Still having a Happy Holiday Really!

Good Morning!


I am still having a Happy Holiday really, although some days it has been just barely! (Can any of you out there relate?!). The "barely" part really came into play yesterday when we went to buy our son's Christmas gifts and the invoice I was handed was about $900.00...(gulp, sigh and small sweat!). We buy our children only 3 gifts each year...something to share with each other, something they need and then something they want. Well...until about a month ago 2 of my sons were still in bunk beds. Bunk beds are great and we had them for about 10 years, but...my boys are getting big enough now that I thought it was time that they graduate from that scenario and get their own, twin beds.

So...for the past 6 months I have been working on this task of getting them out of the bunk beds and into the twin beds. I have utilized Craigslist and Freecycle and managed to get 3 free box springs, one free bed frame and one bed for only $15.00. Well - doing the fast math you can see that I am still one frame and 3 mattresses short for getting them all into a bed which is where the $900.00 invoice comes in! We are fortunate enough to live very close to a mattress manufacturing company that has been in business for 113 years and have an excellent reputation with good prices and wonderful mattresses. Even so...buying the 3 mattresses all at one time, at a good price still put us out a significant amount of money.

Now...the really tricky part here is how to make this $900.00 purchase exciting for my 3 boys who have actually enjoyed sleeping on the floor in their sleeping bags since Thanksgiving! (We took the bunk beds to my parent’s vacation home over the Thanksgiving break knowing that we were going to be buying mattresses). Any ideas on that would be most appreciated!!!


Now that we have made that purchase my goal of having a Happy Holiday Really is going to be tested this weekend as we try to finish up Christmas with a drastically revised budget. I am looking at all the Free Christmas activities my town has to offer (luckily...living in a large metropolitan area does help with that!) plus I have a few things that we can do here. So...I will let you know how that goes.  And for the rest of the gifts I need to purchase?  Well...coupons and bargain hunting, etc. are something I have been doing for year and so I will use those skill to once again "pull the rabbit from the hat"! 

I am trying to encourage the other half of the Germantown/Port Washington Just Between Friends team to write something here as she is in the middle of that snow storm that has been talked about all over the news! She is hilarious and always has something going on!!!


We do this blog just for our friends, so...let us know what you think, how you are doing and what you know!

Keeping Happy!
Andrea