A.Thimons

So if you haven’t heard, we’ve been couponing out here. It’s been crazy, but it’s been awesome! I was so inspired after reading the book Extreme Couponing by Joni Meyer-Crothers. She approaches couponing from the perspective of a ministry: “Sharing and Saving for Christ”. For anyone who viewed coupoing as I did like a hoarding habit, I urge you to see it in a new light:a way to be able to give back!

I’ve only been doing it for about 6 weeks now, but here are just a few tips that I learned so far:

• 1. Start small. Clip a couple coupons for products you like then hold on to them until you see that product go on sale. That’s the key. Holding onto them. You want to pay the lowest possible price for that item and it is possible, it just takes time. HERE is a link to a list of sale cycles (what goes on sale when) it really helps! And THIS is a link of stock up prices…meaning what is the absolute cheapest you should be able to get that item for. It took me about 4 weeks to see the value in holding onto those coupons, and resisting just using them because I had them. It really paid off, though! Last week I bought Pantene Pro-V Shampoo (the regular size) for only 50 cents a bottle! It was a Walgreens deal for 2/$6, but I had accumulated $5 per 2 bottles in coupons, which made the sale 2/$1…My best trip so far!
• 2.If you can get even one item free a week, that is one more item that you had! And even if coupons are for items you don’t use, if you know how to get it for free..then get it and donate it! Couponing can really be a great way to give back. I can’t even begin to tell you how thrilled I am to be able to give a full bag of groceries away every week…I know it is all because of couponing! And because of Joni’s website that inspired me: www.freetastesgood.com
• 3. Read this book: Extreme Couponing. Get it out from the library and just give it a shot.
• 4. Get organized. I bought a 3 ring binder on clearance at Wal-Mart for $2.00, then I filled it with one hundred currency holders that I found on Amazon. Then I bring the whole binder in with me to every store, because you never know what unannounced sales you’ll stumble upon. Last week, I went into Walgreens for diapers and instead walked out with some awesome Garnier stylers for only $2! They were retailing at $9.99! (note: at the end of every aisle in Walgreens are the markdown items!)
• 5. Follow this blog : www.freetastesgood.com. Joni is an “extreme giver” and that’s what drew me to this couponing craze, you don’t have to hoard it….you can SHARE it! “Pass the blessing on!” On this blog, Joni makes couponing very simple and matter of fact, showing you exactly what to purchase and how to get items for free or ridiculously cheap!
• 6.Make a list for what items you use the most, that way you have an idea what you want to watch the flyers for and “stock up” on. For us, that list includes: shampoo, diapers, wipes, soap (hand & dish), deodorant, toilet paper, paper towels, and cereal. It has only taken us 5 weeks to build up a stock pile on all of those items but one!
• 7.Switch your stores. I have to agree with Joni’s tip: the best deals are going to be in stores you’d least expect. My coupons actually do better at the more expensive store in town, but that’s because they have better sales! And I get the most for my money at Walgreens. Last week our trip totaled $96.20 in merchandise and I only paid $23 out of pocket. This was for stock up items like Pampers baby wipes, contact solution, toothpaste, shampoo and cereal! Nothing extraneous!
• 8. Give it a good 8 weeks. That was our goal. To try out the couponing thing (the right way: holding onto coupons, following the blog) for a good 8 weeks and if we didn’t see an improvement or difference by then we’d forget about it. Set small goals. Remember though, the first 3 weeks are the toughest…I nearly gave up and then that Walgreens trip in week 4 was a major success!
• 9. Share your success and " pass on the blessing!”

START HERE: COUPON NEWBIE

It is with great joy that I want to share with you a beautiful online community for women dealing with infertility. This ministry has touched my heart, and I know it is a much needed outreach for many of us out there. It is truly evident that Holy Spirit has guided the hearts and words of these women who are venturing out in starting this new online community! Please spread the word on your Facebook walls and Twitter about Faith In All Times! Read what founder, Melissa Clayton, has to say about it:

Annemarie was gracious enough to let me share my new venture and ministry with you today; thank you again Annemarie!

When I was 16 yrs. old I was diagnosed with endometriosis, a fertility and auto immune disorder that causes painful periods and in most cases infertility. My diagnosis meant I may never have children or at the very least have a difficult time getting pregnant. When I married my husband we were hopeful God would bless us and that the doctors had been wrong, but we soon found ourselves on the long road of infertility.

I had a wonderful partner in life and love, but like many women dealing with infertility I felt very alone and began seeking community online. I only came across women who were partaking in treatments I didn’t morally agree, leaving me longing for a sense of community and support that sadly I never found.

This lack of community set the desire on my heart to create a place for Catholic women to come together and share their journeys with infertility. I wanted somewhere to share the Church’s teachings on matters of reproductive technologies and to educate and loving lead other Catholic women to morally sound options.

It’s taken me awhile to figure out how exactly to foster that community. Together with my husband and other brave women willing to share their stories we’ve created Faith In All Times. My hope and prayer is to provide community and God’s truth about reproductive technologies.

Please take a few minutes to stop by and read the stories our contributors have been brave enough to share. If you or anyone else feels the call to become a contributor please contact me at melissa@faithinalltimes.com

The Rule of Self-Esteem

Which is, when one has finally showered and/or clothed thyself in clean, new clothes. Thou shalt be barfed, pooped, or boogered on. Before leaving the house.

The Stocking Rule

If you wear stockings with a skirt or dress to church or a nice event in public, this rule demands that without fail one of your children will walk across your foot, dragging their rubbery soled shoes with them ripping a snag in your stockings. Or they will sit directly behind you while you are kneeling and scrape the back of your calf with their rubber sole. This rule implies that whenever the moment is you will have to stand before the most amount of people publicly, you will be assured to have a hole in the stocking.

The Yeah Right Rule

If you ever find yourself ahead of the game on any household chore. You won’t be. This rule, typical in laundry situations, depends on two individuals. One (the doer) of the laundry and the other (the creator) of the laundry. When the Doer finds themselves finished with all the laundry for the week, The Creator will instinctively have “accidents” not once, or twice, but six times within a 24 hour period. Thus ensuring that the Doer will remain enslaved to the washing machine until the next week load of laundry is in the hamper and ready.

The Rule of A Minute to Myself

Whereby, you set up the kids with a show, a snack, have them down for naps, or all of the above and you sneak away for a minute. Usually to reply to an e-mail, or get a glass of water, eat your breakfast or use the toilet. This rule demands that the moment you distract and step away, all hell will break loose. No matter what show you put on, they will be starving, in dire need of orange juice, or just want to ask you pointless questions about your life like “why are you still in pajamas?” Anything to keep your mind from a moments peace. They are programmed to loose all interest in any activity the minute they realize you are selfishly using the bathroom in peace and quiet.

Crisis Rules

This would be only applicable when you are changing the worst dirty diaper of your life, cleaning up some horrendous throw up incident off a mattress or the like. The rule stresses that each or every child will have a major crisis when you are up to your elbows already in crap. And they will stand at your heels making repeated whiny attempts to make sure you understand the very urgency of their crisis…in example, saying “more orange juice” over and over again in your ear until you have a crisis of your own.

The Rule of Middle of the Night

When one child awakens, the other children lie in bed silently and wait until you tuck yourself back into bed. Once you put your head on your pillow and find the perfect spot, the next one wakens, and thus continues in age order until you find yourself completely wide awake and totally unable to go back to bed…at 3am.

The Don’t Wake Daddy Rule

Whereby two, three or more individuals crying in the dead of night will not wake Daddy. But the garbage truck coming by in the morning, when he has forgotten to put out the cans…will.

–to be continued.

It’s Holy Week, ladies! I just received the most incredible mediation that my dear friend Maura e-mailed me. It’s about how contemplative motherhood truly is. It was the most uplifting and beautiful piece I have ever read on the vocation of motherhood, and now I wish to share it with all of you! Have a blessed Holy Week and a very Happy Easter!

Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers
of the past half century, lived for more than a dozen
years as a hermit in the Sahara Desert, alone with the
Blessed Sacrament for company, milking a goat for his
food, and translating the Bible into the local Bedouin
language. He prayed for long hours by himself.
Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he
came to a startling realization. His mother, who for
more than 30 years of her life had been so busy
raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private
minute for herself, was more contemplative than he
was.
Carretto though was careful to draw the right lesson
from this. What this taught was not that there was
anything wrong with what he had been doing living as a
hermit. The lesson was rather that there was something
wonderfully right about what his mother was doing all
these years as she lived the interrupted life amid the
noise and incessant demands of small children. He had
been in a monastery, but so had she.
What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a
place set apart for monks and nuns, as it is a place
set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the
value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time
is not ours, but God’s.
Our home and our duties can, just like a monastery,
teach us those things. For example, the mother who
stays home with small children experiences a very real
withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely
monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from
the centers of power and social importance. And she
feels it.
Moreover, the demands of young children also provide
her with what St. Bernard, one of the great architects
of monasticism, called the “monastic bell”. All
monasteries have a bell. Bernard, in writing his rules
for monasticism told his monks that whenever the
monastic bell rang they were to d rop whatever they
were doing, and go immediately to the particular
activity (prayer, meals, work, study, sleep) to which
the bell was summoning them. He was adamant that they
respond immediately, stating that if they were writing
a letter they were to stop in mid-sentence when the
bell rang. The idea in his mind was that when the bell
called, it called you to the next task and you were to
respond immediately, not because you want to, but
because it’s time, it’s God’s time. For him, the
monastic bell was intended as a discipline to stretch
the heart by always taking you beyond your own agenda
to God’s agenda.
Hence, a mother rearing children, perhaps in a more
privileged way even than a professional contemplative
is forced, almost against her will, to constantly
stretch her heart. For years, while rearing children,
her time is never her own, her own needs have to be
kept in second place and every time she turns around a
hand is reaching out and demanding something. She
hears the monastic bell many times during the day and
she has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond,
not because she wants to, but because it’s time for
that activity and time isn’t her time, but God’s time.
The rest of us experience the monastic bell each
morning when our alarm clock rings and we get out of
bed and ready ourselves for the day, not because we
want to, but because it’s time. Response to duty can
be monastic prayer, a needy hand can be a monastic
bell, and working without status and power can
constitute a withdrawal into a monastery where God can
meet us. The domestic can be the monastic.
By Fr. Ron Rolheiser, OMI, Seattle, WA

Ok, since my first college roomie, Ellen, over at the McSisters tagged me in this virtual chain letter…I have decided to participate. Mostly because it’s Ellen. And seriously how can I say no to the first person who lived with me during the most transitional year of my life. She’s kind of got the get out of jail free card for putting up with me for those months.

5 Random facts about A.Thimons…

1. So, Pope John Paul II totally prayed for me. By name. Yep, I have proof. At World Youth Day in Toronto (2002) I traveled with my youth group and I brought with me a cotton American flag in which I wrote down the names of people in our community and people I met on the trip who needed prayers. The biggest name said “Pray for Maria Miglino” who was a woman in our town dying of Ovarian cancer. I used to do her laundry, watch her kids and clean her house. Anyway, JPII had a lunch on Thursday of WYD week, with 14 youth representing 12 different countries. The girl chosen to represent the USA was from our diocese. Robin, was her name. Robin was staying in our hotel (yes, we stayed in a hotel for WYD) and word got out that she was accepting things to bring with her when she met the Pope. So…I got my flag together and I wrapped it up with a handwritten note to my “Dear Papa!” explaining about who I was I who all the names on my flag were. The next morning on the news, there was Robin, and there was my flag! In JPII’s hands holding it up for the cameras! Papers wrote “Robin Cammorata presented the pope with an American flag passed to her from Good Shepherd Parish in Rhinebeck, NY” Once I dig out my photo album that has been buried the in garage from this move, I will post a picture for y’all.

2. Every time I’ve been in labor, I’ve had chinese food. And I save the fortune cookies for their baby books.

3. I onced saved a lady from falling down an escalator about two years ago. Her foot was stuck in the tread on the base of the escalator, and the rest of her was going up, up, up, and she was screaming bloody murder. Tom and my Mom were with me, just standing there in shock. I walked ahead and pressed the “EMERGENCY STOP” button. And she was able to get her foot out. And she didn’t split in half after all. Yep. I don’t know how I saw that button … totally was my guardian angel.

4.When Tom first asked me out, we went sledding at the college we were attending. We brought a can of PAM spray with us and greased up the bottom of the flying saucer sled I had. We kept taking turns seeing who could sled farther, using the PAM top which was bright red, stuck in the snow as a marker. At the end of our “date” Tom stepped on the lid of the PAM, burying it into the snow, down into the ground. He said maybe it would still be there in the springtime, while he would be away in Austria for the semester. Sure enough, one spring morning at Steubie, I went digging around the lawn in front of the JC Williams Center and sure enough I found it! And what a surprise Tom had in Austria when he got it in the mail. Of course, we saved that dear little PAM lid.

5. I won first place in a  CYO talent show for singing “A Boy like That” from West Side Story. I was 17 and sang the part of Anita, the saucy Hispanic sister in law of Maria.

Ok… so now I get to tag 5 people and I choose…… LIZ from over at Quick Eyed Love, SARAH my college travel buddy, DEBBIE my big sister in household, DIANE a kindred spirit I met at Mom’s Night Out, and my hubby TOM (he’s totally not going to participate). Yay, have fun!!

Well, you can congratulate me. I have finally earned my Mommy merit badge. At least, I think I can safely say I’ve officially been inducted into “motherhood” now that all three of my kids have had the stomach flu at once. Which yes, yes, I know is hardly anything compared to some moms I know who’ve dealt with six, nine or ten kids puking at once…but that would be like an Eagle scout badge or something. I just got a badge. Numero uno, but at least I’m not sitting on the sidelines waiting for coach to throw me in the game anymore. I am in.

I really kind of dreaded getting put “in” this game. Always have been avoiding the thought of it, and kind of realllllyy enjoyed my view from the sidelines. But, it happened and now I am sorta glad in a weird way. I guess because the biggest fears you have are of the unknown, and now that we ‘know’ it….it’s not so scary anymore!

But boy. What an induction. Not what I had expected at all. Never did I yearn so earnestly for vinyl furniture in my life. Or for those awesome old school Italian plastic covered couches. Ahhhh what I would give for rubber sheets. Or rubber pants! Also, I never felt so strongly about shaving my daughter’s head.

What began as Princess waking up Sunday morning with a tummy ache and an episode of throwing up ended up turning into a live version of Family Double Dare. Without the slime. Or Marc Summers. Just a lot of bodily fluids. And Daddy.

I was inducted about three hours after Princess first threw up. She was bouncing off the wall, seemingly fine and begging me to take her to church with me. I surmised the dinner last night must not have sat well with her, and since CG had hit mass already, so off we two girls headed. It was the quietest part of mass. I had squashed myself in the only available pew, about 6 rows from the back. Next to a hefty sized lady with an even heftier amount of old perfume on.  Princess was fussing, moving all around, under my legs, under my coat…just fidgeting. And we all knelt down cozy cozy, shoulder to shoulder for the consecration.

That’s when I noticed her face looking…er.. green? I picked her up and as she coughed every siren went off screaming in my brain “run, RUN, RUN FOR IT!” And I pushed her head into my my hair that was draped over my shoulder and bolted so awkwardly obvious to the back of the church where the wonderful, God bless them ushers threw open the vestibule doors. As I came running into the vestibule I heard gurgles and I knew she was going to blow.

‘Is there a bathroom? A bathroom? She’s gonna puke!” I dashed back and forth looking for one

“Down the stairs! Go!” an usher shoved me (in the politest way possible) towards a staircase and I rushed down the stairs when it happened. I felt it explode near my right ear, and felt some slide down my skirt. I knew some of it must have landed over my shoulder onto the extremely unlucky carpeted stairs.

I burst into the bathroom and peeled her off my pea coat, which was glistening with proof that we didn’t make it. Also, her coat was covered and so was my hair. My hair that was just washed, dried and flat ironed with a watermelony Paul Mitchell product only an hour prior. It didn’t smell so watermelony any more.

An unfortunate old lady was still going in the stall next to the sink where I had sat Princess temporarily while I waited for my brain to reboot.

“Uhhh don’t come out here! My daughter just puked and I don’t know how contagious she is!” I warned my unknown victim. But my victim didn’t heed my warning and instead emerged from her protective stall with eyes bulging, mouth gaping going “ohhhh myy”.

Yep. Of all the days to go to church alone.

So that was that. Later in the day, it obviously only got worse, and more frequent. Chubs got it and he too, took the memo and made sure he christened me again. At least we were standing in the kitchen and not in a stuffed church that we don’t even belong to with a bunch of petrified people skeeving us. Guess we won’t be joining that church.

By the middle of the night, CG and I had been up 7 times before I lost count. We didn’t sleep until 4:30am because all three of them were taking turns, and everything was coming out of every which way on each of them. And we bathed them all so much, and had the washer going so often that we ran out of hot water…so that all the dirty dishes were piled on the counter waiting to be washed. And kids were crying for wanting a warm bath and wow. I just thought a funny thought to myself in the midst of all that chaos. How, when I was younger I used to think being a housewife instead of a nun was taking the easy way out. Like, I used to minimize housewifery in comparison to religious life. I thought for sure the quickest and greatest and most perfect way was that of Mother Teresa of Calcutta, of solitude, prayer, and service to others. And now, well, now….now I feel like I didn’t take the easy way at all. I think motherhood is more corporal than spiritual works of mercy, and being a parent is your Calcutta. We don’t need to seek out penance or sacrifice, it is handed to us. It is just a more earth bound way of practicing mercy, because we have to “Do unto the least of them” to our children. In a sense, at least for me, that’s a harder form of detachment! Trying to see Christ in my own kids, instead of the homeless guy in the middle sidewalk asking for change. Trying to keep a smile on my face as I change the sheets on their bed, or not weep when they’ve vomited on my new couch for the umpeenth time because “that you do unto Me”. I am by no means saying religious life is easy or that being a mother is better. But I think my perspective has changed to appreciate parenthood more. Or at least not minimize the vocation of married life as “less sure” of a way to heaven. This whole stomach flu thing did induct me into the trenches of parenthood maybe, but more importantly it opened my eyes to the treasure and greatness of this path we are on.