Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Life In General

I haven't posted for a while and I will try not to bore you with a 3 hour post, but here it goes. I have finally succeeded in the potty training department, it seemed like an eternity, and more mess than any human should possibly have to endure, but it is done. HOORAY!!!

I am getting better with the idea of having a Senior in the house, learning from my mistakes and taking in the actuality of how expensive it is. ACT are back and it looks like we will be footing the bill for a few of the kids to take them again to get the scores up. All in all, the outlook is good on that front, college is still the goal.

Getting a bit more into the stay at home mom thing, (hence the reason I haven't been posting a lot) Trying to get a schedule for myself established, you know the kind where you spend an hour cleaning a room, and then leave to start on another, only to come back and the room you just finished somehow encountered a tornado while you were away. Searching all closets, beds, dressers, toy boxes, etc for the hidden laundry that probably hasn't been washed in a month.

I have also gotten into learning the tricks of Extreme Couponing...Now mind you I have not been able to save 99% of my grocery bill, or even begin on a stock pile. But I'm getting there, lol. My first official grocery store trip with coupons was very disorganized, I had all of my coupons in an envelope and had to stop every 5 steps to check if I had a coupon for this item of that. Not successful to say the least, although I did end up saving $55...

I came home and decided I really needed to get into this if it was going to work for us, so I googled couponing and came across an amazing site www.couponing101.com. Very educational for the beginning couponer! For less than $10 I was able to make my coupon binder: A simple binder (for school), dividers,2 packs of baseball card pages, and tabs, and a little pouch to keep all of my couponing materials in (pen, extra tabs, etc). It took me a few hours, but I decided the best way for me was to use the dividers to seperate my coupons into 8 categories: Food, snacks, drinks, household, hygeine, paper and misc. once I seperated all of my coupons into those categories, I went alphabetical (I wasn't anal about it, I just went ABC and didn't pay attention to the second letter) I put the coupons that would expire first in front, so I was sure they would get used first. Time Consuming, but I am much more confident about my next shopping trip!

Another thing that I learned was not to just look for deals on ANYTHING. Look for deals on things you will actually USE, It may be feel great to get 10 of an item for only $.25, but if you aren't going to use it, then it really doesn't make a difference. AND most important thing, (of course I forgot this on my first trip) MAKE A LIST!!! If you find a wonderful deal on something great, otherwise try to stick to the list!

Well that is my post for the day! If you have any couponing tips for me or my readers PLEASE post them here!!!

Until Next Time,

My Mixed Up Family of 9!

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