I am loving Swagbucks. I joined last summer just on a whim, figuring why not? Now I’ve earned over $105 in Amazon.com gift cards. Amazing. It’s been nice having “free money,” in a sense, to do things with. We’ve used the gift cards for Christmas gifts, for needs, and for fun things like my new pink tool set. (I’ve been wanting my own tools for a while, but just never got around to getting any until now. Now I don’t have to run out to the shed to find a hammer.)

If you haven’t given Swagbucks a try, I recommend it! It’s a great way to earn stuff while doing what you’re already doing (internet searches).

There were some other pictures of just the tool set, but aren’t Caleb’s little hands just too cute?

I came across these pictures the other day. They’re several years old, from when I was trying to culture my own buttermilk. Usually it worked fine, but this day I tightened the lid down too far, and left the house. When I got home, it had exploded all over my oven. Let me tell you, the smell was awful! Thankfully, Stephen cleaned a lot of it up for me. My piano students got a good laugh out of it that night though!

Adventures aside, I might just try making it again. Buttermilk makes biscuits taste amazing!

A friend of ours asked to see pictures of our chicken coop. It took me a while to find these – they weren’t on my blog like I thought they were.

This was right after we finished building it in 2005. If I remember right, it’s 10 by 10. Everything was given to us in some way or another – mostly from friends and things from Freecycle.

We’ve changed some things since then. The hutch inside is now outside and houses our quail. The feed cans aren’t inside any more either. We’ve also added a large fenced-in run for the birds and additional nesting boxes.

We’re down to 13 chickens now. It’s really strange to have so few when we were used to around 60. We just ordered 12 Buff Orpingtons from our farmer’s service store, and we’re planning on incubating some of our own eggs when the nights are a bit warmer too.

It’s supposed to rain for the next several days so I’ll probably forget to take any new pictures by the time the weather clears up. But there you have it – a look at our chicken coop.

I’m working on making some schedule changes. Anna quit sleeping through the night for a while (we’re guessing it was teething-related – she got her first two teeth about two weeks ago) so I’d pretty much abandoned efforts to stick to any type of a routine. Now I’m thinking that wasn’t the best idea. Hopefully she’ll start sleeping all night again though – that would be a HUGE help!

Before, I tried to put one generic schedule on a page, even though some days of our week vary quite a bit. This time I’m thinking of making different pages for different days – so I’m not trying to follow a routine that doesn’t fit the events of that day.

I never thought I was much of a person to stick to a set schedule, but it seems like I was wrong. They help more than I thought. Hopefully this will help make things go more smoothly around here. It’s not awful but improvement sure wouldn’t hurt either.

Sometimes it’s just fun to play around with pictures.

A friend of mine asked the other day about why and how we do our cash system.

In short, we’re loosely following Dave Ramsey’s system for budgeting. We pay most of our bills online, and everything else is typically pre-allocated before payday arrives.

We pay cash for most budget categories, with groceries and clothing being the two biggest. Gas money stays in our account because it is so much easier for me to pay with a debit card at the pump than dragging three kids inside the gas station to pay with cash. It has really helped us to stay within our budget categories. We did okay before, but it’s been a lot easier to stay within the budget with cash.

We’ve been working on becoming debt free, and now that we can actually see the end, it’s even more motivation to keep going and get that debt gone forever. Some of it was ignorant, fresh-out-of-college debt, but a lot of it was what Dave calls survival debt too. Either way, we want that debt gone for good and we’re working as hard as we can toward that end. And finally, I can say we’re getting close!

You know, it’s amazing. Once we stopped using credit cards to help us through tough times, that’s when we started seeing God’s provision in amazing ways. That’s when we started seeing things like money in the mail, people helping us pay our mortgage, bags of groceries or grocery money given to us when we were out of food, and I could go on and on. It’s funny how once we stop using plastic to meet our needs, that’s when we see God truly meet those needs, and in amazing ways.

Anyway, back to the cash system. . .I made the cash envelope wallet because I wanted something to keep the cash in one place in my purse, without mixing up the categories. What I wasn’t expecting was other people liked them and wanted wallets too.

Here’s mine:

Here’s one I made for an online friend K: (and she was kind enough to email me with suggestions to make it better after she received it!)

And here’s a picture of two that are listed in my Etsy shop:

So our plan is to work as hard as we can, as fast as we can, to earn extra money to go toward becoming debt free. I told Stephen that seeing the end helps me be even more determined to get there as fast as I can!

Last week I found this eyelet bed skirt at the thrift store for $2. I love it. The only problem is it makes me want to make a more summery quilt to go along with it. The one on the bed right now took me two years to make – I highly doubt getting a new one done any time soon is very likely!