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This week with the Mommies!
We have a lot going on the rest of this month and in May!  Be sure to stay connected to KitsapMommies for all the fun details!

Friday, April 19 is our monthly Friday night Chat.  Be sure to join us for some fun conversations with members of our community! 


We are preparing for our March of Dimes walk for Babies in May!  Donate or join our team today!  We have 7 walkers and would love the company of more!  :)

We have several new members this month!  Please stop by and welcome them to our community!

Be sure to wish our March and April Mommies a Happy Birthday! 

Thanks for being a valuable part of our community and we'll see you on the boards!

Author:
Melissa from TriangleMommies
Original Post Location and Date: The Mommies Network National Blog on April 29, 2011
Submitted Through: Content Team Subject: Saving Money, Grocery Shopping, Frugal Living
Clear to Re-post after: May 6, 2011


1. Shop In Season
If you buy fresh fruits and vegetables that are in season, you will spend less money. As an added bonus, your food will taste better too. Foods that are shipped in from faraway places so that we can eat them out of season - think strawberries, oranges, cucumbers in the winter - have the added cost of transportation to get them to the store. Resist buying that hot house tomato in January. It isn't going to taste good anyway! If you have Farmer's Markets in your area, consider shopping there for local produce. Chances are it will be less expensive, taste better and be organically grown.

2. Shop Sales
Pay attention to the sales that your store is advertising. Buy only what is on sale, instead of buying based on cravings. Most stores post weekly and monthly sales. Find out the sales cycle of your favorite grocer because they don't all run Sunday to Saturday.

3. Plan Meals around Sales
Plan your meals for the week around the weekly sales. Chicken and ground beef are on sale this week? Great - plan your menu to include chicken enchiladas, stuffed chicken breasts, tacos and sloppy joes.

4. Sign up for Store Rewards Cards
By signing up for store rewards cards, you will pay the lowest price for the items in that store. You will also be eligible for special deals and promotions and may receive coupons in the mail directly from the store itself. Your receipt will show you how much you have saved just by having that special card.

5. Sign up for Store email Notices
Many grocery stores now have online coupons and unique online specials. If you sign up for their email notices, you will be in the know about these special coupons and deals. Stores also use their email lists to notify customers of events like super doubles and triples.

6. Use Coupons
Shop with coupons. You can find coupons in the Sunday paper, online, in the grocery store fliers, on special bulletin boards throughout the grocery store, on store shelves, on wine bottles and in blinking machines situated inside grocery stores. You may think that buying generic is always cheaper, but that is often not the case. By combining sales with coupons, you can often get items for free.

7. Plant a Garden
Feed a man and he eats for a day. Plant a garden and you can eat all year long. Fresh fruits and vegetables are expensive, even in season. Buy seeds and plant a garden for a fraction of the cost. Even apartment dwellers can plant small window gardens.

8. Eat Before you Shop
Never shop on an empty stomach. Make sure you eat before you head to the grocery store. Studies show that hungry shoppers spend more money.

9. Leave your Kids at Home
Shop by yourself whenever possible. Children often ask for empty calorie foods and have no concept of cost. Many a mom has broken down and handed over as box of cookies just to get some peace and quiet. Leave them home, shop in quiet and stay on budget.

10. Take a List and Stick to it
Get out your sales fliers, your coupons and your email notices ahead of time and make a list of what you need to buy for the week. Be sure to take your list and a pen with you on your shopping trip and determine to buy only what you have on the list. You will avoid impulse buys this way.

How to Cope with Stay at Home Burnout

Being an at home parent may be the best job you'll ever get, but it's HARD. You're on call 24/7, and when you go on vacation, you still have the same responsibilities. And if you have a home business or work at home job, life can be even more challenging.

The first step to coping with burnout is preventing it in the first place. Don't overfill your schedule with activities for the kids or yourself. Take a little time for yourself every day. You don't need to be alone, but you do need to relax a little. Whether this may be during the kids' naps or when they're in school, even taking just a few minutes for you can really help. Then you can take advantage of the time to get things done with a clear head.

Make sure your expectations and those of your family are realistic. If you're running a home business or have a work at home job, you can't be expected to keep as perfect a house as a mother who does not. Pick a day to do the laundry, the vacuuming and other housework that doesn't need to be done on a daily basis and leave it until then… unless the urgent need arises, of course.

When you get angry, don't consider yourself an imperfect or bad parent. We all get angry sometimes. What is more important is how you react to the anger.

Make sure you get enough sleep. The more tired you are, the more stress you are going to feel, and the harder it will be to cope with it. If necessary, take a nap at the same time as the kids do, so they're not getting into trouble for lack of supervision.

Plan fun activities once in a while to relieve stress. Depending on your needs and the needs of your family, this can be alone or with the entire family. Go to the beach, a park, zoo, mall, wherever it is you can relax and just have fun.

Consider planning or even cooking meals and snacks in advance. It's easy to give your children healthy snacks if you have sliced vegetables and/or fruits ready to go in the fridge. A few minutes' work early in the week can save you time. Meals may also be prepared in advance and frozen for those nights when you're simply too tired to cook. Plan your meals for leftovers that will freeze well, and say goodbye to expensive frozen dinners from the grocery store.

If writing out your schedule helps you, then keep a written schedule. If it makes you feel overwhelmed, then don't. Just because your best friend says it keeps her on schedule to have a calendar with everything she needs to do on it doesn't mean the same will work for you.

Finally, don't let other parents make you feel you owe them favors just because you're at home andhave time. You're doing a full time job taking care of your family, not just loafing. Your schedule may be just as full as theirs, if not more so.

StatesvilleMommies part of The Mommies Network

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It's February!  We have some exciting events coming up this week!  Our first Meet and Greet this year!  And let's not forget our monthly third-Friday Night Chat! 

Last week the site received a color and theme update!  We're now ready for Valentine's Day this week!  If you haven't visited us in awhile, do so now and join us on some of our posts
QOTW Feb 11

Who's pregnant or TTC?

PPD Facts

February Birthdays!

or Welcome our newest members!

Save the Date!

Friday Night Chat  Be sure to RSVP and bring a cup of tea and join Kitsap Mommies for a relaxing time to chat with other mommies!

February Meet & Greet!   This is open to the public!  Check out our Event information on FB if you're not a member of Kitsap Mommies and RSVP on the message boards if you are!

Phase 1 is like the first day of a new diet. You know, the day you swear you’ll never eat another doughnut and will hit the gym every day? Yeah. So Phase 1 is full of big ideas, hours spent cruising mommy blogs, crafting blogs, searching for the perfect organization system for your pantry/closet/playroom/garage. Phase 1 is full of blissfully willful ignorance. You make lists of all the places you will take your children. You make a cleaning schedule like that bug woman.

In Phase 1, you are going to stick to a well-planned schedule and proudly display your home, your children, and yourself. Phase 1 is when you pull out all your children's clothes and re-launder them for sorting into the following categories: consign, hand-me-down, preserve for life, mend, donate.

Phase 2, also known as Tuesday, starts with Phase 1's enthusiasm. You wake up and probably bathe. You check the menus you planned yesterday to get meals ready for the entire day. You consult that cleaning schedule and notice that you need to start a new load of laundry. This is where it begins to fall apart. That forgotten load in the washer rears its ugly head. You can't start today's load of laundry until you rewash the now-stale load from yesterday. In the meantime, your darlings have awoken and are begging for Sugar Blasted Crunchies for breakfast. They will not be swayed by your explanation that today's menu calls for green eggs and ham (your oh-so-clever attempt to sneak some spinach into their mouths). Undaunted, you prepare bowls of cereal, wipe the kitchen sink, and pat yourself on the back for your excellent skills. Why do stay-at-home moms think this is hard?

Tuesday continues with very few speed bumps. You get your clean children to whatever class you’ve scheduled for the day and return in time for dinner with the same number of small people that you left with. Dinner prep is a snap since you were smart enough to plan ahead. The children play while you set a lovely table, complete with linen napkins.

After the family meal, you beg your husband to get the kids ready for bed while you scrape mashed potatoes off the underside of the table, compliments of your littlest slugger's newly found throwing skills. While down there, you find a petrified stash of green beans from a week ago. By the time you have reclaimed the kitchen and dining rooms, it's time to tuck the kids into bed, do one more sweep through the house to tidy up, and you, too, head for bed.

Enter Phase 3. You wake from a restless sleep to find at least one extra creature in your bed: child, pet, alien, whatever. Out of compassion for this little creature, you roll over and grab a few extra z’s yourself. Suddenly, your eyes snap open, and you silently chastise yourself for being so slovenly. You have a schedule! The mental tongue-lashing gets you back on track, and you check the schedule. Laundry. Rats, that load from Monday has gone stale again, and yesterday's load never made it into the wash. Unfortunately, Monday's wash fails the sniff test, so you wash it again.
The kids turn their noses up at your homemade oat-bran muffins and demand Sugar Blasted Crunchies again. You sigh and pour the bowls again. There’s just enough milk to eke out breakfast, which means an unexpected trip to the grocery store. You begin to question the wisdom of weekly menu planning.

Once every one is dressed, you head to the grocery store with all the kids. The baby falls asleep in the car. The toddler insists on the cart that looks like a race car. The preschooler demands to push said cart. As soon as the door slides open, you are assaulted with requests for cookies, balloons, money for the gumball machine, and every item on the shelves with a remotely recognizable character on the label. As you get in line to pay, you realize you've left your coupons in the car and have to make a series of nimble adjustments to get all the kids back outside just long enough to retrieve the envelope and then back inside maneuvering around the cookie/balloon/gumball gauntlet.

It’s too late to bake homemade macaroni with artisan cheese for lunch, so you run through the drive-thru on the way home. Child B manages to get the chocolate milk open and pour it on the floor of the car while Child A discovers the excitement of ketchup-packet squishing. Making a game of it, you let the children eat a picnic on the porch while you sop up the rapidly spoiling dairy product and discover that even Windex is no match for ketchup on glass. You declare mandatory naptime so you can feed yourself and get off your aching feet for a few minutes. But dinner cannot be delayed, and you end up spending your You Time cleaning up the breakfast mess and preparing another four-star meal that only you appreciate. The children beg for hot dogs, and your husband informs you that he had a late lunch and isn't all that hungry. Saint that he is, he offers to clean the kitchen while you get the kids ready for bed.

You strip the kids down and begin running a bath when you discover that last night, the little angels poured all the shampoo into the tub while Daddy was reading about muscle cars. You head out the door to the drugstore when one of your naked offspring bursts into tears not wanting to be apart from you for that long. You quickly clothe one, and the others join the bandwagon. You load your children, wearing mostly matching outfits, back into the car so you can grab a 99-cent bottle of shampoo. By the time you get back to the house and unloaded, the water in the bath has cooled, and you don't have the energy. You get the kids into their pajamas and into bed. You are asleep before your head hits the pillow.

Phase 4 is not going to show you any mercy. You've resigned yourself to less than perfection. You scour mommy blogs for other posts with reality checks and declarations that you shouldn't try to do it all. You cut yourself some slack and congratulate yourself on not putting yourself under all the pressure of Wonder Mom ideals. Today you promise to spend time with your children: the real reason you decided to stay home anyway. After Sugar Blasted Crunchies, drive-thru for lunch on the way to the park, and laughter with your kids, you scrap your menu plans and make breakfast for dinner.
Division of labor for after dinner is not an option since the love of your life has to work on a project. You put the leftovers away, throw the dirty dishes in the sink, and run a bath for the kids when you remember that load of laundry. Crud. As you re-restart Monday's wash, you forget about the tub, which overflows. The kids find this hilarious and use you as a personal jungle gym while you mop up the excess and drain the tub to a reasonable level. Once the kids are tucked in you go to collapse in bed when you realize there's a clump of ketchup in your hair from yesterday. You take the World’s Fastest Shower and pass out with your feet hanging out of the bed.

Phase 5 brings renewal. It’s Friday! The weekend is always a chance to relax and spend some family time. Today you will get the house neat and tidy again so that you can spend some much-needed fun time with your beloved. You set your children in front of a DVD with Sugar Blasted Crunchies and warn them to not disturb you unless someone is bleeding. You start scrubbing toilets and floors. As you begin sorting mail, you realize you need to balance the checkbook and pay bills, which leads to searching the web for a new paperwork organization system. You bookmark 15 different sites with the promise to yourself that you will come back to them and implement your own POS when you have some free time.

Lunch consists of peanut butter sandwiches and potato chips. At least that’s what you surmise by the mess left in the kitchen when you finally get the rest of the house clean. This is also when you discover that your offspring have poured honey on the baby, scribbled on the walls with permanent marker, and deemed your living room a nudist colony. The bookshelf has been converted to a climbing wall. You grab a granola bar for your own lunch as you tackle the newest avalanche of filth.
Exhausted from a productive day of cleaning everything, you call your husband with orders to pick up pizzas on his way home. Family Movie Night plucks a tiny chord of guilt in your belly, but you are too tired to worry about your kids watching too much TV.

Phase 6 is a great day! You have big ideas again. This time about all the fun your family will have together on this day. You let yourself daydream about home-improvement projects and crafts for upcoming gift-giving holidays. But no day is without responsibilities. You can pile everyone into the car and head to a nearby lake, park, or hiking trail, but when you return, you will still have cleaning and cooking and bathing and, oh crap, that load of laundry.

Phase 7. Yesterday recharged your batteries some, and you are grateful for one more family day. The kids follow Daddy around, helping with the yardwork and his latest woodworking masterpiece. You take some time to clip coupons and reward yourself with the Sunday crossword or celebrity gossip pages. It's a smooth day. One that reminds you that you are more capable than you imagine. One that gives you time to reflect on your successes and failures of the last week. You go to bed promising to do a better job of keeping everything on track. You steal a few moments of cuddling with each of your children and then your husband. In his warm embrace, just as you are dozing off, he gently asks, "Do I have any clean shirts for this week?"



Author: Ashley (00tedsgirl) from TriadMommies.com Original Post Location and Date: http://triadmommies.blogspot.com/2011/     August, 28, 2011 Subject: Parenting, Humor, Stay-At-Home-Moms

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Have you logged on this week to welcome our new members?  If not, now is the time to sign-in and meet them!

This Saturday, we had to cancel our event at the Keyport museum due to construction, but we will be meeting at Home Depot for their Kids Workshop!  The kids will be working on a Valentine's Card Holder!  This is a FREE event!  Check out our calendar for time & location!

We are also looking for blog writers!  If you enjoy blogging (even if you don't have a blog), you can volunteer your time to be a contributor for Kitsap Mommies!  If interested, send an email to rosemary.king (@) kitsapmommies.com (no spaces) before February 15, 2013.

If you're not a member of Kitsap Mommies, it's FREE & EASY to join!  Simply complete a Registration online!  Once approved, you'll have access to all the fun that Kitsap Mommies has to offer!

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