Helping My Hamburger

Today I took nineteen pictures of Robert. All of them are of him crying or just about to cry. This should give you some kind of idea of what kind of baby-wrangling day it was. He was sweet at church, thankfully, and then spent most of the rest of the day having baby tantrums. I haven't made it down to the store lately for a weighted feeding, but I think I'm going to have to. He's so fussy after eating, I wonder if he's getting enough. In the meantime, I'm drinking the mother's milk tea that I have, and looking at getting more. That stuff hardly ever goes on sale, either. Bummer.

The new week of shopping has been good to me so far, though. Meijer is running another of their "Buy 10 for 10, get the 11th item free" promotions, and once again it has coincided with a good run of Hamburger Helper coupons, as well as coupons on a number of other box and package mixes for things. M and Robert and I went to the store this afternoon, and while Robert sniveled in my cart, we got two identical orders of 22 items apiece, each one 12 Helpers, two boxes of potatoes, two boxes of pasta, two cans of soup, and two packages of cookie mix. We split on the last items, he got dinner rolls and I got the sponge cake portion for strawberry shortcake. I also picked up a tub of Cool Whip towards that end as well. With coupons, we ended up with 73 dollars worth of food for 21 dollars. (Observant readers will note that this is about half what you'd expect to pay for 44 items in a Buy 10 for 10 sale, but that's the beauty of coupons.) I used our gift card from last month, so it doesn't come out of the budget, either. Excellent. The only other purchase of the day was my weekly newspapers at Walgreens, plus I picked up the free 8x10 I ordered during their week of deals last week.

Oh wait, no, I was totally wrong about that. This evening I got a wild hair and started shopping on Amazon, because it is almost my birthday. Swagbucks and Surveyhead, two of the online companies I work with, reward me in Amazon gift cards, and I had 40 dollars worth saved up after a few months of work. Not bad! I found a beautiful glass teakettle/infuser that is stove and microwave safe, and will infuse tea right in the kettle. It's just lovely, and will be even better when I don't have to drink the nasty tea anymore and can have good tea. I also picked up an entire Nora Roberts trilogy that I've been wanting but haven't wanted to pay for up until this point. I got the first two used, and picked up the third one on preorder, so I saved in each case. Between the tea kettle and the four books, I used all my gift cards, but I only ended up spending 49 cents of my own money. That will be a lovely birthday present to myself, and now I don't mind so much if I end up needing the cash money for something. I can't wait to brew a pot of tea and sit down with a new book... preferably after seeing M and Robert off on some adventure outside the house. ;-)