BHG

I've always been a magazine addict. Home and garden and cooking magazines mostly. However, I never fully appreciated them until I bought my first ever Martha Stewart magazine and read it just after Gabe was born. Gabe was fussy one day and I couldn't do anything but hold him and the magazine was the only readable thing within my reach so I made sure that I read it the entire way through - every page. The first article was about Martha's trip to Prague and everything that she did and saw seemed so interesting to me! Even her Q&A pages were fantastic. Since then, I have become a subscriber to Martha Stewart Living and it has inspired me to take up sewing and knitting again, to take up felting and to make a whole load of food. Martha Stewart Living has been my favorite magazine since then but slowly Better Homes and Gardens has been growing on me too. While I don't appreciate every single article the way I do with Martha's, BHG has fantastic tips sometimes. The current issue has a whole bunch of money saving tips with a whole insert of money saving websites. I'd never even heard of most of these and I'm the type to keep my eyes and ears open for such websites. One of the websites that I've checked out thus far is www.nobetterdeal.com. There's not a lot on the site, but the prices are amazing. It sells open box and as is products. I'd never buy electronics off of it, but home decor items and the sort could be great from it! The other website I checked out is even better - www.shopgoodwill.com. If you are looking for something on Ebay and can't find it, don't get discouraged, just check out this website! Their selection in the home decor catagory is breath-taking. So many gorgeous pieces... And great prices of course. The only problem I've noticed so far is that I've now seen 5 different things that I would have bought in a moment except that those sellers didn't ship to Canada. Sigh. It's probably for the best... it's saving us alot of money.
Today was a bit of a hectic day. I meant to wake up early, go for a run, shower and make breakfast for Matt... none of that happened. I didn't wake up until Matt came and kissed me goodbye as he was leaving for work. I got up a bit later and then realized we had nothing for Gabe's breakfast. I normally give him some combination of yogurt, bananas, baby cereal, whole milk, cottage cheese and peaches. We had none of those. So, after giving him some makeshift breakfast we ran out to the grocery store to get some staples. Unfortunately, I had apparently not fed him enough because when we got to the canned fruit aisle and I picked up some fruit cups (super convenient for when we're out and about over lunch time) and he recognized them as food he normally eats (in the fruit section he just thinks that everything is a ball). Anyway, he started screaming, it was messy and I had to wrap up the shopping a bit soon. I got into the car and realized I hadn't picked up any meat for dinner, which was one of the big things I needed to get. So we drove across town to Superstore. I hadn't shopped there since before Christmas and I've heard from so many people so many different things that I need to go there for: clothes, chicken wings, baby toys... Well, when I got there I fed Gabe a banana in the car and then went to get a car seat. It unfortunately had just started raining so I was scrambling to keep Gabe dry while trying to find a shopping cart with a working seat-belt and then I noticed they were all wet. I didn't want to get Gabe's bum wet so I decided to just carry him through the store. Well, that didn't leave me much carrying ability. Plus, I found Mum-Mum's on sale - 2 for $4. Couple that with buying steaks for dinner and I was pretty much done. So, I forgot to get chicken wings, I barely looked at clothes, and I didn't even get near the toys.
Once I got home I few Gabe more and I tried to get him settled down for a nap - which totally didn't work. So I started uploading pictures from my crazy long weekend and then started scheming a bit. Matt put together our new bookshelf last night and it looks fantastic but it does not go with our old dining room set. So, we're selling our table, chairs and china cabinet! We have another table - a pub height one that my parents bought us for our wedding - that we'll now be bringing upstairs. It has been working as a sewing table for me but it'll be easy enough to find another one of those. Anyway, we're thinking we can get $300 for our dining room set (I saw one that was almost identical, just less pretty, for $400) and that will pay for our new bookshelf, a new sewing table, and we'll still have over $100 left over! I loaded up the bookshelf today and it holds all of our cookbooks, textbooks, magazines and other books. Oh, and it's organized in catagories: text books, classic novels, world history and languages, fantasy, theology... oh, and Jane Austen has her very own shelf :) For dinner I made a steak salad (we'd had one last night at Matt's sister's place and it was so good I was craving more) and the steak was the best one I've ever barbqued. It was perfect! Oh, and we used our Grizzly Paw Brewing Company barbque sauce which is my new favorite barbque sauce. I stayed home from Auxano tonight just to have some time to myself. I had a bath, read my magazine and now I'm doing this :)
But Matt's home now so I'm going to go hang with him!

Mrs. Vander Leek ;)