Triple Clicks

Wednesday, January 28, 2015

No Egg Recipes

My mother in law was kind enough to make my cake, so I had to change my blog post for this week. :) 


I've discovered more allergies in our family. Grace is having issues with eggs, so I'm looking at alternative recipes and egg substitutes.  

With pancakes, I can just leave the egg out and they turn out perfectly fine.  

I attempted waffles. That didn't work out so well.  I tried again today and they turned out better, but the recipe still needs something.  I have a friend who has offered recipes, so I'm messaging her today for help.  

Not too much is going on around here.  Going a little stir crazy in the house, but we are geting through it. 

Have a good week! 

~Tabitha


Wednesday, January 21, 2015

Birthdays, Birthdays and More Birthdays!

The first four months are chock full birthdays around here.  In January we have Eva's, my dad's, mine and my mom's. February we have Grace's and Dennis'. March has Adrianna's and April has Andrew's.  

The kids get to tell me what kind of cake they want and what decoration they want. We also do their favorite food for lunch (that way they have time to run off the sugar of the cake before bed time). 

For Eva's birthday, she wanted a Thomas the Train cake and pizza for her birthday.  So we got frozen pizza to bake and the kids 'helped' with the cake. (Read as: they ate icing as I was trying to decorate.) 

I was really excited to try out my new cake pans. I finally have round cake pans so I can do a little more with cakes rather than just rectangles.  I wasn't able to get as fancy as I wanted because Grace was sick and getting very grumpy in the high chair. But Eva loved it, and that's the important part. 

I did discover I needed more icing than I made.  There just wasn't enough to my liking. :)  But then, I do have a sweet tooth.  I also didn't realize how little room there was on a round cake and should have put the train on before I wrote the letters, but oh well.  





Hard to believe my little girl is 3 already. Goodness knows she has the attitude to go with it.  


I have plans for my cake, just hope it turns out ok.. That will be next week as we are doing it early... Then the week after we'll do my parent's cake... As long as they let me make it at their house anyway. :)  Just so many cakes going on! :) 





There's my birthday girl.  Complete with pizza sauce. 'Scuse the messy floor behind her. 

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Shopping Trip January 17, 2015

Things continue to be crazy around our house. My husband went through a period where he didn't want me to meal plan, just use what we had.... I'm going a little crazy, so back to meal planning. 

There seems to be a few good sales running around stores this week, so it looks like I'm going to be hitting a few more stores to get the sales.  Hopefully Andrew holds up and doesn't go crazy on me. At least the weatherman says it will be a little warmer, hopefully it will. Then the kids can just bundle in sweatshirts and hats and we won't have to take coats on and off half a dozen times. :) 

Well, As it is. Ads are out for this week. I don't have my meal plan made out.. but I do have a few meals in mind, so we'll see how they fit with the sales.  

Here's your ad links



Happy Ad shopping. If you use HyVee, don't forget to check out the digital coupon section on the site. They download straight onto your fuel saver card, so when that gets scanned for fuel saver points, the coupons come off and you don't have to remember to give them to the cashier. 

Stay Warm!  Our 'high' is around 40 this weekend, hope it gets that warm lol. 

Wednesday, January 7, 2015

Budget Saving Ideas

I'm sure it's no secret by now we try to save money wherever we can.  One of the biggest things that always plague budgets is TV. Satellite or Cable? Well now there's new options.  

A year ago we found a little box called a Google TV. Amazon has their name brand and Roku also has one. It basically allows you to get online through your TV and watch things, play music.  I even got on Facebook a few times through it. It's come in handy. I think it cost us $100.

A few months ago, my husband found the Google Chromecast stick.. yet again Amazon and Roku also has their own, but Amazon videos don't work well unless you buy theirs, so if you watch a lot from Amazon Prime, keep that in mind. This handy little dude plugs into an HDMI port in your TV and you download an extension on your browser to cast or mirror (depending on the site) anything on your internet browser to your TV. It's pretty awesome. There's also an extra extension to put on your browser that casts things that would normally mirror (including Facebook videos), but make sure you put on the adblock plus extension before visiting the free movie sites or you'll go insane with the popups.  

Just to be clear, "mirroring" means it still plays on your computer, but you can watch it-with the sound-coming through your TV. "Casting" means it sends whatever your watching to your TV and you just have to keep the browser up. 

Hulu mirrors, while Netflix and YouTube cast. YouTube also lets you create a playlist to cast to your TV.  This little stick cost us $30.  Netflix and Hulu subscriptions are $8 each a month. 

Now, we are weird people and listen to music at night, so that's been our major stumbling block here.  We had found a surround sound speaker system we bought initially for the TV...but it didn't work like we thought it would and thought we had wasted $130.. But now that we have it figured out (we aren't exactly technically savvy around here), we have our night time music problem solved. It is a wireless system, we hook in the MP3 player or an old smart phone through our Wifi network on Pandora and let the music go. It will put music in both the kids' rooms, too, because we bought extra speakers.  

We're all set now to give Dish Network the boot... we barely watch TV anyway, it's almost all Netflix or YouTube. We are just waiting for the power cords to come in to keep the smart phone with power all night. 

There are cheaper speakers out there.. or you can just chromecast Pandora through your computer if you don't want it in your bedroom. Once we get rid of Dish, our monthly TV cost will be $16.  It still remains to be seen if Dennis will want to pay to watch Football next season, but it's not a very big fee through ESPN.com.  

The site we use that's free, has a HUGE database of movies and new shows is www.primewire.ag. You want to add the AdBlock Plus extension before you go there. Just do it. You can turn the extension off and on by clicking on it. In the Google Chrome browser, click on the three little bars in the upper right hand corner, go into 'settings', on the left hand side there is an option for 'extensions'. Click it then find Ad Block Plus. 

The only show I haven't found through any of these ways is 19 Kids and Counting. That's because TLC is stingy :( So I'm impatiently waiting to be able to see the new episodes.  

We're hoping we can get on the network web sites after we cancel Dish.. But as for now, it's blocking us out because we have to sign in through Dish... But I have friends telling me they can watch episodes on the sites. 

Hope this helps somebody else.

Tabitha