This past week I had a few matters that prevented me from writing and also I took the time to plan how I’d like to continue the blog. Being the mother of three takes a lot of time. Our family is involved in church activities and my husband works two jobs. This makes me fairly busy keeping up with all the household tasks and extracurricular things. I’ve blogged almost every day for the past year and I’ve had a very good time. However, considering how my schedule will be in the next year, I’ve decided to scale back down to around 3 entries per week. I think this will contribute to a higher quality of postings and also allow me to have a little more free time. Our friend who has helped us with our websites will be designing a new layout scheme in the next month or so and you’ll see some changes soon. Thank you so much for following me here and I look forward to providing you with entertaining or informative posts in the future.
Archive for the ‘"What Is The Crafty Dollar?"’ Category
My Week Long Disappearance from the Blogosphere
Saturday, February 20th, 2010"What Is The Crafty Dollar?"
Monday, April 20th, 2009
My husband was promoting my website to his friends recently. We have a good friend who asked him something along the lines of the following: “What is the thesis of the website? What’s it supposed to be about?”
At the time, his answer was, “Uh, well, she is just writing about whatever. Uhhhh……” We have to extend a large amount of gratitude to this friend because it forced us to think about what the website really is and what it might be in the future. The Crafty Dollar was originally started to express the following:
- Doing More: When I first decided to stay home with the kids, we found ourselves settling for less. We were settling for so much less that we had to sit down and look at what we were spending. Our spending had become too much, whether it was on groceries, gasoline, coffee…..something. We sat down together and decided that we wanted to do more. We wanted to get back to as close to how it used to be in terms of being able to go out to dinner more often or being able to give.
- Being Creative: I first started clipping coupons, trading coupons on the internet, or looking for internet-based deals as something to fulfill a creative need just as much as I wanted to reduce our grocery budget. It is fulfilling to go to the grocery store that has onions for $0.18 a pound, chop them up, and freeze them for future use. I am being creative in a way that is more frugal than artistic, but still makes me feel good about what I’m teaching my kids. They have asked us what we are doing when we have a big mess of onions, carrots, peppers, and other vegetables chopped and diced for freezing. It creates a teachable moment.
- Being Above Average: We decided that how we were eating before was just not healthy. Eating out at restaurants most of the time is simply not very healthy. We found ourselves eating quite a bit of very salty, high carbohydrate and fat-filled foods on a regular basis either for lunch or dinner. When we examined our budget, it was no coincidence that my husband lost 15 lbs. We gave up our trips to the convenience store for food we didn’t need anyway and of course were forced to get back into cooking rather than picking up take-out Chinese on busy nights. We had always cooked, but we took it to another level.
- Stewardship: The minute we cut out the extra frivolous spending, we had money to give again. I’m going to define giving as either being able to give money to your favorite church or charity or buy a friend lunch.
A little about me and my family: I am a stay-at-home mom to three great kids; twin girls and a boy. My twins are twelve years old our son is three and very rowdy. Yes, we are about to hit the teenage years (please say a prayer for our sanity). Of course I can’t forget my awesome husband who makes it possible for me to stay home with our kids.