4/20/05 TEENS, CREATIVE & FUN DATES, STAY-AT-HOME MOM, GARAGE SALES
Posted by: jhbreneman <jhbreneman@...>
ENCOURAGEMENT TO WOMEN
Compiled especially for YOU with LOVE by Lois Breneman
GODLY WISDOM AND GUIDANCE FOR PARENTS WITH TEENS
HOSPITAL PATIENT INFORMATION
[email protected] or visit http://www.parentsandteens.com
- Go on a breakfast, lunch or dinner picnic. Or grill a meal at home.
- Go to a park and swing as high as you can. Watch out for the children!
- Hike or climb trees.
- Make popcorn, maybe even caramel corn.
- Plan a scavenger hunt.
- Bake cookies
- Read a good book aloud.
- Look through photo albums or view family slides - very interesting!
- Play miniature golf or croquet.
- Go fishing.
- Play a board game with the family
- Work on a jigsaw puzzle.
- Go roller skating or ice skating.
- Make silhouettes of each other. Use a slide projector or a bright lamp to project the head profile on a blank wall. Hold paper against the wall and trace the silhouette. Cut out and glue it on a contrasting sheet of paper or poster board.
- Work on a crossword puzzle.
- Go to garage sales together.
- Sing favorite choruses and hymns around the piano or guitar.
- Make homemade ice cream or visit an ice cream parlor.
- Bake a double batch of cookies and deliver one to a needy family.
- Visit an airport and watch the planes take off and land, or go to a lake and watch the boats, while you have a picnic.
- Go to the zoo.
- Go bowling.
- Make your own homemade pizza. Add mushrooms, peppers, onions, black olives and crushed pineapple to the pizza sauce and cheese.
- Play Charades or Guesstures with the family.
- Listen to recordings of your favorite music.
- One sunny Saturday morning, get out the gardening tools and find someone (a shut-in, perhaps) who could use some free yard work. Or offer to help your family.
- Write the words and music to a chorus together.
- Have a bonfire outdoors or in your fireplace and roast hot dogs and marshmallows.
- Share prayer requests that affect and concern your families, then pray about them.
- Make a list together of all the things in your house that use electricity. You might do this when you lose power sometime.
- Play badminton, volleyball, tennis, Frisbee, yard darts or ping pong.
- Go jogging or take a walk together.
- Go to the library.
- Make fudge, other candy, brownies or caramel apples together.
- Fly a kite!
- Read favorite poems aloud.
- Pick apples and make apple sauce together.
- Gather seashells.
- Go to a ball game or play one - football, kickball, softball, baseball, basketball, soccer.
- Go sledding, skiing or snowboarding.
- Take a trip to an amusement park, a museum or a planetarium.
- Set a Bible verse to a familiar tune or make up your own together.
- Take a bicycle trip.
- Catch butterflies with a butterfly net.
- Go bird watching.
- Plan and cook a meal together.
- Have a water balloon toss.
- Read jokes to each other.
- Read true to life stories to each other from Reader's Digest. (Life in These United States, Humor in Uniform, All in a Day's Work, etc.)
- Ask Grandma and Grandpa tell how they met and how life was for them as children.
- Make "smores" in the fireplace or outdoors.
- Learn to juggle or yoyo successfully.
- Carve an animal out of a bar of Ivory soap.
- Wear old tennis shoes and go wading in a stream.
- Watch a parade together.
- Feed ducks at a duck pond.
- Visit an antique shop with grandparents, and listen to their stories of how it was when they were growing up. Have them explain how the various antiques were used.
- See what you can buy at a dollar store, where everything is $1.
- Go to the city market together some Saturday morning.
- Whistle with a blade of grass between your thumbs.
- Make banana splits together.
- Clean house together. I'm sure you would learn a lot about the other person doing this!
- Go on a photography walk. Take pictures of each other, against a backdrop of flowers or nice scenery.
- Go to the tallest building in your area and see what landmarks you can spot.
- Have a taffy pull.
- Make yeast bread together~~or sticky buns.
- Enjoy the snow together by building a snowman, snow bears, a huge turtle or other animals, making a snow fort or throwing snowballs. How about making snow ice cream?
- Go to Sunday school, church and Bible study together.
- Make sandwiches or a casserole together.
1 16-ounce can sauerkraut, drained 2 cups shredded Swiss cheese
1 pound deli sliced corned beef, cut into strips
Preheat oven to 400 º. Spread bread cubes in the bottom of a 9x13 inch baking dish. Spread sauerkraut evenly over the bread cubes, then layer beef strips over sauerkraut. Pour dressing over all. Spray aluminum foil with cooking spray and use to cover baking dish, sprayed side down. Bake in the preheated oven for 20 minutes. Remove cover, sprinkle with cheese and bake uncovered for another 10 minutes, or until cheese is melted and bubbly. Yield: 6 servings
By Homebodies founder, Cheryl Gochnauer - [email protected] - ©1997 - Used by permission
http://www.gospelcom.net/homebodies/experts/cgochnauer/index.php
(Note from Cheryl: The following column is a shortened version of the article that started Homebodies several years ago. This story was written as a letter to the editor, after a checker at a convenience store refused to accept my home number as a "real work number." Reader response was overwhelming, and prompted the editor to ask me to write a weekly column. Homebodies was born!)
I have found the Promised Land, and it is in my own backyard. The honey flows sweetly, whether soft spring breezes are ruffling my children's hair, or the kids are splashing through summer's sprinklers, or I join them tumbling in autumn's leaves. Even smacked upside the head with a preschooler's snowball, I love being a stay-at-home mom.
I am a thirty-something, college-educated, work-oriented woman. Ranking high on my list of career priorities is providing the absolute best life for my children, my husband, and myself. I personally can best achieve that goal by putting my training and education into action on the homefront.
Organizational skills gleaned from the classroom and workplace serve me well as I juggle my family's needs. In my role as Chief Financial Officer, I take our family's paycheck and stretch it in all ways imaginable.
A classic Type A personality, I am sure that quitting full-time work outside the home has extended my life considerably. I no longer feel my head is about to explode as I rush to daycare, rush to work, rush to errands at lunch, rush back to work, rush to daycare, rush to the supermarket, rush home, rush supper, rush housecleaning, rush my kids to bed so I can have a moment's peace, rush to my pillow to rush in six hours sleep before we start this all over again tomorrow.
Instead, I can follow a flexible schedule just as vital as any I used to outline in my Daytimer. I work for a smaller corporation now, a private entity composed of me, my husband, and our two children.
It hasn't always been this way. Although I sincerely wished I could be home with my two daughters, I didn't believe it was financially possible. But as I took a complete look at our finances, I found that after Uncle Sam, the babysitter, the car finance company and the fast-food diners took their cut, I was bringing home $39 a week.
I was sacrificing my dream of being home with my kids for less than a dollar an hour. According to the figures, I had been working for this measly amount for almost a year.
I called my husband and asked if he could pick up $39 in overtime a week, to which he immediately responded, "Yes." I turned in my notice that day.
It's true. It's not how much you make, it's how much you spend. We sold our late model luxury car and paid cash for an ancient but well-maintained auto. Do I miss my plush car? Of course. Am I willing to work full-time so I can have it? Of course not.
So I live within my means, knowing that someday, when my children are grown or more money appears in our household, we may choose to buy a new car again.
Instead of racing to the restaurant for a primo lunch - and watching the clock, glaring at the slow waiter, then paying triple what it would have cost to make it myself - I can brown-bag a lunch of PB&J (the perennial kid's favorite) and go to the park on a time schedule I set myself.
My luxury car languished in a parking lot when I worked. Now my older car patiently waits as my children and I brown ourselves under sunny skies. We lay on our bellies, our faces inches above the microworld contained in grass we once just trampled, discovering tiny treasures.
Chubby fingers push back my hair and soft lips smack my forehead. "I love you, Mommy." No car is worth this.
You probably instinctively knew all the pluses to staying home before you started reading this article. Sounds like a great dream, but you can't afford to quit work. Maybe. Or maybe not.
Sit down with your spouse and determine your goals for your family. Don't just look at finances; include personal and spiritual goals. What would be the ultimate situation for your family? What would be tolerable? What is unacceptable?
Cut out everything that is wasting your money, time and energies. Discover the difference between wants and needs. Are some of your wants stunting an area of need? Your children are precious. What expendable items stand between them and you?
You may be proud of the beautiful house you have provided for your kids. However, if you find they spend little time there with you - that they are instead at a childcare center while you make the money to pay the mortgage, then there may be a problem in priorities.
Same thing with the fancy car. If Mom's not there to drive to fun places, why bother?
There are universal truths, and one Truth is this: When given a choice, young children will always choose time with their beloved parents over time with things.
If after making all the cuts you can muster, you still don't see enough room in the budget to leave the office behind, consider the next best thing: working part-time.
It's not always possible for a woman to make the jump from full-time worker to stay-at-home mom in one leap, even if she wants to. There are many reasons she might choose to work part-time first.
Maybe the budget won't allow a total break right now. Maybe her husband's a little nervous. Maybe she's not sure exactly how she will like being home all the time. Whatever the reasoning, going the part-time route is a road an increasing amount of mothers are choosing to maneuver.
Cutting back on work commitments benefits both you and your children. But you may be surprised at the change in your husband, too. Instead of evenings filled with laundry and housework, you can schedule your chores so that you get off work when he does. Now the evenings are free for family fun.
Deciding to stay at home is definitely an example of "less is more." Consider simplifying your life and realize the rewards of downscaling material expectations. Like me, you might discover the Promised Land in your own backyard.
Comments? Write Cheryl at [email protected] or visit the active message boards at http://www.homebodies.org. To subscribe, [email protected]
If you'd like to get an autographed copy of Cheryl's "Stay-at-Home Handbook," visit
http://www.gospelcom.net/homebodies/bookstore/orderSAHH.php
from "Debi's Tips-and-Quips" - by Deborah Taylor-Hough - http://simplemom.com/
NUMBER OF DAYS
To begin with, I planned the sale for more than the typical one or two days. For my most recent sale, I decided on four days -- Wednesday through Saturday. I'm glad I decided to go for the longer sale starting earlier in the week. Many shoppers stopped by just out of the novelty of seeing a Garage Sale being held on a day different from Friday/Saturday.
Also, holding a Sale on an "off" day when there aren't other sales going on is beneficial because people aren't holding onto their pennies, waiting to see if there's something better at the next sale down the road. If you're the only game in town, they buy rather than browse.
CLASSIFIED ADS
I placed two separate ads in the local paper. The first ad covered the sale for Wednesday and Thursday. The second ad was for Friday and Saturday. I thought that if I had just one ad that said the sale goes from Wednesday to Saturday, fewer people would show up on the last two days of the sale. From reading the ad, they'd probably think all the good stuff had already been picked over.
Be sure to double-check your ad when it appears in the paper. One of the days my ad ran, the newspaper misprinted some information. I called the paper about it and they refunded my money. Also, the longer your ad, the better. Most Garage Sale ads are fairly short, but longer ads stand out better amidst long listings of Garage Sales. Try to list types of items you're selling individually: furniture, clothing, small appliances, toys, baby items, blankets, collectibles, etc. If there's anything special about your sale, mention it. I put in my ad that my sale contained five generations of "treasures" because my children, my husband and I, our parents, my grandparents, and even some things from my great-grandmother were included in the sale.
STUFF TO SELL
I collected bags and boxes full of all sorts of stuff from family and friends. I just told people I was going to be having a Garage Sale, and if they had anything they were going to be getting rid of, I'd be happy to come by and pick it up for my sale. Everyone I approached was more than happy to contribute some of their "gently used" and not-so-gently used items to my sale.
When choosing what to display at your sale, don't sort things out according to what you think will sell and what you think won't. Try to sell everything! What's junk to one person is often someone else's treasure! Even broken appliances can be sold for parts. And don't throw out your old magazines. Stick them all in a box and sell them for a quarter a piece.
You'll be amazed at the things that sell. The hot items at my last sale were tacky (to me) costume jewelry, children's clothing, assorted gift items, and sheet music from the 20's and 30's. At my suggestion, customers were buying the sheet music to frame for wall decorations. Then later in the day, a collector came along and offered to buy all the remaining sheet music
for a sizeable amount.
ARRANGEMENT OF SALE
Think "store" when you're setting up your sale. Try to think of how traffic patterns of browsing customers would walk around your garage. You want people to feel comfortable as they browse and shop. You don't want them just running in, glancing at a mess of junk, and running right back out the door.
Arrange your tables according to categories: all kitchen stuff on one table, bedding on another, clothes on another, gift items grouped together, jewelry displayed next to a mirror, etc. Decide in advance which categories of stuff you have, and then sort your items. It's so much easier for people to find things they want if they can look at a table and think, "Ah, ha! Kitchen stuff! Just what I needed" or "Oh! How nice ... a table of gift items!"
CLOTHING
Be sure to display your clothing nicely. If you have a free-standing clothes rack, put it in the garage for your sale to hold nicer items. Clothing on a table should be sorted according to general sizes (baby things, kids clothes, adult men, adult women), and folded and stacked neatly. I had to go back over to the clothing table several times each day and restack, refold and resort the clothes, but it was worth the effort (almost everything sold -- even stained stuff and things with holes in the knees). People don't enjoy digging through piles and piles of mix-n-matched junk clothing, but when they see everything looking nice and neat -- displayed like they'd see it in a store -- they quite happily stand there and sort through the items.
I also washed clothing (and most stuffed animals) before putting them out for the sale. It not only makes the items more attractive, but you can also get a higher price for these items if they look as close to "new" as possible.
Rather than pricing each piece of clothing individually, I just put a big easy-to-read sign over the table (I hung mine on cardboard from the garage rafters at lower-than-eye-level right over the clothing table). I sold clothes for "50 cents each, or three for $1 (unless otherwise marked)."
I priced nicer clothing, designer items, and things like kids' winter coats and snow pants higher.
SOFT BACKGROUND MUSIC
One of the most important tips (you're probably going to think it's crazy -- but trust me!) is playing quiet background music while people shop. Set a mood conducive to shopping. Don't play music that's loud or too lively -- it'll make people a bit hyper and more apt to shop too quickly. You want them to relax ... shop ... take their time ... enjoy the process. Probably an easy-listening station that plays familiar songs from the 70's and 80's would be ideal. People would hum and sing as they shopped at my sale -- maybe not even leaving until after their favorite song's over. Ever notice the background music in many restaurants and stores? Usually just easy listening, easy-to-hum-along-with songs.
I personally chose a Classical music station for a large portion of the day (it's the normal station I listen to) since I had to sit there all day for four days listening to the music, too -- I didn't want to lose my mind listening to music I don't normally play (although I'm sure a lot of people would lose their mind listening to Classical all day!). My customers enjoyed the music, though, and several even commented about what a nice tone it set to my sale.
One morning I was noticing that people weren't browsing like they had been earlier. They were just running in, looking quickly, and then running out again and not buying anything. It seemed strange since that hadn't been the tone of the sale during the previous days. Suddenly it dawned on me that I'd forgotten to turn on the radio. Within just a few minutes of playing quiet background music again, the shoppers slowed down, took their time, and started BUYING things again. That quiet, soothing music completely changed everything.
ODDS AND ENDS TIPS
1) On those large colorful signs that you post around town for your sale, be sure to list some of the items at your sale: tools, baby items, clothing, housewares, collectibles, etc. (and please don't forget to take your signs down after the sale is through!).
2) Stock up on bags from the grocery store so you can offer to bag up purchases for those customers with armloads of small items.
3) Another quick tip: Make people comfortable. Since I've worked for many years in "people" oriented jobs, this practically comes as second nature to me, but I've been to so many garage sales where the people holding the sale just sat there and glared at you as you shopped. I wanted people to be comfortable and feel welcome at my sale. They weren't an inconvenience to me ... they were actually the entire reason I was sitting out in my garage all weekend!
4) Say "Good morning" or "Hi!" to everyone who comes to your sale. We were experiencing a heat wave the week during our sale last year, so we chatted a lot about the weather. This is definitely the time to make just idle small talk ... don't get personal ... just greet them, SMILE (!!), make a comment about the weather (or some other innocent remark), and maybe ask them if there's anything specific they're looking for. If someone comes and goes without buying anything, still say as nicely as possible (with a smile, of course), "Thanks for stopping by! Have a great day!" Not only is it a nice thing to do, but other customers will overhear you and it'll make them more comfortable, too.
5) Consider providing coffee if it's a cold day (offer it free by "donation only"), or ice cold lemonade if it's weather like we had last year (your kids can man the refreshment table -- my daughter made some extra money for a trip to Mexico she was planning with the church youth group).
6) I personally think it's better to price things a little bit on the high side, rather than too low (I'm certainly not talking about setting prices comparable to the local antique stores, but you don't have to price things for ten cents, either). If someone really wants an item that they feel is over-priced, they'll make an offer. This gives you room to come down a bit with your price. But lots of people won't haggle over prices -- they'll just quite happily pay whatever you ask for things (within reason, of course).
7) Since I planned on doing a garage sale again in the future, I didn't come down on my prices too much since everything that didn't sell the first time around will just find it's way into my next sale.
8) If your goal is to clear out as much stuff as possible (and make a few pennies on the side), offer some sort of great deal on the afternoon of the last day such as: everything a customer can stuff into a shopping bag for $1, or half price on all items after 12 noon on Saturday, or Freebies in the late afternoon of the final day of your sale.
I hope these tips give you some motivation to try holding a garage sale this year. It's definitely a great way to make a few extra pennies, and clear out clutter at the same time!
(This article was excerpted adapted in part from the book, A Simple Choice: A Practical Guide for Saving Your Time, Money & Sanity, by Deborah Taylor-Hough)
http://hometown.aol.com/dsimple/ Author: Frugal Living for Dummies(r), A Simple Choice, Frozen Assets, and Mix-and-Match RecipesTips&Quips - http://groups.yahoo.com/group/tips-and-quips/
A variety of short homemaking tips, parenting ideas, family-friendly recipes, quotes, recommended books and resources, random thoughts, articles, and more!
The operator said "I'll be glad to help, Dear. What's the name and room number?"
The grandmother in her weak tremulous voice said, "Holly Finkel in room 302."
The Operator replied, "Let me check. Oh, good news. Her records say that Holly is doing very well. Her blood pressure is fine; her blood work just came back as normal and her physician, Dr. Cohen, has scheduled her to be discharged on Tuesday."
The Grandmother said, "Thank you. That's wonderful! I was so worried! God bless you for the good news."
The operator replied, "You're more than welcome. Is Holly your daughter?"
The Grandmother said, "No, I'm Holly Finkel in 302. Dr.Cohen doesn't tell me anything!"
(http://www.gospelcom.net/homebodies/experts/jmccoy/index.php),
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