02 August 2011

Christmas in August

It has been quite a while since I posted last. Sorry. Tyson and I have been very busy with family reunions, missionary farewells, baby showers, and getting ready for the baby. Yesterday marked the beginning of my 37th week so Baby Remy is officially full-term. Tyson and I also had our first official FHE yesterday. Official because we sang a song and had a prayer and a spiritual thought. It was intense. Our activity was to set up our new budgeting system: the envelope system.
I had heard about this from one of my friends but Tyson is the one who decided we should give it a try. Basically, you pull out a bunch of money from the bank and the beginning of the month. You then divide it into envelopes labeled different things like Groceries, Tithing, or Fuel. Your goal for the month is to not spend more than what is in the envelope. We are going to try and make this work and I will report on its success (or failure) sometime in the future.
We have a jar in our room where we keep all our spare change. This is a great thing to do because after a few months you can count all your coins like Scrooge and feel a bit richer. Yesterday we counted up our change monies and we had $70 plus a bit. That is a lot of change!



We decided that we would use this money to start saving for our Christmas gift to each other: 2012 Season Passes to the Hale Center Theater in Orem. YAY! I didn't even have to twist Tyson's arm about this. The 2012 season is going to be awesome. Seriously. Here are the shows: The 39 Steps, Xanadu, The Secret Garden, Crazy for You, Arsenic and Old Lace, and a Rodgers and Hammerstein production that can't tell us until January 2012 but using my amazing detective skills I've decided it must be South Pacific. AWESOME SHOWS. I am particularly excited about The 39 Steps and Crazy for You.
Anyway, season passes are $95/person plus a $3 processing fee. After setting aside all that change and then adding in our saved up fun money we had all the money we needed to get our passes! Tyson really wants to show up at the theater with $70 in change and make them count it but I think we'll make a stop at the bank and pick up some coin rolls instead. I am very proud of the pair of us. We love going to the theater and these passes will be a great date night pretty much once a month for the next year. We wouldn't have done it if we didn't want to see all the shows. I am so grateful for a husband who plans ahead and looks out for our theatrical future :)
Another bonus of paying off our Christmas gifts now is that we have still budgeted ourselves fun money every month. What does that mean? We don't have to worry about saving it for Christmas! I can save up mine and get a bike trailer, or a gym membership, or new shoes, or maybe we'll just end up spending it all on diapers for Baby Remy. Either way, we're feeling pretty dang savvy right about now. Maybe I'll get Tyson a Euro scarf to wear to the theater :) Just kidding!

1 comment:

Rachel said...

speaking of diapers, has anyone told you about amazon mom yet? Once you figure out what brand of diapers works for you and your baby (and maybe after you're done with newborn size, since you don't know how fast baby will grow) join amazon mom. Joining amazon mom (for free) gives you 15% off of whatever you buy, and if you do the subscribe and save program (where you set up an automatic shipment once/twice/thrice a month), it's an extra 15% off. I love it! also- they email you a week before they are going to ship your order, in case you want to cancel your order entirely or change something like diaper size/brand/quantity. It ships to your door with two free day shipping. This discount/free shipping also includes any other baby products- wipes, breast pumps, toys etc. It's the greatest advise I ever heard, so I thought I'd pass it on. One package (168 ct) lasts about 5 weeksish for us, for about $22.