Mommin' It Up!

November 1, 2008

I Coupon, Therefore I Am

This week was CRAZY. I only went to CVS TWICE!! Sunday and Friday. Now that’s just very unlike me, but I was BUSY! They were already out of some stuff I wanted on Sunday, so this is all I got:

Freestyle $39.99
Milk $2.99
Soy Joys $4
Total= $46.98
Coupons:
$5/$25 Rite Aid coupon (My CVS takes competitor q’s)
up to $55 off Freestyle coupon (found on tearpad at CVS) – $39.99
Two B1G1 free Soy Joy coupons
Total = $-.01 The cashier added a penny “taxable item” onto the order, so it came to $0, and I got back 14 ECB!! 10 for the monitor and 4 for the Soy Joy! Yahooo!! I love making $$ shopping!

Then Friday I went back cause we were dangerously low on sippy cups!

Three Playskool Wash & Toss cups on sale for $3.59 each (I didn’t realize they were on sale so this threw my calculations off a bit! Whoops!)
Three 160 count Playskool wipes on sale for$3.99 each
Total = $22.74
Coupons: $5/$25 Rite Aid coupon (I had though it would be over $25 with the cups at regular price – cashier let it slide! Love my CVS!!)
$4/$20 CVS CRT for Playskool
$2 CVS CRT for Playskool wipes
$2 CVS CRT (expired but my CVS takes them for 30 days) for Playskool wipes
Two $1 CVS coupons for Playskool wipes
Total – $7.54
I paid with a 7.99 ECB adjusted down to 7.54, paid 35 cents cash and got back 5 ECB for the Playskool deal! Playskool wipes are my fave so I was very happy with that one!

Now, happily, KMart in our area FINALLY did the “super double coupons” thing this week! They doubled $2 coupons up to $4!! Crazy!! Here is what I got!

I paid $2.24 for all of this!! My total before coupons was $39.10. Everything in the picture I got for free, except the peanut butter, which was $1. So I paid $1 for it and $1.24 tax for all these goodies!! Thanks KMART!

I also got paid three dollars by Meijer to buy 12 boxes of cereal and 9 boxes of jello, but I was too tired to take a picture when I got home. 🙂

Hope you all did great this week! To see how the rest of the crazy couponers did, check out Super Savings Saturday at Money Saving Mom and CVS Superstars at The Centsible Sawyer!

October 31, 2008

Beggar’s Night and a Brow Wax, Woo-hoo!

Tonight we had a great time as usual at Emily’s house for Beggar’s Night! Well, everyone but Sophie that is. She had to pull a few Diva tricks and act like she HATED wearing her chicken costume and HATED being in her stroller and ya da ya da, but we still managed to have fun! Since she was such a grump, this is the best picture I got of her last night in her chicken suit:

I promise you, she was totally adorable! But you’ll have to take my word for it! Joshua and Kate, however were ALL SMILES:

Sammy was the Poisoned Apple to Kate’s Snow White, and he was the most scrumptious apple ever!! I wanted to eat him up!

Ok, now on to the stuff you REALLY care about!! MY EYEBROWS!!

Well, I am pleased to announce that it hardly hurt at all! Seriously! It was NOTHING! I got all worked up over nothing, basically. So, I am dumb. But we all knew that already, so let’s move on and see thems BROWS, mmkay??? Here is the new, improved version:

You can see the before picture here. No more hairs underneath where they should be and no more creeping towards the middle! Yay! And here’s my new haircut:

Take a good look, as it will never look like that again, ’cause I CANNOT flatiron it like that. But I am VERY happy with the cut! Now everyone in the Dayton area, go visit my stylist Janelle and tell her I sent you! She is awesome! She totally kicked booty on the brow wax!

I have lots more great photos of Beggar’s Night that I’ll share on my Weekly Winners post this week. Have a great weekend!

October 30, 2008October 30, 2008

Our Halloween Tradition

Every year since Kate and Joshua were born, Jenny’s family has come over to our house for trick-or-treating. It’s one of my favorite yearly rituals! We’re gearing up to do it once again tonight, and I’ve been thinking about how much our kids (and our trick-or-treating experiences) have changed over the years. And as I was going through pictures, I realized how much Jenny and I like to recycle costumes!

In 2004, Kate was six months old and Joshua was eight months. Here’s Joshua all decked out, hanging out with his daddy:

I don’t know why, but I couldn’t find a picture of both the kids in their costumes, but here they are later that night:

(Oh, hi, this is Jenny, I found a pic of them in their costumes! Kate was a bug! So cute! Ok, now back to Emily!)

For their second Halloween, we got them all dressed up again and handed out candy at our house (those were the blissful days when they didn’t yet know what candy was). Here’s my cute chicken (this costume will be put back into circulation tonight!):

And Jenny’s cute turtle:

In 2006, we finally introduced Joshua and Kate to trick-or-treating. I will never forget the looks on their faces when they figured out exactly what was going on! Here they are going up to the first door together:

After they gathered their loot (note Joshua’s costume – you will see it again!):

Kate’s costume that year was some serious recycling! Here’s a throwback picture of me and my friend Karson – I’m wearing the same clown outfit Kate’s wearing in the picture above. My great-grandmother made it, and it’s been worn by my sister and cousin as well.

The next year, we added (or Jenny and Bobby added, I guess) another kid into the mix (costume handed down by my friend Marianne):

Since Joshua was still obsessed with Thomas, Jenny saved some $$ and broke out that costume once again:

Tonight will be round five. I am so excited… it is unbelievable to me that already so many halloweens have passed and our kids have grown up so much.

Frankly, I’m still not sure how Jenny and I went from dressing up as California Raisins (note to self: find pictures of that!) and hitting the streets to wrangling FOUR kids of our own into their costumes.

When did we become the grown ups?