And She Scores! (At the Grocery Store)----Plus an "Award"

Maybe this is a seriously lame thing to blog about, but I'm gonna share anyway. I've been "couponing" for about 2 years now. It's a tad bit time consuming and sometimes I'm a few weeks behind in my clipping, but it's definitely worthwhile. Especially when you hit the sales/coupon combos just right and save a lot of money! I get five papers every sunday for about $16 a month. I found the deal here. I'm sure that I've saved at least that much on groceries each month, usually more, and sometimes a lot more. Here's the latest score that got me re-motivated to keep at it : )Three boxes of cereal, 10 boxes of fruit snacks, 10 boxes of granola bars, two cookie mixes, and three boxes of Dannon crush cups. I love saving on snacks especially, because they get eaten up quickly and every kid in the neighborhood helps us eat them. So here is the breakdown:

Cost before discounts: $94.65 (Sheesh!)

Manufacturer's coupons (from the paper): $23.05

InStore discounts/sales (automatic with store card): $30.27 They were running a sale where for every 10 participating items you bought, they gave a $5 discount--that helped a lot.

Savings: 57%--$53.32

I hid most of this stuff from the kids, because if they can see it all, it seems to disappear faster : )

After buying all of that stuff, I headed over to WalGreens to buy hair color. They were offering the $7 box for $6 and they had an instore coupon for $3 off. I paired that with the manufacturer's coupon for $2 off. That made them each $2. Yay!

Okay, so enough of the boring shopping news. My super cool friend Christina gave me a bloggy award:

Here are the rules for the award:
1. Choose a minimum of 7 blogs that you find brilliant in content or design.
2. Show the 7 winners names and links on your blog.
3. List at least 10 honest things about yourself.

Here we go with my "honesty" session:
1. I think I'm pretty lazy. I really enjoy sleep and I don't enjoy cleaning. I think my house is clean and basically looks ok, but there's almost always some clutter around.
2. I'd love to drop 10 pounds. I don't mind changing some eating habits to get there, but on the other hand, I don't want to be on a perpetual diet to achieve it either.
3. I love it when my kitty curls up next to me at night.
4. I think my kids are the cutest, most wonderful little people in the world. I could just stare at their faces all day long.
5. In high school my favorite bands were The Cure, Depeche Mode, and Information Society. In college, it was The Smiths/Morrissey
6. My husband totally cracks me up. I think it's one of his best qualities (among many).
7. I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up. I feel guilty that I got a degree in Elementary Education and then realized that it didn't make me happy. Sometimes I think if I tried it again I might feel differently because it's been 9 years since I taught, but I don't know. I just don't know what my "thing" is, and the things I'd like to try would keep me away from my kids too much and I don't want that either. Oh, the confusion!
8. When I was really little, I wanted to marry a dog.
9. I would never trade back, but sometimes I miss the social life of college
10. I was always a one best friend type person---I think I was "cut out" for marriage in that way. I still miss my high school best friend (Debbie) and wish I could see her/talk to her more often.

And here are 7 blogs I love (it's ok if you don't want to play, I love you all anyway!)
1. Kellie @ Camp Run-a-Muk
2. Hollie @ The Traylor Park Blog
3. Kari @ Come What May and Love It
4. Hair Today (she just quit blogging, but if you've got girls there is a wealth of hair ideas here)
5. Tara @ Three Little Babelets
6. Sarah @ The Mundy Family
7. Karley @ The Simmons Family

Whenever I see that these people have posted, it makes me happy because I love to read what they've got to say. Thanks for entertaining me!