Bringing up Allie

So much for keeping up with the ol' blog. Whatever...I'm over trying to write every week. Hopefully I can keep up with it a little more because I know it will be great to have for Allie to look back on, but if I can't get to it, I can't get to it. There are more important things to worry about.

 So once again I have to catch up on the past couple of weeks.

We had Allie Mae's 2nd Birthday party and besides a huge storm that caused us to be without power the whole party, everything went great. She had so much fun running around and playing with all her little friends and cousins. We did a Toy Story theme and everything looked so cute. I had someone I went to high school with make her a two teared fondant cake and it turned out awesome. The fondant tasted terrible and everyone agreed, but it was so cute and so worth the $25 I paid for it. She got a ton of new stuff. Clothes, art supplies, and toys. We ended up taking a lot of stuff back to the store because she was either not interested or too young, but everything else she's still playing with. With all the returns we had, we were able to pretty much pay for all of her Christmas gifts. That may have been bad to do, but she does NOT need that many toys.


BDAY PICS

Shortly after her party we celebrated Thanksgiving Day with my side of the family. We had dinner over at my parents house as usual and then after dinner I headed out with my sister and Aunt Donna to get some Black Friday shopping done. I actually surprised myself and didn't get as much stuff as I had originally planned too. I picked up a couple of Christmas gifts, a video game for Loren for $30 (normally $70) and a single serve coffee maker for $12 (normally $25), a Black and Decker Blender for my sister for $19 (normally $30), and a set of nice flannel sheets for myself for $17 (normally $25). Overall I got some pretty sweet deals, but with all the coupon shopping and sale watching I've been doing lately, I've gotten better deals online. As far as Christmas shopping goes, I'm pretty much done. I have one more gift to purchase for Loren's dad and that's it. I kind dropped the ball this year. Last year I made most of the gifts, but this year I bought most of them. I'm fine with it though, because we've had NO time to make anything and it ended up being cheaper to just buy gifts than having to make everything. We're still making a couple gifts for my mom and sister that I'm really excited about, but that's it.

I'm so excited for Christmas this year. I think the best part about it is that I stayed under budget and spent way less than what we normally do. Previous years I would over spend because I was worried about getting everyone the best gits. This year I just explained that we don't have the money for it this year. We're working really hard to save up a good amount of money and I don't want to waste money on junk that nobody is actually going to use.

Other than preparing for Christmas, nothing else has really been going on. I'm working really hard at changing some not so good habits, but I'll get more into that later.

We're supposed to get a lot of snow over night and into tomorrow morning and we have Loren's company Christmas party to go to tomorrow so hopefully it doesn't mess with the travel too much. We'll see...