Frugal Boy

A Winter Hike

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Cabin Fever is at 200% at our house, so when the mercury rose to a balmy 44° on a sunny Saturday we did not hesitate to bundle up and go for an adventure picnic!

You cannot hike on an empty stomach, so the first priority was to make sure everyone was fueled up.  We utilized one of the local school fundraiser coupon cards that we purchased last year from a neighbor to get a 16″ sub sandwich for free.  Yay!  Half of the card cost has been recouped so far.

With our bellies full, we set off in search of adventure and education.

Frugal Boy had fun crossing this little stream and then gave tips to his parents on how they could cross it.

Later on, he made a stream of his own.

And then he made two more streams later in the hike.  He’s a regular Niagara Falls!

The hike was interspersed with teaching moments.

Frugal Boy learned that some plants have thorns to keep animals away from them.  Thorns hurt.  I thought that might be obvious, but sometimes you just have to learn from experience.

We also examined different footprints.  Dogs, people, and deer were very common and easy to spot in the muddy conditions.  An osage orange provided a nice distraction from tired legs as we kicked it, smelled it, and broke it in half to look at the inside.  There were several mole tunnels.  I learned today that the surface tunnels that you commonly see where the sod is lifted up is called a runway tunnel and are used for foraging/feeding.

The days are already getting longer and it won’t be long until flowers start blooming in our yard!

Freebie Parent Resource: KindergartenWorksheets.net

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Lately I have been keeping Frugal Boy busy and more importantly, out of my hair, by engaging him in kindergarten worksheets.  A great, and FREE, resource that I have found is kindergartenworksheets.net

 

Even though it says, “Kindergarten”, many of the worksheets are appropriate for a younger audience.

Here are some that Frugal Boy did yesterday and today.  I can already tell he has his mother’s number aptitude.  The math worksheets are finished a lot faster than the reading/writing ones!

At about half a penny for copy paper, this is a pretty cheap source of entertainment!  Leave a comment to share your favorite resources.

5 Things to Do with Halloween Candy

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Happy November!

If you have kids, you probably have a mountain of candy from trick or treating and Halloween parties.  You could eat it all right now, or maybe you did last night, but that would be a tad gluttonous and bad for your health.  So after you’ve picked out a few pieces, what do you do with the rest of it?

1. Dentist Buyback

This was the first year that I had heard of it, and it is genius!  Simply find a participating dentist or company in your area that is offering a buyback.  The idea is that the dentist buys candy from the kids to get some of that sugar off the street and the kid benefits by getting some sweet cash instead!

Frugal Boy brought in a pound and a half of candy and the dentist gave him $5 AND a fidget spinner.  Honestly, they could have just given him the fidget spinner and he would have been tickled pink.

2. Take it to Work

I’m not a huge fan of this common practice but it is very effective in getting sugar out of your house.  The reason why I’m not a fan of it is that you’re promoting bad health habits amongst your coworkers, ya know, the people you share health insurance with.

3. Freeze It

If you want to be really frugal, throw it in the freezer and dig it out next year to hand out to trick or treaters.  If that idea is to scuzzy for you, then consider reusing it personally for easter egg hunts in the Spring.

4. Make Gingerbread Houses

The stores have been promoting Christmas since the beginning of October anyway, so why not get a head start on making gingerbread houses.  You’ll have something pretty (or sentimental if little kids are participating) and you can simply toss the whole affair when you are tired of looking at it.

5. Chuck It

It is okay to throw out junk food.  I give you my frugal permission to not feel bad about it.  If you really want, you can make your own ‘buyback’ program to sell it to your kids and have them bring their candy to you and you supply the cash to them.  Next year try to buy less and maybe call trick or treating over a bit earlier.  You don’t really need to hit every house in the neighborhood.  I try to limit how many houses we visit and usually stick to ones of people that we know.  Even keeping the list short, we still end up with a surplus of candy, so use a combination of the above methods to keep the sugar intake to a minimal.  We still have Thanksgiving and Christmas to get through so your body will thank you in the Spring if you practice some self restraint now.

 

Leave a comment with your favorite ways of using that mountain of Halloween candy.

The Only Toy Your Child Needs

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I will be the first to admit it.  My children have WAY WAAYYY too many toys.  The kicker is that most of them only get played with a few times before they are tossed aside and ignored for weeks, months, even years at a time.  There is one toy though that has persistently been used time and time again by Frugal Boy.  I used it as well when I was a kid.  It costs nothing and takes up zero space.  The more it is used the better it becomes.  There are no batteries that need to be changed.  It can be used anywhere at anytime.  Every child in the world already has it.  What toy could possibly check all of those boxes?  Imagination.  Imagination is the only toy any child needs.

Kids can use their wonderful imagination to keep themselves entertained wherever they may be.  It is always with them, never gets dirty (that comes later in life), and is wonderfully adaptable.  Here is Frugal Boy jumping off a tall cliff into the sea.

The ever popular, “Floor is Made of Lava” seems to be imprinted in human DNA.

A little bump in the topography is all that is needed to be King of the Mountain.

A small drainage stream is HOURS of entertainment for an active imagination to work with.

You can pretend that you are a famous person by putting your hands (or feet) into wet concrete.

A pile of busted up concrete provides a wealth of possibilities.  Frugal Boy was happy to imagine himself as some big shot builder.

Toys that you buy at the store can help an imagination, but when that imagination has extracted everything it can from a particular toy, it gets tossed aside.  That is why toys such as Lego, blocks, and dolls have such a long play time.  They are good enablers of imagination letting the child play out a wide variety of scenarios.  The more your child practices using their imagination, the better they will get and the fewer aids they will need.

Catching up on Going Ons

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I am way behind on blog posts so here is a turbo catch up.

Shae’s maternity leave ended a couple of weeks ago.  It was a great taste of what early retirement could be and served to strengthen our resolve to save and be frugal to reach that goal.

Part of going back to work and leaving a baby with a sitter means pumping milk.  Under the ACA, breast pumps are covered by insurance.  Medela is the most well known brand, but Shae opted for a Spectra.  According to her it is a much better machine.

A few weeks ago I turned 30 years old.

Quite a bit of family came to celebrate and spend time with us.  We had a good time.

Shae, Frugal Boy, Frugal Girl, and I did our first camping trip.  Frugal Boy was so excited he didn’t go to sleep until 9:30.  There was a giant raccoon lurking around in the trees to the left of the tent.  Naturally at 3am when he says he has to go pee I tell him to go to the right side.  Does he listen?  Nope!

Summer is definitely here.  It has been hot and like clockwork Shae and I have had the conversation of whether or not we should get air conditioning.  It always goes something like this.

“It is so hot”

“and the kids just want to snuggle”

“ya they are total hot boxes”

“we should get air conditioning”

“no the forecast says it is going to cool off soon”

“yep, let’s just sweat it out”

And then we’ll go outside and make a slip n slide.

This summer we have a nice basement room for the first time to retreat to and even sleep in.

We have also made a couple of trips to the swimming pool.  Frugal Girl did a lot of grunting in the zero depth kiddie pool.

Mulberries are in season right now.  I have a favorite spot to go picking that is about a mile away from our house.  Frugal Boy went with me last year and is now a fairly independent picker.  I’ll have to take him blueberry picking later this summer.

Mulberries are really tasty and healthy.  They are packed full of antioxidants.  The only way to get them is to pick them yourself.  Grocery stores don’t carry them because of their limited shelf life and fragility.

We did our first family 5K.  It was a bit of an operation to load two jogging strollers into the car along with four people.

It was girls vs boys.  Frugal Boy and I did well enough to medal in my age group.

Back at work, Shae needed an adaptor for our laptop to do a presentation for the employers internal ‘shark tank’ competition.  I had Frugal Boy tag along with me to the ‘tv store’.  He was majorly disappointed that we did not buy a tv.

Finally, the library’s summer reading program is in full swing.  Frugal Boy is an avid ‘reader’ and thankfully he enjoys ‘reading’ to his little sister.

That about does it.  I still have some big gaps from earlier this year.  There just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything that I want.