Today I sent the husband out to run the frugal errands for a change!

I sent him to Half-Price books with a stack of kids summer reading logs. I just heard about their summer reading program earlier this week(it ends today) and asked the employee if I could just take a stack of logs and fill them up with our reading logs from the library. He said yes, but I wonder what they'll say when Michael actually shows up with the stack, ready for his gift cards! They supposedly get a $3 gift card for each completed log. We had eight, so we'll see :) I also found out that educators get a 10% discount card that they can use anytime, so since he's a teacher, he's going to sign up for that. I signed up for their email list a while back and still have some really good coupons to use, as well. I have a feeling Mom might be redeeming a couple of those gift cards.

After that he's going back to the bread store to redeem another coupon. They had more B1G1 free coupons, so we're going to stock up on English muffins, which are my favorite breakfast food.

Then he's going to run down the street to Kroger to get our free pint of Starbucks ice cream from the Facebook promotion. We have some movies we got from the library and are planning to spend the evening watching movies and sharing some ice cream :)

Creative use of leftover mashed potatoes

Last night we had breakfast for dinner. I used some of my bread from my bread store deal to make french toast. I also had leftover mashed potatoes and was trying to figure out a creative way to use them up. Pancakes and mashed potatoes didn't exactly sound appealing. I thought hash browns sounded good and figured that grated potatoes can't be that different from mashed potatoes. I added an egg, a couple tablespoons of flour, and about 1/4 c. of finely chopped onion to my mashed potatoes, sort of made patties out of them (as best I could) and I dropped them into a little bit of hot oil in a skillet. They weren't very pretty, but they tasted really good! They were gobbled up by my husband and kids.

We had enough leftovers this morning that the kids had french toast and potato pancakes for breakfast.

Bread Store Score!

Our Mrs. Baird's outlet is always a good deal, but today I got an exceptional deal! I always go through those annoying junk mail circulars that come every Wednesday just to see if I can find any really good deals or coupons. Last week, there was a coupon for the Mrs. Baird's outlet. They had a buy 1 get one free deal on bread and you could use the coupon twice. I got four loaves of bread for $2.28. That's 0.57 per loaf for you math people :)

I'll be going back tomorrow, because they had another coupon (you could only use one a day), for buy 1 get one free on muffins, so I'll be able to get my english muffins for super cheap. I'm lucky it's super close to my house.

I realized that I never posted about Andy's birthday, which was June 24. We budgeted $100 for party & gifts. We ended up having a make your own pizza and cupcakes party! It was really fun. I sat down and made a list of items we would need and estimates of prices. I wanted to get a pinata, but realized we wouldn't have enough money for one. I was originally going to buy biscuit dough for the pizza crusts, but I ended up just making two pizza crusts from scratch--it was much cheaper that way. To feed the adults, I just made one large pizza. The kids were able to just pull off a hunk of dough that I had prepared earlier and top their pizzas with whatever they wanted, then I popped them in the oven. Some of them got really creative!

I baked two boxes of boxed cake mix cupcakes, which was way more than we ended up needing! Because we had the kids doing all the cooking, I didn't really have to have any games which would have cost more money.

I did want to get some party favors, so I went to the dollar store to hunt for something that would go with our cooking themed party. I ended up finding these really cute Ratatouille cookbooks with gummy food and spoons in them. They came with a little soup recipe. Very cute, and $1 each. I also bought all the cups/plates/napkins/streamers at the dollar store. I bought candy to decorate the cupcakes there as well.

As his gift, we got him a really big kiddie pool (big enough for Mom and Dad to lounge in :) ).

The kids all really seemed to enjoy themselves and Andy loved his cooking party!

10 summer looks for $25

Went to Goodwill today and snagged some great deals! I spent $25 on everything, including one pair of dressy sandals. Here are ten looks I put together!