Organizing Gift Cards

Gift cards seem to be the 'in' thing to give these days. I know we enjoy getting them. The boys love going to stores and picking out what they want and giving their card for it. My wallet was busting at the seems with gift cards, and that was just a small fraction of them lol. We had a stash in the car, a stash in the kitchen, and a stash on a shelf in the living room. I needed to figure something out so that they were organized, and not taking up valuable real estate in my wallet

I've recently became obsessed with Thirty-One. Mostly because it's just new in Canada, and I'm pretty sure it's only in Ontario. I've spent a lot of time lusting over their beautiful, coordinating, organizational product for a long time. I was so excited when they came here, and even more excited when one of my very good friends signed up to sell! I'm also slightly obsessed with Chevron. So it was an added bonus that they had a Chevron print. I ordered this coupon clutch because I thought it was cute. I wasn't totally sure what I was going to do with it. Maybe try the Dave Ramsey system and use this to organize the cash for our budget Odds are my husband would never take this to the hardware store, which would defeat the purpose. I don't use coupons, it just seems like a lot of work to save $0.40 on a can of tomatoes. Then it hit me! Why not use this for alllll of our gift cards! 

It worked perfectly! I broke it down into 5 categories - Food, Household, Clothing, Kids, and Tim Hortons. Everything is in one place. No more digging through my wallet to discover that the Build-A-Bear gift card is in the stash on the shelf, no more promising the kids McDonalds only to realize we forgot their gift cards (Not that I would break a promise over a silly gift card, but they love paying for their own stuff with their own 'money') If my husband is going some where, he knows he can find the gift cards in clutch in my purse. Now comes the fun part, putting all those gift cards to use! 

Sorry for the informalness of the pictures, I was outside playing with the boys when this idea hit me.

We LOVE Summer!

Well if you want to call this summer that is! I can not believe how COLD it's been this year! We've hardly been in the pool this summer :( But I'll give it to my boys, they don't let the cold weather stop them. They're still wanting to go outside and play on the trampoline or in the sandbox as soon as they're done breakfast in the morning and wanting to stay out until supper time. Which isn't that really what summer is all about? It's so hard to believe that in less then three weeks Bear will be starting Grade 1, the following week Monkey goes into his last year of preschool, and the week after that Bear turns 6. It makes me sad to think just how quickly time is going by. This summer our lives have got much slower and have allowed us to take every possible minute to drink up all the fun times.

As nice as it's been to have quality time with just my adorable little men, I'm looking forward to getting back into the routine that school brings! And don't get me wrong - I LOVE my kids more then anything, but the time has come lol. Bear and I are on a countdown to when he goes back. Him because he loves school, me because I love packing lunches :O lol I'm already planning lunches for the first few weeks. I've ordered some new fun lunch accessories. You can bet I'll post about that soon :)