Two things happened this week with Thing 2 that I wanted to share...

1. Ryan was helping me fix dinner and Kylie came in and said she wanted to talk to him. She took his hand and led him into the living room where they sat down on the couch.

Kylie: “You know what?”

Ryan: “What?”

Kylie: “If you weren’t married and you were in college again and I was in college…I’d pick you.”

(Ryan's heart begins to melt.)

We've had a good week at our house. Here are some things that happened:

1. Ryan finished his first class in his Master's program. He now has a week off from studying at night. YIPPEE!!
2. Kylie won the story telling festival at her school for the lower grades (K-3) and is headed to the district competition. She even told her story at an assembly in front of the entire school.
3. Talmage aced his spelling test for the 8th (?) week in a row.
4. Molly sang "Eenie meenie miney moe" all week long.
5. I lost 2.5 lbs. and made it through the KILLER cardio I had to do 6 days in a row.
6. I ran errands with all 3 kids on Friday night so Ryan could finish his last paper. We were gone for 4 hours and no one died. In fact, we sort of had fun. Who know that dinner at the food court at Target was cool for them?!

Looking forward to another nice week!

So I went grocery shopping tonight and got a grundle of great deals. I bought all this stuff for $23.94. I would have cost me just over $100 (at Wal-Mart no less, not at the regular grocery store) without my coupons and price matching.


Here are my best deals:
Toaster Strudels $.20 each
Lunchables $.23 each
Cake Mixes $.04 each
Brownie Mix $.10 each
Oreo Cakesters FREE
Sandwich Thins $1.00 each
Yoplait Smoothie FREE
Body Wash FREE
Dental Floss FREE
Salsa $.12 each
Fruit Snacks $.44 each
Sorry game $.24

Molly was having a melt down this morning about wearing her winter coat. We woke up to about 6-8 inches of new snow this morning. She's wearing her winter coat today, I'm thinking, but she is insisting on her Valentine's hoodie from Grandma Pollmann.
Me: Molly, you'll freeze your butt off if you don't wear a coat.
Molly: No, I have my pants on. It not freeze off.

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Molly brought me a diaper and the box of wipes the other day so I could change her stinkiness. They drops everything as she huffs and puffs and says, "Oh man, I'm so frong (strong)."

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One Saturday morning, the jobs lists were written and everyone was going to work. Everyone but Talmage that is. He was in a huff because he had "so much work to do" before he went out to play. He was getting more and more dramatic about the situation, but it escalated when he started demanding a lawyer so he could sue his abusive parents. Abuse? I'll show you abuse, little boy!

Tomorrow is the final day of my pantry challenge. Since I'm not headed to the grocery store today or tomorrow, I decided to tally everything up and see how I did. I spent $96.41 on groceries this month!!

Now keep in mind that I am currently eating different food than my family right now, as I lose weight, and my meal plan changes every week. So I didn't count that food since I couldn't plan for the changes or just eat whatever we already had. So I technically spent more than that, but it was on stuff just for me.

But with that being said I bought TONS of stuff in that $96 that we didn't NEED, but they were simply on sale for a great price and I had a coupon: cookies, Rhodes rolls, fruit snacks, oatmeal, candy, Sobe drinks, Skinny Cows, soda, etc. I also bought things that I could have made: bread, milk (we have powdered milk), yogurt.

Here's the best part too... aside from being in need of some dairy and produce, my pantry, freezer, and food storage looks the exact same as before. It doesn't look like we lived off of it for a month, at all. Cool.

So I know that if we had NO money to spend on food I could feed my family, no problem. We'd miss the cheese, yogurt, and fresh produce the most. But we would have have milk still to help cover the need for dairy. And we have plenty of frozen and canned produce.

This was a fun little experiment to try. I think that I'll informally continue to do it. I plan to continue to pull from our storage regularly, but I won't be keeping track of my spending like before. I do plan to continue to buy the things that I can get a great deal on, rather than whatever my heart desires.

P.S. Ryan noticed a HUGE change in our credit card bill this month too. (We put everything on our credit card --paying it off each month, of course-- so we can see all of our expenses at a glance...and to earn lots and lots of American Express points...) Because I wasn't going to the store as often, I wasn't picking up a little extra something here and there. Apparently all those little things add up to big dollars. Oops.