My word. I just slept in til 10 am. That is not good with all I have to do today. What happened to my kids being my alarm clocks? Is that era really over?

Last week was busy and a bit of a blur. Sebastian was home sick Tuesday and Wednesday. Wednesday night I had a meeting that kept me out rather late. On Thursday, I went with Gemma on her kindergarten field trip to the Insectarium. No sports practices due to illness and weather, however. After the field trip I ended up locked out of my house, which led to pizza for dinner. Also ordered in last night (Saturday).

So the meals went something like this: Sunday, leftovers (?); Monday, spaghetti and homemade meatballs; Tuesday, meatball sandwiches with leftover meatballs; Wednesday, chicken nuggets, complete (I let them get Mister Softee in the afternoon which ruined their appetite).

Meatballs getting started

Friday… Friday:

Tilapia fingers breaded in panko crumbs and fried, served with lemon-garlic mayo and homemade rice-a-roni! Yum! The kids didn’t love the fish (and ketchup was their condiment), but the boys ate it without too much complaint. Gemma, no. Fish on a Friday, it was just like being Catholic again 😛

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I have some small frugal wins to report. I’ve been getting free coffee at Wawa a lot recently. I got a free one every Friday in March, any size, so I would get the biggest size and save half for Saturday morning. Somewhere in there I earned a free latte as well, and the other day I finally completed one of their “how was your visit?” surveys because the reward was (you guessed it) a free coffee. More importantly, I have only gotten the coffees on these trips, no other purchases (more or less). Lastly, if you are local please note that this Thursday, April 13 is Free Coffee Day at Wawa!

I’ve also been shopping at Acme somewhat frequently, and while I’ve avoided the time suck of playing the Monopoly game, I take the tickets and look through them for the freebies. Got two free bagels so far.

After reading this post on The Nonconsumer Advocate on focus groups, I signed up for a couple local firms and spent some time taking screeners and whatnot. Then when they finally started calling me about actually doing them, I got busy with meetings and the field trip and so I haven’t called them back yet. D’oh! But nice to know that the opportunity is there. To give you an idea, one I looked at was paying $225 for a nine-hour gig.

My current eBay listings are a bit stagnant. I am probably asking too much for them, but I’m trying to let them ride a little longer.

I titled this post Ms. Fix-It because I was so happy that I was able to fix my electric pencil sharpener, which had stopped working. However, that is the only thing I’ve fixed 🙂 Oh, I looked up a YouTube video on how to fix our dishwasher and emailed it to my husband.

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After many months of not being interested in fixing up the house at all, suddenly Aidan and I have been watching HGTV every night, swapping ideas, and looking at Pinterest together. I don’t have any specific plans to start renovating anything, but it just feels good to dream and plan again. I even got out the blueprint I made a couple years ago of my whole grand idea for renovating the kitchen/family room area. I had a new “eureka” moment where I realized we could move our back door so that it opens into the playroom instead of the kitchen, and make a mudroom area back there.

The one small thing I did was to decide to fully turn our dining room into a homework room. It was halfway there — I just put away a lot of the dishes and stuff and made more room for school and art supplies. I want to hit the thrift stores today and look for matching baskets, for school papers and artwork, etc. A bulletin board would be nice in there too. Of course we can still eat in there as needed. I’m not going to completely “kidify” it.

So now when the kids come home, I hang their bookbags on the dining room chairs, and I’m sure after six months of nagging, they will start doing that too!

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Yesterday was our town’s Green Festival. I helped to (wo)man the booth for our local group that is working on making chicken-keeping legal in our town. Our chicken mentor, who lives in a different town, brought her chickens, Rosebud and Hattie. Grownups and kids alike flocked (snicker) to our booth to pet the chickens and marvel over the egg Rosebud laid, and to (yay!) sign our petition in support of backyard hens. It was nice to hear so many people express support for chickens and it was really encouraging. In a time when there’s so much going on politically and so many confusing issues, it feels good to work on something that I know is a win-win-win.

Enjoy your Sunday!