Spending Freeze Adventure: Frugal Fun

Just because we aren't spending any money doesn't mean we can't have any fun...

Today my husband took a much deserved day off.  He was sweet enough to watch Liam while I got my haircut (don't worry, I had saved up for this before the spending freeze).  Then when I got home we headed out to ArtPrize.  If you're not from the area or familiar with ArtPrize it's the world's largest art competition and gives the world's largest prize for contemporary art.  You can check it out here!   They give out prizes based on public voting and as well as juried prizes.

This is a great opportunity to have a frugal, fun day with your family, but it also works well as a field trip if you live in the area and homeschool your children.  There are so many great opportunities for art discussion because the variety is extensive!  It would be fairly easy to spend a bunch of money at some of the food vendors, but all you really need is some spare change for a parking meter, the rest is free!

So we headed out and used all the spare change in our car to park for a few hours at a meter downtown.  We spent some time looking at exhibits around the riverfront area.  Here were a couple of our favorites!
 

This guy would stand absolutely still for the longest time and then would "come to life" and put on a show.

We loved this piece!

This one was unique and we liked the 3D aspect of it.

This one was gorgeous!

This one was a lot of fun!

I thought this dress made out of measuring tape was intriguing!

So many ties!  Looks like part of Will's closet...

This one cracked us up.  However we were a little disappointed to find out that he had created/painted all the license plates and signs; they weren't real.

As we meandered our way along the river we stopped in a nice shady place to eat the lunch we packed.  It was a beautiful (though warm) day and we enjoyed the rest and shade!  And Liam enjoyed some time out of the stroller and a yummy honey crisp apple (courtesy of Will's nice boss who has his own honey crisp orchard)!  Our total out of pocket cost for this day of fun was $1.85 that we paid for our parking meter.

Always stealing someone's shades, but never willing to wear his own...

Be still, my beating heart!

"App-poe peeeeee!"

I have so much more that I want to share about the tiny million ways God has shown His love to us since we started this adventure but I don't want to overwhelm you guys!  I'll share one quick little example: Today we were able to find a great parking spot at a parking meter that still had a considerable amount of time left on it!  It may seem small, but it was still an encouragement to us and stretched our $1.85 even further!

Hopefully I'll have a post up tomorrow about our first official grocery shopping trip of this spending freeze and whether or not I was able to stick to my $10/budget...