You Live and You Learn!

I have to say the last couple of weeks I have learned some pretty interesting stuff. I'll start first with the importance of regularly evaluating your insurance policies on your home and your car.
Insurance
Insurance is a interesting beast. I know that we all hate paying for it, because all of us NEVER think that WE are going to have to use it. Jeff and I until recently had taken that attitude that we would have pretty high insurance deductibles, because we were only going to file a claim if there was a catastrophe and we have heard that making claims on your insurance can lead to your insurance rates being raised or your insurance dropped completely. Not only that but high deductibles reduce your rates. As mentioned in my previous post, we recently incurred some exterior damage to our house. The lessons we have learned from this incident so far are:
1) Why have insurance if you are not going to use it? In the end, we decided to file a claim for the damage to our house. As of right now, we have been told by the insurance company that this will not count against us because the damage was caused by a force of nature.
2) Make sure that you don't have too much insurance. Because of the recent events, we decided to re-evaluate our insurance policies and found out that we had insured our house too much...this was due to a miscommunication between me and the insurance. After correcting this problem, not only were we able to reduce our yearly home insurance rates, but we were also able to greatly reduce our deductible. Lesson learned!
3) The insurance business can sometimes be complicated. Does anyone know what recoverable depreciation is? I don't either. There are a bunch of insurance terms that I need to learn.
4) One of the first questions that many repairmen ask when looking at the damage is are you going to file with your insurance? Why should that matter other than they will probably increase their rates if you are?
5) There is still a lot that I need to learn about insurance...but I won't bore you anymore about insurance...however, maybe I have gotten a few of you to think about your own.

Garden Boxes
Last week for one of our Enrichment Activities in Relief Society we made Garden Boxes. We have one sister in our branch that swears by them for having a successful garden. In fact, she no longer gardens at all in the ground and gardens only in her 36 garden boxes. I am pretty excited about this alternative to ground gardening. We created these boxes using a 22 gallon tote, a 18 gallon tote, some garden netting, and a 2.5 foot piece of PVC pipe. The interesting part of the evening was that we had to use a jigsaw to make some cuts in the totes....many of the women, including myself, have never used one of these tools (there were some scary moments, but everyone left with all of their fingers). Now the tough part comes in trying to figure out what to plant. I think we will start with a couple of tomato plants and see how it goes. I'll post a picture soon.

Swimming
Bayley was asked to move up to the "Big" swim team this last week. She was swimming circles around the new group of Mini-TigerSharks, so her coach said that she probably needed to move up. Jeff and I have been reluctant to let her move up. The main reason being that the "Big" team is full a serious swimmers. Which is great if you are 12 and ready to commit to a sport where they want you to practice at least 5 days a week. Bayley is 6 and we refuse to let her burn out on swimming. We want her to continue to enjoy swimming and not take it too seriously, yet. So after some discussion with her coach, we agreed to have her move up but Bayley will continue to only practice 2 days a week. Her coach was very understanding and actually said she wished more parents had the same attitude.

Life
Everyday I am reminded how much I have to learn. My kids continually teach me...Bayley loves to know that I learn from her. In one of her recent prayers she lovingly told Heavenly Father that her parents needed to stick around because they still had much to learn from her and her brother and sister. Isn't that the truth?

I will post pictures later this week...I have tried 3 times and it continues to have a server error! Oh well!