living on a budget.

I don't know how many of you know about Quicken? For us its been a life saver!! We use to do everything in Excel and have to change it every time we had a new bill coming in or a bill that's paid and take it out. Quicken is a great way to show you what comes in and what comes out each and every month. It shows your lowest forecasted amount in the bank account for the month. It uploads each transaction you do through your online banking. It can show you your net worth. Also it shows you according to your mortgage and the interest rate your paying, how much interest over the 20 year mortgage (or whatever your mortgage term is) you pay. It graphs your spending and shows you what percent you spend on housing, food, auto, entertainment etc. This helps us know our weak areas and what we need to cut back on and where we can spend more.

The whole reason I’m blogging this is i just wanted to share with everyone something that has really helped us through these past few months. Dave not working for the past 4 months and I now being on mat leave we have had to rely on our budgeting for everything.

Another one of my favorite things Dave and I have is we bank through Scotia, they have a program called “bank the rest.” What they do is every time you do a transaction they round up and bank the “extra” into your saving account. For example we spend $23.08 at Wal-Mart and then get $46.22 in gas that day. So they round up to $24 at Wal-Mart and $47 in gas. We choose to round to the nearest dollar instead of $5. Where if you choose that option it would be $25 at Wal-Mart and $50 in gas. So for us $1.80 went into our saving account that day. This adds up fast and its such little amounts that you don't even notice it being gone.

With summer coming and so many extra spending activities i just thought i would share some of our tips.     Happy Budgeting!

We drove out to Vulcan today to go see Leonard Nimoy. The man who played “Spock” in the 1980 Star Trek movie.

Here's what he looked like in the movie:

Here's what he looks like now:

This photo was taken during the parade part of the day.

Here's a few fun photos of us through out Vulcan.

An alien mural downtown.

The Hardware store was playing Star Trek and it was so LOUD!

They posted around town all the “live long and prosper” signs.

I can’t separate my fingers very well, we both got a good chuckle!

So sunny! We had a good laugh about everyone who took it so seriously and got all dressed up.

Here's just an example of the many “ears” we saw.

It was a fun little outing for the afternoon. We aren’t huge trekkies, but we enjoyed the day!

schools out for the summer..

 

Dave's last final exam = start of summer..  woohoo!!!! Can’t wait to start camping, swimming, walks, fishing, and  gardening.

On a side note, i just need to brag about how proud of my husband i am. He worked so hard this semester to achieve high grades.  Well, he did it. He achieved his 4.0 GPA just like he set his mind to do. We celebrated tonight with a blizzard and then tomorrow were gonna go fishing!

in desperate need of advice…

Woman who have been pregnant or are pregnant, how do you sleep comfortably? I have been struggling for the past 3 weeks to sleep for more then an hour stretch at night without waking up because I'm so uncomfortable. I sleep with a pillow between my knees and one under my belly and I’m still so uncomfortable. i don't know what it is about laying down but it feels like my pelvis and hips separate. its extremely painful and i just can’t seem to find a comfortable position. My doctor has told me not to sleep on my back, as the baby can push on my siatic nerves and cause more hip and pelvis pain. I am just trying to sleep on my left side but for some reason the right side seems more comfortable, its probably because I'm not suppose to sleep on my right side. Any who sorry about the rant but I'm just in desperate need of advice or tips on how to get more sleep and be more comfortable. Thanks guys!

i spy with my little eye…

 

not too much longer and my feet will disappear.

Guess who’s room is finally coming together…

YAY!! its all coming together. Obviously the pictures need to be hung and the clothes sorted a little better.

I painted the frames  & modge podged the  paper.  I haven’t decided what to put in them yet so they just have paper in them for now. If you have any ideas let me know PLEASE?!

from this ….

to this…

and….

magic! For $3 i created the theme…

the newest addition to the murray home.

Here she is in all her glory, or should i say my glory. I used this website for my free pattern (the website is great for anything baby related!). My sister helped me tackle this monster, THANK HEAVENS. I am so NOT a patient sewer, especially if a pattern is involved. This took me about 6 hours to make, if your a more competent sewer you’d be a lot faster. You wouldn’t have to un-pick stitches and re-do things. :)

One giant pocket on the left.

On the right side of the front here is 2 pockets ( might be hard to see sorry) that are perfect size for bottles or sippy cups.

Inside has 2 pockets.

there’s a wee baby in there…

a couple of days ago i was babysitting my nephews and i asked one of them what was in my tummy? the one replied “old food”. i had a pretty good chuckle over that. after explaining besides old food there is a little boy in there, we talked about names. one of them told me i should name our baby his name. he thought it was pretty darn hilarious (which it was). i explained to him that cousins can’t have the same name. i told him the names we liked and he agreed on our most favourite!

I finally purchased the fabric for my diaper bag! woohoo…

This is the design i picked.. wish me luck with the pattern..

 

So excited.

I already made a change pad to match..

scroll saw..

We bought a scroll saw yesterday so we can now do this:

 

 

 

I can’t wait to start crafting! I want to do this in the kitchen!

 

This is an example of what i’d like to do in the baby’s room. This name has nothing to do with our name choices just an example i found.

 

how does your garden grow?

Mary, Mary, quite contrary,
How does your garden grow?
With silver bells, and cockle shells,
And pretty maids all in a row.

Well we started the spring fun last week! We are loving having our own yard to do as we please. Were ripping out bushes, creating a garden, removing cement, weeding and did i mention weeding?

Here we ripped out some concrete slabs and evened out the land. Can you see its in a ‘L’ shape? The little piece jutting off we will plant grass seed to fill in the holes where the concrete was.

Then we decided bigger is better. Why not try planting some other things then just potatoes, peas & carrots?

So we tackled the other side of the deck to create more room.

This is how i help garden when im not feeling well, I keep dave company.

Now on Saturday we tackled the front of the house. We had these nasty shrubs and i am not sure of the name but they grow from one root.

 

 

This is one truck load full and its still consuming half of the front yard. Were gonna do a flower bed in the front and plant grass seed.

Here’s Dave showing off his muscles after he pulled out the root! It took us forever to get that stubborn root out. Its crazy how from one root grows so much shrubbery.

So we took a load to the dump Saturday. This morning the man who runs Bridge Villa Estates came in with a tractor and picked up the rest of the branches for us. We are so grateful!

Here's some of the flowers starting to grow.

Happy Spring!

how wild does your hair get in the morning.. ?

Dave loves this picture and as much as i hate it too, it does create a smile. This is what happens when i goto bed with wet hair. This picture is for all of you who think my hair looks good all the time. enjoy.

Isn’t Dave so lucky to be married to me? He gets to wake up every morning to this, what a LUCKY man!!

 

How does your hair look in the morning?

The second u/s.

We had the second u/s yesterday to check up on why i am getting so bog so fast. We won’t have all the results back until i see my doctor next Friday. We have one very uncooperative baby. His face was down (facing my spine) and this resulted in a LONG and PAINFUL u/s. The tech couldn’t get all the pictures and measurements that she needed. So she had to go get another tech to help, i rolled back and forth several times so they could try getting pictures on my side. Still didn’t get any pictures of the face. She said i seemed to be right on track for my due date. We will find out more once i see my doctor because the techs can’t really tell us anything. We didn’t get sent home with any pictures  (dang it!) and we didn’t get to see much of this little guy. Were getting so excited we only have 14 weeks left!