Weekend road trip to Delaware! Part 1.

So we had made plans this past weekend to visit Ben's Grand-mom in Delaware. She is only a few hours away, so we loaded up the family in the Jeep and hit the road.

 

 It was a little crowded with 3 people, 2 dogs and 1 cat. But we made the best of it. We played "I spy" and the alphabet game. The alphabet game started off a little slow, it took us about 15 minutes to find the letter B but it was so fun! Cordelia was so excited with every letter we found. However, the novelty wore off by the time we got to F or maybe G!

  

 Juju wasn't so pleased riding in the Jeep, though she did a lot better this time compared to previous trips. She choose to do this half hanging off the seat thing, leaning on the bags that were on the floor.

 

 We finally made it. We hit a little traffic and with having to stop to get dinner it took a little longer than it could. Everyone was happy to arrive and get out of the Jeep!

Wordless Wednesday-JuJu

Bowled Over

This weekend was lots of fun. Cordelia got to spend Friday night and some time on Saturday with her Pap-Pap and Grammy. While Grammy worked Cordelia and Pap-Pap had to entertain themselves so they decided to head to The Garden State Discovery Museum! Cordelia had a ton of fun, but did get some blisters from her sandals, which, she is still "recovering" from! But that didn't mean the fun stopped there. When she was finally ready to come home and after Ben and I had had enough slogging away rearranging the garage we decided to go bowling!

Its been awhile and its not like riding a bike...it took some time to get back into the swing of things..sadly I didn't even get a strike! But we had a great time hanging out together.

Cordelia's turn-don't drop the ball!

We had to wait awhile to see how many pins she'd knock down as the ball didn't move very fast.

Yeah!

Fun times!

And you guessed it-Ben won the game! Way to go honey!

Alissa's baby shower

So not this weekend past, but the weekend before Cordelia and I got to attend her second cousins baby shower. Now on Cordelia's Dad's side of the family the cousins get very confusing, very quickly as they range from 35 ish to 6 months with this one on the way. I believe Cordelia is great grand baby #16. You do the math! 

We got to enjoy lots of good food and everyone's company. Cordelia of course had a ball. Here are a few pictures taken by another second cousin Malisa.

Time to open presents

Cordelia and her Mom-mom (aka great grandma)

Making instant friends

You can barely see it but that is a hair band in her hair..it lasted 5 mins : )

April come back!!

So I really don't know where the time went last month. after my birthday celebrations its seems May arrived and I could not get a blog post in edge ways! That pretty much summed up the end of April for me. Ben and I weren't able to finish our movies that we put on without crawling to bed 15-20 mins in, I didn't have a chance to meal plan or even get to the grocery store...it was bad! And now I think about it I have no idea what stopped me from getting things done!

Okay, maybe I remember a few things...

Cordelia and I got to enjoy a wonderful Mother/daughter activity at church. We made necklaces from washers, nail polish and ribbon. We made flower pens, note book covers and enjoyed doing some zumba together. Oh and as there was nail polish around we painted our nails!

Cordelia painting her nails "all by herself"

My pendant drying.

Painted nails!

Cordelia enjoying Zumba...I joined in shortly after.

Oh, but before we left to enjoy our night out, I nearly had a heart attack. Ben had left a few minutes before Cordelia and I, so I let the puppies out so they'd be set until we got home.  Well I go to let them back in and only Jada was in the back  yard! Where was my Bella Boo?? I check the side gate and it was wide open! WHO stole my Bella Boo? Hang on a second...no one could steal Bella without me hearing her bark them into next week. So where could she be? I immediately call Ben, hysterical, and he of course immediately heads home. Our great neigbors across the road hear my frantic calls for Bella and head over to help me. Cordelia was still in the house so I couldn't leave to look for Bella. As I'm walking in to the house I hear our neigbors calling Bella and who comes bounding out of the woods! BELLA. I was so relieved. I called Ben back to let him know he didn't need to come home, he kindly informs he that he had left the gate open! WHAT!!

Bella after galavanting in the woods

Turning 30!

So this was not a day I've been looking forward to, but here it is, I turned 30 today(this was written on Saturday : )). I decided awhile ago that I should definitely celebrate this mile stone. My usual celebrations are pretty low key and laid back. For example I love nothing better than to order take out and have a transformer marathon for valentine's day. But I knew I would regret not making the effort to make this celebration stand out. And because Ben is fabulous he was on board.

I didn't have anything extravagant in mind so we decided to take a trip to Atlantic City. We live less than 2 hours away and I love the beach and there is just so much to see. We found a deal on-line for one of the higher end hotels that had its own spa. Well I was in desperate need of a pedicure and an eye brow wax so we left right after work (on Friday) so we could get down there in time for me to go and partake. I didn't get any pictures of the spa but had a wonderful experience. Then it was up to the hotel room to get ready for the night.

All ready for dinner and a good time!

 Once I was ready and we finally decided where we were going to eat we headed out for a walk on the boardwalk down to Caesar's the hotel/ casino where we decided we would eat. This was disastrous for 2 reasons:- 1) I was wearing heels and the "short" walk wasn't so short and 2) The wind was a menace. My hair got ruined...beyond belief. So after a few shed tears and an attempt to fix my hair I forgot about it and went on to enjoy the evening. I say a few tears but it may or may not have been a full scale melt down in the ladies bathroom...opps!  It's a good thing it was dark in the restaurant; that helps when you're having a bad hair evening!

The rest of the evening was perfect-we enjoyed our meal and I got to watch some of the Philly's baseball game out the corner of my eye as I ate (The restaurant had a bar section with sports playing). After the meal we headed to Tropicana another hotel/casino where they had a night club called boogie nights-1 requisite I had was I wanted to dance. Well  as we were walking around the casino I saw an advertisement that said that if we had eaten at a Tropicana restaurant we could get into the night club for free. I hate to pay for something that could be free so we ended up at a bar called Tango's. They had a lounge with sofas where we could relax but they were also playing some good music.

Well we weren't even there 5 minutes when they had a DJ set up. And this is when the real fun began. Ben and I love to people watch and there were a bunch of hilarious people in the bar that night. It began with a older, heavier guy trying to get down with the ladies from the few bachelorette parties that were there. And then add in a group of young guys and the next thing we know one of the guys was shirtless...needless to say endless entertainment.

We called it a night pretty early, shortly after midnight, as we knew it would be a fairly early morning. The deal we got included breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel. Ben enjoyed an omelet and I enjoyed granola and banana's. It was delicious. We had to do a few logistical moves with our car and in the process noticed that there was an imax 3d movie theater at the Tropicana so we purchased tickets and headed to enjoy the beach for awhile and get Ben's art project completed.

Enjoying breakfast

Yeah! The beach

Ben's art project

Shoes and shells!

After the movie-which was awesome- we headed back home to scoop up Cordelia and head out to dinner. We ended up at a local German restaurant. we had a wonderful time and as Cordelia and I declared in the car on the way home...It was THE BEST DAY EVER : )!

Cordy holding the flowers she cut for me with Mom-Mom

Enjoying dinner

Checkbook register

Being a fan of Dave Ramsey I try to implement alot of what he teaches. Okay everything he teaches. One thing he mentions is keeping your checking account/check book balanced. Well in today's world of on-line banking you can see what is going on at the bank in real time however it was important to me to master this skill.

I started out with good old fashioned pen and paper, but found it increasing difficult to keep it up. I would always get messed up if I forgot to make an entry or if I entered an entry incorrectly. I'm a little OCD so trying to correct these made a mess so didn't sit well with me. Additionally, whenever it did come to balancing the account I would be off by some bizarre amount.

Well I started researching what software was available to help keep track of these things. I tried mint and yodlee and I know years ago I tried quick books and microsoft money too. I would always get frustrated with this type of software as you would typically download your transactions and things wouldn't always jive and I felt that they only told me where my money went than managing my money. Now this probably had more to do with user error than anything, but needless to say, it didn't work for me.

I finally came across clearcheckbook.com ! This met my criteria exactly. You manually input transactions-like the old fashioned pen and paper method, it has an on-line interface as well as mobile apps for both andriod and iphone and I can reconcile my account properly. So I can see if checks that I've written have cleared or on-line purchases with my debit card. It even has scheduled reminders for items that automatically hit your account each month. Did I mention its free?

Now if you swipe your debit card like a crazy person I can see how the manual entry thing could get exhausting but I love that when I get my bank statement I can go down the line of items and check them off and that the balances match. If for some reason things don't balance its much simpler to double check my transactions and make any necessary changes.

I was able to set up budgets so I can see at a glance where we stand. And I love that Ben and I can see what's going on with our accounts in real time on the go. Now we are just trying to figure out how long we should keep receipts! How long do you keep yours?