Christmas, Finals, and Life Lately

Whew, has it been a crazy few weeks. Eric just finished up his finals on Tuesday (wahoo!), I went home for my church's bazaar last weekend to sell artwork (which was a huge success - I was very pleased. More on that later!), Amanda came down for a few days, and now we're in the middle of the chaos of finishing up preparations for Christmas. Can I get a few days off to relax now please?! :) (I wish!)

So with the help of my wonderful sister (thanks Kim!), we were able to get a few Christmas cards printed this year. They're nothing fancy, but I thought it was important to start a tradition so that Eric and I would have one every year from the year we got married. I'll share them on here once we get them in the mail. Next year it's my goal to start working on them sooner so I can do something neat and creative.

Eric's out of school now for 5 weeks (I'm so jealous), and I've decided that I definitely don't like the whole "no winter break" thing and having to work the whole time. :) Thankfully though, a few of my girlfriends are in the same situation and we all have to work while our significant others get to do nothing all day. :) At least we encourage each other, LOL. However, I'm finding that it's not all bad - I came home last night to a vacuumed and clean apartment and Eric even had the grocery coupons all printed out. He's also been getting up at 6:45 to fix lunch as usual, too, so I can't complain! (THANK YOU ERIC!)

It's going to be one of our New Year's resolutions to start budgeting even better. We've been doing pretty good, I must say. It's especially been a little more difficult for me to get used to since I'm used to spending some of my paycheck at the mall on clothes. Eric did the whole Dave Ramsey series a few years ago, thanks to Aunt Cindy and Uncle Dave!, and I'm thinking I should probably look into it, too, since I'm not as good as he is. But we have a good envelope system with cash, he has his calculator out every week at the grocery store making sure we don't go over our budget (that's depressing sometimes though, because we reach the limit so quick! Goodbye snacks, sweets, and other good food! :) ), and I'm always trying to find coupons to save a few dollars here and there. My friend Kalyn found a website a few weeks ago that Dave Ramsey is a fan of called e-mealz.com. We haven't created an account yet, but we're going to in the next few days! Check out her blog on the left (Life with the Cavaliers) and read what she has to say about it! I'm definitely excited about it because it tells you how you can budget your money, find good coupons, etc. Now, the next step is how do we get this rising utility bill down?! :) I just about cried when Eric just sent me the bill especially since it was a LOT more and we were gone a whole week for Thanksgiving! Aye aye aye. I just told Emily that I guess we'll be turning off the heat and getting us some Snuggies instead! Oh the life of being newlyweds...

That's all for now. Have a great weekend!