"Thinking Ahead Thursday"

Welcome to the second installment of our “Thinking Ahead Thursday” series on “Christmas in July”! I’ve been sharing some of my tips to get organized and plan ahead for the Christmas holiday season. It’s such a busy time of year that, by planning ahead, we can save ourselves some time and be able to spend more time with our families and loved ones this holiday season!

If you joined us last week, I talked about the gift list and crafts calendar. Today, we’re going to do some more list making, shopping, and other preparations for the holiday season. By strategizing early, we can get many of our chores done in October and November, right before the Christmas season really kicks into high gear!

Make your list and check it twice (a month, that is). Check your gift list and crafts calendar twice a month in order to check your progress. This will help keep your gift buying and making organized and hopefully help keep you sane! You will want to include any birthdays, anniversaries, and other occasions that are before Christmas as well…this will keep you from forgetting someone’s birthday because you were totally focused on Christmas!

List all the rooms you decorate during the holiday season. If you’re super-organized, make a list of all the chores you will need to do to prepare each room for guests and decorations. (At the beginning of the holiday season, our cleaning and organizing is very similar to spring cleaning!) Let’s use our kitchen as an example.

Late October / Early November:

• Clean out and organize kitchen cabinets.
• Box up food we won’t be using for Second Harvest Food Bank.
• Wipe down & clean kitchen cabinets.
• Clean out & organize refrigerator.
• Clean out & organize freezer.

Mid-November:

• Unpack Christmas dishes & glasses.
• Wash Christmas dishes & mugs in dishwasher.
• Take everyday plates & mugs out of the cabinets.
• Pack everyday plates & mugs in boxes & store in garage.
• Put clean Christmas dishes & mugs in the cabinets.
• Clean oven.
• Wipe down kitchen countertops.
• Sweep & mop kitchen.

List any special decorations /projects you do during the holiday season. I have a Christmas village, but because we’ve travelled over Christmas the past few years, I haven’t gotten it out in three or four years. I’ve added to my village, so there are miscellaneous pieces in different Christmas boxes, but I haven’t actually set up the village. In October, I’ll be going through all our Christmas boxes in the garage, and hunting out my village pieces. I’ll gather them in one place and take stock of what I have. I’m even going to try to make a master list of the pieces I have in my village. Who knows? If I feel really spunky, I might draw a sketch of how I’m going to lay everything out!

There’s so much you can think about and do now to help you prepare for Christmas! If we keep at it and “think ahead” now, we’ll have much more time to spend with our families this holiday season! What are some things you do in October and November to ready for the holiday season?Please join me again next week, as I share my checklists for our home, and we talk about how we can start preparing in advance for our Christmas menus!

Works for Me Wednesday: Repurposing Link Round-up!

I hope you’ve joined us the past few weeks for our “Repurposing” series as a part of “Works for me Wednesday”. If you’re new to the series, please feel free to revisit our previous articles on repurposing bags, boxes, baskets, and bottles. Please join me today as we celebrate repurposing with a link love fest!

• Deputy HeadMistress at Frugal Hacks wrote a great article on “The Lowly Envelope”! I can’t wait to start trying some of these great tips!


• TipNut.com is a great resource of all kinds of repurposing and recycling projects! Here’s an article on 25 Things to Do with Old Jeans. Be sure to check out their section on Green Living and a special section within their crafts all about Repurposing. This article on Household Tips also has some great ideas for repurposing!


• I found this great article on a Magazine Bowl through TipNut.com! Be sure to check out Patricia’s site, A Little Hut and all her recycling projects!


• Lifehacker did a special round-up on Repurposing…make sure to check it out!


• Rachel Ray has highlighted repurposing in several segments on her show. This segment shows you how to repurpose clothes! Last week, I saw a rerun with the Threadbangers! Rachel has several clips with the Threadbangers on her site, and you can also visit their site directly. If you’re a visual learner, you’ll want to check out their videos on their site.


• I think one of the greatest ways to find things to repurpose or recycle is Freecycle. Although this falls a little more into the recycling category, you might find something you can repurpose!


• If you’re thinking about Christmas presents, why not repurpose an outgrown sweatshirt into a pair of mittens? This site from HGTV.com shows you how!

What are your favorite sites to learn about repurposing? Have you repurposed any items that you would like to share? Please post a link below!

Tackle it Tuesday: Preparing for the Big Yard Sale!

We’re having a yard sale this Thursday and Friday! It’s been two months in coming, so you would think I would be ready, wouldn’t you? So today’s “Tackle it Tuesday” is a list of things to do to prepare for our yard sale. I’ll edit this post later and cross things out as I get the list whittled down.

• Get all items for the yard sale gathered into the living room. (Yikes! I know this will be a mess!)
• Sort items by “department” (kitchen, household, toys, clothes, etc.)
• Price items.
• Put priced items back in garage.
• Make signs to post with directions.

This weekend, I’ll write a full report about how our yard sale goes! My goal is to have a significant amount to pay on my credit card! Look forward for that report this weekend!

10 Least Favorite Celebrities

I'm trying something new today! I've joined the 10 on Tuesday list! So every Tuesday, I'll be bringing you two blog entries, my regular "Tackle it Tuesday" and a "10 on Tuesday" themed list. Today's theme is "10 Least Favorite Celebrities". I'm not sure I can think of 10, but I'll give it my best shot!

1. Ann Coulter--I just don't think you should say such nasty things about people. If she was three, she would get a major time out!
2. Denise Richards--Somehow, I just really feel sorry for Charlie Sheen. I've seen interviews about her cursing around her children...not good, not good at all!
3. Michael Savage--If you've seen the news, Michael Savage said on his radio show that kids with autism are "brats" who don't have fathers around to tell them to "sit up and stop being an idiot." As the foster sister of a child with autism, I would really like to tell him a head full! I would love for him to be around when my sister's having a meltdown.
4. Don Imus--While we're on the topic of radio hosts, let me add Don Imus to this list. What he said about the Rutgers women's basketball team was atrocious! How do people expect us to reach healing in this country if people like Imus continue to spout bigotry?
5. Eddie Murphy--What he did to his then wife and then denying that Mel B.'s child was his...grr! I don't care if he is Donkey in the Shrek movies, be a man and accept responsibility for your actions!
6. Dog the Bounty Hunter--I just don't like him, and I can't understand why A&E would give him a show.
7. Perez Hilton--I used to read his site all the time, but he's just so mean! When he started attacking John Mayer, I stopped reading his site. Perez is crass and rude, definitely someone I would not want to be around.

That's all I can think of at the moment! I almost feel guilty confessing to my "10 least favorite celebrities". What celebrities really irritate you?

Trusted Tours and Attractions: Saving Money & Having Fun!

Ahh…August is nearing and school supplies are on sale everywhere. It starts to make me think about that annual essay, “What I Did on My Summer Vacation”. What has been one of your best summer vacations? This year, I had the opportunity to go to Atlanta with a group from my alma mater and visit the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial, the King Center, and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. It was an amazing trip!

My family wants to go back to Atlanta with me sometime, so I’ve been looking for us to get a good tour of Atlanta. I found a site about a company called Trusted Tours & Attractions. They cover a lot of cities including Atlanta, Boston, Las Vegas, Memphis, Miami, New Orleans, and Philadelphia, all places I want to go. I checked out their things to do in Atlanta. They’re running some great specials right now, including a sale on the Atlanta City Pass. Although it’s not on sale, I was excited to see the Segway tour of Atlanta…I think that sounds like a lot of fun! They have a lot of online travel guides, and I also spent some time checking out their things to do in Boston (as an early American historian, I’m so anxious to go there!). And of course, someday, I’d love to go back to the Kennedy Space Center!

So are you planning your next vacation? Looking for ideas on what to do? Sign up for the Trusted Travels eNewsletter and you can enter to win a $150 iTunes gift card! I’m definitely signing up…the chance to win a free iTunes gift card and travel ideas? I’m so there!

Update

In my all utter goofiness, I meant to schedule Monday's posts to post on Monday. But I hit "Publish Post" before thinking to click "Post Options", so I apologize that Monday's posts are a day early! You can wait and read them on Monday if you want to!

In a couple of general Frugal Bookworm bloggy updates, let me first thank those of you who voted in our poll! I love you! After our "Repurposing" series concludes on Wednesday with a link round-up of my favorite "Repurposing" links, next week, I will start a new "Works for me Wednesday" series on "Home Remedies". I'm going to be doing some research and sharing some of our family's tips for home remedies for colds & the flu, headaches / aches & pains, stomach problems, and children's illnesses.

I'd also like to ask you to please consider visiting some of my commission buddies...Vista Print, Trend Micro, and Coupons.com! They're over in the sidebar, and you can get some great deals through these online sites!

Thanks for being a reader at the Frugal Bookworm! I love writing for you!

Work at Home Daughters: Part III, Being True to Yourself & Pursuing Happiness

Welcome to another edition of “Work at Home Daughters”! This series is mirroring Crystal’s (of Money Saving Mom) series on Work at Home Moms. If you’ve joined us for this series so far, in the first week, I talked about my own situation, and last week, we talked about how stay-at-home-daughters can “work” at home to help their families. I hope that you’re also closely following Crystal’s series, as she has examined some important lessons including that work at home is “work”, prioritization and organization, setting up a budget, and examining your “passions, skills, and gifts.” This week I want to highlight this last topic—looking at what you love, what you’re good at, and what talents God gave you.

Please do make sure that you read Crystal’s article for this past week…spending some time in prayer (I believe this should be your first step), being honest with yourself, and making a list of your passions, talents, and gifts—these are avenues I would encourage you to pursue. Like Crystal, I encourage you to ask yourself one important question: what are your dreams? It’s taken me a long time to get to this point. I’ve asked myself for over a year, what do I want to do? That seems like such a simple question, but I’ve often struggled with an “approval addiction.” In the last ten years, I’ve spent too much time trying to do what I thought everyone else expected of me and too little time doing what makes me happy. Mistake! If you’re a young woman, I would encourage you to get this valuable lesson through to yourself now…do what makes you happy. Let your goals reflect the truth of your identity, not what everyone else expects you to do or thinks you should do. If I had done that, I would be a highly ambitious lawyer or slaving away to get my Ph.D. in history.

When you’re true to yourself, and your dreams, then your goals tend to change. As I’ve “grown up” a bit in the past couple of years, I’ve discovered that I don’t have to try to be an overachiever. I just need to do what makes me happy. I love to write, so here I am at the Frugal Bookworm. I’ve always been passionate about history and crafts, so I’m working on a small business which allows me to do both of the things I love. And I love sewing, so eventually, I’m going to have an Etsy account and try to sell some things online and in local craft shows. Doing these things and my “work” at home helping my family is a lot of “work”! But I’m happy! You see the difference is that I’m doing things I love, pursuing interests that make me happy. And that makes all the difference.

What are some of the talents you’ve chosen to pursue as a Work-at-Home Mom or a Stay-at-Home Daughter? Please share your journey and your comments below. Stay tuned next week for part IV of our “Work at Home Daughters” series, as I talk about how we can reconcile the “work” we do for our families and the “work” we do to earn money.