A lovely afternoon

We have been enjoying some cooler weather lately, and today we have a lot of windows open with a nice breeze coming in. Such a nice change from running the air conditioner constantly! (Not that I'm not thankful for the air conditioner--I am VERY thankful! But it's nice to have fresh air for a change, and our electric bill will be happier, too. :)) I've had a fairly productive morning and am now enjoying the smell of bread beginning to bake in the oven. I rarely bake bread (to my shame, since I own a bread machine!), but I'm planning on making a french toast bake for tomorrow's lunch, for which I need a loaf of white bread. Rather than buy one, I decided to try making one, and actually used the Kitchen Aid mixer and the oven instead of the bread machine. I'm excited to see how it turns out! I also made some cranberry lemonade, loaded and ran the dishwasher, washed a few more dishes by hand, and now it is time to unload and reload the dishwasher, since I created a bunch more dishes! I also made a batch of hummingbird nectar, so I need to clean and refill the feeder. Julia is on her second nap of the day, and Sam is down for (hopefully) a few hours. :) It's been a nice, laid-back sort of day. I love Saturdays! Jim is over at our mechanic friend's house, working on fixing his plow truck so hopefully it will run better this winter. I don't even want to THINK about winter at this point, but I know it will come all too soon. Even now, in mid-August, it is starting to feel like fall!

Last night, Jim and I went out to eat to celebrate our anniversary. My parents watched the kiddos for us, and both kids did very well! Julia even took almost the whole bottle of milk that I had pumped for her. Yippee!!! We went out to a new Mexican restaurant in town. The food was good, although very heavy. The menu selection was very small, with only about 6 or 8 meals to choose from. Jim and I both had a quesadilla, his with ground beef and mine with chicken. The meals came with beans and rice, and unlimited chips and salsa (both homemade). It was fun to try, although we both decided we probably wouldn't eat there again, as there are other places around that we like more. We also got fried ice cream for dessert, but it wasn't "authentic"--still pretty good, but I've had better. Anyway, we both were very happy to have a little date and some quiet time for the two of us. After eating, we went to Walmart and walked around, mostly just window shopping for a few minutes. Jim did buy me a little present, though--a nice fabric trash bag for the new Suburban. :) We felt very refreshed by our night out!

I meant to mention this on my frugality post, but I forgot . . . anyway, I tried something new last Saturday: taking clothes in to a local consignment shop. I had received several bags of used clothes for Julia a while back. I went through them all, picked out what I could use, and then set the rest aside to consign. I finally got around to bringing them in last week. I had no idea if the shop had certain guidelines, or will only take clothes for the current season, as some do, but the lady said to just give her the bag and she would go through it. She ended up taking it all (yay!) and I ended up with $14.15 worth of store credit. She figured out how much she would sell the things for, then I got to choose either 50% store credit or a check for 30%. Since I like shopping there, I picked the store credit. I picked out these three things for Julia to grow into, and still have about $4 left to use. I know I have some more things I can take in, so I will have to do some more sorting. It's such a nice way to recycle clothes I can't use and get others that I will!

Well, I am off to clean up my kitchen and hopefully get the rest of the house spiffed up a bit before my little sleeping beauty awakes! :)