I had wanted really wanted the little white and yellow daisy buttons, but I could only find four of them.  As I was laying out the buttons to see which ones looked better I hit upon this pattern and and loved it.

It's long but not as long as it looks due to the camera angle

She was very excited that her sweater is finished, but she did remark "it's too big."  Which she says a lot anyway (unless I happen to say something is too small).

The last of the baby steps from the Dave Ramsey class we took is to build wealth and give.  We are far, far away from baby step seven.  But we learned to build donating into our monthly budget.  We don't have a lot at this point to donate, but I like that it is introduced early enough into the steps to make it a habit.  I decided that we would pick a charity a month to donate our money to.

The charity we donated to in January was Room to Read.  Room to Read believes in literacy and gender equality in education in Asia and Africa.  I was originally going to donate to the Central Asia Institute (Three Cups of Tea and Stones into Schools by Greg Mortenson), but remembered reading something about the way their funds were being mismanaged.  After a bit of research I found this wonderful website Charity Navigator.  There was indeed an alert of the CAI charity and the Room to Read charity was a 4-star charity.  I believe strongly in teaching children to read and the impact of educating girls is huge so this was a no brainer.

Our February donation went to Corrine's school.  She goes to a non profit cooperative preschool.  All parents have to volunteer to be on a committee plus we have to aide in the classroom once a month.  Their big yearly fundraiser is coming up.  They use this money for scholarships and classroom equipment.

I've bookmarked a few charities so far on Charity Navigator.  I'm excited about the prospect of being able to donate even a little bit of money once a month to the charity of our choice.  I think we will incorporate the choice into a monthly budget meeting and even use it as an opportunity to teach Corrine about giving.

 I put them in the mail on Wednesday with the hopes they arrived in time for Valentines Day.

A friend loaned me Dead Lucky by Lincoln Hall.  It's the true story of Hall's being left for dead near the summit of Everest in 2006.  His teammates thought he was dead and left him.  He spent a night in the elements and "came to" the next day.  I'm not very far into the book.  His expedition has just reached base camp on the Tibetan side of Everest.  While I love to hike and have summitted many of the non technical 14er's (a 14,000 foot peak in Colorado), I am definitely an armchair enthusiast of the very technical and dangerous Mt. Everest summit attempts.  I'll adventure vicariously through others.

Happy Yarn Along Wednesday!

I have been meaning to write about this for a couple of months now.  Debt, it seems is the American way.  I am 45 years old and still live paycheck to paycheck.  I signed Bryan and myself up for Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace University last fall.  Too say he was not happy would be an understatement.  A co-worker had gone through these classes and she and her husband are debt free except for their house and that will be paid off in less than five years.  My friend and I had many discussions about being in debt and I had always just gone with the flow and figured everyone was in debt so it was okay.

The straw that broke the camels back came in July 2013.  It was the day before the closing on our rental house.  The title company called and told us we had to bring $5600 to closing.   Who had that kind of money just laying around?  Not us.  Luckily the buyers had a paperwork issue and the closing was pushed back a couple of days.  We scraped together the money, mostly with a loan from my 401K (which later I found out Dave said do no do!).  At that moment I decided we needed some serious help.
Financial Peace University is a nine week series of classes.  They feature a DVD of Dave speaking about that weeks topic which he calls the Seven Baby Steps (some weeks are two parts).  The seven baby steps are:

1. Your $1000 emergency fund 
2. Your debt snowball.  Pay off the smallest debt first and then when that is paid off put that payment with the next smallest debt and so on until it's all paid off.
3. Finish funding an emergency fund of 3-6 months of expenses.
4. Maximize retirement funding.
5. Save for college.
6. Pay off the home mortgage.
7. Build Wealth and give 10% of your income to charity.  

Like I said earlier, Bryan was not happy about attending the classes at first.  He is more on board with the program now, but I think he is still dragging his feet.  We have yet to sit down and make a budget.  I do a partial one for my paychecks, but we haven't combined anything yet.  Part of that is because we have really worked a lot of opposite schedules for the past couple of months since our babysitter quit and we don't want to rely to heavily on my parents. I hope we get to it soon.  I would really like to have a grasp of this soon.

I debated for a while on whether or not to write about this.   Although I finally decided a while ago, it has taken me a couple of months to actually sit down to write this post.  I figured that while sharing publicly about our debt struggles might be humiliating, it will also be energizing and we will be held accountable for updates to said struggles.

*  On Tuesday while we were hanging out in the house I made yogurt.  This time I skipped the yogurt maker and followed this easy greek yogurt recipe from my sister in law's blog.  It was so easy!  I let it strain overnight in the refrigerator because I thought it was too runny when I went to bed.  Let me tell you, it's fabulous.  I'll be making this one again for sure (and soon since we eat so much yogurt).

* I went to the gym Wednesday afternoon and it was pretty crowded.   We were there as soon as the afternoon day care shift opened but since it's freezing outside, there were more people there than usual. I opened about four lockers before I found an empty one to put my boots and coat into.  It amazes me how many women will put their stuff in a locker and not lock it.  I'm not that trusting.  It crossed my mind for about 2 seconds to move someone's stuff just to see how much they would freak out.  Of course I would never do it.  I'm a huge believer in Karma and that would come back on me in a big way.

Happy Thursday!  Stay warm out there.

On the book front, I am about halfway through The Monuments Men.  It really is a fascinating book.  I never gave it a thought when I was in Europe touring many historical sights.  The movie is based on the book and comes out February 7th.  The Monuments Men were a group of men (and women) who were pretty much on the front lines trying to save the historical monuments and the priceless art from destruction by Allied forces.   They faced many difficulties to do a job they believed in, one simply being it was war.  While they were an official group it was hard for them to get the supplies they needed to do their job and they had to work with the  bureaucracy of the army.   If you like history and World War II history at that, absolutely pick up this book.  It's a whole different side to the war.

Happy Yarn Along Wednesday!