Blessings, Family and Money

I am making my grocery list and checking out every ones blog so I thought I would write on mine. My new thing is coupon shopping at first it was complicated and took a lot of time but I think I am starting to get the hang of it. It only takes me about 45 minutes to make my list and get my coupons together. I told Jeremy last week that I should have taken a picture of everything that I got, I spent $28 on about $100 worth of food. I was so excited!!! If you would like to learn how to coupon shop contact me I would love to teach you, thanks to awesome people in my ward that is how I learned. Sometimes after the bills are paid that is the only place I can cut back on, I only go to the store once a week and usually only two grocery stores.
Well the last two weeks have been exciting at our house we had a clogged pipe somewhere that when you flushed the toilet upstairs the sink downstairs would overflow with yucky stuff, so we called the plumber and half my mortgage payment later it was supposedly fixed. The renter came up today and told us it did it again! And the buckle on Madelyn's car seat broke and then the dryer went out.
I think the dryer going out was my fault, two days before it happened I told Jeremy that we should put a clothesline outside and hang our clothes to dry, that it would probably save us money :). Well I got my wish:). It was kind of fun the first day but when it came to line dried towels let's just say when Hadley got out of the shower and we wrapped the towel around him he said "Ow".
The funny thing, besides crying about the plumbers bill, we have laughed through it all. I have learned that life is full of trials we can make them worse by brewing over them or we can look at our blessings and just be grateful for what we have. We have always tried to live a debt free life and sometimes it gets hard and people make fun of us because we are so frugal but I figure that's the only way to live sometimes. Debt has been a big thing on mind lately with the economy and with us trying to get Jeremy through his last year of school we have been trying to live very frugally so that we can do that. The Lord has blessed me by helping me realize what great blessings I have.
The first day I went to pick up Hadley from preschool there were 14 minivans in the parking lot, all white and with there doors opened up because they automatically do that and there I was in my purple minivan at least 10 years older than theirs. I felt very out of place and even more so when I had to get out of the van to open the door. I was telling a friend about this when a small voice came to me again and said "what you have is good enough for your needs". This same little reminder has come to me as I have gotten jealous of those with bigger houses and better things than I have "that my wants may not be filled but my needs are".
I have since then noticed so many blessings in my life, like we had just run out of canned fruit in our food storage and I didn't know how we would replace it and that same day I went outside and our pears on our tree were ready to be picked so I could can them and a friend emailed asking if I wanted peaches. And when the dryer broke I found that I had a 65 ft clothes line already that I could tie from one tree to the other.
When I think about my three kids sharing a room and how it might be nice if we had another room I think of how we would have missed Hadley singing to Madelyn "I am a Child of God" because she was crying one night. And how when we put the bunk beds up you would have thought it was Christmas, it was the first time the kids ever asked if they could go to bed :)
Sorry about all of the rambling I just have had a day of thinking about blessings, family and money somehow it is all tied into one. It seems like that was the focus of church today and other conversations today. One interesting thing that was said today at church was that Europeans live off 1/3 of what Americans live off of and are happier. It goes to show that all those extra things in life don't bring us happiness we only think they will. That's my goal to be happy with what I have, maybe the Lord's reason for the commandment of 'thou shalt not covet' is that it never brought more happiness to have what our neighbor has.