The code will only work today, but it will get you a free movie at your local Redbox. Just enter in the code: 54TRX3.
I hope you can enjoy a fun & free holiday movie tonight with your family!
Sound Off: Have you seen any good movies lately that you could recommend?
Thanks to Heather over at Freebies 4 Mom for her help on compiling our freebie list for the week! Please visit her site for more great freebies and check us out for your freebies each Friday. Happy holidays and enjoy these fun (and FREE) stocking stuffers!
Food
Burger King Reward Coupons (sent via your mobile phone or through email)
Free Rental Code from The New Release: USFNF
Today on Frugal Hacks, I am sharing tips for recording all of your favorite Christmas specials and movies on television this year. Who would want to miss any of their old favorites? Plus, they added some great new favorites (did anyone else love the new Shrek Christmas special?) for the year too. Be sure to check out my post so you can set those recorders for some fun family nights together!
Over the Thanksgiving weekend, we checked out some of our old favorite movies and I happened upon a movie that we had not seen before called, “The Holiday Inn.” This has become my new favorite Christmas movie and I would recommend checking it out for your family this holiday season. T
here is lots of great singing and dancing in this film and although there is some political incorrectness for our time period, it is an excellent movie that really made us smile! Interesting enough, it was also the inspiration for the hotel chain name…Holiday Inn.
I am curious, what is your favorite holiday movie? Do you have any obscure holiday movies that might be overlooked by most families, but that is a favorite in your house?
Today on our WSBT-TV segment, I am sharing inexpensive ways to ship your packages, good investments for creating a shipping center at home, and things you can use around your house for packing materials for your packages.
This goes along with a post that I wrote awhile back on shipping your packages frugally and our adventures in shipping. I plan to write a more extensive article after I noticed that it is one of the top things people have been searching for on our site.
You can also see our new Christmas tree, as our tree this year was looking a little um… Charlie Brown-ish. The top had broken on it and I had hot glued it last year, but it couldn’t survive another year. We had just put it up, but no decorations for it yet.
Sound Off: Do you have any tips for cheap shipping or any frugal materials around your house that you use for packing your gifts?
I used a free random number generator to choose the winner for our giveaway. It quickly calculated and told me that…
Rachel from Pursuits of Heart & Home is the lucky recipient of our fun bloggy giveaway. Rachel- please email me at amy@momadvice.com as soon as you can with your shipping address.
Once again, thanks to everyone for participating and sharing your ideas for MomAdvice.com and where we should take our site in the upcoming year. I have so many great ideas to work with and have already started jotting down thoughts of how I can accomplish some of these articles for the site. It is so exciting to get some material to work with and to find ways that I can share on things you are looking for.
Thank you all and congratulations to Rachel on winning the Kaboost Booster Seat!
Special thanks to Heather, from Freebies 4 Mom, for helping gather up freebie offers for our readers! Please visit her site for more great freebies!
Don’t forget to sign up for our Kaboost Booster Seat Giveaway! The giveaway ends at 8 PM Eastern Standard Time and I will announce the winner on Saturday! Thank you to everyone who has already entered and supplied incredible ideas for what I can be doing in 2008. Half of the battle is coming up with ideas so thank you for supplying those.
Happy Friday to everyone!
Health & Beauty:
Home & Garden:
I have been hard at work over at The Motherloot and wanted to share some of our new product reviews with you! I wanted to make sure I got these up in time for all of that holiday shopping so I hope you can take a peek for some great gift ideas.
New Reviews:
Flip Video Ultra Series
Otopia Organic Skin Care Products
For the Kids Three CD
OskerBee Baby Changing Station
FamilyStories Books
Ferrero Rondnoir Chocolates
You might also notice that my hubby has been hard at work on our website too! We have a new banner for both The Mother load and The Aldi Queen Blog. He also has created a great landing page with an introduction to all of the blogs on our site so that it is easier to find what you are looking for and tons easier to subscribe to our feeds.
In honor of all of the big changes I am making around here, I am giving away the Kaboost Booster Seat that I had received from the company. I absolutely adore it, but it doesn’t hit
at the right height for our table so I want to share it with someone else for the holiday season. These retail for $39.95 so it is a great freebie for one special reader.
Rules to Enter: Please click to leave a comment and tell me one article or idea that you would like to see on our website for 2008. I am stumped for new article ideas and this would be a wonderful help to me for creating the type of site that you want to keep coming back to! Entries must be received by 8PM Eastern Standard Time on Friday evening. The winner will be announced on Saturday! Good luck and please feel free to share the giveaway with your readers. It is as an awesome product and would be a great addition to your dinner table!
For today’s installment on Frugal Hacks, I am sharing crafty ideas for making holiday ornaments with your children. I have been spending some time surfing the internet to come up with some ideas for Ethan & I to do together so I thought I would share them with you too!
In this picture is our ornament making station that I made for our special ornament-making days. I purchased a vinyl tablecloth and loads of fun crafty supplies from the dollar store. Right now they have wooden ornaments that come in a ten pack for decorating that would be a wonderful decorative addition to any gift.
I just love decorating the Christmas tree and thought it would be a fun discussion to share your favorite ornaments that you hang on your tree each year.
I have two special ornaments that I absolutely love and that bring a smile to my face each time I get them out. One is a beautiful painted light bulb that one of my co-workers purchased for me at my very first “real” job. I was working as an administrative assistant and this gentleman was the head of the sales department and told me if I worked extra hard, he would secure a position for me in the sales department. So…I worked my tail off and did extra projects for the group and he gave me this special ornament right before he told me that he never got permission to hire me as an assistant and then I eventually was laid off after a brief promotion as a marketing assistant…WAIT! This is a horrible story! Why the heck is that my favorite ornament?
In all seriousness, the ornament represented one of the first times in my life where I felt like a grown-up and I felt valued as an employee. I felt like a smart woman and I had struggled through school (getting by on my fine social skills, mind you!) so it felt good to feel appreciated and valued as an employee.
My other favorite ornament is a Dunkin’ Donuts ornament that I won in an ornament exchange. When we lived in Massachusetts, every single day I would buy myself a cup of joe over at our local Dunkin’ Donuts. Our first home, a small townhouse, was situated behind a Dunkin’ Donuts and we would get bagels and muffins from there all of the time for our Saturday mornings.
Right after I had Ethan, I was determined to get my baby weight off, and we had an amazing bike trail right outside of our home so I would walk it for miles trying to get the baby weight off. On my way, I would stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts to pick up an iced mochachocalocaroca that I thought tasted like a little bit of heaven. It was my little reward to myself for working so hard to get my weight off.
But my weight wasn’t coming off. And I was putting on weight. How was this possible? Um, did the smart & educated woman check to see how many calories a mochachocalocaroca has in it? No! Despite a background in food and nutrition, I never thought twice about the gazillion calories I was taking on my athletic walk. But, oh, what a taste of heaven that was!
The moral of the story is, every ornament has a story. Go ahead! Ask your grandmother about the ornaments on her tree- I bet she will have a story to tell!
Sound Off: Please share your favorite ornament on your tree! I would love to hear your stories!
Guess what I won’t be doing on Black Friday?
You can read my post on Frugal Hacks and discuss your Black Friday routines!
I hope you will share freely and don’t let my lack of shopping get you down!
Convenience foods can ruin anyone’s grocery budget. When my husband and I were first married, I shudder to think how many of my own grocery dollars were wasted on foods like these. We would load our cart with tons of convenience foods… and these were for the nights that we were “saving money” by dining in.
Now you will find very few convenience foods in our home and as I become more familiar with the kitchen, I am beginning to discover all of the things that I am able to make myself.
But, let’s face it, convenience foods are called convenience foods for a reason. They are wonderful to have on hand for the times in your life where you don’t feel like cooking and they are great when mommy isn’t home.
There are things that I have been trying to do to keep convenient food in our house without going over our grocery budget. Here are a few of the things that we have tried in our house:
1. I try to individually wrap items for our family. Items like homemade granola bars, homemade fruit & cereal bars, muffins (any variety will do), and even slices of homemade breads can be wrapped in single-serving portions. These are great to throw into lunch boxes or for a quick snack as you are walking out the door. And if you have big eaters in your family, like I do in mine, then it also can help with portion control.
2. I try to take snacks for the kids in my purse, but just wrapping them in a small piece of foil or plastic wrap offers no protection from the destruction that can occur with my purse. It is easy to smash snacks when you are dragging one kid with one arm and have a little one slung on the same hip as your purse. In such cases, it is nice to have small containers that can fit inside your purse. Our dollar store has a set of four of five for $1 which fit perfectly for these kind of occasions. I like to put our snacks in these or make up a batch of trail mix for the kids for when they get hungry while we are out and about. These are helpful for when the grocery stores have not been so helpful and have put lots of goodies by the cash register for your children to throw tantrums over.
3. I try to make time to make snacks for our family. Since we have been going way over on our grocery budget, I am making even more of an effort to do this. My commitment to scheduling a baking day is working out well for us and it puts an emphasis on staying home with the family, spending time with my children in the kitchen, and staying out of the stores. You will probably find me baking on Black Friday- this will not only help our budget, but it will also help us to be home on one of the craziest days of the year.
4. Preparation is a necessity if you want to attempt making your own “convenient” food. For example, a well-stocked freezer or items that can be throw into a slow cooker can be awfully convenient when you don’t feel like cooking.
5. And then, there are just those times where having convenience foods around could still do your budget some justice. For example, we have all been down and out with colds and tonight would be a great night for some good ol’ Spaghetti-O’s (or equally convenient food). This convenient food would still be cheaper than grabbing some junk food at the drive thru. Giving myself permission to take a night off could come from grabbing one or two items for these kinds of nights.
Sound Off: Do you buy convenience foods? How do you make food “convenient” in your home?