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May, 2012

  1. Make It Your Own!

    May 31, 2012 by admin

    One of our favorite, simple tricks to save money is buying plain frozen cheese pizzas and dressing them up at home.  We all have nights where we don’t feel like cooking.  But we can’t afford to get a pizza delivered very often. The average delivered pizza costs around $15 where as a store purchased frozen pizza can be as little as $3.  Once home, just saute some onions, or whatever you like to top a pizza, and spread it out over the frozen pie before you toss it in the oven.

    We like to use onions, pepperoncini, green olives, or Wickles (http://www.simsfoods.com/products/relish).

    Choose your own toppings and follow your tastes to see what you can come up with.  Guaranteed that in less than 30 minutes (average pizza delivery time!) you will be enjoying your own deluxe-topped frozen pizza!

    Pizza!

    Frozen pizza with Onions, pepperoncini, fake bacon and garlic

     

    Category Groceries & Meal Planning | Tags: , | 2 Comments

  2. Don’t Forget Your Public Library!

    May 30, 2012 by admin

    When is the last time you walked through the doors of your public library?  Do you have a library card?  In this digital age, we wouldn’t be surprised if you didn’t even know where your public library is located.  But your local library still exists and is adapting to the new-media world of the twenty-first century.

    The Libe

    We suggest that you strongly consider locating your library and then sign up for a card.   The library is a FREE source for books, magazines, music cd’s, books on disc/tape, movies on disc/tape, and limited internet usage.  Most libraries offer a free story hour for kids as well as numerous resources/activities/classes for adults and children.

    Our library has a small play area in the children’s section. The toys are worn but that is ok.  It is a treat for Bluey to visit and play while intermittently searching for a book or a movie to take home.  And the Plum loves searching independently for books, kid’s magazines, and movies.

    We (the adults) love grabbing a handful of cd’s to borrow and burn into mp3s to expand our music collection.  And since our library is doing its best to keep up with the digital age- we also reserve recent releases online to pick up at our local branch when they’re available.

    And let us not forget the books!  Is your child interested in a popular series during a time when you don’t have the funds to buy it?  Check it out at the Library!

    We encourage you to give your public library a much deserved first or second glance.  After all- it is chock full of freebies!  And it is a much better way to spend a rainy afternoon as a family than plunked down in front of the TV or computer.

    Category Thrifty Tips | Tags: ,, | 1 Comment

  3. How to Turn Your Kids Into Great Travelers: Let the Music Play

    May 29, 2012 by admin

    Let the Music playOur family loves music.  Our computer iTunes plays in the background at home throughout the day.  Both of our kids and Dad strum the guitar almost daily.  And no car trip is begun without our iPod at the ready.

    Music in the car helps the time go by happily. Music on the iPod means no commercials, no fading stations, and no repeats.  We love rockin’ out.

    Even though everyone in the family appreciates a wide variety of music, we all have our favorites.  Our iPod contains a play list for Plum and Bluey, as well as organized lists for us adult folk.

    We usually default to a random mix and just let the music play.  But it doesn’t take long for someone to shout out a desire for a specific play list or song.  It is a great thing to be able to lift a grumpy kiddo’s mood simply by blasting “Party in the USA,” and breaking out our own unique family choreography! Or should that be Car-eography? ;p

    We sometimes use the Ipod’s capacity to make a custom list for a day while we’re on-the-go.  We start the trip going through the car’s passengers, asking each person to name a song for the list.  Adults can help young ones remember their favorites.  When we feel we have enough selections, we let the new song list play on random.  Everyone gets to hear her/his favorites and perhaps finds a new favorite from someone else’s choice.

    Category Road Trippin' | Tags: ,, | 3 Comments

  4. We Eat the Food in the House

    May 28, 2012 by admin

    Yum!If you want your family to eat healthy, you have to buy healthy food.  It seems simple enough.  Yet we are often amazed at the conversations we have with parents concerning their family’s diet.  A parent will bemoan that all their child will eat for breakfast is Pop Tarts.  Or that their child will snack on Ding Dongs and Doritos all day long and then refuse to eat dinner.

    If you don’t buy junk food, your kid won’t have junk to eat.  And no!  It isn’t better for them to have a Ding Dong rather than nothing at all; your child won’t starve.  If you stock your house with a range of healthy options, eventually your children will gravitate towards those choices.  Our little one loves snacking on cashews and almonds.  And our oldest loves yoghurt and fruit.  Now we aren’t suggesting that you have a treat free household.  Everyone likes a little sweet nibble every now and then!  But choose wisely.  For instance, Breyer’s ice cream has a short list of natural ingredients.  Or find the dye free gummy bears at your local natural food store.  And make these sweet treats the exception to the supply of food in your home rather than the majority.

    Category Parenting | Tags: , | Comments Off on We Eat the Food in the House

  5. Chop & Save

    May 27, 2012 by admin

    chopped vegYou can easily save money whenever and wherever you shop for groceries by following this simple adage:  you do the work and you save the cash.

    Veggies

    When buying mushrooms, why pay an extra 30 cents for an 8oz. package because some machine pre-sliced the product? You can peel, slice, and dice your own veggies quickly and easily. It takes about a minute to slice 8oz. of mushrooms.  An additional bonus is that whole veggies stay fresh longer than those handled, pre-sliced, and over priced vegetables.

    Beans

    Boil your own beans.  Dried beans are about $1.25 a pound vs. canned beans which are about 90 cents per can.  But each pound of dried beans makes 4 or more equivalent servings of canned beans.  This fact equates to a HUGE savings for minimal effort.  It doesn’t take long at all to boil beans.  It is as easy as boiling water!  Cooked beans last for about 1 week in your fridge and for up to 3 months stored properly in your freezer.

    Juice

    Make your own juice from frozen concentrate.  It costs over three times as much to pay for juice in the bottle vs. frozen concentrate.  You are paying close to $4 or more per gallon for the factory addition of WATER.  And make no mistake: your prepared juice is just as good as the ready to go bottled variety.   They make the juice in the bottle the same way.  The company adds water to concentrate at their facilities.  So why not do it yourself and save some serious money?  Plus, if you have concerns about sugar intake or just want to stretch your juice further, you can add more water than recommended and the juice still tastes great.  Our kids never noticed when we switched to frozen concentrate and we always significantly dilute the juice with no complaints!

    Cheese

    Shred and slice your own cheese.  Blocks of cheese typically average half the cost of the pre-shredded varieties.  For our family of four, it takes less than a minute to shred all the cheese we need for a meal, be it for lasagna, burritos, or anything else.  It’s rarely worth it to buy pre-shredded cheese.

    Tip:  Remember to watch store sales for the rare exceptions! Every once in a while shredded cheese goes on a terrific sale- like around Super Bowl Sunday.  Always keep an eye on prices as you go through the grocery store.

    When you do the work, which only takes a minute, you’ll see your grocery bill go down.  Saving 30 cents here, 50 cents there, or a few bucks when it comes to cheese—it all adds up.  You can even spot savings on items like olives and pickles (Whole vs. Sliced), or garlic (crushed vs. chopped by you).

    Category Groceries & Meal Planning | Tags: | Comments Off on Chop & Save

  6. Taking the Long Way

    May 26, 2012 by admin

    Dr. Evermor's LabWe usually take back-roads in at least one direction on our jaunts.  Who knows what you’ll see?  Llamas?  Giant concrete fish?  Bald eagles in flight?  We’ve seen this and more!  Each oddity or surprise makes a trip a memory.  Our world is filled with things wondrous and bizarre.  If you take the Interstate your whole life, you miss most of the quirks that make life fun.

    We made a brief stop at Dr.Evermor‘s on the way home from a totally different adventure. What will we find next?

    Be on the lookout for posts tagged ‘Backroad Bonus’ and ‘Alternate Route.’  We’ll let you in on some of the great finds we have encountered while plying the highways and bi-ways of America.

    Category Road Trippin' | Tags: | 2 Comments

  7. Get me to the church on time!

    May 25, 2012 by admin

    Planning a good Rummaging trip:

    If you want the good stuff, get out there early!  We have never experienced a sale that opens later than 10am on a Saturday – and that is considered a very late start (we hit these late ones on our way home!) You have to plan for starts as early as 7:00am.  We prepare the night ahead for the greatest success.

    We start at craigslist to find sales that look good to us by searching in our city for “rummage sale” and “garage sale.”   We then use googlemaps (yahoo maps, and mapquest work too!) to coordinate our entire route of sale hopping so there is no confusion about where to head next.  We can also use our route to plan alternate stops—if things start going downhill, we can go get a breakfast snack, walk through a good park, or stop at Target.

    We make sure we have cash on hand (including $1 bills) as most sales won’t accept checks or credit cards.  Cash makes it easier to haggle, too.  It’s hard to convince someone to sell you their $5 bookshelf for $3 when you are standing there with a fiver in your hand.

    It is our experience that church rummage sales are notorious for advertising a specific start time for the sale but actually opening their doors at least ½ hour ahead of time.  Garage sales and flea markets seem to react the least kindly to early arrivals.  Many ads for garage sales specify “No Early Birds!”  That said, we highly recommend that you arrive right on time (doors open) for the best selections.  We’ve seen rummage sales with only bits and pieces remaining a ½ hour after the start of the sale.

    The flip side is that you can also plan to arrive late for the best prices.  People are most willing to negotiate (we’ll discuss pricing and haggling in a later post) as the sale is winding down.  And the ‘Free” box tends to grow as the sale winds down.  We think of Grandma, who drove a hard bargain at a garage sale:  “If you won’t meet my price, you can just carry that back to your basement.”

    But remember that not everything is a bargain.  Even things in the Free Box aren’t worth it if those items just add to your junk pile.

    Category Garage/ Rummage/ Book Sales | Tags: , | Comments Off on Get me to the church on time!

  8. How to Turn Your Kids Into Great Travelers: The Log Book

    May 23, 2012 by admin

     

    How do we reinforce the idea that life is an adventure?  We keep an Adventure Log!

    On the way home from our jaunts, the parent in the passenger seat pulls out the now beat-up journal tucked in the door and makes notes about the day’s adventure: where we went, who attended, and most importantly the Highlights.

    Highlights allow everyone to offer up their favorite moments from the trip.  There is no limit to how many highlights you can list.  There are no rules about it at all.  Everyone’s highlights get jotted down, whether that’s a sight from the road, what we had for lunch, or a funny moment.  It all gets recorded in the log.  Parents can help remind younger kids about what we saw and what they appeared to like.

    The log enforces the value we get from our trips.  And it allows everyone to find their own special memories from each trip.  We all take something different away from each adventure, but the Family Log binds all the memories into a Family Memory.

    On long trips, we can read about our adventures from times past and remind ourselves of all the fun we’ve had.

    Category Road Trippin' | Tags: | 2 Comments

  9. Take to the Field: Field Museum, Chicago

    May 22, 2012 by admin

    We looped a pickup at Union Station in Chicago into a trip to the Field Museum.  It is a great museum and worth the trip—but plan well!

    Admission to the Field Museum is $15 for adults and $10 for kids 3 and up.   This means our family would pay $50 to get in for the day.  Yikes!

    But this didn’t bother us because our admission was free using our Milwaukee Public Museum (MPM) Membership.  It cost us $75 to get an annual family membership at the MPM.  We just saved 2/3 of the cost of our membership on one visit to the Field.  Did we mention that a Membership is worth it (see Moohlah Tips)?

    Parking was a bit of a guessing game for us.  We haven’t been to the Field often, so following all the signs wasn’t always the easiest.  But with patience we got onto the right access road and up to the parking level.   Here we were flummoxed for a bit when it seemed like there wasn’t any parking left.  Then we took a chance and followed another car that seemed to be heading into a different section that wasn’t obviously related to the Field Museum.  The section was empty.  It was legal.  We were parked!  A few minutes later, we were climbing the marble steps to the Field.  Parking is a steep fee:  $19 the first 4 hours and $22 for up to 12 hours.  We are not aware of any alternative if you drive into town as there didn’t appear to be the option for street parking near the museum.

    Knowing how expensive museum meals tend to be, we packed a picnic basket.  We left our cooler in the car and when we were ready for lunch, Daddy-O ran out to the car and used his stamped hand to get back in—Easy Cheesy!  We ate in the designated basement food area and paused for a minute for Daddy-O to run the picnic stuff back to car before resuming our tour.  There are plenty of cafeteria style tables in the basement level for your use.  If you choose to purchase museum food, there is a McDonalds in the basement along with plenty of snack machines.  The main level has a Museum café.

    The Field is Huge.  We can’t even imagine adults without kids seeing it all in one day.  We highly recommend picking a few choice sections and limiting your visit to these areas.  Save the rest of the Museum for your next trip out.  There are a lot of stairs at the Field and elevators are not easy to find.  As we watched parents hauling strollers up the stone stairwells, we were very glad that we no longer had children that young.

    Overall, we don’t recommend the Field for kids under 5 years of age.  In addition to the stroller troubles, the exhibits are really geared toward older kids.  Our 3 year old had fun but we could tell he experienced it much differently than visits to other museums.  He was very easily distracted and just cruised by exhibit after exhibit.  At our favorite MPM, he stops, observes, engages, and lingers.  The Field was too much for him.

    Although we appreciate the efforts of the Field to update displays and to try to remain ‘current’, we found they went overboard with the use of video terminals.  We were repeatedly dragging our youngest away from the video screens and struggling to get him to look at the actual dinosaur bones that were our focus.  In the Field’s effort to be ‘modern,’ they actually decreased the interactivity with the video displays.

    There are at least four gift shops in the Field.  We recommend picking one that looks good and just doing your shopping there.  Or you could spend all day following your kids from one shop to the next.

    We loved the Field and we look forward to going back!

    Category Jaunts | Tags: , | Comments Off on Take to the Field: Field Museum, Chicago

  10. An Incremental Approach is OK

    May 21, 2012 by admin


    We have spent nearly two years trying to rid our kitchen/home of plastic containers.  BPA freaks us out and our stash of older plastic has an unknown BPA content.  So we made the decision to chuck all it.  Plus we like the old-school charm of glass and stainless steel.

    But we can’t do it all at once because we lack the hundreds of dollars to go out and buy new containers for left-overs and lunches, storage for freezer goods, and such.  Rather than give up on it, we’ve had to do it a bit at a time.

    It takes a while.  We’re trying not to repeat past mistakes, so each piece requires research.   This process is mixed in with our efforts to have a home free of preservatives and an economical kitchen.  Also, each item removed from our shopping list requires new research into recipes and safe sources for alternatives.  Now we make our own refried beans from dried beans and our own marinara sauce from fresh tomatoes.  These home-made items require their own storage solutions.  As we complete the Lunch Container part of the program and the meal Left-Over Containers for the fridge, we’re moving into Freezer Storage.  Home Canning looms on the horizon.

    Rather than give up at the price tag of all these bits, we have set ourselves on a steady path to have each purchase of a BPA-free alternative count as a step in the right direction.  We are steadily removing the plastic from our lives.

    We have purged three quarters of the plastic from our home.  We feel good about this and don’t let the other few pieces that remain get us down.  We know their time to depart is coming.

    Category Rambler Ramblings | Tags: , | 6 Comments

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