So last night I shared with Jay my idea to simplify our lives.  His response was "Uh, how about you just stop spending so much money at Target?"  Okay, so he's not following me, but I'm still on this quest.

First things first.  Our house is full of stuff.  Our home is roughly 900 square feet.  Small.  Our kids (remember when I said how spoiled they are in the previous post?) have toys ev.ry.where.  Toys they likely don't even know exist.  Therefore, we are going to have a garage sale in 2 weeks.  We have already started gathering items to sell.  We will use any money we make towards Christmas.

I also took Allison to church with me (Ethan is still out of town with my parents).  As I said earlier, it's so much easier to just leave her at home.  She won't go to Sunday School.  She cries the entire time and I just can't do that to her.  Therefore, she has to stay with me, which means I have to keep her quiet for at least an hour and a half and it can be pretty tricky!  But I did it.  She dressed sweetly in her ladybug dress.  Snacked on dried cranberries throughout the sermon, and when it was time to pray, she politely bowed her head.  At one point as she was sitting on my lap, she leaned back, looked at me, smiled and whispered "I just a little girl."

This afternoon, Jay had plans for the entire afternoon.  I wanted to take Allison to the zoo, but that easily would have cost about $60 with gas and the admission fee.  Instead, we drove 10 minutes away to Elizabeth Park.  We sat in the grass and fed the ducks.  We also counted them (there were 29!) and I helped Allison count all the way to 29.  After, we visited all the play areas, and finished off at the animals, where she pet 2 goats, said hello to a duck, and waved to the horses.  Then we came home.  We spent $0.00 and had a beautiful time.

Every day is a work in progress for me.  Heck, most days every minute is work.  I have to make the conscious effort to make my day good and worthwhile.  It's hard, but I am setting goals for myself and I firmly believe I will get back on track.