Father's Day at Powell Gardens

For Father's Day today, we took Jason out to breakfast and then to Powell Gardens, our local botanical garden.  They are having a dinosaur exhibit this year and the boys LOVE dinosaurs.

We spent a couple hours walking around, searching for the dinosaurs and enjoying the beautiful flowers and plants.

I love Clematis!

In the Island Garden, they have planters filled with water and water plants.  A couple of these planters had tadpoles in them!  We thought that was super cool!

It was a lot of fun searching for the dinosaurs. One of them had us stumped for quite a while!

Each set of dinosaurs had a display board that gave facts about the dinosaur.  They also had QR codes that you can scan with your code scanner on your smartphone which opens up a YouTube video showing more pictures and giving more information about the dinosaur.  VERY cool!  My boys were a little young for all of it.  We tried reading the display boards to them, but they were more interested in the bugs crawling on the ground!  Haha!

I would highly recommend Powell Gardens for your next family outing!

We all enjoyed our Father's Day!  I hope you all did, too!

Change of Plans...

Well, I didn't make it to the grocery store today.  Actually, I didn't even leave the house.  I wasn't feeling too well, so I just decided to stay home and finalize my grocery list so I can go tomorrow.  While I was working on my meal plan for the week and my grocery list, I read through my freezer-cooking cookbook that I borrowed from the library.  I decided that most of the recipes in it, though they look really yummy, do not fit into my plan of losing weight.  Most of them are not diet friendly.  I did find a few slow-cooker recipes that I will try and several recipes for grilling.  My new fancy-schmancy slow-cooker came today, so I'm really anxious to try it out next week!  I'll keep you posted on how it works!  :)

Current Goals

So, as I try to get this blog going again, I'm thinking of all of the things that are rattling around in this brain of mine.  My current goals for my life are:

• To have a fun summer with my boys before C starts kindergarten in the fall.  (Can't believe that's even possible!!!)
• To get my household organized.
• Try to keep my house a little more presentable.  (Ha!  I laugh because that's so tough for me.)
• To lose weight.
• To start exercising on a regular basis.
• To feed my family healthier meals.
• To save money where I can.
• To be "green".

In order to accomplish these goals, I have many, many ideas for little steps I can take along the way.  So, that's where I'm going to start here.

Today, Mom and I took the boys out to garage sales.  We had a pretty good day.  I found a few bargains.  The boys, as usual, spent way too much money on toys (some of which didn't even work, as usual).  I found a couple pieces of art for my walls (now I just have to figure out where to hang them!), and a few baskets to help me with my organization.  I also found a book, The One-Minute Organizer Plain & Simple by Donna Smallin, which I'm hoping will give me a few tips to help me reach my goals.

Tomorrow, we have to go to the grocery store.  I've been trying to do a little of the Extreme Couponing.  I'm definitely NOT extreme!  But, I'm thinking it's a good start for me to cut some of my household costs!  I've started a stockpile and we just bought a second refrigerator (LOVE Craigslist!).  I also checked out a book at the library called Don't Panic--Dinner's in the Freezer.  I'm hoping to get into a routine of cooking a bunch of meals in one day to freeze and reheat later on.  Especially since I don't like to use my oven much in the summer and with all of our outdoor activities, I find myself not wanting to cook a lot of the time.  So, now I need to start thinking about my meal plan and grocery list!