NCLEX

So now the craziness of taking my NCLEX and waiting for the results has passed! I spent hours upon hours studying for the biggest test of my life and only ended up getting 75 questions! But I passed and am now a registered nurse and that's what counts!

I now spend my days at home being a mother and housewife I have been trying to soak up every moment of spending time with my children. I have also been trying to clean out the house. Unfortunately I find that to be tedious and extremely unfulfilling. However I start working in the emergency room in a couple weeks and so I would like my house to be clutter free. It's just so hard to find the motivation to do spring cleaning when it's much more fun to play with my smiley eight-month-old. She is so sweet and so fun to play with. She makes me laugh and smile every time I'm with her. However, as much as I love being home with Amelia all day and picking the kids up from school each afternoon and making dinner each evening I do have to admit that I'm excited to start working at the hospital too.

On other news, hubby and I paid off another credit card $3362.24!! We are excited to continue moving forward with our debt-free lives. However working out our monthly budget is getting to be a little tricky. Especially since we need to pay for childcare in February before I will ever get a paycheck to pay for it. It's also hard to realize how expensive childcare is for three children. But we are working it out and all will be good!

NCLEX studying

Alright... I'm still studying for the NCLEX (which I take on Friday). Enough said.

Breakfast

Budgets and Baths

Our Financial Peace University kit came in the mail the other day. I was stoked. Hubby was neither here nor there, to be honest! In the kit there was a pencil and an eraser to do your budget. I got a kick out of them because the pencil said, "the nerd's budget maker" on it and the eraser said, "the free spirit's budget adjuster" on it. In Dave's class he talks about how in a relationship there is always a nerd and a free spirit. I am definitely the nerd in our relationship, I love to write lists, plans, menus, charts, etc. I have done that since I was Elisabeth's age. While hubby is not a "free spirit" in a careless sense (and that's not the way Dave means "free spirit" either), he definitely would rather not be writing out budgets or plans. They seem to bother him. Although he does write out lists and to-do's, so I don't get that. So now that we have our kit, I've gone nuts making sure I use every tool, plan and chart that is made available in it! I love this thing!

While I listen to the Dave Ramsey Show when I am in the car, I can't get reception in my house to listen to it, so while I am home, I pull up the Dave Ramsey app and listen to past questions and answers. I have loved this becasue I can pause it when I need to go something or I can just skip the questions that aren't relevant to me. The other thing I like about Dave Ramsey's app is that I can read the answers. They aren't verbatim what Dave says, but they are pretty darn close. The other day a lady had asked about her and her husband having separate checking accounts. This was Dave's response and I love it! It completely makes sense to me! I love when he says: When you do your spending together and 'we' have an income and 'we' have expenses and 'we' have goals, it keeps it being 'we'. It creates unity. This has been so true for us! I truly feel that every since my hubby and I have been doing this class and working with our money as if it's ours and not his or mine, we have felt so much closer in everything. We seem to be working better as a team than ever before. I would recommend this class to any married couple! It's not just a class about the numbers, Dave gives such great marriage advice and thoughts, it's been great.

I don't know if I have mentioned this before but baths are quite the luxury in our house. I make the kids all take showers, in fact I have given Amelia a shower until she was six months old. Yup, she had not had a single bath in her life until she was six months old. I find showering babies so much easier and less work. It took a little while to get a system so I wouldn't drop my slippery little buggers, but when I figured out how to shower them effectively, that's all I do. So Elisabeth got baths when she was a baby, but then I showered Noah and now showered Amelia too. I just don't see the point in wasting money, space or time trying to buy a baby bath and bathe a slippery little baby would feels insecure laying on their back in a tub of water. They love being cradled by mom or dad and letting the water shower down onto their backs. It quiets my babies right down! But, as I said, Amelia gets to take baths now because she can sit and crawl around. I just put in two or three inches and she has a field day! Then for Elisabeth and Noah, baths were causing so many problems a few months ago because they would splash water all over the floors, never clean up the water or their toys and would through a temper tantrum when I said it was time to get out. Now baths are a special activity they get to pay for. It costs four tickets to be able to have a 'spa bath', which means a thirty minute bath in mom and dad's bathtub, with lots of bubbles, colored water, and any music of their choice playing while they bathe plus mom and dad will do the clean-up. This has been their number one activity of choice. Over playing the computer, the iPad, or watching t.v. or a movie (which all also cost four tickets) and I love this. They feel special doing it and it's been a huge motivator for them doing their chores. I'm a genius!

Amelia cracks me up when she bathes. When the water starts to get a little cool, which happens fast when you have such a little amount, I turn on the water to give her some fresh warm water. When that water turns on she squeals in delight and crawls straight to the water stream and shoves her head directly under the flow. Of course she can't breathe when she does this so then she takes her head out and sits to watch the water, but every single time that water turns on she books it over there to drown herself. It's rather funny and a little scary.

Cheerios and Shopping Sprees

I've been giving Amelia Cheerios for a few weeks to help her with her fine motor skills. Well I'll tell you: if you have a baby DON'T BUY INTO THIS!! No way! Ever since she's figured out how to use her fingers and thumbs all in unison and to move things from her hand to her mouth it's been a huge disaster around here. You want to delay this skill as long as possible. Amelia now crawls around the floor picking up whatever she can find. I'll vacuum and pick everything up off the floor but then she manages to collect odds and ends in her mouth somehow. Suddenly I'll see that her mouth is full and I will pull out a hairball (I shed a ton of hair!), a little piece of string, a piece of lint, AND a leaf. Crying out loud kid! Then I'll set her back down and see her crawl over to some item she sees on the floor that I still can't see even as I watch her go toward it. And she'll quickly shove whatever it is in her mouth and keep on crawling. It's as if she has some need to collect things in her mouth! She couldn't care less as to what it is, it must go in.

Well I called Dave Ramsey on Friday and talked to him about how to help the kids save their "save" money. Not how to save, but more or less what they should be saving for. Should they be saving for college, a care, their wedding...? Well Dave said to have them choose something they really wanted and to take a picture of it and have them save for that until they learn the concept of saving and can save for college a few years down the road. They can spend their "spend" money each week as they want to. So yesterday after we sat down to divvy out their money they earned, based on commission, we took a family trip out to Toys R Us, Lakeshore Learning, and Target. Elisabeth had $6 to spend, Noah had $2 and we were on a mission to help them find something to save up for.

It was a disappointment to both my hubby and I becasue we remember Toys R Us being a lot bigger, more organized and cleaner. The kids didn't even really find anything they were dying to have. They did have us take a few pictures of a few things and they are going to think about which item they want to save for.

We went to Lakeshore Learning after Toys R Us because it was right across the parking lot and they actually found way more things they wanted to purchase their than in Toys R Us. That made hubby and I happy. Elisabeth ended up spending $3 and some odd cents there.

We then went to Target. They found nothing worth purchasing here. Which was funny because normally they both spend all their money here.

It's hard to teach them that they can save up their small amounts of money to get something bigger. It was a difficult concept to explain while at the store. Elisabeth ended up breaking down crying in Toys R Us saying, "why does everything cost so much? I hate saving!!" She was so excited because she was sure that her $6 was going to allow her to buy whatever her little heart desired. I'm hoping that over the next couple months the kids will learn to value their things more and also that they will see the value in a dollar and saving it for something they really really want!

Today hubby and I sat down to discuss finances more. Man ever since starting Financial Peace University, we spend a few minutes everyday talking about our money. It's something that used to cause a little anxiety and maybe even contention when we would discuss it. But now we enjoy discussing how we are working toward our goal of being debt free. We even called and closed my American Express card, which we had paid off last week. They lady couldn't figure out why in the heck we'd close it. It made me laugh. We even talked about expenses we knew would be coming during the next several months and how we needed to start setting money aside each month to save for these expenses. It's something we've never done before. That sounds sad, but it's true. I've never thought to save up for something like that. We'd just take each month at a time and pay for things that needed to be paid for that month. If it didn't get paid for in cash, it went on a credit card. Not anymore!