Weekly Round-Up: Springing and Sprunging

Spring is here- it’s official! The bulbs are budding, birds are building their nests and it’s (barely) warm enough to go outside with Crocs on.

We’ve been taking advantage of the sunny weather to teach our boys how to ride their bikes without training wheels- good times! (As an aside: when our boys first got their bikes, they had training wheels on them, so not only did they have to first learn how to ride with training wheels on, they are also going to have to learn with the training wheels off. But our neighbor, father to six, gave us a great tip: take the pedals off the bike at first, like those fancy push bikes you sometimes see. This lets the kid learn balance and stopping skills first, and then peddling skills after- all on a regular bike. We’re going to try this with my daughter in a year or two.)

Meanwhile, here are some of my favorite reads for the week:

• FreeRice: For each answer you get right, we donate 10 grains of rice through the World Food Programme to help end hunger.
• 7 Reasons We Love a Simple Home | Making This Home
• A Little Common Sense on a Billboard – DivineCaroline
• 42 Money Lessons from 19 Very Frugal Bloggers!
• Meet the radical homemaker: Goodbye rat race, hello vegetable garden – The Globe and Mail
• For Consumers, Some Clarity on Health Care Changes – NYTimes.com
• Good Ol’ Homemade Brownies – Buns In My Oven
• Index Credit Cards: The MOST Credit Card Offers online! 1,200+Cards
• Join a babysitting co-op or start your own: get free child care and make new friends
• Shortcuts – When a Cap Full of Soap Is Not a Good Thing – NYTimes.com

As always, you can check out the Good Reads page or my Tumblr site Almost Frugal Finds for all my links, as well as following me on Twitter for the Frugal Tips of the Day.

Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

Kelly Rigotti started Almost Frugal as a thirty-something American trying to dig her way out from under a mountain of debt (~€60,000). She's almost frugal and would like to be more so, but shops at Ikea too often for her own good.

Kelly has blogged 584 posts here.