Friday afternoon, while putting away some of my hanging clothes, I went thru and purged out my closet. I got rid of a few sweaters that I haven't worn all winter, a few shirts, and then organized the ones I have left. It was nice to get rid of those things that were just sitting in my closet.
Not to be outdone by my husband (*smile*), I had to do come cleaning on Saturday. I've been meaning to organize my magazines for a few months now. We had even bought a few magazine racks/box things (like they have in the library for magazines) at Ikea when we were there last. So, for a little while that afternoon, my living room floor was covered with magazines. I never realized how many scrapbooking/cardmaking mags I had until then! They completely filled two of my boxes. Then, was my Rachel Ray in another box and then the last one has a few assorted magazines like the Ikea catalog, Uppercase Living catalog, Premier Designs jewelry catalog, and my newest magazine subscription Popular Photography! I'm pretty excited about that one. I also went thru our books some, too, and pulled out our duplicates that Aaron and I have from Bible School. Thankfully, because the main book you study at AFBLS is the Bible, we didn't have very many duplicate books.
My favorite book and story from this purging was when I pulled out our copies of Larry Burkett's Using Your Money Wisely and looked at the 'bookmark' Aaron had in his copy, it was a receipt from him opening credit card! Don't get me wrong, credit cards can be good when used properly and you make sure you're paying them off every month, but for some they do more harm than good. Aaron was one of them who wasn't the best at handling his money and if he (and I) would have actually read the book, we wouldn't have had as many money problems at the start of our marriage as we did. I wouldn't give up those problems now because they did help us grow closer as a couple and helped us rely on God to provide for us and our family. Our past mistakes have also made us see exactly what we don't want to experience again. We have actually just started following Dave Ramsey's guidelines from Total Money Makeover and also his Financial Peace Junior for kids. We are completely debt free (yippee!), have established our $1000 baby emergency fund, are saving for our family vacation out East this summer, and are working on establishing a separate 6-month emergency fund for in case Aaron ever lost his job. Once that's established, we will start saving for our own house and for investing. We don't want our kids to have money struggles like we did, so we're starting early with them so by the time they are to be responsible with a regular income, they'll know what to do with it. The biggest thing we want them to take away from it is to tithe and never owe money to anyone. The kids tithe off their commissions for the week and they give it to Sunday School. It's been fun watching them put their money in their Giving, Saving, and Spending banks and also watching the kinds of decisions they make when we go shopping with them. Wow...didn't know that was going to make it in this post!
I took Sunday off, as usual, and today. It is actually feeling like spring around here...finally! You can see a noticable difference in the amount of snow and the robins are back! While washing the dishes this afternoon, I decided that I'd take Jacob outside to blow bubbles. He seen the commercials for Crayola's color bubbles and wants them. I told them I think we'll just stick with the regular ones and he seemed fine with that. I took a few pictures of the kids while we were outside. It was a lot of fun!
I snapped this photo while Hailey was spinning around with the wand.
Jacob blew a big bubble
Running after the bubbles to pop them!
Waiting for more bubbles to pop.
Trying to blow a big bubble.
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