Impatient Drivers Suck!!!

I was out running errands today with my little boy in the car, and everywhere I went was accompanied by at least one, but usually more, impatient driver!! If you don't have enough sense to leave earlier to get to work on time, do NOT drive like an insane person and cut off at least 3 people just to try to get there on time! Seriously people! Is it so hard to hang back at least half a car length from the car that clearly has a car seat with a baby in it?! There are traffic laws for a reason you meatheads! It's enough to give a person some serious road rage issues! haha

Another Day In The Life Of The Mannings

Today has been rather uneventful. It has been quite the lazy Saturday for me, but it seems to have flown by! Briar is now 11 weeks old, and can almost sit up on his own. He continues to try to walk, even though he can barely stand with help!  He is growing like a weed and at just over 2 months old he will be soon moving on into his 6-9 month sized clothes! He is now just over 15 lbs and 25 inches! I have decided that with the rate he is growing and the price of clothes these days that yard sales are soon going to be a frequented activity for our family! HaHa!

Netflix!

In place of Satellite or Cable TV we stream Netflix right to our TV from our Wii! It is much cheaper than the regular Cable or Satellite, and has a TON of stuff for us to watch! We love being able to watch the shows that we want anytime without have to follow a schedule! We can queue up all the things we want to watch without having to search through channels! The only possible downside is that we can't keep up with all the new releases, but usually we have a few seasons to go before we get there anyhow. Absolutely awesome!!!

Couponing!

This last year I have started to dip my toes into the waters of couponing. For those of you who have not heard of this, there is a TV show called "Extreme Couponing" and in this show they feature real, everyday people, who save HUNDREDS of dollars by couponing! It is almost an art form! You combine coupons with sales and store policies to achieve great savings and your ultimate success is when you manage to find deals that make your items free! In this last year, with the exception of a few months when I was really sick from being pregnant, I have saved tons of money each month! You can buy coupons from people that gather them up, or you can collect them up yourself, and watch the savings start to roll in. I have several large storage tubs in our garage filled with nothing but things I got for free by couponing! My husband has not had to buy deodorant or body wash all this last year!! Bathroom and Beauty products are the most common freebies but we also have over $50 worth of pasta in food storage that was absolutely free! :) There are a few great websites that help you to get started with this, my favorites are www.grocerysmarts.com and www.capriservices.blogspot.com both are wonderfully helpful! I see this as a sort of game to see just how much I can bring down my total by using coupons! :)

Cloth Diapers Vs. Disposables

So my husband and I decided to go with cloth diapers to save money. I decided to research just how much we would save by doing this and it turns out the savings are in the thousands!!! We decided to go with the All In One snap diapers so they fit from birth to potty training. In my research I found that the only negative thing that people really had to say was that it add extra laundry and that you really have to keep up with it or they smell up the house, and so far I have to say I LOVE them!!! They do add a bit of laundry to the To Do List, but it is totally worth it! You don't encounter those awful messy explosion diapers, and if you have to go in the car for a while without stopping they do not leak all over if they mess more than once! It was a bit of a start up cost, but once you have the diapers all you pay for is detergent and water which, when you use coupons for the detergent, really is hardly any cost at all! I have decided to put a bit of extra work into cloth diapering by keeping the diapers as stain free as possible, but overall they are far easier than I expected, and I HIGHLY recommend them to anyone who is willing to try them! So far I have tried a few different brands, but no particular favorites as of yet. And I have found that going on Ebay saved on the initial cost to start cloth diapers significantly, although some of them come from China so there is a couple weeks for waiting, but you can save up to at least 1/2 the cost per diaper by doing it that way!