhh... I am SOO ready for fall .:)LOL

Enough of my whining.. We had a pretty great week over all. Our month is busy this month so we will be busy bees. School starts soon so we are excited about that. I did my orientation for that this week but Boo Bear has his orientation today.  I am excited and nervous. This is going to a lot of work but with God's help we can do this. :) Our books have been shipped as of yesterday so we are really getting pumped!

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! I am not sure what we are going to do. Maybe a trip to the lake.. who knows.. I know one thing.. We will be trying to stay cool. Oh yeah, Tropical Storm Emily may be affecting our weekend.. Hmm. Maybe an inside Candyland type weekend...

Oh and if you can... Stop by and follow my new Facebook Page Our Journey. I would be very appreciative! I will be hosting my first giveaway in September and there are some exciting things to come. I can feel it! Thanks to all and be blessed!!

To Coupon or Not to Coupon: Friday Finals

Okay I have to vent a little. I have been trying to figure out this grocery budget thing since I got married... 7 1/2 years ago...

So I had truly discovered the couponing phenomenon last year sometime. I was hooked immediately. I can get stuff for FREE??? No kidding!!! Why would it ever be free?? LOL I was on again off again with the couponing and recently went through an on again phase. Okay I admit... You can really get some great deals if you are watching the sales and religiously buy your Sunday papers every week. While I did this for a while I just simply got burned out. I noticed that while trying to save money I was spending lots of money on "free" stuff. Yes some of the items were free or had an overage but I did not ever see the type of deals and savings that so many others have been able to find. Our state does not double coupons so $.50 is just $.50 for me. So...

While I do think it is a great idea I just haven't mastered most of it yet. I just get tired honestly of the hours it takes to prepare for a grocery shopping trip. I do so love to save money but don't feel I can devote that much time to it. While I am sure I will go back to couponing soon I just need some down time I guess. I do notice I feel bad for paying prices when I could possibly get it cheaper later on. But then again I look at the sales and don't see things I would use or would need. So it is a catch 22....

Do you have any saving tips you can pass on? Do you coupon or do you just try to get the best deals where you shop? Share your tips and let me know how you keep your grocery budget on budget. Do you even have a budget? I would love to hear how you do it!

Friday Hop- Finding New Friends!

Make some friends this weekend and have a great time finding new blogs to read! Here is where you can find me linked up at:

















Why not hop around this weekend and find some great new friends? I love hopping and discovering all the blogs out there! Have a great weekend!!

Friday Finals/ Some Hopping

Whew! The past two days have FLOWN by! My Boo Bear and I have had a blast the past couple of days getting to play with friends and yesterday seeing friends we haven't seen since they moved away last year. It was such a nice couple of days but we are both tired of going. ;o) We were gone ALL day yesterday and I just did not have that planned when we left at 9 yesterday morning. Sometimes though our plans work out differently and works out great!

Yesterday since we were gone we didn't get to do our homeschooling we had planned. I was okay as I haven't tried to push it on him since he just got out of pre k but he was upset last night at 8:00. So we got out a book for him to practice his handwriting, put our date on the calendar and sang our date songs. That made him feel better. ;o) I am so excited that he is excited and wants to do school stuff. It makes it a lot easier on me ;o)

I am linking up to some great blog hops this weekend. You can hop on over to either one, link up, get some new followers and have fun reading new blogs. Let me know if you are a new follower here and I will follow you back. Thanks for stopping by and hope you have a wonderful hopping weekend!

TGIF!

Yeah! It is Friday! Better yet it is the last Friday of the school year. My son has three more days next week and pre- k is done. Poor little guy is tired of getting up and asked to skip school today. LOL He loves playing but says school is boring. ;o) I think he is as excited to start homeschooling as I am. Course I am trying to get my mind and plans together so it is kind of crazy here and I am glad I have three more days of school.

This morning I printed out our state's guidelines for what the standards are for Kindergartners. I was kind of surprised at the emphasis on certain items. There was one page for math while there were four pages of physical education items. Don't get me wrong, I believe those are important to learn. I just was slightly shocked at the emphasis on some items while others seemed lacking. I guess that is the benefit of homeschooling. :o) My parents are Science and English teachers so I am sure we will have those covered. I am working on getting our curriculum set up for this coming year. Since this is our first year and we are trying to develop this in the budget we are going with online resources and others that have been suggested. I am super excited to be doing the Geography curriculum from Erica over at Confessions of a Homeschooler.  Our reading program this year is a combination of things. One of the main items is You Can Read by Carisa. That with a combination of sight words from Erica and a few online games and items. We will also be getting some of the BOB books to make sure we have easy readers to help him get started.

I am very blessed to have my dad working on my math curriculum. :o) Boo Bear loves math and numbers and science so I am thinking our years will be heavily based on those two right now. Looking forward to all the experiments and lessons we will learn together.

Hope you all have a wonderful Friday and Memorial Day weekend! Be safe and Blessed as you spend it with your family.

Friday Finals:

Well, we didn't get much bargain shopping in this week. ;o) We celebrated a birthday yesterday all day. We had a blast last night at Chuck E Cheese playing with Boo bear and then a nice dinner.

Today I made cupcakes for the party that is tomorrow. We head off to have a blast with my kiddo and his friends. I took the easy way out this year. We will be having the party at a gymnastics place so they take care of everything. {Yeah!! } I am looking forward to it. It has been a long and busy week and we are all ready to have some fun. I have enjoyed my parents being here this week too. Kept us from going insane.

Hope you all have a wonderful week and I will have pictures soon! Be Blessed!

Friday Finals: Teaching About Coupons

Okay, since I am so seriously considering Home schooling Boo Bear now I am looking for lessons everywhere we go. ;o) We do this anyway but even more so now. We went to dinner last night and ran over to the Publix behind the restaurant so we could get a few things. I was also on the look out for some coupon books. Well I made it a game for Boo. He was getting kind of antsy so I showed him a blinkie and told him he had to help me find all those and get the "cash" out of them for the next time we come to the store. In case you hadn't ever thought of it that way think about it. Coupons are basically the manufacturer giving you cash to come by their product. That is pretty awesome when you think about it.

He had a blast going around finding money to come back shopping the next time. He gathered up over $30 worth of coupons from blinkie's alone. I was pretty darn proud of him. He was having a blast and I was teaching him a lesson in being frugal.

I had a great CVS trip this week. I did the deals you can find over at Southern Savers and spent $3.26 for 3 Airwick Motion Freshmatics and 2 cans of Lysol Spray. I also got some great FREE bubble! :o) There are some great freebies coming up this week at CVS and you can still get some of the great ones from this week. Stop by Jenny's site and see how much you can be saving.

Friday Finals

Hi! :o) Well Today has been a pretty productive day. I got 16 different articles done this morning so I was on a high. ;o) I also had some fun time out with the kiddo with his friends then we went on our Publix run.

We ended up with 6 boxes of Mini Wheats, 4 Aunt Jemima frozen pancakes, 2 bags of Beggin Strips for the pups, 2 half gallons of Silk, one bag of meatballs(only thing I didn't have a coupon for) and 4 boxes of value pack Fiber One Bars. Grand Total was: :$29 (and some change) WOW!!! I was super pumped because all this was less than $30. {not much less but still less. LOL}

We have lots going on this weekend. We are going to meet Thomas the Train tomorrow and then my birthday is Sunday. I think I am going to skip this one.... LOL
Hope you all have a great Friday and a great weekend. See you in a few!