Hello. My name is Rhonda.
And I have an addiction.
I like to buy my children cutesy-matchy outfits for Easter and Christmas.
Like this:

And this:

In my defense, it is written into the budget and I bought it when the store had it on sale "up to 40% off" and I used a 20% off coupon. Plus, I got free shipping because I bought this adorable shirt for the little man who LOVES his ties because it was either buy something for $5 and get free shipping or pay $5 in shipping:


That is all.

One week overdue...

...Or at least I should have been because I like to bake my babies for as long as possible. And I don’t mind, either. I just love being pregnant and don’t feel a bit miserable being 41 weeks pregnant. Even in the August heat. Once they are born, you have to actually take care of the baby… feed him, change him, and wake up in the middle of the night. Not so much when you are pregnant (or at least, I don’t have to wake up in the night to go bathroom like so many other women complain about!) And I say him because I am convinced that our little one was a “him”. We do not find out the genders of our babies before they are born, but so far, I’ve been two for two in correctly predicting the gender. When I was pregnant with our angel baby, I had a couple people ask me my prediction and I didn’t know then. (I usually don’t know until about 7 or so months along.) But, I joked that it was probably because it was one of each! Little did I know that we would never know with 100% certainty. But, one day Isaac and I were talking about names and out of nowhere he suggested a name that I had been thinking about and was a top contender on my long list of boy baby names. Corban, a gift devoted to God. Taken from Mark 7:11. While Corban probably could be a gender neutral name, you’ll never convince me that he wasn’t a boy or a wonderful gift from God, taken back to Him way too soon.

Anyways, last Wednesday was the day that I was due with our baby that went to heaven way too soon. I had a pretty tough start to the week. Monday, I got a telephone call with a health survey. They asked me a ton of health questions and at the end asked if I was pregnant and some more questions along those lines. So, by the end of the conversation I was nearly crying and trying to get him off the phone as soon as possible. And then Tuesday, I was going through the tubs from the basement of clothes that the kids have outgrown and looking for summer clothes. I came across the very adorable owl onesie that my sister and brother in law bought for our baby and gave to us when I was 8.5 weeks pregnant, two weeks before my miscarriage. This one was doubly hard. When I told my sister about the pregnancy, it was by asking what their plans were for this coming Easter and telling her there would be someone new for them to meet. Renee and Nathan had decided the Easter before that they wanted to come up to our house for this year because Easter was more fun with little kids around. For those who don’t know, my brother in law, Nathan passed away at the way-too-young age of 25 this January, so next week we will be missing two people. He adored our kids so much and I’d like to believe that he is able to take care of little Corban up in heaven. By the way, I think Renee is holding up amazingly well for all she has been through the past year and a half with Nathan’s leukemia diagnosis, treatment, and passing and you should all follow her blog. (http://minusambition.blogspot.com) She writes much better and much more often than I. Anyways, on Wednesday Isaac, who is not typically a very sentimental kind of guy, had half a dozen red roses sent to the house. It was a very wonderful surprise which caused me to shed a few tears. That night when Kadin was getting ready to go to bed, she gave me a hug and said, “I’m sorry about your baby.” She has such a caring heart!

I didn't realize that my upcoming due date was going to cause so much heartache, maybe even more than I had at the time of the miscarriage. But, I'm doing well now. I'm so thankful for the two wonderful kids I do have. And maybe next time, I won't wait 5 months to make a new post!

Menu Plan Monday... again already?

I did a really good job sticking to my menu plan from last week. The only difference was that on Friday, we ate at Isaac's parents' house, so I pushed the Salsibury steaks back to Saturday since I'd already gotten them out of the freezer when we decided to go.

Monday: Meatloaf (Isaac made five meatloaves for our freezer yesterday!)
Tuesday: Velveeta Cheeseburger Mac by request from Kadin
Wednesday: Spaghetti (We'll try it again for this week.)
Thursday: Eating at the in-laws
Friday: Not sure yet what we'll be doing.
Saturday: Hosting my mom's family for Thanksgiving--turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, hot rolls with honey butter, sweet potatoes, green beans, stuffing, cranberry salad, pumpkin pie, pecan pie
Sunday: Leftovers!

And a random helpful household hint: If you are going to wash your curtains, be sure to make sure that they are not dry clean only FIRST. Otherwise, they will come out of the dryer completely wrinkled and about six inches shorter. (Not that I'm speaking from experience or anything...well, maybe a little bit...)

Menu Plan Monday

Well, I completely fell off the thankfulness wagon! Life got busy and the kids and I all got colds. Have you ever taken NyQuil 2.5 hours before you could sleep? You get to feeling pretty looping before you crash! I was desperate for some cold meds and all I had with me was NyQuil, so I took it anyways. So, I'm abandoning the thankfulness challenge. Instead, I'm going to plan out of menu for this week so that I am not wondering what to make last minute. Of course, it is always subject to change!

Monday-Half of the ham we bought last week with a "buy a ham get a free turkey" coupon, cooked with brown sugar and maple syrup
Tuesday-Sweet Onion BBQ Burgers (These things are amazing!) We have store-bought buns leftover from yesterday, so I'll skip making my own this time!
Wednesday-Roast in the crockpot. We still have a ton of roasts left from our quarter of a cow.
Thursday-Cheesy potato soup made with leftover ham
Friday-Salisbury steaks (Already made and in the freezer. I love freezer cooking!!)
Saturday-Spaghetti-Unless we are at the in-laws, which is highly probable considering it is the last Saturday before Thanksgiving and the lights aren't all up yet.
Sunday-Lunch at Isaac's grandparents' for Thanksgiving. I think I'm supposed to make the hot rolls.

Day #5 of Thankfulness

I don't know which one thing I should say I am thankful for from yesterday! So, I guess I'll go with Dave Ramsey. I first learned about Dave Ramsey in the spring of 2008. Some ladies at a Bible Study I was attending were talking about him. When I got home that day, I looked him up online and the rest is history! Dave lives completely debt free and has a method called the 7 Baby Steps that he teaches to help others get out of debt. I started listening to the first hour (of three) of Dave's podcast that you can download free on iTunes to learn all I could.

Baby Step 1 is $1000 in the bank as a starter emergency fund. We got that easily because we already had a few thousand in the bank from a couple money market accounts we started when we got married and lots of savings bonds from Isaac's childhood. Check!

Baby Step 2 is the debt snowball. You are supposed to pay off all your debts except your house as quickly as possible, starting with the smallest payoff amount to the largest, and turning old minimum payments into a "snowball" effect on the next debt. We had a few credit cards, a small student loan, and a larger van loan. This is where we had to decide to get serious if we wanted to get out of debt. We cashed in the money market accounts except $1500 in savings bonds, we got a couple insurance payments from hail damage (although we did have to replace our house roof), and we started our debt snowball. We tried to get out of debt without making a budget and we weren't doing very well. In January 2009, we made our first real budget and started using cash envelopes for quite a few spending categories. Over several months, we kept tweaking it and by May 2009, we were debt free except our house! During this time, I was learning more about Dave's program called Financial Peace University, which is a 13 week video series of him teaching almost everything you can know about money (or at least everything you can learn in 13 weeks!) We saw that a church 30 minutes away was hosting FPU and we debating on spending all the gas money and extra time driving to it when we decided that we would just start hosting it at our church. We started our first FPU class in the summer of 2009.

Baby Step 3 is a fully funded emergency fund of 3-6 months of expenses. Our monthly written budget and lots of long hours of Isaac re-roofing several houses in the county, helped us along the way. We finished our FFEF in October of 2009.

Baby Step 4 is contributing 15% into retirement. We didn't get this started until January 2010 because I was trying to get our checking account built up so that we always have a one month buffer in our account because of Isaac's unstable line of work. (And, it did end to be a very slow winter)

Baby Step 5 is contributing to kids' college accounts. We haven't completely decided yet what we are going to do for this, so we skipped it!

Baby Step 6 is pay off your house early. In January 2010, I looked at our house loan and made a goal of paying off $10,000 of our house, which had a balance of just over $19,000. We got super gazelle intense and me, being a numbers person figured and re-figured and figured again how we could get the house paid off faster. In July, we decided to temporary stop retirement funding and put it all on the house (which the goal of repaying the retirement fund once the house was paid off.) We scrimped and sacrificed and lowered our FFEF amount a little bit, which brought us up to Monday of this week. Isaac called the bank to get the payoff balance and it was less than I was expecting. So, after he got paid from his work for the first week of November, we had enough money to make the trip to Kirksville and write the final check to pay off the balance of our house!

Baby Step 7 is build wealth and give, and I'm looking forward to it! We have a lot of smaller goals now, like refilling retirement and our FFEF and saving for some things we've put off (new flooring in the living and dining rooms).

If you live in the Unionville area and haven't been through Financial Peace University, we will be starting again in January and would love to have lots of people come. You will learn a ton of things, whether you have a lot of debt or no debt at all. The lesson on insurance saved us a lot of money in our monthly budget. And I will make a yummy cake for our graduation!

Day #4 (A day late!)

Friday was a busy day, with Isaac only working a half day and spending the rest of the day in Kirksville (more on that later!), so I didn't get my Thursday post made Friday. On Thursday, I was thankful for work out DVDs. More specifically, Jillian Michael's 30 Day Shred. I started my thirty days for the second time (the first time I hurt my ankle halfway through and quit) on Monday, October 25th. In the 30 Day Shred DVD, you do the same 24 minute workout (plus warm up and cool down) for ten days, for each of the three levels. On Thursday, I moved up to the second level. It's a lot harder than the first level, but then again, I thought the first level was hard when I started it. I'm loving the daily workout and am starting to see results, which is always fun!

Day #3--Internet Recipe Websites

Yesterday, I was thankful for internet recipe websites. I am my father's daughter. He has a massive stack of recipes printed off the internet, but I just have a bookmark folder in FireFox called "recipes to try out" that has tons of recipe ideas that sound really yummy and that I might end up making eventually.

Last night, we made Papa John's Pizza Dough Recipe. We don't copy the pizza sauce recipe since we can our own pizza sauce, but the crust is amazing. It tastes so much like Papa John's, which is my favorite pizza place, but is an hour away from home. And, homemade pizza is much cheaper than buying it, and if you know me, you know I like that!

I previously posted my recipe for Red Lobster Cheddar Bay Biscuits, but there is not enough time in the week to post all the recipes that I have found on the internet and have quickly become some of our favorite meals. My favorite recipe places are Recipezaar (now called food.com) and Pioneer Woman. I haven't actually made too many Pioneer Woman recipes, I just like to look at all the yummy pictures! I did make her Braised Beef Brisket once and it was amazing, and am looking forward to making it again someday when the occasion arises since I have a brisket waiting in my freezer.