House Inspection and Pictures

Well our house inspection went great. The inspector found a few minor issues but nothing serious. One funny thing he found was that our dishwasher works great but it won't open! I guess the latch is broken, so we may just have to get a new dishwasher. I am glad there were no major issues though. I took a lot of pictures that day, and took measurements of everything, the inspector probably thought I was crazy because of how many pictures I took!

So there are a few changes we are going to make, such as scrape the ceilings, paint, new carpet in the two guest bedrooms, get rid of the above ground pool, new counters (eventually) and CLEAN, CLEAN, CLEAN!!! We will probably have a cleaning party, so anyone is welcome :)




This is our master bedroom, on the other side of the room we have a bay window which is really pretty!

This is the front of the house, I didn't realize until I got home it is the only one I got-but you can see the people before us did a nice job with the yard.

My favorite room of the house! It is the 2nd living and eat in kitchen area, I love the windows in this room!!

View from the kitchen to the living, as you can see there are the green counter tops and dishwasher that does not open :)

This is the formal dining and living area, it is the first room when you walk in the front door-there is another large indow on the wall next to the front door also.

A few engagement pictures for you to see...

A few of my favorite engagement pictures...


Before I forget, our engagement announcement will be in the Fort Worth Star Telegram on Sunday May 24th. (I will make note of the specific picture being included)

The picture above is at the table where Nate proposed!

This is the picture that will be in our engagement announcement.

I will update on the house after the inspection tomorrow~

We got a house!

Finally! Our offer was accepted on a house, some of you may know we were having a difficult time finding a house because so many others are looking at houses right now. I mentioned this in another post, but there were so many offers on all of the houses we liked. On Thursday our offer was accepted on a house in Keller and I am so excited! This Thursday we are getting the house inspected and if that goes smoothly (if there are no huge problems, and the house is not going to fall down) then it is ours! :)

Until next time!

Shelby

BeCentsable.net

This morning while I was getting ready for class I was watching the CBS early morning show and they had these two ladies on the show who created this website. They basically said they were tired of paying so much for groceries and decided to change the way they were grocery shopping. After they researched and became expert grocery shoppers basically they created this website that completely focuses on coupons and saving money! They went to a few different stores and at one store the total was about $79 and after all of their coupons the paid $29!! It was so neat because they researched everything you could possibly research about saving money, what coupons stores will take and which products you can use multiple coupons on and possibly get for free because of your combination of coupons.

I found out that when you have a coupon from the newspaper, for example $1 off of Colgate products, and a grocery store is having a sale on Colgate products you can combine the coupons! The only time you can't combine would be like taking two of your Kroger or tom thumb specific coupons and doubling up. I was pretty excited about this website, so I encourage all of you to check out this website, and also coupons.com updates their list of coupons every single day!

http://www.becentsable.net/
http://www.coupons.com/

Here is the video from the CBS Early Morning Show
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2009/04/28/earlyshow/main4974159.shtml

Until Next Time!

Honeymoon Booked!

I know, I posted twice tonight but I have been meaning to put this up for a few weeks. I have just been so busy with school, my past 3 weeks or so have been jam packed with school, projects (big projects... 26 page paper, 12 pages, and a biology research paper that is very time consuming, and of course finals are about to be here) In addition to school Nate and I have been looking more for houses... no luck though :( In case some of you don't know, we have put an offer on about 4 houses and almost on 3 more but they sold before we got a chance. I will not get discouraged though, it just means there is a specific AND wonderful house that is supposed to be ours!!!

Anyways, as some of you know because of the timing of the wedding, we are not able to go on the honeymoon we had planned on. Carroll's football stuff moved up to the week after our wedding and so we have to make it a 3 day weekend instead of going to Eldorado Royale in Mexico. But it is ok because we are going to have a blast anyways and we will get to go on a trip 6 month or a year down the road.

We are going to stay in Dallas at the W-Victory Hotel http://www.starwoodhotels.com/whotels/property/overview/index.html?propertyID=1521

We are staying in The "Cool Corner Room" -weird names for all the rooms. But it is windows from floor to ceiling and we are on a corner, hence the name. Our view will be downtown Dallas!
I am excited, it is a neat hotel and we plan on laying out at their pool (on the 16th floor!) and relaxing for a few days.

Take a look at the pictures on the website, it is a really nice hotel!

Advertising to Children

I recently had to write a paper for my media law and ethics class. We had to choose a topic that in our opinion was an ethical issue in the media. I chose advertising and targeting children in the media. I am posting this because the information I found was astounding and although I know the media affects children, I never realized that there are specific companies targeting children because they know how vulnerable they are. I initially chose the topic because I had heard about Mattel creating a Shopping Barbie. This particular barbie came with a register and a MasterCard to swipe all her purchases, I think this is horrible because it teaches children while they are developing their perception and opinions of the world that it is right to take your MasterCard (the specific brand and logo on the card) to spend money. They associate barbie, a toy that they love with MasterCard. It is very clever of MasterCard...

I know everyone would agree that media and advertising in some ways influences us as adults, I mean I would be lying if I said that seeing a beautiful woman who is thin on TV does not make me a little jealous, or make me a little more critical on my own body and appearance. This is not the only area that the media and advertisers are targeting children now, they have developed advertising plans completely targeting children from 2 years old to middle school age. Advertisers target children indirectly with food advertisements, soda ads, movie ads and even cigarette ads which really shocked me. In my research I found that cigarette advertisers place ads in magazines where they know children and teens will see even though the actual magazine is not intended for children and teens. The advertisers are very intelligent, they have methods of tracking circulation and readership so they are able to identify their audiences and age groups, interests ect, by doing this they can find out how many children read a specific magazine that is intended for their older siblings (for example) and place cigarette ads in them.. Another shocking piece of information I found was that advertisers are teaming up with child psychologists now to find out what areas children are the most vulnerable in, what they are interested in and what celebrities they are the most interested in so that they can use those celebrities to promote certain products that children will be drawn to even though they are not old enough for the product or won't be able to purchase the product until they are older. The goal is to draw them in while they are young and make a product appealing so that when the child is older, they will immediately be drawn to the initial brand they were introduced to, this is called brand loyalty. Marketers trying to create brand loyalty is all over the place, I could go on and on about this but I am going to leave you with a few things I found and you can decide for yourself how you feel.

-James McNEal, Author of a book on Marketing to Kids said “Brand Marketing must begin with children. Even if a child does not buy the product and will not for many years…the marketing must begin in childhood.”

-USA Today printed this article, a "how to"-6 marketing strategies for marketing to children
http://www.usatoday.com/money/advertising/2006-11-21-toy-strategies-usat_x.htm

-According to the American Psychological Association, children lack the cognitive skills and abilities of adults and do not critically comprehend advertisements the same way adults do, children tend to believe advertisements are truthful and accurate.

-In 2007, according to the APA $2 billion was spent on advertising to children

There was so much more info, so I suggest looking into it more- and being careful what kids around you are exposed to, I didn't even touch on the studys focusing on the results of the media on children!

Kids say the funniest things!

I have to tell you all about the girls I kind of nanny/help tutor them ( they call me their nanny which is funny because I used to have a lady I called nanny and she was a mom who made quilts, baked, decorated wedding cakes and throws cookie decorating parties. She is a much better nanny than I am!) But anyways, there are four girls, Rivers the youngest, then Mandy, Ryleigh and Shalah. They are such a joy to be around, not just the girls but also their wonderful mom Jenny. I could go on and on about them and what a wonderful family they are and how much I love them so I have to just get to the point! The two youngest girls amaze me with the imagination they have, but especially Rivers the youngest. Rivers ( 6 yrs old) has a huge imagination and sometimes will tell me things that are so off the wall, and she is so serious! I love it! One day she asked why I was not getting a house with a pool, because she said they are very cheap and if the house does not already have one, you just need a couple shovels...she offered to help dig the pool! :)

Anyways, the most current story I have was when I was in the kitchen with her. She began by telling me it makes her sad that she can't read the big books and she only gets to read the short ones..so I told her that that's why we read the short ones and after practicing those enough you get to move up to the longer books. Apparently I was not understanding so she continued to say I want to read the big books, with the big words. She said, " I just really wish I could read the curse words like adults can." You can imagine my shock! So I ask her twice about it, then I told her I did not like that she wanted to read curse words (by this time Jenny was in there just as confused as I was). Next she tells us that she will show us the only curse word she knows and I am still just so shocked that she even knows how to spell them! Finally she walks in, and writes an A for us... after a few moments Jenny said, "Rivers do you mean CURSIVE?! " And of course that's what she wanted to read!

That was a pretty long story, I could make a whole blog about these girls and the fun times I have with them! I will post about the other girls also it would be way too long of a post to write about all four, there is so much to say about them!

Here is a picture of Rivers that definitly fits her personality!