the story of us: Staycation

Garrett and I started Dave Ramsey's Total Money Makeover last fall and made quite a bit of headway with Garrett's Christmas bonus, which by the way is NOT a fun way to spend it. We have been making progress, but I recently updated everything since after paying off all of our medical bills from 2009 (Garrett's back surgery, Hayden's scrutiny of doctor visits, etc) we incurred more after Hayden had surgery in February and then we had a baby in March. It only took a few months to rack up more medical expenses which is rather discouraging, but it was unavoidable.

We are trying to pay off debt, mostly medical bills and student loans, but more importantly we want to be good stewards of our money. I have been trying to use coupons whenever possible, but we buy a lot of organic/natural products and unfortunately there's not many coupons out there for that. I have had luck at CVS though with the Extra Care Bucks. Couponing can be very time consuming and I'm amazed at how much money some people save. I am happy when I save $25 at the grocery store until I read about someone only having to spend $25.

This summer instead of taking a vacation, we have been doing more of a "staycation". Fortunately, we live in a big city where there is a lot of fun things to do. We are actually not necessarily doing all of these things at one time.

A couple of weekends ago, Garrett took Hayden to the children's museum with Randall, Heather and Kinzie and then took him fishing and he caught his first bass. We took the boys to their first baseball game this past Saturday and they LOVED it. More to come on that. We have also been going to the park, swimming, spending lots of time outside, going to the Jumpy Gym and cramming in as many fun activities as we can. Hayden loves golf and practices his swing throughout the house with his play golf clubs every single day so we plan on taking him to play putt-putt soon.