I love saving a buck any time, but especially in an economic slump

Four things that have saved me more then a buck and have brought a smile to my face over and over again.


Sione and I have found a movie theater that shows movies on Tuesdays for 50 cents, this means that we can go as a couple for a dollar. I'm not really a numbers person but this much I know - If our movie costs a dollar for the two of us then for sure we can afford one of their dollar hot dogs. Now that's when I wish I had a camera, to catch the look on Junior's face as I hand him the worlds smallest hot dog.


Verlyn and I hit a garage sale where the mother and her mother-in-law were both teachers and they had stacks and stacks of kids books. Well, I went book by book trying to narrow down the number of books that I figured I could pay for (I had 2 20's in my pocket) and realisticly how many we could carry back to the car. Eventually the woman came and sat down with me and started making suggestions, well - more like "you have to takes". By the time I finished I had 50 books in hand and she said she would give me the deal of a life time, everthing for $20!!! How happy was I. This is LaRee with some of the books. Please make a note that her dad was the one that dressed her that morning since the momma was out garage saleing. We as women came out of the womb knowing that you shouldn't put a pattern shirt with a patterned pants.



As most newlyweds, we had a little wedding gift money and decided to spend it on one of those fancy garbage cans that you open with your foot. Well, about a month ago a piece of plastic on the hinge broke leaving it unusable. I was so happy to hear that Sione had a plan to fix it, although my first thought was the fear that this involved ducktape, but he suprised me and used durable, semi-attractive, hardly noticable metal. Thank you Sione for being so creative and persistant!!

Eating at home is becoming more frequent for us and now that I am a stay-at-home mom, I am trying to be better with meal planning, etc. We have discovered that Rhodes sells 3 frozen loaves of bread for a dollar and some change which is much cheaper then any prebaked loaf you will find in the store, so we have been trying to keep on top of baking our own bread at home. Here is LaRee singing her praises for homemade bread.

My 2 Part blog of over the holidays

This was the first year that we had a real tree. We always put up our, as Sione likes to call it "Charlie Brown" tree, but this year we invested in a real fake tree and finally after years of collecting ornaments I was able to display them.




Christmas was a lot of fun and most of that has to do with having LaRee in our life. Her excitement grew during the day as you will see in the pictures. It was the first day that she felt good in over a week. Bless her nose running heart!!
Here LaRee and Elmo are watching T.V. on one of the days that she didn't feel so good. Elmo gives LaRee much comfort in her times of need.





Not a real fancy fairy princess look but this is the best picture to show the whole shoe/wand package.

Our family friend Todd ( we know him from San Diego and he now lives in Dallas too) his sisters came in from Arizona for Christmas so we took the opportunity to all get together and play tourist with a trip out to The South Fork Ranch where parts of the television show "Dallas" was filmed. Our little island boy is even a fan. Sione watched the show for the year and a half that he lived in Hawaii with his Grandparents. It's hard to even slip in the word Dallas without Sione jumping in with the theme song from the show.


Let me tell you, LaRee seemed to enjoy this 2 hour adventure 100 times more then our 2 day trip to Disneyland. It was too funny to watch. She loved it. She really likes spending time with her Uncle Todd and its a ranch so she had wide open spaces to be and do as she pleased.