Frugal Boy
Ringing in the New Year
2016 is here. Hopefully it is not quite as much of a blur as 2015. We celebrated at home with grandparents and aunts. Frugal Boy got to open some more presents and was absolutely delighted with the tractor. Wheels need not apply.
Entertaining guests in the Midwest in the winter is always a bit of a challenge. We filled the time by going to a classic car dealer/showroom.
Then for lunch we went to the Bustaurant. It is a double decker bus that has been converted into a food truck. The kitchen and order counter are on the first floor and seating is on the second.
Well that was a fun diversion. Eh guvernor?
Back at home we played with blocks.
Some of us went to the local downtown game store and played games for free. I thought it was really neat that you could take almost any board or card game off the shelf and sit down at a table and play it. BFB, before frugal boy, Shae and I visited my brother and sister-in-law and they had a very similar game shop that let you try out games. One additional nicety that we discovered with our local game store was the ability to rent board games for the night.
For a total of $5 we rented two games, Tsuro and Munchkin Steampunk Edition for 5 days.
Tsuro ended up being very popular in our house. The easy to learn but difficult to master game had more than a few people engaged.
Nobody made it to midnight on new years eve. Maybe next year!
A Trip to the Children’s Museum
Yesterday was a rainy day, so a trip to the Children’s Museum was in order. Frugal Boy is old enough now that he would actually enjoy it and not put every single toy in his mouth. Our museum offers memberships for $95 that give unlimited visits for the entire family for 1 year. That isn’t a bad price considering a daily ticket is $7 per person two and older. We splurged and got the membership plus level for $130. The extra cost includes one free guest pass for each visit and access to the ACM reciprocal network.
Now we have 12 months to get another $109 worth of value out of our memberships. It should be good motivation to get out of the house and go places.
choo choo
paging Dr. Frugal
plant those fields, milk those cows
not as good as the real thing
mom had more fun 😉
Enjoying Spring Like Weather in December
PSA: I recently changed the comment captcha so if you weren’t able to comment before you may be able to do so now.
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The weather outside has been delightful! Yesterday we basked in 67° and soaked up as much outside time as we could with a trip to Sugar Grove Nature Center.
There is an abundance of trails that ramble through the prairie and woods around the nature center and we picked a shorter 1/3 mile loop that we thought Frugal Boy could complete on his own.
I was a little worried when he fell down for the first time and got his hands dirty. I wasn’t worried that he fell or his hands where dirty, but that he was insistent that we clean them off. Of course we said no, and told him to buck up. A little while later and he had remembered how to little boy. Whew!
The trail meandered through the woods and even had a bridge at one point. Near the end it opened back out to prairie and Frugal Boy was starting to whine, then cry. He forgot about his tired little legs when we made it to the playground. It was unlike any playground he had been to before!
This was a nature playground where kids can be kids.
and big kids can be big kids.
Frugal Boy had completely forgotten about staying clean. So it was a big success.
Later on a bunch of other kids came and Frugal Boy made some new friends. He is a very loving and caring little boy, but it still grossed me out when he kissed a stranger toddler girl on the lips. Twice.
2 Weeks Till Christmas
Yowza! Where did the time go?! Last weekend we visited Santa and that involved getting dressed up in actual clothes (something of an obscurity in these parts).
Frugal Boy wasn’t entirely thrilled with the idea, but I thought he looked mighty handsome.
While we waited in line for Santa I tried to get him excited. I explained what the other boys and girls were doing. “He’s sitting in Santa’s lap”, “She’s telling Santa what a good girl she’s been.” Ever since the yard decorations have started going up around town Frugal Boy has been on a Santa babble. I thought there might be hope for a great photo this year.
Hmmm… He’s not too sure about this. Maybe if we had let him wear his snow boots like he wanted he would have felt better about the whole situation.
Shae got a couple of photos before it turned into a “SAVE ME DADA”.
Oh well. The whole process is rather creepy. Hey, go sit on that strangers lap while everyone looks at you and takes pictures. There was another pair of parents with a similar aged girl and she noped right out of there.
We took a few more photos with the props, but we could tell his heart wasn’t in it, so we called it a morning.
A week later, this afternoon, his Christmas present arrived in the mail. He has been glued to the Duplo block table that we built him a month ago.
Duplo is the Lego brand building block for ages 1.5-5. They are compatible with the smaller Lego pieces and unsurprising are expensive. I used to think that Lego was expensive, but Duplo is even worse! At retail, it costs about $1 per block! ¡Aye caramba!
With a little shopping though, it is possible to find good deals on building sets. I purchased a 123 piece lot from eBay for $20 with shipping. That comes to about 16¢/block.
If you have the patience you could also find good deals at yard sales or on your local Craigslist. Finally, if you are concerned about the cleanliness of used bricks, you can put them in a mesh bag in the top rack of the dishwasher. Just make sure not to use high heat otherwise you might melt them!