Where have I been?.....

Greetings dear friends and blogging buddies!~ Ok so I have been a litte MIA lately. Wanna know what I've been up to? Well stick around and you shall find out! I've been busy that's for certain!

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Are you a miserly mom?

Well.... I have decided I have to buckle down and really really try to manage our money better. Oh I'm pretty frugal already . Try to save where ever I can. But it seems to be pretty difficult to stretch that all mighty dollar doesn't it? In my recent efforts to get that money belt a little tighter, I landed in my local Barnes & Noble. I turned my head and (gasp) walked right by the Starbucks in the corner on the way in! Now if I hadn't already came in with my money saving armour on, I probably would have caved and stopped by.

I walked back to the finance section and was hoping to purchase the Dave Ramsey book "The Total Money Makeover". It wasn't in stock . My eyes slowly skimmed the other books on the shelf and BINGO , I found a name I recognized. I picked up the book "Miserly Moms" by Jonni Mc Coy. Any of you ever see her around on the talk shows or in articles from Good Housekeeping? Well, anyway, I continued to look through it. Now came the questions. Do I order the Dave Ramsey book and wait for it to come in , or do I buy this book and get started today? Well I decided I'd better start that day, so Miserly Moms came home with me. I can tell you that there are some things that don't fit our family. But then I looked at Dave Ramsey's Financial Peace program that someone had and I see that he has things that don't apply to us either. Guess they're just trying to cover everybody, which I get. Just gotta gleen what you can from them both I guess.

My husband took a little mini- vacation from work last week to surprise me. One of then things we did was take a little trip NE of us to a little town called Tunas. There's not much there , but they have a wonderful little Amish country store there. He had been in there before for something for work and knew I would want to check it out. They have some awesome prices there and you don't have to pay tax on anything! They have raw honey for 73 cents a pound so I bought some. We also picked up some Amish butter cheese, farmer cheese, homemade orange slice candy, chocolate covered pecan-carmels, and some whole wheat flour. The flour was 5 lbs for $1.86. I couldn't pass that up! I could have spent a couple hundred dollars in there easily. Not because the prices were high, because they weren't .It's because I wanted so much! Most of their spices were probaby double to three times the quantity you would get at the grocery store, and most of them were under $2 a container! I really wanted to stock up on those , but I had to watch it! LOL.

No pictures inside the store, so the best I could do was take a picture of the outside. Sorry for getting part of the car door in the shot!

I treated myself this week to one LHN's newest patterns, Simple Joys. I also got the floss I need for it. All but one color,as the store didn't carry that shade. I'm sure I can find something that will work though.

I have picked up a needle to stitch in over a week! Still working on projects for the lady I do ocassional knitting for . They are all baby afghans. I knitted the following three in a weeks time and I have 6 more to go! Here is what I have done so far.

The knitting lesson with the little girl is moving along. She told me the other day that she wanted to get good enough to sell her things later. I told her that she would have to stick with it so she could get better. She was very excited and said that she could hardly wait! I kind of thought that in the beginning that she would kind of get tired of it and that , at 7, her interest would kind of be fleeting. After we spoke the other day , and she told me of all that she wanted to learn how to knit, I think that interest will linger for some time to come! She gets so excited, it's really funny to see.

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Well that will do it for another "edition" of The Happy Needle. I hope you all are doing great , and I hope to see you all back here again really soon!

'til next time,

don't be a stranger, ( guess I've been one lately !LOL)

Sharlotte