For example, a baby needs a safe place to sleep. There are many ways to accomplish this, and varying price tags associated with the multiple options. If you are convinced that co – sleeping is safe and is right for your family (it works for us), your bed can be that safe place (be sure to educate yourself about safe co –sleeping) at little or no additional cost. Other options include Moses baskets, bassinets, cribs, and pack and plays to name a few.

You have options for feeding, too. Mom’s milk costs nothing (although if you go back to work you’ll need bottles and a good pump) yet it is just what your baby needs to grow and thrive. Formulas vary in price, but cost does not always indicate quality or whether your baby will tolerate a specific brand well. The same goes for bottles and other feeding supplies – start with just a handful of a few kinds and then see what works best for you. When baby starts to eat solids, you can choose to buy baby foods, make special foods for baby, or feed baby right off your plate (we did).

Clothing is another area where there are many options for every budget. Babies aren’t too tough on clothes (except for certain stains which may render an outfit unusable, but I digress) so buying used is a great option. Often, friends and family are happy to hand items down at no cost. Whatever you do buy, don’t go overboard as tempting as that may be. Your baby could be born too big for some of the newborn items, and babies grow out of each size fairly fast. By the way, babies don’t need shoes until they learn to walk, so save your money for buying a good pair of “first walker” shoes when that time comes.

Sleep, food, and clothing are three basic needs for which parents have many options. What other frugal baby shopping tips do you have?

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Yesterday, I mentioned that I have been reading a great parenting book. “Playful Parenting” by Lawrence J. Cohen has reminded me of how much my boys need me to play with them. They need me to play with them much more often than I have been playing with them. They need me to be involved directly with them much more than they need me to be spending a great deal of time concerning myself with household tasks like dishes, laundry, cooking and cleaning.

Of course, the fact that my sons need me to play with them and focus exclusively on them at multiple times throughout each day does not excuse me from my domestic duties or my work. That said, I can see how focusing more on parenting playfully and immersing myself fully in play time with the boys could lead to a situation where I feel like I have more time to devote to my adult responsibilities instead of less.

You see, over the past couple of days I have noticed that when I stop everything and just play for a while, my sons (the three and a half year old especially) are sometimes content to play on their own for a little bit afterwards. While they are playing independently, I can whip up a simple meal in the kitchen or wash some of the dishes much more easily than I usually can because usually they are both right at my feet trying their best to distract me from the task at hand. I witnessed this phenomenon very clearly a couple of nights ago. Dylan wanted me to play a chase game with him, which I did very enthusiastically for about fifteen or twenty minutes. When I was done playing, I mentioned to him that I needed to go inside for a minute and I would be right back. I went in to the kitchen and left the door open so that I could see the boys as they played in the sandbox, and I put chicken in the oven and sweet potatoes into the microwave for dinner. Nothing special or complicated, but with timers set for the food, I went back outside and sat by the sandbox. I talked with the boys about what they were doing in the sandbox, really noticing their handiwork instead of throwing out a passing “that’s great” as I walked by. Eventually the timers went off and I excused myself to the kitchen again. There was no complaint, and after dinner was on the table I went outside and helped the boys to wrap up their play so that we could have dinner.

As I was putting the boys to bed that night, Dylan mentioned that he had really enjoyed his day because I had, as he put it “played with him all day long”. He then turned to me with a puzzled expression on his face and said “You were playing with us so much, how did dinner get cooked?” That, to me, was a clear indicator that I am on the right track with Playful Parenting. Dylan was so fulfilled by our play time that he enjoyed playing on his own without following me into the kitchen. He enjoyed playing with his brother and did not really acknowledge my absence from the scene. I encourage you to read “Playful Parenting”, especially if you have a naggings sense that “something is missing” in your relationship with your children.

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The end of the month is the best time to take your family out to dinner or to pick up some fast food. Many restaurants offer coupons that expire on the very last day of the month. This means that you are more likely to find a coupon, deal, or special offer at your family’s favorite place to eat right now than you will be if you wait for the calendar to flip over.

Burger King has an offer that does not require a coupon. Get a small size Frozen Coke or small size Frozen Cherry for $0.75. This offer is valid through May 23, 2013.

Bob Evans has a coupon for one free breakfast entree, with the purchase of a breakfast entree of equal or greater value, and 2 drinks. This coupon is valid through May 24, 2013.

White Castle has a special offer that is valid through May 26, 2013. Get $5.00 off any $25.00 purchase when you order online and use the promo code: SAVINGS.

Baja Fresh has a coupon on their Facebook page. Military personnel who come into any Baja Fresh between now and May 27, 2013, will get 25% off any purchase. They must have this coupon with them and must show valid military ID.

Caribou Coffee has an offer that does not require a coupon. Get a free Sparkling drink, when you buy a tumbler. This offer is valid through May 27, 2013.

Smashburger has a special offer that does not require a coupon. They will give anyone whose name has the word “burger” in it a free Classic Smash. This offer is good on one day only, May 28, 2013. You must be able to show valid ID to receive this offer.

Bruster’s has two coupons for you. Each will expire on May 31, 2013. They are:

Get a regular sundae for $0.99, with the purchase of another regular sundae at regular price.

Get $1.00 off a Waffle Cone

Jack in the Box has two coupons for you that are available through Coupons.com. Each is valid through May 31, 2013 (but may disappear at any time). They are:

Get a Free Chipotle Chicken Club Sandwich with the purchase of a Chipotle Chicken Club Sandwich.

Get a free regular Smoothie with the purchase of any regular size Smoothie.

Little Caesars has a coupon for a Crazy Combo. You get an 8 piece order of Crazy Bread and some Crazy Sauce for $1.99. This coupon will expire on May 31, 2013.

Image by Paul Swansen on Flickr

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Legos: The longest lasting toy through four kids and many painful random steps goes to Legos. All of my children love Legos and it bridges the age gap. The whole family can sit and build together. My husband’s collection from his childhood is still played with today.

Miniature Plastic Character and Animal Toys: You know those tiny plastic toys you wonder why your kids keep around or carry with them. They come in a variety of name brands to dollar store specials but they are loved equally. We have a box filled with princesses, toy cars, safari animals, sea creatures, and more. The kids play with them outside in the dirt, in the sand, and even take them in the bath. It is story telling and imaginative play at its best.

Art Supplies: Paper, pencils, and paint in plentiful supply make for playful afternoons. Whatever the art medium the kids are fully engaged and the years never mute the drive for creativity.

Dollhouse: I almost hesitated to place my daughter’s huge dollhouse in my living room. I now know that had I placed it in her bedroom she never would have come out. She is a teenager now and I am thinking of doing the same with her phone. Through the years, many little families have moved in and out of the dollhouse. It think for a few years it was played with on a daily basis. All my girls and even my son, when he was a toddler, have enjoyed this type of imaginative type of role playing.

Balls: Soccer, basketball, football, baseball, tennis, whatever ball exists we have it. Every summer we buy more of those plastic balls you find at the grocery store. Just throw a ball into the yard and its a party at our house.

Toy Phones: My oldest daughter has traded her toy phone in for a real one and my son traded his in for a video game controller. However, when they were young, both loved to carry around their silly plastic toys with buttons that made all sorts of unrealistic sounds. I almost wish my phone was as interesting. My two younger girls think toy phones are the thing to have in their purses. My four year old spends quite a bit of time talking on her phone and sometimes insisting we all hush while she has her conversation.

Bikes: Not sure you would consider it a toy but every one of my kids spent many fair weather hours riding bikes.

Board Games: We love playing games in our family. We don’t mess around…even in Candyland.

Play Cookware: During those times the kids are not allowed to help in the kitchen or the cook is taking a much needed break, play cookware comes to the rescue.

Play Doh: I have to admit I love Play Doh as much as the kids. We clear the dining room table and begin creating amazing things only to mix and squish it so it packs back down in the container for the next time.

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Not all states require homeschoolers to keep records but all homeschoolers should require it of themselves.  Even a personal log of what your children have done and accomplished is valuable.  Your child may want to keep track for herself, laws in your state may change, your child may attend school or college, you may want to keep track for yourself to know what your child has done and what worked best in your homeschool.  For all those reasons and more, you will want to an easy to use, thorough, and affordable tracking system.  One such system that you may want to emply is My Home School Grades.

What Can My Home School Grades Do?

• Keeps track of grades and/or progress.
• Enables you to customize with your own curriculum.
• Enables you to add students and student information.
• Keeps track of extra-curricular activities.
• Makes official college ready transcripts easily!

How Affordable is My Home School Grades?

Believe it or not it is $49.99.  No silly, not $49.99 a year.  No again, not $49.99 per student.  You get all your tracking needs for all your children for $49.99 period.  Lifetime membership!  If you are still uncertain but interested then try the 14 day free trial to decide for yourself.

My Thoughts on My Home School Grades

I have a real problem with implementing anything else in my life that takes brainpower.  I do.  I admit it.  If I am going to add one more aspect to my homeschooling it has to be easy to use.  My Home School Grades qualifies in the easy to use department.  The navigation is simple and the program is intuitive.  You won’t be wrestling this to the ground just to enter in a math quiz.  I also do not keep grades in a traditional sense on every subject so I don’t want a lot of extras I will never use.  With My Home School Grades, you can select a Pass/Fail option.  Another thing on my list is easy set up.  I will not go out of my way to use anything that promises to organize me or help me.  Yes, I am difficult but that’s why you love me.  Well, set up is simple.  All I had to do was click and type and click again.  And if you want me to reveal another little dark part of myself…I will not use anything that has only one purpose.  Why? Because I am disorganized like that.  I will never be able to keep up with something that tracks grades and extra-curricular activities.  And yes, My Home School Grades does both.  I have to keep track of these things for my children’s end of the year evaluation.  If I have to do it, it must be done easy and right and made to look like it wasn’t so easy.  Yes, add pride issues to my intolerance to a heavy work load on things I would rather not do.  So, My Home School Grades makes me look like Miss Super Organized Homeschooler and it is also like having my own little assistant.  What more could a girl want?

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Coupons can be a wonderful way to reduce your grocery bill. The cost of food can be high these days, and cents-off coupons make sense. Just make sure that when you use coupons, you use them carefully. Otherwise, you may actually see your grocery bill balloon to new heights.

How can coupons raise your grocery bill? The basic answer is that coupons are actually calculated to get you to spend money by enticing you to purchase a product. They work really well at doing this, which is why manufacturers continue to offer them. If you aren’t careful, you could get caught up in the excitement of using coupons and wind up spending more overall to get the perceived coupon savings.

The bulk of manufacturer coupons tend to be for processed items. The problem with processed items, other than nutrition in many cases, is the fact that they tend to be more expensive. The more work that goes into a product, the more a manufacturer has to recoup in the price. So using a coupon on a kit for macaroni salad will make that kit cost less than usual, but you will probably still wind up paying more than if you simply made the macaroni salad yourself from basic ingredients.

Another reason that food manufacturers issue coupons is to get you to try a new product. If you are careful, you can often get that product for free. One famous new product that was heavily marketed with “free” coupons was a name brand cooking cream, a product type that had not been available before. You try the product and like the product, and then when it is for sale at full price with no coupons you buy it anyway. This scenario is what the manufacturers hope for anyway; the product will become part of your regular grocery list, even when there are no coupons serving as incentives.

Bypassing cheaper product alternatives is another way that coupons can inflate your grocery costs. With brand-name coupon in hand, you may miss the better deal on a generic product or an off-brand.

One way coupons can raise your grocery bill is when you over buy. If you have five coupons and a great deal, why not buy five products? The problem is that the products may never get used. These days, many coupons require you to buy at least two or three of an item. Multiple that by the number of coupons that may be available, and you are suddenly hoarding gobs of mustard when you don’t even like the stuff very much.

Coupons can also raise your grocery bill when you get caught up in acquiring the coupons for grocery deals. Many people purchase coupons (or the service of clipping them) online. In an auction setting, a bidding war may result in the coupons costing more than their face values! Even when the coupons are purchased  for a reasonable price, many buyers don’t calculate the total cost, such as with the inclusion of shipping and handling fees.

Use your coupons wisely, and they will help you to spend less not more.

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Last Saturday, we decided to take a trip up to a tourist spot, Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Many people vacation there because Lancaster has a large Amish community. Sure enough, there are plenty of fun things to do and buy. There are handmade items, such as quilts and furniture and plenty of yummy pies, cakes and bread to purchase.

While we can’t resist picking up a pie, our usual stops in Lancaster have nothing to do with the Amish tourist trade. Instead, we focus on where the value is.

Our first stop is an Amish-run natural food store. The store is tucked away at the end of a long driveway, past a farm or two. Devoid of traditional electricity, the store is lit only by natural light, and the “cool room,” where the flour and other grains are kept, is powered by a generator. It is here that we pick up bulk organic goods, such as flour, corn meal, raisins, oats and apples. The store generally gets a mostly local trade.

Another stop was to the bargain room at the Goodwill. Clothing here will run you only 85 cents an item no matter what it is, and I was able to pick out a really nice name-brand winter coat for my daughter (for next year), as well as a dress shirt for my husband and several other clothing pieces. Score.

Contemplating dinner in Lancaster is a feat. There are a number of places to eat, from buffet to family style choices. Yummy Yummy. These places, tend to run anywhere from $18-$24 per person. With six of us in tow, we opted for Cici’s pizza, a buffet pizza restaurant that was offering all you can eat, including dessert, for $5 a person. No, it isn’t the Amish experience, unless you count the fact that about a third of the customers were Amish families who came to eat.

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If you happen to be nearing the end of your pregnancy and you are also in a mood to nest, one great thing that you can do to give yourself a head start for when your baby arrives is making and freezing some nutritious meals. Sure, there’s always the nursery to decorate and all of those adorable onesies to wash, fold, and put away but those may not take up all of your spare time. What’s more, once baby arrives, you are going to need to eat and you may as well have something healthy and easy to prepare on hand.

Many meals can be frozen for up to three months, if they are packaged properly to avoid air coming into contact with the food. While you are creating your grocery list with ingredients for the meals themselves, don’t forget to add your packaging materials – freezer bags and freezer safe plastic containers with tight fitting lids. Many great recipes for stew, chili, and lasagna can be found online in addition to recipes for your favorite ethnic foods like curries, burritos, and meatballs and sauce. Oh, and carnitas. Lets not forget about carnitas – that is my favorite thing to make in the crock pot, it freezes well and you can eat it on its own with veggies on the side or as a part of burritos, tacos or other dishes. In fact, many meals that you can make in a crock pot freeze well, so you can prepare food for your freezer (and your dinner) without standing in the kitchen all day long.

If you start now and make double batches of your dinner every couple of days, by the time your baby arrives you will have a freezer full of options for those times when you are hungry and cooking a meal from start to finish is just not an option. Of course, having access to a wide variety of good takeout and friends bearing casseroles are also very helpful. If the takeout selection in your area is limited, be sure to whip up a bunch of freezer meals. Trust me – the selection in my town is limited pretty much to pizza and Chinese food, and after about a week of takeout every night I was ready for something different.

 Photo by ronnieb on morguefile.com.

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The other day I started reading a wonderful parenting book that has already helped me to enjoy being at home with my kids more. I came upon “Playful Parenting” by Lawrence J. Cohen the other day when I remembered that I had seen the book mentioned a while ago on one of the parenting websites that I visit regularly. I wondered whether the book could help me with an issue that I have been having lately.

It is an issue that I am sure I am not alone in experiencing, although not that many people talk about it. It can affect any parent, whether they are at home with their kids all of the time or whether they work outside of the home. It affects mothers, and fathers too. Sometimes we become so wrapped up in just getting everybody through the day fed, clothed, and clean as well as attending to our domestic responsibilities like cooking, dishes, laundry, and the many other things that we have on our plates that it all seems like one big unending parade of chores. Sometimes we engage with our children, but other times their requests for attention or requests that we play with them can grate on our nerves and annoy us – don’t they know that we have a lot of important things to attend to? We become anxious, frazzled, frustrated, and sometimes even resentful and we find ourselves wondering where all of the fun is that we are supposed to be having with our children.

Once I remembered that I had seen a book about “Playful Parenting”, I began to wonder whether a book with such a title could help me to enjoy parenting more and maybe even encourage better behavior on the part of my boys. I love to read parenting books, and it has been a while since I last treated myself to one so I downloaded it onto my Kindle. As soon as I started reading, I found myself nodding my head in agreement. I realized that I had been missing many opportunities to inject lighthearted fun into our days, and that was more than likely affecting both me and my kids. I am about halfway through the book now, and I love it. Tomorrow I will share with you some of the reasons why “Playful Parenting” is such a great book and how it has “played out” for us so far.

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One major reason that freelancing “on the side” is good for people who have a job outside of the home is that it enables them to make extra money on a schedule that works for them. Juggling two jobs outside of the home can be a hassle, but since freelancers are in control of how much work they take on and what kind of work they pick up, it is much easier to pick up some freelance work instead of getting a second job.

If you have a job that is not in the area that you really want to be working in, you may feel grateful to be employed yet somewhat sad or disappointed that you are not working in the field that you want to work in. If the field that you want to work in is something that you can do as a freelancer, why not pick up a few projects so that you can explore the work that you are passionate about. This can also be a great way to build up a portfolio of work so that you can make a move into a job in your field at a later time. Since you would choose which projects to work on, your freelance work can become a source of great joy and satisfaction in addition to providing additional income.

A third way that freelancing can be helpful is if you feel that your job outside of the home may not be secure. In the current economy, it is not uncommon for people to be laid off or suddenly unemployed. Freelance work can provide a bit of a safety net, especially if you begin freelancing before you find yourself without a job. When you work as a freelancer, you can make connections with clients and build a reputation that will enable you to find additional work quickly should you find yourself out of a job.

These are just a few ways in which freelance work can be beneficial for people who work outside of the home. How might it benefit you?

Photo by Cohdra on morguefile.com.

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