Mommin' It Up!

March 6, 2010March 6, 2010

A Blogger Walks Into A Drugstore…

Ok, three drugstores. One of them multiple times. It is possible that I went a little overboard on the couponing this week. But as I now have enough of my faaavorite paper towels (Viva, they are the Rolls Royce of paper towels, thank you Walgreens for the great deal on those this week!) to last me for a couple months and enough laundry detergent for about the next year (at the rate I do laundry – hey I am saving it up for when my new Frigidaire washer & dryer arrive in May!) maybe I will take this week off. 🙂 Here are a few of the things I got!

Stop #1 CVS: My friend Jen and I went in, since I am her coupon guru and she is my apprentice. It was lots of fun, we made friends with the new manager at my fave store, and I got some sweet deals!

Huggies box diapers $19.99
2 Excedrin $2.50 each
CVS pain relief $2
SoftSoap body wash $4.99
Total = $31.98

Coupons:
CVS $5/$30 email coupon
$2 Huggies printable coupon
$4 off Huggies big box diapers CVS CRT
Two $2 off Excedrin printable coupons
$3/2 Excedrin CVS email coupon
$.75 cents off SoftSoap printable coupon
$1 off any body wash CVS CRT
total = $14.23
I paid with 12-ish extra care buck and paid $2.63 cash including tax, and got back 8 ECB, 4 for the diapers and 4 for the body wash. YAY!!!

Next stop, Rite Aid! I am recently love, love loving Rite Aid. They have great printable coupons available through their Video Values program where you watch short commercials and get to print high-value coupons. SCORE!

2 Suave shampoo/conditioner $1.99 each
2 Carefree pantiliners .99 each
2 Nivea lip balm .99 each
Tampax $2.99 each
Satin care shave gel $1.99
Listerine pocketpaks $3.99
Garnier styler $2.99 (one of my fave hair products, I have been waiting for a sale for forever!)
$19.90

Coupons:
Rite Aid $3/$15 printable coupon
$1/2 Suave manu coupon
$2 off Carefree Rite Aid video values coupon
$1/2 Carefree manu coupon
$1 off Garnier Rite Aid video values coupon
$1 off Garnier manu coupon
$1 off Tampax manu coupon
50 cents off Listerine manu coupon
99 cents (BOGO free) Nivea lip balm coupon

Total = $8.41 – paid in cash and I will get $6 single check rebate, 1 for the Suave, 1 for the Tampax, 3 for the Listerine and 1 for the Gillette shave gel. 🙂

Finally, WALGREENS. Now I will tell you that Walgreens is my THIRD-favorite drugstore. However I was in there about 80 bajillion times this week because they had some sweet deals I could not pass up. And I CAN BE BOUGHT. I do the coupon shopping for my BFF Luanne (because she is coupon challenged, and I LOVE her) and I went in a couple times to load her family up on toilet paper, paper towels (VIVA!!), laundry detergent, Kleenex, and feminine care products (she has two daughters, they need their own Fort Kotex) and I did a few transactions for myself as well (Viva, Kleenex, laundry detergent, clearance diapers, lots of free plus overage Tylenol PM!) Here’s a couple examples:

2 Purex BOGO free, $5.99
6 Kleenex, BOGO free $2.19 (for two)
total = $12.56
coupons:
BOGO Free Purex – $5.99
two 50 cents off 3 Kleenex – $1
total = $5.57 and I got back 3 register rewards for buying the Kleenex, yippee!

Then, much to my frugal delight, I made a magical discovery in the baby aisle at Walgreens. They had some sizes of Walgreens brand jumbo pack diapers clearanced to $2.29. YES, I SAID $2.29 FOR A JUMBO PACK!! I about died of nerdy happiness. I got SIX packs as I have some peeps to get baby gifts for. I used several register rewards I had accumulated through the weeks and paid less than $5 total out of pocket. WHEEEE!! Oh, and I got two more bottles of Purex, (pictured with the kleenex above), WHAT UP!? Somebody give me a high five!

Ok, that’s all for me this week. From Fort Kotex and the Viva Palace, I bid you happy couponing!

Wanna see some more sweet deals?? Check out the round-up at Shopping SUperstars at the Thrifty Mama’s place!

March 5, 2010

A Little Less Crazy, A Lot More Bald

If you’re not still to scared from the unbridled anger Emily released a few days ago in her rant about birth control pills, allow me to add a wee update about my journey with these things.

As you may remember, I started taking them a year ago, hoping to balance out my super-crazy hormones, which were causing headaches, acne, and (in my opinion) sleeping problems.

They cured my acne but they made me batsh** crazy and depressed. So I tried another kind, and another kind, and then anti-depressants on top of that. Then another kind of anti-depressant after a few months. I had a sleep study which came back negative, increasing my suspicions that hormones are at the root of my sleeping problems.

Because my sleeping problems are the main issue at this point, I asked my doctor last month if she could test them. She said I would have to be off the birth control pill for at least 30 days before she could do that. So I stopped taking it. My next appointment is near the end of April and I wanted to make sure my hormones were good and natural by then.

And I feel about 90% less crazy. Even with the anti-depressant, I was having very low moods before my period, and times of anxiety. And this month, I have had none of that!! I am still taking the anti-depressant, but it is amazing how different I feel now that I have stopped taking the pill. A couple more months of this, and I may be able to stop taking my A-D.

(Of course if my giant ZITS come back, I may get depressed all over again.)

Also, since I stopped taking the pill, my hair is falling out like CRAZY, just like it did for a few months after I gave birth. Fortunately, I have tons of hair, so I am not too worried about it (I wish the gray ones would fall out! Or some of my excess eyebrow!) but I find that to be rather odd and just another sign that hormones are FRAPPING WEIRD and they do CRAZY things to us lady people. (Check back with me in a month. If the hair loss speeds up and my zits come back, I am gonna be really fugly, and really depressed!! Nothing cuter than a bald, acne-covered 32-year-old woman.)

So, I am a little less crazy, which feels awesome. And a lot more bald, which at this point, is still ok. And also, a little bit more hopeful that one day I’ll be back to me.

March 2, 2010

Cake-troversy

So you may have noticed from the pictures from Joshua’s birthday that his cake appeared very store-bought and not at all homemade. “Whaaaat?” you say. “How can this be? We all know that Jenny feels that her love for her children is directly proportional to how much she tortured herself making their birthday cake!”

And you would be right. There was a time, oh so recently, when I felt that I had to trash my kitchen and stain my fingers with icing dye to ensure that my children had a fabulous birthday! Like this time, and this time, and this time!

But I was wrong. And I admit that Emily was righttarget (this once.) As much as it HUUURTS.

So around the time of Sophie’s birthday, my friend Cortney was getting REALLY good at making cakes. She had made my birthday cake and it was fab, and I decided, why not let HER torture herself making Sophie’s cake? I really wanted Sophie to have a “Word World” cake but I didn’t have it in me to give it a try. So, I was thrilled when Cortney came up with this masterpiece:

It was AMAZING!! And Sophie loved it. And I didn’t have to make it or trash my kitchen, give myself hives or turn to drink! Score!

So for Joshua’s birthday cake, I once again turned to my cake guru Cortney. Joshua wanted a Super Mario Bros. cake as he loooooves playing that Wii game with his Daddy. So Cortney was commissioned.

(In the meantime, being a true slacker mom, I couldn’t find Super Mario Bros. decor anywhere, and when I checked online, it was too late to order them in time, so I bought SpeedRacer decor. And convinced Joshua it would be totally cool.)

But even cake geniuses like Cortney sometimes have unavoidable cake-tastrophe’s. Check out her post to see what happened to the Super Mario Bros. cake! She texted me about 9:30 the night before the party that it had imploded. So, my wonderful hubby went out to Kroger in the snow around 10:00 to find his boy a birthday cake. He bought the only one he could find without flowers on it, we threw Joshua’s two toy SpeedRacer cars on it, and we called it a birthday cake!

Bobby did have to sit Joshua down and tell him that the Super Mario cake wasn’t gonna happen. He was a little sad, but recovered well, and had a really GREAT birthday!

And I am pretty sure he knows I still love him more than ever.

Although next year, I AM going to get the right decorations on time!! I swear!