New Year Archives — Thrifty Mommas Tips

Best London Christmas Lights to See Now (Have a Drive Through, Socially Distant New Year!)

Paula — Thu, 31 Dec 2020 14:59:29 +0000

So where are the best London Christmas lights that are safe to see from the car? Are they still open? Can you make that part of your New Year’s Eve tonight? Read the information below to find out. Obviously parades and the holiday season went virtual this year around Ontario and in many places throughout Canada. But, what about New Year’s Eve? And what about social distancing? Good news. There are still a few London Christmas lights and homes to drive by and enjoy. Check out some of the Best Drive Through London Christmas lights and holiday light displays before they end! Drive Through London Christmas Lights (And Surrounding Area) While we still can’t do much in person, we can get out for walks and the occasional drive. There are a couple of local areas where you can visit Christmas lights and enjoy them safely with your family from the car. Drive by, or drive through lighting displays, help cheer everyone up. Making Spirits Bright When social distancing and lockdown is the name of the game, you can actually still safely do a few things to keep spirits bright. Believe me, that’s what we have been working on, because this round of lockdown is pretty crappy, especially since we have been following the rules and being extremely cautious in my home since March. (Even though many others have not extended the same courtesy and exercised responsibility.) Lockdown 2.0 in Ontario It has been extremely hard to watch as others don’t provide the community with the same consideration as anti-maskers decide their freedom is somehow negatively impacted by wearing a small piece of cloth that protects people from germs. Our Routine During the first round of lockdown, some days my greatest goal was actually just making sure my teenagers got out of bed and moved. In my house, we manage mental health with medicine (and doctors), plus a routine of water, diet, sleep and exercise. These are the things that I tell my kids are not negotiable. I am a broken record that way. Most days, I was reasonably sure at least 2-3 of us in this house were actually dressed. Other days, I said the heck with it and told my teens throw on a jacket and walk in your pyjamas with me. Nobody else will know or care. Winter Lockdown Over the last year, I have rallied the troops and plugged in all the virtual support possible. Yet, here we are again, in the middle of winter, with ski season postponed indefinitely. Don’t even get me started on that. Ski hills have been working for months on how to social distance and be safe and still offer people the chance to stay fit mentally and physically on ski hills. And no other province in Canada has blocked ski hills from opening because they have all implemented strict ski with your family and leave protocols. So, with little to do but sit tight again and get mad occasionally because others aren’t following rules and politicians are also not following their own rules, we have found the occasional local drive through London Christmas lights (and surrounding area) a small respite from the repetition. Lighting of the Lights Everyone in London knows that there’s typically a unique tree lighting ceremony in Victoria Park called Lighting of the Lights. This year, that display on Clarence Street in downtown London is up and ready to view from your car or from a social distance with masks on only. Typically in years gone by we have also gathered to skate and watch the fireworks at 9 pm, a kid’s display that we loved when the kids were younger. Maybe another year that will happen again. I always loved skating in Victoria Park. Downtown London Although the official ceremony of Lighting of the Lights will not be held this year, crews are still working to install over 75,000 lights in the park. Residents can still visit on their own time and enjoy the beauty of nature and the lights! Lights on Stratford A stunning display throughout Stratford. The City of Stratford has released new details on the upcoming Lights On Stratford festival, which will run from Nov. 19 to Feb. 14, 2021, in several locations throughout the city. That makes this a MUST DO open through part of February! From north London this is a quick 45 minute drive. We are planning to see it this week. Every single report that I have seen from friends indicates this is stunning and super spread out throughout Stratford. So, hurray and that makes it even more socially distant!! Ilderton Listen, there’s a home there in Ilderton that goes nuts on Songbird Lane. Wear your mask and get out for a quick photo if it is safe. This is a pandemic. Please be safe. We took photos in Ilderton on Christmas Eve after we did Zoom calls and FaceTime calls here with all of our relatives. We didn’t SEE anyone in person all Christmas and I am desperately trying to keep teens with mental illness alive in my home during a pandemic. So, I need all of the small boosts possible, whether that is a drive by light display or making hot chocolate bombs or doing a silly TikTok. I am attempting to boost the mental health of people here in my home, so we drove by the display and we paused to take photos with our masks on and we loved it. While this is outside London, it qualifies for me as one of the best local London light displays. St. Marys Winter Lights-St. Marys.. on until January 3, 2021 – enjoy their lights throughout the holiday season! Take a short drive to St Marys to see their winter light show from your vehicle. City of Woodstock Virtual Tour of Lights. While this is a bit further away than the rest of these London Christmas lights, it is also available virtually. Check it out here – > City of Woodstock Virtual Tour of Lights. I love that this one is available on Youtube. So check it out from home, no matter where you are! Happy New Year and Happy 2021! Wishing you a brilliant new year ahead!

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New Years Resolutions Goal Setting +Printable

Paula — Tue, 29 Dec 2020 14:57:00 +0000

So, after the year we just had, is it even possible to have New Years Resolutions? Is it advisable? It is worrisome? Well, maybe just a bit. But I am tentatively creating some anyways and holding a few close to the chest. Didn’t we all have all of the intentions and resolutions last year at the start of 2020 before the world went topsy turvey and the pandemic was declared? SMART Goals I can’t even imagine a year now where my resolutions are not SMART goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. BIGGEST emphasis on REALISTIC. So, What are My New Years Resolutions? What are my New Years Resolutions? Well, this year I am saving at least one of those just for me. But, I am planning to continue to diversify. I have grown my name brand and my writing by publishing numerous pieces in magazines and I have a regular gig over at CBC Parents. Plus, I still do all of the content for two neighbourhood magazines, so that is a consistent editing and writing job. And, there have been some other bylines this year. I’ve also done some ghost writing and more. There’s more on the way obviously and that is something I will continue. But what else is there? Well, I just started TikTok and it’s fun and amusing during lockdown, so I plan to grow that and just have fun with it. Of course, I hope to return to travel SOON. But bring that vaccine first, please. Maybe, just maybe there’s something new on the horizon for me too. In the meantime print this out and have fun with it, but also don’t feel that you need to take it too literally. Keep the goals and resolutions flexible or general if you need to. Check out this CBC Parents Crafts Post right now on Goal Jars if you want a cute kid’s New Years Resolutions activity. How to Print This New Years Resolutions Printable Out! Click on the link below and print it. Simple as that. If Getting Fit is in Your Plans Don’t miss this deal on Under Armour Canada Extra 40% Off ALL Outlet & Select Full Price Styles with Code OCT40 + Get an Extra 10% Off AND Free Shipping with Code: EXTRA10 at Checkout!

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Happy New Year Scavenger Hunt

Paula — Thu, 24 Dec 2020 14:47:00 +0000

Happy soon-to-be New Year 2021 to all of you! Today, I am sharing a Happy New Year Scavenger Hunt with all of you knowing you can use the easy and fun family activities for your end of year celebrations this season. Good Bye 2020 Let’s be honest here. Has there ever been a year that you were more anxious to see end? I mean, I have had a few challenging years. Like the year my Mom passed away. But I am more than ready to say good bye to 2020. Looking forward to a year of vaccines and a potential return to travel. Wishful thinking, perhaps, but I have to think like that too. Easy, Fun and Free Family New Year’s Ideas This year, like everything for the past eight or nine months, I am sure we will all be hunting for clever ideas to help celebrate the launch of a new year with social distancing in mind. Everything has been challenging this year. Not going to lie. Every. Last. Thing. has been anxiety provoking and worrisome. At times, many of us have wondered if life will ever return to any semblance of normalcy. Happy New Year Scavenger Hunt But, to that end, I have been providing some free fun resources and activities here. We can use all of the easy ideas to have fun close to home right now. Print this out for your kids via the link below and do it together, especially if you have a family New Year’s Eve. Here’s a Happy New Year Scavenger Hunt you can share with your family this year. I wish you all the best this year. Good health and happiness and prosperity too. Don’t Miss My Pinterest Printables Here’s to a Happy 2021! If nothing else, I know that this past year has served to show us how strong we are and how adaptable. I wish that we could all move forward with that knowledge and build a brilliant and happy year ahead.

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31 Days of Positive Messages Inspirational Calendar

Paula — Fri, 01 Jan 2016 04:00:56 +0000

Happy New Year to each and every one of you! Where do you find your inspiration? Is inspiration important to you? In the spirit of the new year, I am sharing an inspirational calendar for the month of January. Use this inspirational calendar to help you stay positive this January regardless of the weather, the bills, the challenges that come your way. Here’s to you and a glorious happy healthy brilliant year full of opportunity and moments to remember. Find your inspiration every day this month with this inspirational calendar. Sometimes all it takes is a visual quote to help give you focus or strength, even to remind you of what you already have. To download click below here on the highlighted link and save it then print the calendar out for your own reference. Inspirational Calendar for January. daysofinspiration What is your favourite quote?

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2015 Fitness Goals Printable

Paula — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 03:26:37 +0000

Happy New Year! When the clock strikes 12:01 on January 1st you inevitably hear all the great promises to lose weight and get fit. It’s pretty much the standard New Year’s resolution. Get fit, and lose weight. But sometimes it’s not sustainable. Sometimes despite the best intentions life happens and fitness falls by the wayside. I know this to be true. My own fitness goals were great in 2014 but then September hit and they unravelled entirely. I am hopeful this year will be better for me that way. I have a few tools keeping me on track. The tools that keep me accountable are worth their weight in gold. I have been clear recently about my own fitness goals for the coming year. I started reviewing my fitness plan and my eating habits back here in December after our family doctor advised me I have high blood pressure. That was the start of me recommitting to fitness routines, and banishing some bad habits. I am extremely happy to report that I am still on track with the low sodium diet and the caffeine reduction. Caffeine is not good for blood pressure. I recently wrote a post about how I was doing on this mission to banish high blood pressure. I am committed to maintaining this goal through the entire year because blood pressure is not something to mess with at all. In the interest of helping all my readers maintain and active lifestyle and a healthy outlook this coming year I am sharing some fitness goals free printables. Look for more related to fitness and diet in the coming weeks. How about you? Do you have any significant fitness goals this year? Are they new goals? Are they health related? If you want to right click on the image above and save it to your computer you are welcome to print it out that way. Or you can click through to the PDF version in the link below. I prefer that link because the image is typically better and easier to download. Anyways Happy New Year and I hope you will do your best to make it a healthy one too. Fitness_Goals_PS

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How to Set a Budget For The New Year

Paula — Sat, 03 Jan 2015 03:15:01 +0000

Budget for the New Year The New Year is coming up quickly and you might be wanting to start a budget as your New Year’s resolution! There are many others, like you, who want to set a budget for the New Year but don’t know where to get started. If you’re struggling to start your budget and you need some tips to help you get it started, look no further! These tips are sure to help you set a successful budget for the New Year – a budget you can stick to. Look back at how much you made last year. It’s important to look back and see how much you were and currently are making. This will help you set your budget for the New Year. If you’ve recently got a raise, take note of that when you’re making your budget to allow for differences in income. Decide if you want part of your income to go to savings. If you’re not quite ready to start putting money in savings because of your financial situation, that’s totally okay. If you are starting a savings or adding to your savings is a really important component to setting your budget for the New Year. Do you have any financial goals in mind? Maybe you want to take a cruise in the next three years! If so, decide how much you’ll need to get to that goal (example: $3000) and put away enough each month to reach that goal by the allotted time you gave yourself. Writing this all down is very helpful! Print out a budget template. There are tons of templates on Pinterest and Google that you can print out for your budget for the New Year. Printing these templates out might make you see a cost you missed. They could also be very helpful in keeping you organized, and if you’re a visual person, this is a great way to see your budget and really understand how it’s all being broken down! Make yourself a promise OR enact a reward system. Budgets can be extremely difficult to stick to, especially if you’ve never had one before. Make yourself an extremely serious promise about sticking to it! You could even set up a reward system so if you don’t go over your budget for 6 months, you get to pick out something special for yourself! This is a great incentive to keep your budget for the New Year intact. Is setting a budget for the New Year your New Year’s resolution? What made you want to start a budget?

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These are My Weapons Against Child Poverty #WorldVisionGifts #TMMWVC

Paula — Wed, 24 Dec 2014 01:51:41 +0000

There is a saying in martial arts that my kids repeat over and over each time they grade. My husband knows it too. I am paraphrasing a bit but it’s a little like this – I come to you with empty hands. If I should be forced to use them. These are my weapons: my empty hands. It’s the end of 2014 and so everyone is wrapping up their year with little red bows and packaging it away to start fresh on January 1st. There is beauty and peace in that. We are building our resolutions, hopes and plans. We are collectively hopeful on January 1st each year and it is a beautiful thing. I will be away with my family resting and welcoming the new year in from somewhere new. I will be out exploring more of the world because it is vast and magnificent, even in the context of all that still demands repair, even in the context of child poverty. I will disconnect from my social channels for a week and leave business in the hands of my helpers while I choose to hug my family, read some books I long to finish and capture some shots of stingrays. I plan to smile a lot, clear my head and breathe. But I choose not to forget 2014, because it was epic. There are so many things to do as we wrap up a year, celebrate Christmas, and start a vacation. This morning I was eating breakfast thinking through my To Do list with my daughter when a Magisto video popped up reminding me I had made a video of my experience in Bucaramanga, Colombia and I had forgotten all about it. So we watched it together. I took some time to explain each one of these beautiful people I met in this remarkable city. I told her of Jhon Vera and the place he was born. I grappled with images and words of things she has never seen. I see vultures, garbage strewn throughout the mountainside, smoke from the area high up the mountainside where even the longtime residents of slums know never to go. I also see Jhon passing out one day near the end of our visit because he is a kid working so hard with the weight of a country’s children on his shoulders. He is very simply exhausted and too young to know to pace himself. I don’t know what my daughter hears when I tell her all of this. I know she is listening though and some days that is the sweet spot where something resonates and sinks in. She is fortunate, like a lot of Canadian kids she has everything she could ever want or need. I try to paint a picture and my eyes tear up because this kitchen is bigger than many of the homes I saw where these children grew up. And my heart jumps right up into my throat making the tears spill out wondering where is Johan and Jhon and Yenni, Wilson, Maria and Carol? How are the people I met in Asomiflor? What does their Christmas and New Year look like? Trees and presents and things. None of that is really important in the bigger scheme of the world, in the context of child poverty and violence and human trafficking, child labour, clean water, natural disasters. Of all the things I reflect on in this past year, this is the thing, the experience, that captured and stole my heart. In September I travelled with World Vision Canada to see their work in the field. We visited some extremely impoverished and vulnerable areas of Colombia. I spent close to a week there and I found this group in Bucaramanga on the third or fourth day we were there and they captured my heart as they told me their stories. I still struggle to find the words to describe why this was so impactful. This group of young people were all former sponsored children. You can see in the video here the pictures that were shared when they first came to be sponsored children as part of the World Vision Canada program. Now these youth all work inside World Vision Colombia building community and life and hope and dignity for all the children in Colombia. That is what hope and dignity looks like. So what does any of that have to do with martial arts or weapons? I am thinking of my year end wrap up. We sponsor a child now. We gave many people gifts from the World Vision Canada gift catalogue this year and I continue to share my stories from this experience in Colombia. We have made some choices and changes as a family so that we are giving back more this year. But weapons? What weapons do we have as Canadians? I have weapons more powerful than guns and violence and drugs. These are my weapons – my hands, my heart, my pen, my voice, my computer. The World Vision Gift Catalogue remains a gifting option all year. Child sponsorship is impactful all year round too. https://www.thriftymommastips.com/world-vision-gift-catalogue-2014/ I believe we can change the world together. You can read more about my travels in Colombia with World Vision Canada Part 1: The Briefing Part 2: Where Hope Lives Part 3: What a Soccer Ball Looks Like Part 4: When I Sponsor a Child with World Vision Canada Part 5: Two Hands Are Enough Part 6: The Strength of Women in Morales Duque. Part 7: The Importance of Uniforms in Sports Part 8: Johan’s Story. For more information visit the main World Vision site. You can also follow World Vision on twitter at http://www.twitter.com/worldvisioncan/ and on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/WorldVisionCan Happy New Year! What are your weapons this year?

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One Word New Year’s

Paula — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 02:19:00 +0000

Productivity is a goal here every day. Writing can be a solitary activity. It is indeed a craft and vocation that only works if you are super self disciplined. I am actually mostly that person. I can focus hard when necessary and get jobs done. But, it is with renewed intent that I am choosing this as a word to guide the next year. Productivity. Here’s why. People have been asking me repeatedly this week about New Year’s resolutions and really, they aren’t a thing I do. Instead, I choose goals and try to meet them and strive to improve throughout the year. But resolutions, at least to me, are all about masochism and I respect myself too much to beat myself up all year over something I couldn’t finish. Goals are more manageable somehow. And I am accountable to myself mostly, for meeting those goals. A few years ago I set myself a professional goal of being published in The Globe and Mail and Today’s Parent, because I had yet to be published there. By September of that year I had done what I set out to do. In fact, I was proud. Never once had I articulated that as a goal or resolution to anyone besides myself. My goals are my own and when I meet them, it is golden. On New Year’s Day, my smart oldest daughter, who reads like I did at her age, and consumes a lot of media, as do most children in North America, woke up and told me two things. “The World is Going to End.” Oh, and she said: “I have 40 resolutions.” (I resisted the smart alecky: “Um if the world is going to end anyways, then why do you need resolutions?”) And I chose instead to reframe. Humm. She rhymed off a few (most of which centred on weight loss – because there are entire industries devoted to self flagellation at this time of year and she hears it everywhere right now. Let’s all get skinny, have surgery and eat pills to lose weight. Even my seven-year-old looked at me today, holding her calf muscle in her hand asking: (Is this fat? Um no it’s called muscle and you are a 43 pound seven year old athlete.) There was a bit of adolescent girl stuff tossed in amongst the tween resolutions – “I will be the most popular girl in my class” – but together we whittled them down to a couple of smaller more realistic goals. We ended up with we will all try to eat healthier and exercise as much as we are able to stay fit and healthy. These are goals I am happy with every year. Some of my goals are personal and some professional. More than likely to share the personal with you because this is a blog and blogs by nature are personal. Anyways this year I have been thinking a lot about productivity and so today when I came across my friend Tara’s blog linky, it prompted a post. New Years in One Word. This year will be productive. For me, that means, cutting back on what I give away – my time and skills. Because often people think that writers work for free. And writers who advocate also in their spare time, well no end of causes for you…There are still a few causes I will never abandon. Oh, I like a good fight after all. I will still be on the PTA at the kids’ school and I will still help run our non profit The Canadian Coalition of Adoptive Families, but I don’t work for free and I can’t commit to every committee out there. Productivity. Today that meant, while home with laryngitis, I hopped into a twitter chat at Mom Central and connected with some friends while forging a few new ones and coloured my hair (see picture above) because that was a commitment to myself – covering up the greys – and back over to the chat. Because 10 minute hair colour from Garnier Nutrisse is a miracle. After that it was on to lunch, some cleaning and another twitter chat with the great Microsoft Windows techie people on #win7chat. Picked up some techie productivity tips and a prize while making a cheescake with my daughter. Eventually, I threw a quiche in the oven, got a salad ready and ate dinner with my kids before dressing them for martial arts. With a hint of quiet in the house I popped by Tara’s blog and was inspired to post this… So, here’s to productivity. It’s going to be a great year. Unless, of course, the world ends 🙂

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