Cute Child's Bank

This is my daughter's bank that we made. Its made out of a hawaiin punch container. We washed it out, removed the label, made a new label and cut a slit in the top. My daughter loves it! It's a great way to recycle too!


You'll need something strong to cut the slit in the top. I used my husband!  : )

How to Keep Cool This Summer

The fan, the air conditioner and the swamp cooler are the most common ways to deal with the high summer temperatures...

The picture on the right is our new portable swamp cooler. We got it on Amazon. It's great! It has wheels on the bottom that make it easy to move to another room if needed and has an alarm when it runs out of water. One con to this option is that it only cools the room its in.


Here are some not so common ways to keep cool this summer:

 Open the windows that can be opened and have screens on them. Once we opened the windows in all the rooms, it wasn't stuffy or as hot.

Try to watch tv less and keep other electronics off during the summer. They put off a lot of heat and contribute to the high temperatures within your house.

Use a crockpot to cook instead of the oven. The oven heats up the house and its very difficult to cool it back down afterwards. A lot of recipes that you bake in the oven can be cooked in a crock pot.

Keep the lights off as much as you can during the day and have the blinds open to let the light in. Lights put off a lot of heat. If possible switch all light bulbs out to energy savers, they put off a lot less heat and keep your utilities lower.

If you have your washer and dryer in a laundry room, keep the door closed while the dryer is going. It puts off a tremendous amount of heat.

Portioning

Have you ever thought about how much of something you're using and if you're using too much or going through something too quickly? Maybe you need to portion things so you are only using what you need. Portioning saves you money because you have to buy it less often and none of it goes to waste.

Take this dishwasher detergent for example. Its package design causes you too accidentally use too much and waste some of it because of the pour spout feature. Do you even know how much your dishwasher needs? I used to just fill up the soap cup and close the door with no thought of whether or not it actually needed that much. When we moved to this apartment, our dishwasher always left a lot of residue on the dishes. We decided it may help if we used less. We filled them according to the fill lines and it solved our residue problem.  But... we still had the problem with the dishwasher detergent package...oops! I spilled! We decided to put it in a container and figure out the amount we were to use in order to just reach the fill line. It ended up being only 1 Tablespoon. That's it! One stinkin Tablespoon! Now we keep a tablespoon scoop in the container and none gets spilled and none goes to waste.

Here are some other examples of portioning:

Ovaltine, we figured out that we use 2 Tablespoons in our cup, so we keep a 2 Tablespoon scoop in it now.

Laundry detergent. We decided one day that we're probably using too much in every load and should portion it too. If you look at the fill lines for Tide. It says for Medium loads, fill to the line 1, for Large loads, fill to line 2. We usually only need to wash Large loads. It turned out to measure out to be 1/3 cup.

                                                           

My two year old and I use the same body wash, shampoo and conditioner. Of course, I just bought them and used them in their original containers. The original containers had lids that you had to use all your strength to open and you tipped it upside down to get some in your hand to use. Of course, when you dump liquid into your hand, sometimes it pours out too quickly and you end up with too much. Then you waste time trying to get the excess liquid back into the opening and of course... that doesn't work.  So today, I went to Walmart and got these little beauties. They cost me $1.88 each. I like that they are clear so I can tell how low they are getting without hopping into the shower and discovering that and having-to hop out and hunt down a new one from the closet. I never end up with too much in my hand and I don't have to hurt my hand and waste all my strength on a lid. Genius!

What other ways do you portion?

Pepperidge Farm Thrift Store

We went to Pepperidge Farm Thrift Store yesterday and found soup for about $10 and it feeds approximately 12-15 people with large servings. The package has two separate sections so you can freeze one section of it and just use the one. They have several different kinds of soup. We purchased two different kinds: Cheddar Cheese, Ham and Bacon soup (also known as Wisconsin Cheddar soup) and Mexican Tortilla soup. We also bought goldfish crackers for $1 and a package of three loaves of french bread for $1.50.

We had family over last night and had the Cheddar Cheese, Ham and Bacon soup and the french bread with goldfish crackers. It fed the whole family and we still had leftovers. Everyone had large servings and loved the soup and french bread. The goldfish crackers are great for soup because they don't go soggy quickly. This is a really cheap meal with great leftovers and feeds a lot of people in case you have family over.