Coupons

Daryl has put me on coupon restriction! He just shakes his head when I come home with more bags and says "I hope you can find a place to put all of that stuff that I don't really think we need any more of!" He is partly right, I don't really need anything at the moment, and that feels really good. I have officially out grown my "new" pantry, I'm going to need to do some creative re-organizing as soon as it's not 120 degrees in the garage! Here are a few updated pictures ~

This is the overflow from my kitchen pantry, which is full since I made a Winco trip last week and restocked all my canned goods! And I didn't show you the inside of the garage fridge, uuummm, it's full too!

And on to upstairs for all of the toiletries ~

and finally the laundry room. I've never kept excess in laundry detergent and softner, loving that I don't have to run to the store unplanned to get something that I have run out of.


Needless to say I'm set for awhile. We will be clean and have food for several months I'd guess, only buying fruits/veggies/dairy products. Any shopping that I will do will have to be a huge savings. I have $30.00 in Wal-Green's register rewards that I will use this week, which will bring up my percentage saved. I spent more than normal there in the last 2 weeks because of a sale they were having on John Frieda hair products. I think I got about $114.00 worth of hair stuff for $36.00, almost a 70% savings. So I have lots of register rewards to use. I'm working to keep a 60% or better savings rate, I'm a little under that right now because of my Winco trip. Anytime I do a large shopping trip there my savings average goes down because I can't accurately figure out my savings, they are so much cheaper on so many things than Safeway or Raleys.

I also decided to try and not spend the Target gift cards that I've been earning from their specials and put them away safe and sound to use at Christmas time . . . I've already got $25.00, thinking I should be able to get quiet a few saved in the next 6 months.

It's been 2 weeks????

How the heck did that happen? I knew it had been at least a week, but 2???

Things have been obviously on the busy side here, add with that getting sick and then Meghan being sick, saying good-bye to a good friend, work and field trips, yes 2 of them in 1 week, Fathers Day, oh, well, we will actually be celebrating that tomorrow since we missed it last week because I was sick! and then Meghan's pre-school graduation and getting the slide show finished up, while I was sick, of all times for me to get sick. Yep, it's been 2 weeks!! I'm finally feeling almost 100%. Have I mentioned what a waste of time it is to be sick??

Meghan had her final graduation ceremony, this was our 6th one attending between her and Trev! Makes me just a little bit sad that we are officially D.O.N.E with pre-school and on to the adventure of elementary school.

how cute is this?

Meghan's best friend Lauren just arriving

Mimi & Ms. Jody, with a few extra bobby pins from Ms. Michelle, finally got her cap on and then when she walked out the right side of her hair was all messed up!! Luckily you can't tell too much in the pictures!

And here she is getting her diploma!

When it came time for the slide show, that I had very painstainkingly picked out very cute and theme appropriate music for, the sound was all messed up! It worked fine when we set it up and tested it, but I guess sitting on pause for 30 or so minutes got everything all messed up! I guess the good part is that everyone got one to take home so they can watch it with all the cute music there. We did watch it for awhile, but it's just not the same without the music.

We had our old neighbor Rose over for dinner last night, we had a great time visiting. This is one of the benefits of Daryl not working these days, I can feel life returning to more of a normal way, that part I am liking, and that I don't have to worry about what to do with the kidos while they are out of school, Dad's home to spend lots and lots of quality time with them!


Well, going to try and get my 365 layouts done tonight so I don't stress about them tomorrow since we will be gone almost all day.

Their baaaaack!

and it almost seems as if they were never gone! Sounds like they had a great time and Daryl came home with a record breaking 80 photos! He was hoping to get a few more today, but the camera battery ran out and he came home and told me that the back-up battery I sent with him "didn't work". Well, it was user error, but at least he will know for next time! Here are a few of the pictures he, and Meghan got!

I really don't want to know how Trev got up in that tree, with Max, all by himself!

A self-portrait

Alone . . .

My wonderful husband took the kids, the dog and the trailer and went camping, for 4 days, without me! It is VERY quiet around here, other than the sound of Stitch squawking every now and then, and I am enjoying it very much. Don't get me wrong, I do really miss them, and after 4 days I am going to be really excited to see them, but there is something about having time alone, time to not have to do anything for anyone, well, I do have to give the bird fresh water everyday and bring in the newspaper, and I should probably unload the dishwasher that Daryl started before he left, but other than that, I'm pretty much not doing anything I don't want to do, and I'm loving it!

What I have done is gone to K-Mart, hate that store, but they are having double coupons this week so I decided to make a trip. How much would you pay for all of this stuff?

All of this before sale/coupons is $62.04

2 bottles of listerine
2 bottles of Pert Shampoo
2 bottles of Hawaiian Tropic Suntan oil, and yes, mom, one of them even has sunscreen in it!
3 bottles of Hair Gel, for Trev
1 tube of Dora toothpaste for Meg
2 tubes of mascara
2 bottles of hairspray
2 cans of shaving gel
2 bottles of hand soap

I paid $13.40, a savings of about 80%! This is all stuff that we will use, this makes me really happy! I only had time to make it through the toiletries section, I have some cleaning coupons pulled so I need to try and make one more trip before Saturday.

I also went to Wallgreens, they had another $5.00 off a $25.00 purchase, there were a few things I needed, savings not quiet as good as K-Mart, but still not to bad.

I spent $20.87, saved $22.73 and earn $5.00 in Register Rewards. A savings of 52%, both items I need. The M & M's I had to put in at the last minute because my total was at $24.87 and I needed to be at $25.00 for the $5.00 coupon to work. Darn! Mental note, gotta hide those M & M's before the family returns!

The exciting life of a mom, I'm sure years from now I will laugh at all of this coupon shopping, or who knows maybe I'll still be doing it!

Going to head to bed, can't keep my eyes open!

Memorial Day

Just wanted to put a few pictures up from Memorial Day, better late than never, right? We had a great time BBQing and swimming at the Tidwells. Meghan is a total fish and I'm going to have to get her into swimming lessons this summer. Thank goodness she knows that she cannot get in the water without her life jacket on and she puts it on very willingly.

Jumping into the spa

Trev jumping into the pool

Letting me know that she enjoyed her snack!

Crazy hair!

Even Max got to come to the party

I wish I had video on my camera, it was hilarious watching Max chase Rio around the backyard ~ of course the picture doesn't do it justice and apparently Max doesn't realize that Rio could eat him as an afternoon snack!

Hailey & Kaitlyn were happily sunbathing until Meghan decided to cool them off with a little water!

And then the dad's decided that Kaitlyn really should get in the water!

Scott turned on the heat in the spa, so that turned into the place everyone wanted to be!

A rare picture of me! This would be why I'm never in any pictures, too busy taking pictures and playing with the settings on my camera!

Tooth #2

Gone! It was pretty loose when the first one came out, so I knew it wouldn't last long! She was eating a rice krispy treat today and out it came! After I took a picture I was asked to put it on my blog for all to see!

Photography 101 - Portfolio

So one of the things that I fell behind in the last couple weeks was my Portrait class. I was taking pictures and reading my stuff . . . just didn't get to participate on-line as much as I would have liked to, but luckily it's all still there, and this is what I submitted as my final portfolio for review and comment by the instructor. I'm pretty happy with the way these came out and am anxious to see what she has to say about them!

Getting back into the swing of things

It's been a rough couple of weeks and I feel totally behind in everything! We've been dealing with Meghan and her allergies and newly diagnosed asthma, which thankfully is finally under control. Unfortunately, it took 3 visits to the doctors to get it all figured out. The really frustrating part is that I told him a week before that I thought see needed a breathing treatment. He apparently didn't feel it was necessary and instead prescribed cough syrup with codeine. Well, it didn't work! She had had this cough for about 3 weeks, and all of the medications he put her on for allergies (Zyrtec, Flonase, eye drops) were working fine for all of the other symptoms, all except for the darn cough, the cough that was keeping us up for 2 - 3 hours every night. The cough that was causing her to gag and throw up, and we all know how much I like dealing with that, especially in the middle of the night. Daryl and I spent about 2 weeks sleeping on the couch with her. Last Monday night I was ready to just take her to the ER because I was so done listening to her suffer like she was. From her first doctors appointment to her 3rd appointment last week, she lost almost 2 lbs, it was less than 2 weeks. That is a lot of weight for a little 48 lb. little girlie.

So I took her back in Tuesday afternoon, and guess what, she is wheezing! That was a huge shock to me!!! And it was all I could do to not slap the doctor for making us suffer for a whole week unnecessarily. So, after a breathing treatment and a chest x-ray just to make sure there was no infection, we were sent home with our own little breathing machine and a ton of albuteral.

She has done amazingly well with all of her meds, she does the nose drops herself and tries to do the eye drops, I hate giving her so much medicine, but after the first day/night of breathing treatments we have been sleeping all night without coughing attacks, thank goodness it's working! Since all of this started she has been staying up way to late and therefore I haven't been able to work on my stuff! I'm behind on my 365 layouts for the first time this year, I'm still trying to get some photo's edited from the pictures I took at pre-school. Hopefully I can get a little caught up this week, I'm having a baby shower here for a friend on Saturday, so I gotta get things together!!!