Maneuvering Life and Motherhood with Twins Plus One
Some auto accident injuries may resolve or heal in a matter of days even in the absence of medical treatment. More severe injuries may become permanent and, in some cases, can lead to physical disability.
The severity and type of injuries suffered by passengers and drivers involved in an auto accident depending on whether: Continue reading “Why hire an auto accident attorney?”
When drawing a wedding budget, you are likely to give your attention to big expenses such as venue booking costs, decorations, transportation, hotel accommodations, food, video and photography, and entertainment. Putting together a great wedding takes more than just accounting for these big expected expenses. You must also account for unexpected costs that may arise out of nowhere. Some of the unexpected wedding costs you might forget to include in your final wedding budget:
The beauty treatments you may need on your wedding day may include more things than you have included in your budget. If you hire a stylist, you may want them to stay around for the entire day to touch you up when necessary. If they are being paid by the hour, the final costs may be more than you have budgeted for.
Your pre-wedding celebrations may eat up more money than you expect. Things like clothing and beauty treatments for pre-wedding events should be accounted for. If you have a destination beach wedding at a luxury resort for couples, you should also account for post-wedding expenses since some of your guests won’t return home until a day or two after the wedding.
Depending on how big your guest list is, postage expenses can be a significant cost. The $2 you will spend on an average postage stamp will quickly add up to a 3-figure expense. When you are trying to put together a great wedding, every dollar counts.
There are instances when your wedding organizers and other service providers helping you put your wedding together will work overtime. If they are being paid by the hour and they have higher overtime rates, you will have no option but to dig deep into your pocket to raise the money they’ve earned for an honest overtime work session.
When you order a wedding dress plus suits and dresses for the groomsmen and bridesmaids respectively, you might want to make alterations to the dresses and suits so they fit perfectly. Very few stores will make the alterations for free.
When renting items for your wedding, you will quickly find out that some rental companies require customers to cater for the transportation of the rented items to the venue of the wedding. This is a cost most wedding couples forget to include in their wedding budget. Remember, also, that you will have to transport these items back to the rental company after the wedding.
Tipping etiquette is often very complicated and nothing is cast in stone. When working with various service providers, you will be helped by various professionals employed by the person you’ve hired – if they run a big enough operation. It is always a good idea to tip these people whenever they put in extraordinary effort or when the situation warrants.
The typical wedding budget will include setup costs but will not cover breakdown costs. Labor isn’t free whatever the job is. Bringing down your wedding set up, dumping litter, and transporting wedding equipment to whatever establishment you got them from costs money.
If you have only accounted for guests who’ve confirmed their attendance, you are likely to have a few extra heads you haven’t accounted for show up to your wedding. Some of these guests could have forgotten to RSVP while others just didn’t care to. It is totally unfair but you will have to deal with it anyway.
You will probably hire various professionals to help you on your wedding day such as photographers, a wedding planner, a band, caterers, beauticians, and stylists. These are mouths you will have to feed on your big day. While you are not obligated to feed them as per the contract for services document you will sign when hiring them, it is good etiquette to serve them food along with your invited guests.
You can’t really estimate with total accuracy how much your decorations will cost before the décor is done. As the décor takes shape, you may discover that some items aren’t enough, that you bought more of one type of flower than you needed and less of another or that some items have been spoiled and need to be replaced.
There are several hidden costs you may have to incur on your wedding day. You may discover, for instance, that a price that had been quoted for you did not include the required sales tax. When cancelling an order or booking in favor of another option, you may incur cancellation fees. All these costs can add up pretty fast to become a significant portion of your total expenditure.
Your wedding day is supposed to be one of the best days of your life. You don’t want to spoil it because you forgot about a small detail. While you’re planning your wedding, be sure to cover and prepare for any possible expense. You will be more at ease knowing if something pops up – you will have a plan.
The Chad and I are very transparent parents; we want to ensure our children are well educated about adult topics and life experiences, even at a young age. As children, many of us, including The Chad and I, were not taught about credit, handling money, or finances. I learned by proxy with my father as the banker, my mother broke her arm when I was a teen so I was left to write her checks, balance her checkbook, manage the household finances and do the grocery shopping. Not all children have that experience. With our children we wanted to explain to them the importance of proper budgeting, living within your means, and the ever heavy burden of credit debt. Continue reading “Teaching Kids about Credit”
My dear friend Joie and I have been working together for the last four years. She and I have known one another for the last decade, and this past year we thought high time we created something of a logo for our collaboration. We have been juggling ideas of outsourcing a logo with services like Fiverr. We even contemplated free logos by doing it ourselves in applications like Paint or GIMP. Each time, we were just missing something that made it a truly professional logo, we were in need of a free logo creation application.
One day we happened to receive an email from a representative sharing about an online application for logos. The free logos application allows you to create a logo with thousands of design templates, various fonts and some cool icons. Continue reading “DesignEvo – Create Logos for Free”
Laundry is something we all have to do on a regular basis, which is why it’s important that we do so with our carbon footprint in mind. Charlie’s Soap, is committed to helping us have nice clean laundry while at the same time treating the environment better. Continue reading “Charlies Soap – Live Green”
Disclosure: This is a sponsored post, all opinions expressed are my own.
When my twins were born eight years ago our financial world was turned on its axis. Adding two additional people to our family increased our monthly outgo significantly so The Chad and I sought new and inventive ways to make every penny count and stretch our spending dollars. We knew that Groupon offered tremendous savings with merchants for various services, but what we did not know about is Groupon Coupons and savings for everyday items. Continue reading “Save More with Groupon Coupons”
My kitchen is the most coveted room in the house next to my bedroom. Cleaning with a toxin free cleaner was challenging, so I wanted to share my DIY Softscrub AJjax type cleaner recipe. Have you ever watched chefs and the staff clean a five star restaurant? Yes that is what happens in my kitchen; every surface is scrubbed down, every corner covered by scrubbing and cleaning and the use of hot water and a proper disinfecting cleanser. Literally you could eat off the counters and floors since I am so meticulous about crumbs, dirt, and grime in my kitchen. However I struggled with the use of commercial and toxic cleansers like bleach, softscrub, 409, you name it I used these products in my kitchen and even my bathrooms. The fumes soon became overwhelming after introducing essential oils into my home. So I thought about how my grandmothers would clean their kitchen, their homes. As part of our 52 weeks to toxin free, here is week one and how I began researching a DIY Softscrub or Ajax type of cleanser that was heavy duty but without the toxicity. Continue reading “52 Weeks to Toxin Free DIY Softscrub or Ajax”
Admittedly the Southwest Airlines commercials speak to me. You know the slogan right? “Wanna get away?”
My rhetorical question in return is “Does the sun rise in the East?”
As a mother, adult, and former traveler extraordinaire, I love to get away. But who says you have to reach the far ends of the Earth, comb the beaches of the Caribbean or peruse the boutiques of Europe to consider being on a retreat or to enjoy a vacation. Let’s revisit the first word of this paragraph which will segue into my explanation for a retreat. Mother. Yes, I have child or children in my case, which can often cause a serious reduction in travel. Why? You ask. Well my main reason for a reduction in travel is due to the birth of my twins. You see traveling with two infants and the entourage of gear required for their care could be equivalent to a domestic safari of sorts. However, now that they have evolved into walking, talking, and may I add talking again, little people travel has become less cumbersome. Nonetheless difficult though when you are now the minority and children are the majority.
Additionally, taking trips sans kids can also be difficult. Finding adequate care takers and or family willing to assume your children for a day, week, or even a few hours can be a rather disheartening to the couple wishing to have adult relations outside of the home where they can once again enjoy the company of their date. I know the hubs and I daydream of what life was like without children when we traveled and literally those memories are now daydreams for us.
But we are not letting the days of whine and runny noses get us down! In fact, my mother was so kind to gift us for Christmas gift cards for a weekend or night away from home. When we opened the gift and read the note, the feeling was much like letting the crazies out of the asylum to run the streets for the night. We could taste sweet freedom once again. In fact we got so caught up in getting away we couldn’t decide where the hell to go!
Have no fear though, the hubs is a resourceful geek of sorts. Bless him for having a Hotels.com account where he has been booking almost all of his travels for business, since he travels every other week he has become a domestic expert of travel accommodations. When the time came for us to book our retreat away from the kids, we looked at all the local resorts and spas within the Phoenix metro and downtown area. Finally we found a resort, spa, and casino close to home and even better, the price was right! So the hubs booked us a night at the Radisson Ft. McDowell Resort and Casino.
I was leery to say the least since the resort’s casino was known for being less than favorable. However, after reviewing the beauty shots of the resort on Hotels.com I was put more at ease and looking forward to our night and almost half day away from the kids to reconnect. I was put at even more ease when I saw the total cost of our sans kids retreat. $89 a night! With a sleep number bed, hot meal where I wasn’t required to cut anyone’s food but my own, no fighting kids for my own bed and pillows, and no worries of who would drive home due to the fact we both had some juicy alcoholic beverages. We just walked from the resort’s restaurant to the elevator and then to our room, a most pleasant evening, to which we retreated to enjoy additional quiet time as adults, reconnecting. Furthermore, we got up early enough the next morning to drive home but detoured for some breakfast at a local cafe.
Needless to say I was stoked we were able to get away and even better, Hotels.com helped us to stay on and within our budget, but were able to stay in a five star resort all  the more. Have you ever thought about a stay-cation when you cannot always get away for an extended vacation? Do you have the same struggles of child care when wanting to go on a date night?
With all of my OCD tendencies, having order among a house of chaos, you would think that my junk drawer would have been tackled like a running back. Oh no…my junk drawer multiplied, literally, I believe that it spawned a cousin or something.
In my kitchen I have two drawers of silverware depending on where I am standing in the kitchen so I am assuming that my junk drawer figured as much too. Well she is standing here lets toss everything in this drawer and when you are yonder we can throw it in there. Not so much.
So the wonderful folks at Rubbermaid contacted to me to receive and review their six piece, interlocking drawer organizer set. Now I contemplated using the set for organizing all of my kitchen utensils since they are a smorgasbord of disorganized happiness but I knew that I had two drawers in my kitchen screaming the help of Rubbermaid.
Take a gander at what a slob I am….(see I admit failure….failure to be completely OCD 100% of the time):
Look at all of that JUNK! Wet towelettes, toothpicks, batteries, pot holders and mits, rubberbands OH MY!
Now here is what my fabulous drawers look like after unloading all of the contents on my counter and organizing “the stuff” with the help of these great tips:
What is super awesome is that these trays have special feet to help stabilize them so they do not shift and moe around in your drawers like traditional organizers. What else did you expect from Rubbermaid? Plus with the various tray sizes you can configure your organization which ever way you want. Like in my drawers I split up the trays to effectively organize all my junk like my batteries for my kids toys, the candles for the many birthdays we have and will celebrate, the toothpicks I use for baking and I can easily access my ziploc bags without all the stuff getting in the way. And what is with the door knocker?
Now the second drawer is also much much more functional and look! You can see all my pot holders and everything has a place, even all the Chuck E. Cheese tickets we still need to use have a spot.
I am also giving away one of these fabulous organizing packs. An added bonus $1.00 off coupon for Rubbermaid products!
I apologize for my scatter brain as I was trying to recall all the questions and topics from memory as the Dynamic Duo were invading. You can hear and see them in action…so if nothing else…this video is at least entertaining!
Again any questions regarding taxes, mortgages, you name it….I hope to vlog an answer for you. We can also explore the dark world of organizing! Yes…my OCD tendencies would LOVE to vlog about organizing and how to get organized. Let me know. Or heck…we can just vlog about whatever! Send me your questions and again be sure to fill out the form for the Featurette Friday!
