Getting the New Year off to a Good Start

We've spent our new year so far at home, packing up Christmas decorations and removing the trees. The good thing about the fresh tree leaving pine needles everywhere means I have a really, really clean living room! I had to move all the furniture and get under it. I still have the manger left to take down (somehow I threw out the packing material for it, thankfully I have a lot of Sunday papers to wrap them in), and I need to dust the frames when I put them back up. Aside from my regular cleaning, I also went through the fridge and tossed out all the expired stuff that was in the door of the fridge. I didn't know that most of the salad dressing in there was expired. No wonder I had no space!

My stepdaughter is now back with her Mom in another state. In some ways it's a relief, and in other ways it's not. I'm not going into very many details because it's better that way. Most of my relief is because it was a temporary arrangement while she was here- if she lived here, we would move some things around and make everyone more comfortable space-wise. Other issues, I'm sure it's the same things any mother of a 17 year old goes through. At some point, you just have to hope that you've made some impact in their life and that they will make the right choices on their own. Of course, it's also hard because she's not my child, but she is. Step-parenting is something else.

Doorbuster and I stayed home while step-dd and the 3 older kids went to the Griffith observatory the night before step-dd went home. They got to see both Planetarium shows too. It was a Friday evening, so it was very crowded. I was glad I stayed home with the wee-one, as I would have spent the time freezing outside or trying not to lose him. We'll all go again another day.

Genius says the Planetarium is his favorite place. I'm hoping all that space will stick with him. School starts up tomorrow, so it's back to the schoolwork-dance class- PE class- drum lessons- park days routine. I do want to try for more field trips this year. There are some places we haven't been too that we should visit- like the Discovery Cube, the LA Natural History Museum, and the Western Science Museum. Six Flags also has a homeschool physics day, and I think that Genius and Daredevil would love something like that.

It's been so nice and warm these past few days I called the water park to see if they were open. They told me they open it on warm days when there is demand, like today, unless they are doing maintenance on it, like today. Funny! We will have to wait until their maintenance is done the end of January, and if this weather stays nice, we'll be hanging out in our swimsuits in February. I suppose this is why we have such a "high cost of living". Though- in some of the money saving blogs I read, we pay a lot less for produce then they do, but we pay more in rent. In some places, the rents pretty close too. I wonder how it would work out when you add in the cost of heating oil/propane/ whatever else they use to heat their houses when it's snowing.

On Sunday I restarted couponing again. I took November/December off and used up what was in the stockpile. Now my stockpile has room for more stuff, finally. No, I don't have huge shelves in my garage (not yet anyways, those suckers are expensive), I just have my cupboard at the end of the hall. In good coupon fashion, I started off buying toilet paper and paper towels. We have enough to last us a few months I'd guess. It wasn't free, but it was lower then if I bought it at Walmart/Target. 

Our tree has finally lost almost all of it's leaves. So far we have filled up the green can to the top twice, and we will probably fill it up once more. Next weekend we are doing a good deep cleaning of the backyard, it's been neglected in the whole month or so that we had of cold weather. I think we finally got caught up trash-wise from Christmas, so we should have a pretty empty bin to fill. Just watch, when I get it cleaned up then it will rain buckets. That's just the way it works around here. I bought Brad more long sleeve shirts since he outgrew them, and now it's sunny and he doesn't need them.

My friend Vixi is having a giveaway on her blog. Head on over to her page HERE, and enter to win some of her beautiful jewelry! If you like steampunk type stuff, she has some neat things, and tutorials too.