Frugal Fridays #17

Successes/Blessings:

1. I earned two $5 Amazon gift cards through Swagbucks (referral link). I’ll be saving them to use for birthday/Christmas gifts.
2. I have started my weeks of prodromal labor (typical for me…happens with every pregnancy). The other night I was having contractions (not braxton hicks…but real deal contractions) from about 8:00pm until 4:00am, and then everything just died out. So I’ve been exhausted and frustrated. My mother inlaw kept 3 of my older kids overnight the night before last so that I could rest, and when she dropped them off yesterday, she brought a tray of her Spanish rice and chicken (a family favorite). It was so nice to not have to worry about cooking dinner!
3. I’ve traded a few more books on paperbackswap.com and used the credits for books needed for homeschool.
4. I used the rewards points system that my husband’s work offers to order 2 books as well. Through his program, I discovered the Picture Book Biography series and have ordered 3 of them so far. We’re really enjoying them! I normally don’t like most children’s biographies, but these were well done and not at all boring to read aloud.
5. We filed our taxes this year with TurboTax, and that came with an offer to put a certain amount toward an Amazon gift card, and receive a 10% bonus on that amount. We opted to do that and figured out how much we’d like to spend on birthdays and Christmas for the kids this year, plus a little extra to cover some of the cost of birthday gifts for our 12 nieces and nephews, and put that much on an Amazon gift card from our tax return. That way we already have the money set aside…and we do most of our gift shopping on Amazon anyway.

Fumbles:

1. As I said last week, the remainder of this pregnancy will not consist so much of fumbles…rather like calculated decisions to make my life easier. So while non-super-pregnant me might see the pack of frozen dinner rolls in my freezer as a fumble….super-duper-pregnancy me sees them as a sanity saver. Because that’s one less thing I have to cook. And I love that right now.

Goals:

1. When shortcuts need to be made (like the dinner rolls above), I’m hoping that I can continue to buy my shortcuts at the store rather than cave and order pizza.
2. We’re currently in the market for a used vehicle for my husband to drive to and from work. He’s gone to look at a couple of options, but so far we haven’t found anything. I’m hoping that as the weather warms up, more will come on the market.
3. Order a couple of dwarf fruit trees.

How did you save money this week?

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