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.

Keeping Cool!

July brought some pretty high temps in our area. We had more heat advisory days in July then we had all last summer! We tend to stay in on those days, which can make for some long days for these guys! I had to get creative on different 'projects' for them to do. I decided that I had had enough of being stuck in the house, so I took a bunch of different Tupperware containers, filled then with water and food colouring and left them in the fridge for a few days. I waited for one of the cooler days, I put the boys in their swim suits and we went out to build! They loved these slippery building blocks. Not only were they building with them, but they were colouring on their tummies, legs, arms and of course each other with the coloured ice cubes It was only about 30 minutes before they were too melted or broken apart to play with, but it was the best 30 minutes of out day that day!