Lady with a baby!

So I'm 34 weeks pregnant, but measuring like I'm 38 weeks pregnant. Yikes. Definitely means I feels physically ready to have little Morgan. We had an ultrasound today to check on growth. It was so fun to see the baby. She was very excited to have her picture taken and was squirming all around before and during the ultrasound.
It was funny because the tech was trying to get a profile shot of her and all of a sudden you see this foot pop up. Morgan is apparently measuring so big because she has herself bent in half. She had her foot touching her forehead. I see gymnastics in our future. :)

Anyways, we are never very good about taking "pregnant" pictures of me, so we took a few on Sunday. Here's one of them....

Halloween Costume

It's not even Halloween yet, but Joshua has pretty much worn his costume about all he is going to. Two ward Halloween parties and multiple photo sessions at Grandpa's house. He even borrowed his Cousin Samantha's spider costume for a few pics. So here is our little Pablo the penguin, our little Monster, and a little spider thrown in there too. Plus some of Daddy, Mommy, Grandma, and Grandpa too! Oh and excuse the quality of some of the pics, I tried to spruce a few of them up as best I could in a short amount of time.

Scrapbook party & Blogging Hiatus

I took a bit of a blogging hiatus because the Internet made me mad. More specifically depraved people who spend time trolling the internet looking to feed their sick addictions made me mad. I could go into detail for you, but you are probably having a nice day and don't want to waste time thinking about people and their depravity.

On a happier note, I was also absent from the computer while planning, preparing, and executing my scrapbook party. My S-I-L and three ladies from the ward came over mid-October on a Friday night and scrapbooked for several hours child-free. It was a lot of fun. Here are a few pictures of the night and all the food I made....

Happy Christmas... outfits!

The benefit of having a baby right before Christmas is that I get to plan for Christmas family portraits with our new little one. Yay!
Thanks to my parents and a 15% off coupon at Children's place I have procured the Christmas outfit for little sweet Morgan.

Thanks to my sister, Joshua got an adorable Janie and Jack gray moleskin suit for Christmas last year. It was 12-24 months, but it is really just starting to fit him now. I tried to find a picture of it on the internet, but since it's from last year, no dice. I'm thinking of getting him this tie so he can be all matchy-matchy with Morgan. I wish I had looked for it while we were at the mall today, but it was a mad-house in that store.



Now I just have to figure out what Ryan and I will wear. Hopefully we work out a time with my Dad during his super busy season for him to take our pictures. I guess fancy outfits won't do us much good without a photographer. Details, details.

Joshua & Samantha at the Park

Samantha came over to our house this morning with Grandma and we all went over to the park. It was the same park we had Joshua's 1st birthday party at. The weather was awesome and everyone had a lot of fun. Here are the pictures to prove it!

Big Lots Coupon

As I was reading some of my blogs this morning I saw a link for a Big Lots coupon. Coupons on already heavily discounted merchandise are right up my alley.
So courtesy of Want Not, here is a link for a printable coupon for 20% off your Big Lots purchase. It is good through Oct 13, 2007

http://www.biglots.com/Coupon/BuzzclubCoupon.aspx

I'm sure they would love it if you joined their Buzz Club as well, but that's just up to you.

Organize Your Ribbons on the Cheap

Ever since I got into bow making and adding ribbon to scrapbook pages I have been searching for an effective way to organize my ribbons. There are all sorts of products you can buy and the Internet is full of ideas of ways to organize ribbon.
I actually bought this plastic ribbon organizer that snaps together if you buy multiple.
There were two problems with it though,
1. It was $9.99 (before coupon or sales)
2. A lot of my ribbons spools are too wide to fit into their convenient little dividers.


Here is what I came up with, and it cost about $3.00. :)

Supplies list:
"Caddy Basket" from Hobby Lobby - $1.99
1/4" dowel at Walmart - $0.40
4 dowel caps at Walmart - $1.88 for a bag of 16
Directions -
1. Cut dowel to fit the length of your Caddy and leave about 1 inch on each end for the dowel caps
2. Glue one of the dowel caps onto the end of dowel. The other end needs to stay open to take ribbon spools off and on.
3. Insert the dowel through your caddy and load the ribbon.
4. Slide the other dowel cap onto the other end.
5. Enjoy organized ribbons on the cheap.
Optional - paint/decorate the dowel and dowel caps to have a super crafty looking organizer.

Note: I left the second dowel open so you could get a better visual.

Now I just need to decide on how I want to organize my ribbons.

Changing Table Picture

Finally a picture of the changing table. . .



It's worked out great so far, especially for Ryan. It's several inches taller than the old one, so Ryan can change diapers much more comfortably. I, on the other hand, have to raise my hands up above my head to reach. :) Not quite, but close.

I spent way too much time trying to add a halo around the changing table in photoshop to show how much I really love it. Oh well, maybe next time.

Baby Things

There isn't a lot of things that we need for Baby #2, but we did decide that a double stroller was on the list of must haves. Thankfully my Mom had the same thought because she offered to get us one. I went looking at Babies R Us to find one and discovered that I had a coupon that expired Sunday. So instead of just window shopping and getting ideas, we had to act fast and have my Mom get it on Friday. Here's a picture of it I took in the store. Thanks Mom and Dad!



Also, I have a picture of the changing table, I just need to download it off the camera.

Cousin Capers

Last night Joshua got to play with his cousins while Mommy and Daddy had a nice birthday dinner. Then I went shopping with my S-I-L's so Ryan stayed home with the boys and documented all the fun that took place.





Pictures from Bathtime and playing around


The boys splashing in the bath


Anthony and Joshua is serious debate.

Birthday Celebration Week!

My Birthday was technically Friday, October 5, but it seems like I've been celebrating all week. Last Sunday was a joint b-day party at the in-laws. Tuesday was a joint party for Ryan and I at my Parents house. MMmmmmmmm, prime rib is delicious.

On Friday I treated myself to McDonald's breakfast. Fancy, I know. Friday night we went to the Elder's Quorum Barbecue. I have to admit I wasn't super excited when I found out it conflicted with my birthday and plans to go out for a nice child-free dinner. I did get my "I Support the Priesthood" button for the day though.

Today I get my child-free meal at Texas Roadhouse. We go there about once a year and I always get so excited for it. It is not usually as good as I hyped it up in my head to be, but it definitely is pretty tasty. Thank goodness for our Tivo, so if we aren't in front of the tv for one of the sessions of conference we can watch it later today or tomorrow.

Thanks to everyone that made me feel special on my birthday, it was nice. I felt very loved. I got three different bouquet of flowers. Neato!


Weather report for today: AWESOME!! The high is 82. Yahoo!

Disturbing find of the day

There was a dead scorpion in my washing machine. I had spin cycled it to death apparently.

I can't decide if I would rather believe it got into the washing machine on its own or the more likely truth, which is that it was on the rug I washed when I transported it from Joshua's room to the washing machine. The latter option implies way too many bad thoughts, so maybe I'll convince myself it fell in and just couldn't get back out.
Yeah, that's it!

Winkflash & Snapfish Review

I've recently stepped into the world of submitting my digital pictures online and having them mailed to me. I previously had been using the Costco one hour service, which was convenient but at $0.17 a 4x6 it isn't the best deal in town. One of the blogs I check on a daily basis, BabyCheapskate, posts coupon codes for multiple photo printing sites and so I decided to embark on a test to see where I could find the best deal without sacrificing quality.
So far I have ordered from Snapfish and Winkflash. The photos from Winkflash have arrived. Click the Read More link to see what I thought of their prices, upload utilities, and quality. It is a pretty lengthy review.


Let's start with speed. I ordered my pictures from Snapfish and Winkflash on the same day (09/28). Technically Snapfish was ahead by several hours. Both orders shipped on October 1. I received my Winkflash order on October 3, but have yet to receive the Snapfish order.

Next onto Ease of upload/ordering. Snapfish definitely wins this category. They have an upload utility which installs through the browser and is very easy to use. My only complaint is that you can only upload from one folder at a time, so if your pictures are in multiple places you will have to go through the upload process multiple times.
The other pet peeve is that Snapfish offers a "Select More Photos to Upload" button while the last batch is in the process of uploading. In theory, it works great. In practice, if you haven't selected all the photos to upload by the time the first set finishes, you are redirected away from the page where you were selecting photos to upload. Could result in a lot of wasted time. In fact it did result in a lot of wasted time for me.
On to Winkflash. They have several different options for uploading photos although none are particularly elegant or fast. The Drag/Drop and File Browser options use Java Applets or Active X and both are terribly slow and produce security errors, at least on my machine. I ended up using the "Transporter" which is an application that you download and select the files to upload that way. The application worked well enough but when it came time to upload the photos to Winkflash it took much longer than it should have considering we have High Speed Internet. It would also get about 90% of the way through and encounter some kind of error and restart the uploading process. It took just over an hour to upload 48 pictures. That was choosing the "Fast Upload" option which supposedly compressed the files for faster uploading. Yikes!
The Winkflash shopping cart also gave me some difficulties. I was using their coupon code to get 4x6 prints for $.06. I was also ordering a handful of 5x7 prints. I had my shopping cart all set up and then went to apply the coupon for the cheaper 4x6 prints. The code worked fine but all of the 5x7 prints were automatically removed from my cart. Lame! I was able to add them back in, but had I not been paying attention I could have missed that they had been removed.

Quality - I can only speak to the quality of the Winkflash at this time, but I would say they were just as good as I had been getting at Costco. I typically go through my photos and make any adjustment to color/contrast/lighting/etc myself before I submit for printing. Winkflash has an "Image Enhancement" option which was turned on, but it didn't seem to do much. I had one photo that probably should have had the contrast adjusted and the Image Enhancement option did not do anything. It was my own fault, but beware that your images might not be enhanced quite as advertised.

Now what everyone is interested in... PRICE. Utlizing coupon codes and "new account" freebies I was able to get some good deals between the two sites.
I ended up getting 20 4x6 prints from Snapfish for $1.05 shipped. That was 20 free prints for a new account, and a coupon code to take $0.99 off the cost of shipping. Sales tax was $0.06.
Their shipping is a little complicated to figure out, but they do have a table that you can follow located here: http://www2.snapfish.com/shippingpricingtablespopup
Print Pricing guide here: http://www2.snapfish.com/storeprints

Winkflash has a coupon code advertised on their main page to get 4x6 prints for $0.06 each. They also advertise $0.99 shipping for unlimited 4x6 prints. The two offers can not be used together.
I ended up getting 43 - 4x6's and 4-5x7's for $4.03 with $3.39 in shipping for a total of $7.42. The 5x7 prints were $0.29 and I opted for the $0.06 coupon code. Here are links for shipping costs and a complete pricing guide.
Shipping: http://www.winkflash.com/photo/help/shipping.asp
Print Pricing guide: http://www.winkflash.com/content/pricelist.asp

I realize the price comparison isn't exactly apples to apples, but I ran about 10 different scenarios for the quantity and size of prints I needed and that was the best deal I came up with between the two.

If you have made it this far into the post, congrats. Here is a link to the current coupon codes as posted at Baby Cheapskate. Note that this month Winkflash is offering 100 new prints for new sign-ups. Also be sure to search on your favorite search engine for coupon codes, you never know what you might find.

I plan next to try PEPhoto which boasts $0.08 prints all the time and is having a summer special at $0.06.

Love for the JCP - and little known facts about furniture

Joshua and I decided to hit the mall for an outing. Of course I had some birthday money burning a whole in my pocket as well so shopping did commence.

I found myself a few more maternity tops and a nightgown to use at the hospital. Joshua got a shirt and a pair of jeans. I also got some Christmas gifts knocked off the list while I was at the mall. Woohoo! Morgan even got some onesies and the like from Baby Gap.

I saw lots of cute dresses that I would love to get for Morgan for her Christmas dress. Super cute, but a smidge out of the budget. I will be keeping an eye out for sales at Gymboree and Children's place.

The find of the day however was an awesome changing table from JCPenney. The one that we bought for Joshua is falling apart a lot. This one is more like a real piece of furniture. I'll post some pictures as soon as we can manage to get it in the house.

Here is the little known fact about furniture(at least for budget shoppers.) Real furniture comes assembled. I saw the display piece and figured that the box would fit in my Mom's CRV no problem. I was under the assumption that I would be fitting a box that had the unassembled changing table. Oops, I was wrong. My Mom took time off work to run over and pick up the box, which would not fit. They had to take the table out of the box and even then it took four people to maneuver it into the car. Victory was had though and the nice dock workers, a store manager looking guy, plus my Mom, loaded the changing table. The best part was the price. It was $379.99 full price on sale for $199 at the outlet. The outlet had it on clearance for $149. Yippee! That is 60% off.

More about what has been going on around here later.