Memorial Day and Other Things

Scott is pretty patriotic and he likes to do something for Memorial day even if it's just watching some type of war movie, which he did. He has recently watched Gods and Generals and Gettysburg which are pretty long war movies (3 hrs, 39 min and 4 hrs, 21 min, respectively), but he liked them. Anyway he also wanted to do something else so he looked online and found that they were doing a bunch of things at a cemetery in Caldwell. We packed up the kiddos and went to check it out. Unfortunately it was kind of like church in that we needed to keep Corbin contained and quiet and he couldn't climb on all of the cool military vehicles on display, which was very hard for him. That added with the rain meant that we didn't last too long. It was pretty cool though and it definitely helps you to keep your perspective as to why you are even celebrating the day. We didn't want to worry about the weather so we had grilled hot dogs and baked fries at home.

Scott is a serious budget man. He has a 10 page spread sheet with a million categories. Any time I spend money I bring the receipts to him and he enters it in. We have been trying hard to get out of credit card debt which has been dogging us since Scott lost his job in 2008. We needed credit cards to survive and now 2 years later we are still paying them off. Scott has been really smart about it though and we haven't paid hardly any interest on any of them. We think we will be able to be completely debt free (with the exception of Gabby's hospital bills) by our Anniversary. We think that's the best present we could ever give ourselves. So Jed, Kate, Piper, Ryan we will have to think about New York maybe next year. The Cannons are planning a birthday cruise celebration for Uncle Rick for this coming February. We will be doing a cruise of the Hawaiian Islands. We are pretty excited. Needless to say we are going to have to start saving even more.

Last month was rough we had over $700 of "unexpected" bills between the dentist, anesthesiologist, hospital ect. Last Friday we had a gift card to Sizzler and we were trying to decide if we should go and use our remaining $4 for the tip OR go by some ice-cream because I had been seriously hankering for this yummy triple fudge cake that absolutely needs ice cream with it. We decided if we did both we would go over our budget and that we literally couldn't have our cake and eat it too. We decided to go to Sizzler and it worked out fantastically. We had a little left over from our coupon and they actually gave us cash back. So we had enough money to not only pay our server but we could go and buy ice cream too. It was awesome. We only had 10 cents left by the end of the month but we will take that 10 cents and put it in the bank, like Scrooge MacDuck's lucky dime! Booyah! We even had to resort back to cloth diapers this weekend because we ran out and we didn't want to go over budget. Today is a new month and we went grocery shopping and it was very exciting. Hooray for the blessings of budget and more importantly tithing, where sometimes you really can have your cake and eat it too.

We also have a bird nest in the shrub outside our office window. Scott has been taking pictures of our chirping neighbors over the past few weeks. They only chirp at meal time so they aren't as annoying as you might think.