House Hunting Continues

We have a goal! We want to be able to pay off our student loans and our mortgage within the next 10 years and have me continue to be a stay at home mom.

Keeping this goal in mind and finding a new home in the Kansas City area is proving to be difficult. We are trying to keep ourselves on a fairly tight budget, rather than becoming "house poor" (a situation where all your money goes to the mortgage). However, we want to be in a safe nice area and have a well maintained home that isn't on a busy street.

We've found that in order to stay in our budget we will most likely be in a small town outside of the heart of the metro. Unfortunately that means that my husband will have about a 30 minute commute to and from work everyday. But, his company allows him flexible hours so he can commute when the traffic is low and he should be home by 4:30 everyday.

Even after being flexible with proximity to town we still have to decide what things on our wish list for a home are expendable. This is proving difficult, as many homes either seem to need a lot of work or be extremely small. So we have begun considering new construction homes built on a slab rather than a basement. I'm just trying to get over the idea of not having a basement in Kansas. But, the decision for a slab saves us 20-40k over house built with an unfinished basement, which we would probably spend extra money in order to finish the basement so it would most likely make it more difficult if not impossible to reach our goal.

So currently our home search has our eyes set on one particular slab built home with a three car garage. What do you think? Will I go nuts without a basement? Our will it be worth it to be debt free in 10 years?

Day one, of feeling young again!

Well, this morning I woke up wanting be silly. So I'm starting my day off by sticking a "cutie" clementine sticker to my face. I really want to see if anyone mentions it too me. I know it might sound lame to other people, but I find it extremely funny to have something on my face and then act surprised and clueless when someone tries to help me get it off.  It would be a bonus if someone else had fun with it and said I was a "cutie"!

My experiment went great! Some friend immediately told me and we laughed about it. It felt good. My son and I had fun with it too.

How to feel young Again.

When did I grow up? Sometimes I feel like I should still be about 16 with no responsibilities. Then I look around and realize that I have a husband, a mortgage, two kids and two dogs. I love my life, and wouldn't change a thing, but I don't know how I became so boring.

I was a crazy girl back in the day. Anyone that knew me "back in the day" can probably tell some stories. I was the kind of girl that saw a Jello wrestling competition as I walked across campus and thought it looked like fun. So skipped class and spent the day wrestling people in a pit filled with green Jello, and I ended up winning. I then celebrated my victory by going out with friends laughing and drinking Jello Shots.

I don't long to be that naive and careless again. But, sometimes I think I've lost that carefree spark of youth and I think I'm too young to not have that spark. I need to find that spark again! So here is my list of things I'm going to do to get the "spark back"

1) I'm making it my mission to do something fun and crazy that makes me laugh at least once a week.
2) I'm going to start working out so I have the energy to be silly.
3) Smile! Smile! Smile!

Snow Day Activities

So for the third time this winter we are "snowed in". As a stay at home mom, to a preschooler and a toddler, keeping the kids occupied and active with something other than the T.V. can be a chore, and a test of my creativity. These are 10 of our snow day activities, and I'd love to hear what other mother are doing so I can steal some of their ideas.

1) The kids made sugar cookie dough, I let them mix it with their hands.
2) After refrigerating the dough for a few hours, we used it as a play dough substitute and formed them into various shapes.
3) I then created paint for our creations using evaporated milk and food coloring. They had a blast painting!
4) finally we baked our creations and had a tea party
5) We made an obstacle course around the house. (Crawl under the table, through a tent tunnel, jump on a mini trampoline and land on the couch)
5) Cheap balloons from the dollar store have provided hours of extreme fun and some science experiments with static electricity. (making our hair stand up, rubbing on our hair and sticking it to the wall, running around in our socks to see if the static will transfer to the balloon and make it stick to the wall)
6) Snow ice cream! I sent the bundled up kids outside with a bowl and a spoon and gave them a task to fill the bowl with WHITE snow. When they came in we had warm milk and made up some ice cream.
7) The Wii game, Just Dance For Kids, has provided my kids with a lot of physical activity. Silas loves, Shake the Sillies Out, and Sydney loves, If Your Happy and You Know it.
8) Creating paper snowflakes and coloring them
9) I've been getting the kids involved in the kitchen
10) We read lots of books!