Sunday Shopping

You can have this button too! Just copy and paste over there. Come back every Sunday and link up to share your savings, with our without coupons...hey, it doesn't even have to be groceries, maybe you just got a good deal on some jeans, I don't care! I'm just a newbie to the coupon game, so don't be intimidated. We all want to see what savings there are out there! Plus I'm new the the whole Mr. Linky thing, hopefully I can get a few loyal followers! We'll just see how it goes.

So here it is. My day out. I never thought I'd be so happy about getting to go grocery shopping. But when you are saving this much money, it's a blast!!

I had my new coupon organizer with me today, and got a few weird looks. Plus the lady behind me I'm sure thought 'Oh, great' when she saw the cashier start going through my coupons, but I accomplished 1/2 of my goal this week. I saved $63.39 at Meijer all together this week! That passed my goal of $50! My total was still $27.88 over the desired goal of $100. But we are getting closer. {I hope you all don't mind me sharing this with you. I feel it helps me better manage my money if I'm setting goals for the world to see, and then sharing with you how I do.}

So here's what we got this week. And wait, who's that little boy in the background. Could it be Alex? Who thought I was a dork for doing the coupon thing? And what is that he is holding in his hands??

Why it's this sign: Holy Savings, Batman! That's a lot of money!! (The $170 is CVS and Meijer together. Some items shown where purchsed with WIC which I haven't added to any totals since those are items I don't pay for--there are up sides to not making alot of money) CVS more than paid for itself today. My receipts show savings of $4 and $76! They had Buy1Get1's all over the place, then with my coupons it was marvelous! I paid $42.15 and received $122.15 worth of stuff! I still have $4 in ECB left over to use next time too! If you don't have a CVS Extra Care card yet, you really should get one.

My favorite deals of the day at CVS are as follows:
Did you notice the 6 cans of Glade air freshner? Here's a closer shot of them
CVS paid me $2.28 today to take these home. They are on sale for $.99 with your card, and I had a coupon for B1G1. The coupon stated that the max credit I could get for the free one(s) was $1.75, so that's what she entered as the coupon amount. Yeah for getting paid to shop. Alex claimed we will never need to buy air freshner again!

2nd great deal was Natural Dentist mouthwash. It was on sale at my CVS for $6.99 per bottle, but when you purchase it you receive $4 EB towards your next purchase, plus I had a $2 off coupon, and a rebate by mail form to receive $10 when I purchase 2. So lets do the math...I bought 2 and paid $13.98-$4 (2 bottles means 2 coupons)-$4 EB-$10 I will receive w/rebate=$-4.02 is what I will get paid for using these 2 bottles of mouthwash.

Oh, last but most certainly not least today is a special birthday today. Taylor is now 15! I can't believe it. 1 more year and she can drive. I remember vividly when I turned 15 and the excitement of only 1 more year before the license came. I remember feeling so mature and grown up, but now I look at Taylor and think she is still a kid. It's funny how your perspective on things can change.
Happy Birthday, Taylor!

1. The Katy Perry concert was awesome. It was a very small place, actually an old church, so we could see fairly well. The kids had to sit on a side section of the bar to see but still had fun.
2. The Great Lakes Crossing mall in Auburn Hills, MI is among my favorite malls now.
3. Coloring Easter eggs is only as fun as you make it. Don't worry about the dye staining your dinning room table or porcelain sink. It will all eventually wear away.
4. Easter eggs smell good, and are fun to play with.
5. When giving an option to eat a yummy cinnamon roll or yogurt, Simon will always choose chocolate. Warning: this next photo is nasty!
6. DO NOT forget your camera when going to a cool concert with your kids. Just because you think they might not let you take a camera in they more than likely will let you have it. Just take it!

In other news I found a crazy site called WeUseCoupons.com. It is totally confusing, and I really don't like it that well. Because I don't understand it. It is a forum where ladies, and guys, share their coupon finds and deals. The only thing I have gotten from this site is a cool way to organize my coupons. I had one of the small dollar store things that has the dividers, but I was getting too many coupons and couldn't keep track of what I had. So I tried this. I found an old 3-ring binder in one of the kids' closets and bought trading card protective sheets. This is what it looks like:
I just changed stores and I tried to organize my coupons by isles in the store. All I have to do is take this along with me and flip through to find my coupon(s). Alex was helping me sort them all out and asked if I was really going to take this with me everywhere. My answer....Yes. He's embarrassed already. I love it!

I also found that eBay is a pretty good place to get coupons. I purchased a lot of 100 coupons for like a buck or something. I couldn't get that many with a weekend paper for $1.75. I just love saving money!

I'm turning into a coupon freak!

I had a hard time falling asleep last night. I was just so excited. I was like a kid on Christmas Eve.

Today is the day the new ads come out!

Joey thinks I'm such a freak. He was glad I had fun grocery shopping though. I think this can be my shopping fix. I love it. I admit I do buy things even though we don't need them, but how can you not when they are sometime almost free. Here are some of my favorite deals I got today:

CVS ~ Buy $10 of St. Ives &/or Noxzema and you get $5 ECB (Extra Cash Bucks, which is basically free money for next time). So I got a St. Ives face scrub @ $4.99, Noxzema @ $3.99, and a travel size St. Ives face scrub @ $1.49 for a total of $10.47-$1.50 in 2 coupons-$5 ECB for a grand total of $3.97! This all falls into the area of do I really need it? NO, but with 4 girls in our house I know we will sometime in the near future, plus the travel size scrub will be great for my mini-vacat.

CVS ~ Dawn dish soap is buy 2 for $2, plus I had a $.50 off coupon, making my purchase $1.50, then received $1 ECB...grand total $.50 for 2 yummy smelling Dawn dish soaps.

I could have scored better on my Easter candy I bought, but who really neads 6 bags of candy? Not I. Click here to see how.

Meijer ~ I bought a Febreeze candle @ $6.99 (kinda steap for me but hang on) and had a coupon to get a free Febreeze air freshner. Plus I had a coupon for $1 off the candle and $.50 off the air freshner which they honored, for a total of $5.49 for a purchase that could have been $9.98 if I paid full price for both.

Meijer ~ buy 2 oreos (actually it was sellect Nabisco products) get 1 gallon of milk free! Plus I got 2 boxes of Ritz crackers which gave me another gallon of free milk.

I got some great deals on frozen food items likes veggies, frozen dinners, some different Aunt Jemima frozen breakfast things. I like using coupons so that we are forced to try different things. The kids don't like that part of it so I save the 'new' meals for nights it's just Joey and I, but over all it's going pretty good.

My goal this week was to save $50 and spend $100 or less. Between Meijer and CVS I spent $161 and saved $71. [If I don't count CVS I was at $132 spent and $47 saved!] But I have enough food for almost a week and a half (my family is 7 by the way) where before coupons this amount of money would have just fed us for a week. Oh, and this amount includes dog food for one week too...can't forget the furbabies!

Plus I wanted to share that I received my Everyday Minerals FREE sample on Friday. It is wonderful. You get to choose 3 foundation colors, 1 base, and 1 extra thingy. Click here for more info on all that. But it took less than 1 week and all I paid was $3 for s&h. The products to buy are fairly inexpensive, and so far I'm pretty happy with the way it looks and feels. Check it out.

2009

The holidays are finally over.

The new year has begun.

Only two more days and it's back to work.

We shared a fun day with my Mom and step-dad, Emily and Ali this past Thursday and Friday. We went to Splash Universe in Shipshewanna, IN. The kids all had a blast. We did a little browsing in the shops in town and got home last night just in time to see dad get home from work. It was nice spending time with them all doing something fun with the kids.

It will be nice getting back into the swing of things. Plus school's half over, which means summer's just around the corner...right?!

In my spare time this holiday break I have been doing more research on my family tree. Our computer that has the main copy of everything has decided to take a crap so I started over on my laptop, just for fun. I have started to find people who I hadn't discovered before. I look forward to keeping up the search.

I've also stumbled across another fun site that I like spending time at. It is Paper Back Swap dot com. You swap and share books with other members, only paying shipping to send your books to others. You can request and post paperback, hardcover and audio books. It's fun to have someone want your book, because then you get a 'point' and can request a book from someone else's library. I love it! It's been a great way to get some of my older books off the shelf.

Have a great first week of '09!

haaaggghhh

...as in wow....what a busy couple of days.

Thanksgiving on Thursday, which for us meant the start of Christmas shopping at 6 a.m. Which means you have to get up at 4 a.m. to make it to Meijer at 5 a.m. to wait in line until 6 to get the much coveted gift.

We spent the day with my mom's family in Indiana and had lots of goodies. I need to get my aunt's recipe for her Pumpkin Cheesecake, because it was the bomb! so much so I had 3 helpings of it.

Friday was the official start of the Christmas shopping season for the rest of the world and Alex wanted to see what the hype was all about so we got up kinda early (6:30 a.m.) and made a trip to Kmart to get a Handy Manny Talking tool set for $9.99-normally $34-ish but they were gone! :( That's why you get up early. We did get a few good deals. But I went over my limit so now we are going to be eating Ramen noodles and grilled cheese all week....no joke.

Friday afternoon we got the tree set up.

I actually did get some help from Coopie


But the help didn't last too long

This morning we put the lights up outside and Alex and I made some cute fruit decorations/ornaments.

Dad bitched (sorry mom) griped about the tradition that he started with the girls, where a kid puts the angel on the top of the tree. This is him griping...

But being the great daddy he is he suffered through it.

We took some family photos by the tree. This is the picture I wanted to use but of course....I can't

Daddy took some smoochy pictures with me.

And now it's pretty peacefull around here. The girls are with their mother, Alex is at a birthday party and Simon's trying not to fall asleep in his room...even though it's way past nap-time.

I think I'll join him in nappy land.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving.