She can swim . . .

well, sort of! She's been doing great kicking around the pool with her life jacket on all summer, she is quite the little fish! I kept thinking I would get her into swimming lessons this summer and never did, next year for sure. We were at a birthday party last weekend at a waterpark for one of my oldest (not in age, in number of years, ok! and I prefer not to talk about how many cause then I feel really old) friends daughters. Growing up she taught swim lessons every summer and made a ton of money doing it. I joked that I should have just brought her up to spend a few days with her and she could have given Meg the lessons. She said that as soon as she could put her head under the water she would be ready to swim, well, she's been doing that since she was a baby! So she walked over to the side of the pool and gave her some pointers, and whalaa, under she went and started swimming under water across the pool! I guess it shouldn't really shock me, but I was pretty amazed that just like that, swimming!



Looking forward to a nice quiet weekend. Hoping to get some scrapping done, I'm very behind on my 365 layouts and I have a class sitting in "my classes" over a www.jessicasprague.com I would like to get working on. Happy weekend!

Can I brag for a moment?

yep, it's my blog, so if you don't want to hear me brag on my kiddos for a minute, stop reading now!

Trevor came home last week with the results of his Pre-Algebra assessment test. He's always been a math whiz, but this is ALGEBRA, yes I know it's just pre-algebra, but still, I was a bit nervous, not to mention that it is his 1st period class. Well, I'm not going to worry quite as hard now, he got 40/45 on the test, the highest score in his class, most of the others were in the 20's.


I was talking to Meghan on the phone after school on Friday and she told me she got an award at school, and that she was the only one in the class to get this award. She didn't know what it said, so I tell her great job and I'll see it when I get home. I was half thinking she was making it up! I know, that's bad. But we had just been telling Trev how great he was doing the night before, so I thought maybe, just maybe she was a bit jealous and was making up the little award. Well, boy was I wrong! She had made a picture for her teacher the night before, colored it and then wrote some words on it that she knows how to spell. So she got a "You did a Super Job" award for doing "kid art". She was very proud of herself! And so are we!



Then today Trevor came home with this letter ~


Although I'm not exactly sure what this program is, Trevor says that it's like the GATE Program in elementary school. Needless to say, we are very proud of him for earning this!

In other news, Daryl had a productive weekend doing a little backyard project. It started by getting rid of the wasp nest ~

Then he did a little concrete painting, it looks much better than this in person, and it's not spotty looking, we were going for the "rustic" look!

And then we added a little more seating ~

and a new table, chairs & umbrella ~

I think he did a great job! Thanks honey, I LOVE it!

Cracking me up

Working on editing the 100's of pictures I took last month and came across these, they just made me laugh! These were from the 4th while we were hanging out with the Tidwells.

The girls were laying so nicely, like little girl cousins do, on the towels to dry off.

Enter boy cousin, Levy ~ looking pretty innocent, right? Notice the little grin on his face??

Notice him tickling Meghan's foot?

And then Cayden's


Quite time was over after that.

My not so good K-Mart trip

Wish me luck trying to convince a K-Mart employee that they somehow missed $22.55 of my coupons, EVEN after I asked her to double check because I was pretty sure she had.

A few good deals

Went out yesterday to grab what I thought were just a few things, but I actually came home with quite a lot of stuff. I think the best deal of the day was the cantaloupes that were .10 a pound, I got 3 of them for $1.17, can't beat that!

Remember how much I love my cup?

you can read about it here, well, there was a little accident last week. I won't mention names, to protect the innocent until proven guilty, although the fact that he went to 6 Starbucks looking for a replacement probably is proof enough!


There were attempts made to fix it, and I have to say it is functional, but not so pretty anymore, all of those smudges you see is super glue that was used to put the two pieces back together. Waiting anxiously for these darn cups to make another appearance, and then I will buy more than one of them!

And the results are in . . .

I think I get more nervous for Trevor's STAR Testing results than he does! He has set the standard very high for himself and every year I'm anxious waiting for the numbers to come in. Once again he did not fail and got great scores.


I was also happy to see that his reading list level is at level 11 out of 13 levels. He has always loved reading and read books above his reading level. Keep up the great work Trev, we are very very proud of all your hard work in school. All of your effort is paying off! We love you.

All in a week at Wags

I ended up with all of this after several trips to Wal-Greens last week. I spent $50.00 out of pocket and I still have $10.00 in register rewards left to spend this week. The retail value of this is $232.68, a savings of $182.33 ~ 78%!!!

Unilever and Kelloggs and Loreal were having some great register reward deals, which is why I got even more peanut butter, Ragu and Suave deodorant!!! With the register rewards factored in I came out ahead $3.22 with the deodorant and the ragu and peanut butter cost me .37 each. I got 3 boxes of hair dye, 2 bottles of make-up and some blush for $4.00. Some of the office supplies were "filler items" that were on clearance and I think we now have enough snacks for the kids lunches to last till spring time! I think that the Kelloggs/Keebler items worked out to be .50 each. I love that, no more running to the store at the last minute because there is nothing to put in the lunch box. Amazing what a little bit of planning can do for you. Here are a few close-up pictures.

Bad blogger this week . . .

Not sure why . . . getting into the routine of being back to school, been to 2 back to school nights, Trev already had school pictures on Thrusday, Meghans are on Monday. Meghan is still loving school, Trev still wishes he was off for a little longer! Meghan loves buying her lunch and asks everyday if she can . . . the answer is usually no, I figure they can each buy once or twice a week, the pantry is stuffed with yummy lunch stuff for so much cheaper than the school lunch, Trevor's is $2.75 and Meghan's is $2.50.

I spent too much time clipping/organizing coupons this week, lots of good ones in the paper and all of the internet printable reset. But it has been worth it. My goal this month is to have an average savings of at least 70%, I ended last month at a 62% savings, so now that I can be even pickier I'm working towards being at 70%, so far this month (I do realize that we are only one week in) I'm at 78%, that is for 2 trips to Safeway, 1 trip to CVS and a few stops into Wal-Greens, they had some great Register Reward deals this week, I'll post my weeks worth of bargains after my final stop tomorrow.

Safeway had some awesome coupons this week that matched great with some that I had, today I saved 85%, I did a similar transaction on Sunday and saved 75%. Not to bad, I don't have a picture of Sunday's trip, but it looked a lot like this one. I paid $12.60 for all of this!

Free items are:

4 Twix candy bars
Starbucks ice cream
3 bottles of Marie's salad dressing

Really cheap items are:

Pop-Tarts .49
Tortillas .99
Kraft Cheese slices 1.49
Granola bars .99
Cream Cheese .99
Cantaloupe .77 each
Cookie dough .24
Salad was 1.00/bag
Finish $1.49

For the two visits at Safeway this week I spent $34.11. The total before sales & coupons was $166.80 - for a total savings of 80%.

Since I got 3 newspapers on Sunday I have more coupons so I will make one more trip this weekend to use those coupons too.

So glad it's Friday, need to get to bed, I'm sure Meghan will be up bright and early like always on a Saturday morning, especially she has been promised cinnamon rolls for breakfast!

My husband needs a J.O.B.

Since he is currently playing Mr. Mom, and doing it very well I might add, he is been getting the kids their breakfast, making lunches and getting them to and from school everyday, I'm getting spoiled very fast!!! This will hopefully be a very short lived situation, but until it ends I will enjoy actually getting to work on time, every morning!!! While getting the lunches made this morning he asked for the cookie cutters so he could make Meghan's PB & J sandwich into a heart! Meghan found the butterfly before the heart, so she had a butterfly PB & J sandwich in her lunch today. How cute is that!!!! Should I be worried??!!!