Monday Q&A | Swagbucks, Printable Recipes, and Thanksgiving

Every Monday, I answer a few of the questions that my readers send me. If you have a question you’d like me to answer in a future Q&A post, just leave me a comment here or email me (thefrugalgirl [at] gmail [dot] com) and put Q&A in the subject line. I look forward to hearing from you!

I just registered for Swagbucks. I know that you’ve talked about this a little on your blog. Could you revisit that in a Q&A post? I have a rudimentary understanding of how the whole thing works, very rudimentary, and I don’t want to ask you to spend the time writing back to just me to explain it.

-Molly C.

I wrote a post about Swagbucks a while back, so that might be helpful to you. In a nutshell, the Swagbucks site is a search engine that rewards you with Swagbucks. Swagbucks are redeemable for a number of prizes, but the most useful (in my opinion!) is the Amazon gift card option. You can get $5, $25, and $50 gift cards with your Swagbucks, which totally rocks.

Using the Swagbucks site instead of Google is an obvious way to earn Swagbucks, but I use the Swagbucks site mostly when I’m reading blogs…I just type the name of the blog into the search bar, and I’m often rewarded with Swagbucks. For some reason, I almost always seem to get Swagbucks when I search for Enjoying the Small Things, one of my favorite blogs.

Just recently Swagbucks added a feature that rewards you for printing out and using coupons. I haven’t tried it out myself, but I’m going to.

Oh, and Swagbucks also offers a pretty sweet referral plan. When a person signs up using your referral link, you win Swagbucks every time your referral does, up to the first 1000 Swagbucks. A number of you signed up under me when I posted about this, so I can testify to the fact that having referrals is a lovely thing (you guys rock! Mwah!).

I have now typed the word “swagbucks” so many times, it no longer even looks like a word to me. I’ll take that as a sign that I’ve said enough on the topic!

I love your printable version of your recipes. Can you tell us bloggers how you are setting this up with your blog?

-Jackie

Sure! I’m positive there’s a more fabulous method than mine, but my method does have the free thing going for it.

To make my recipes printable, I copy and paste the recipe into a Word document. I make text and font adjustments as necessary, add a photo, and then print the recipe to the CutePDF writer. This is a free piece of software that turns my documents into PDF files.

To use it after it’s installed, just click “print” and in the drop-down printer menu (where you choose the printer you want to use), CutePDF printer should be an option. Select that, hit “print”, and the CutePDF software will turn your document into a PDF and ask you where you’d like to save it.

After I’ve saved the PDF files to my computer, I upload them to my blog using the same process I use to upload photos.

I think there’s a plugin you can use in WordPress to turn whole posts into printable versions, but that’s not a good option for me. The whole reason I want to offer a printable recipe is to allow my readers to avoid printing the entire post!

I am compiling a binder for each holiday and I was wondering what else you do for Thanksgiving since you have children. Do you read particular stories, say certain prayers, etc.? I try to remember my childhood Thanksgiving, but all I remember is the food and decorations!

-Kristy

Well, since Mr. FG’s parents and my parents both live near us, we usually spend Thanksgiving day with family. We alternate between my family and Mr. FG’s family each year since it’s too hectic to try to get around to both families on one day.

I usually try to read something to my kids about the origins of Thanksgiving, either from our history books or from a library book. I don’t have any great specific recommendations, though. (ohhh, readers……..)

We don’t have particular prayers that we pray on Thanksgiving either, though we definitely encourage grateful prayers each day. At night when we do family worship, we always include prayers of thanksgiving along with our other types of prayers (we thank God for fun events of the day, answered prayers, physical and material blessings, and most of all for sending His son to save us.).

When I was a kid, my family used to go around the table and let each person share things they were grateful for, and we usually still do that when we get together. I think that my parents encouraged us kids to make gratefulness lists some years too….I have some vague memories of that.

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve made a tradition of posting a thankful list on Thanksgiving Day (with 50 things on it), and I intend to do that again this year too. I highly recommend the practice even if you don’t blog, as listing 50 things makes you think a little past the usual family, friends, job, home kind of stuff we tend to put on our lists.

(If you’re interested, here’s my 2008 thankful list and my 2009 thankful list)

On Thanksgiving, we encourage our children to think of things for which to be thankful, but more importantly, we try to encourage thankfulness (and model it!) every other day of the year as well. A consistent, year-round attitude of gratefulness is such an important component of contentedness, and I hope and pray that my children are learning how to be grateful each day.

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Readers, the floor is yours…feel free to share your input in the comments.