Disney vacation savings jar

Posted on August 3, 2014August 4, 2014 by mommyinthemidwest

Since Disney seems to be a big part of my world right now – some part my kids’ daily entertainment – future vacation plans, etc, I decided to just lay it all on the line and freely fly my Disney freak flag. There, I said it. I am in love with Walt Disney World.

I waste too much time googling and pinning all things Disney, like money saving tips, ways to surprise your kids with the news that they’re going, how to manage that LONG car ride with pre-schoolers, etc. I finally took it upon myself to follow through with something that caught my eye. One of the money-saving tips was to create a cute jar and throw your pocket change into it at the end of each day. Or dollar bills. Or Disney gift cards that you just happened to pick up at Target. Or you know, maybe your friends visit and want to empty their pockets in the jar. The idea isn’t necessarily that you will save up enough money for the entire trip, but maybe enough to pay for your food or some souvenirs. Regardless, it’s a fun way to keep a daily reminder that a Disney trip is in the future (however near or far) and to set some spare money aside when possible.

My Disney-loving cousin visited this weekend so I had her school me in the ways of the hot glue gun (I’d never used one before). I think the jar turned out cute – and I bet she’ll be making one of her own soon 😉 …thank you Cousin Kara!

I purchased everything at the craft store. A glass jar with lid, ribbon, and Disney stickers. Luckily Michael’s had TONS of Disney/Walt Disney World stuff in their scrap-booking section. I thought we’d have a hard time choosing a font that looked most like Disney but instead, the problem was deciding which Mickey/Disney stickers would work best on the jar’s shape. Easy Peasy.

Glued two ribbons together to give the savings jar a more festive Disney look.

Settled on glittery red letters for the word “dollars.” We ended up not using/needing the Mickey sticker that you can kind of see in the photos above so he’ll be going back to the store. Hey, $4 is $4! That’s $4 that can go in the jar!

I’m super pleased with how the jar turned out. I think it looks adorable and it wasn’t hard to do at all! We put a total of about $5 in there today just to get it going – I wish we were putting that much in there every day! Now to reserve our next trip…

~C~

catch the moment: week thirty

Posted on August 1, 2014August 1, 2014 by mommyinthemidwest

Here’s a new start for me and a new start for my blog as I introduce mommyinthemidwest.com and say goodbye to my ol’ blogger site.

I’m still working on getting things in order, but read HERE to find out what happened and why I made the change. I decided to go ahead and make this wordpress blog public because I didn’t want to get behind on Catch the Moment. I will continue working on cleaning up imported entries from my old blog but wanted to continue writing and sharing here. Also I have been thinking about hiring a designer to make it pretty. Any affordable suggestions?

Anyway, here we are at week 30 and it’s hard to believe how much of the year has flown by already. Over halfway to Christmas again. Just a little over two months til we go on the vacation that I started planning the day we got back from Disney World last October. School is starting. Summer is winding down, although it feels like it never got off to a good start around here as we’ve had a much cooler than usual couple of months.

Linking up with Mindi, Sarah, and Stephanie for CTM365: Week 30.

205/365: July 23rd. I’m re-sharing this from last week’s post because I realized about 3-4 days after I published week 29 that I gave that week eight days by accident. I guess this was just too pretty to wait another week. I had dinner with the friend on the anniversary of my dad’s death and it was a nice distraction from the blues that hit this time of year. We shared this beautiful appetizer at Mesh. (MILK AND HONEY CROSTINI: CAPRIOLE SOPHIA GOAT CHEESE / BAGUETTE / PICKLED BLACKBERRY / SWEET LIFE FARMS HONEY).

206/365: July 24th. Just playing outside after dinner.

207/365: July 25th. Simple Friday night fun. I snapped this because I thought the water looked cool with the sun shining through it. Too bad the focus is on the legs of the water table!

208/365: July 26th. My sister-in-law got married Saturday and I took this picture of their beautiful rings while she was getting ready.

209/365: July 27th. Because everyone eats popsicles for breakfast the morning after a rockin’ party, right?

210/365: July 28th. We went to Target to buy Theo a new lunch bag (see it behind him? 2nd year in a row that he’s chosen a grown-up lunch bag!) and he decided he was ready to try riding his bike and wanted a helmet. We’re talking about the bike that we bought him for his birthday almost five months ago and he’s refused to ride.

211/365: July 29th. Just some Tuesday night Play-Doh time while I was preparing dinner.

Which photo is your favorite this week? Of course I love seeing my boys’ faces but my favorite this week has to be Day 208 – my sister-in-law’s and her husband’s wedding rings. I just love how it came out!

xo,

Candice

making a change

Image posted on July 30, 2014August 1, 2014 by mommyinthemidwest

I had been thinking for a long time about switching from blogger to WordPress but the unknown was what got in the way. Tuesday, Ryan emailed me around lunchtime. “Hey, what’s wrong with your blog? I wanted to catch up during lunch. All the pictures are missing.” HMMM? I quickly typed in the web address and sure enough, they were gone. Long gone. Gone with the wind. Goodbye. Adios. I’ll stop there, you get the point. For a few months, I’d been getting warnings every time I logged into Gmail that I was out of storage space and needed to free up space or purchase more. Here’s the thing. Google+. I don’t remember if I signed up for that or not – or do you just automatically have it when you have other google accounts? It doesn’t matter – my point is that I HAVE NEVER USED Google+ for anything. I have always uploaded photos to my blog either from my memory card or my computer’s desktop. I don’t really know anything about it. All I know is that Google+ was automatically backing up 343 versions of every photo that I had ever loaded onto my computer, taken with my Android phones, and put on my blog in the last 4 years. Which added up to about 25,000 photos. So Monday I took some time to delete a few THOUSAND pictures from Google+. It warned me that they would be deleted permanently. From Google+. Not from my google-driven blog. So yep, when I started scrolling through my blog, the pictures were…just…gone. Devastating. All that time. All that effort. Hours upon hours. Luckily, I still have the photos. And now I have my wordpress blog. I just need my time back. Time to slowly and carefully re-add the photos to this new space and restore what was once something I was proud of and happy with. So I apologize if you are scrolling through posts here and click on links that go nowhere or find posts with missing photos. I imported all of the content from my old blog and will work on it as I have the time to get all the photos back where they belong. I’m finding that it’s a time-consuming and tedious process. So I’m new at wordpress. I don’t really know what I’m doing. I hope it gets easier. I don’t like change. I don’t really like computers, either. Or having to learn things on them or about them. Not much of a blogger, am I? ~Candice~