Yesterday was a productive day. I got some cleaning and organizing done. I'm noticing that being organized lends itself to being frugal. That gives me more incentive, because I am NOT a naturally organized person. Ethan spilled a jug of water the other day, and I hadn't noticed that a lot of it ended up in the vegetable drawer. I'm bad about checking the veggie drawer anyway, so yesterday I got in there and cleaned it all out, bagged up everything, and hung some cilantro in the garage to dry before it went bad.

Today I need to make a trip to the health food store. I was going to go pick up my vitamins last week, but I remembered that every Tuesday they take 20% off the cost of all vitamins/supplements. I also have a coupon for 25% off of one item, so I might see if they will let me use both.

Cinching the belt a little tighter

Our main financial goal that we're working towards at the moment is saving for my graduate school for the Spring. I will not be going if I don't get an assistantship, because we really cannot spend more on education right now. But, if I do get an assistantship, paying for school will be in the form of a monthly paycheck, so I will need to have money to pay for my classes at the start of the semester. In order for this to be possible, I will also need to somehow earn or save an extra $1200 between now and January. So the next few months will be very, very lean. Michael is on-board with this and we're working together to make this possible.

I've dropped our grocery/toiletry budget to $300 for the month of August. I may try to go lower in September. We have $0 budgeted for eating out or entertainment. Michael and I will still each get our $40 for spending money.

Yesterday was grocery shopping/errand day. I found some really good deals in the Albertson's and Tom Thumb circulars this time, so my two-week grocery trip involved trips to Tom Thumb, Albertson's, The 99 Cents Store, Fiesta, Save a lot, Kroger, and The Mrs. Baird's outlet. The only one of those that is not all on the same two mile stretch of road is Albertson's. I have to go about a mile out of the way to get there. I did plan a good menu, and was able to stock up on some excellent meat deals that will last us much of the month. I spent $142 yesterday for two weeks worth of groceries, and also had to buy deoderant, soap, toothpaste, and dog food. I really used my grocery price book this time to make sure I found the absolute best prices on everything we needed. I bought three pot roasts, a family pack of chicken breast, and five lbs. of 93/7 lean ground beef. I have $8 left if I need some extra produce or a gallon of milk.

The Y where I work out at goes to the food pantry and brings back stuff to give to its members (it is a very low income area), so I got a few things that were helpful in meal planning. I got two turkey roasts, an angel food cake, bagels, and kaiser rolls, so I worked those things into my meal plan.

Here is my plan for the next two weeks:
English muffin pizzas, broccoli
Hamburgers on the grill, oven fries
Chicken with asparagus and roasted red peppers, mashed potatoes
Roast beef sandwiches on kaiser rolls, salad
Taco salad, corn on the cob
Turkey roast, cranberries, steamed broccoli
Pizza Rice Casserole, salad
Baked chicken nuggets, baked potatoes, greens
Chicken & Corn Chili, cornbread (double recipe)
Creamed chicken (or turkey if I have leftover) with cornbread dressing, salad
Grilled jamaican jerk chicken, rice, grilled corn
Beef tacos, lettuce & tomato
Pintos & cheese, cornbread
Steak, baked potato, peas
Breakfast for dinner/pantry meal

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!