Yay, a Garden!

I have been wanting to put in a small veggie garden to help save $$ and just to see if I could actually be successful at it. :) My mom loves gardening and said she would help so we got everything ready and planned to put a raised bed in our backyard today. We were trying to do this as cheaply as possible...since the main reason for doing it is to save money in the first place (and to have some fresh healthy produce around).
It was a perfect day do it...rained a little in the morning and then stopped so we could get the work done most of the afternoon and then started raining right as we were finishing up. It was overcast and felt great outside so it ended up being a great day for it!
Dad and Chris got and hauled the dirt (from a dirt yard right near our house. $17 for a truck load of top soil with compost already mixed in).

We got the wood for the bed for free from a company downtown that gives away their crates. All we had to do was go pick them up and take them apart.

Mom had some supplies already which she brought, and we purchased some plants and seeds on sale at Home Depot earlier this week.


We got some strawberries that we decided to pot cause mom has always done it that way...I hope they grow! Love some strawberries!!

Zachary was so great. He played in his exersaucer for most of them time...then he took a 2 hour nap which was nice too. He is such a good baby. He loved just watching everything we were doing all day.

After several hours of hard work - all done! We shall see what happens (hopefully something grows). We had to put up chicken wire cause we have lots of rabbits in our yard.

We planted 3 different tomato plants (2 red and 1 yellow), green and red bell peppers, banana peppers, cucumbers, zucchini, green beans, brocolli, and corn - all in the bed. We also did some herbs (parsley, oregano, and mint) in planters, and of course the strawberries. I am excited to see what we come up with.

Thank you so much Mom and Dad and Chris for workin so hard with me!

Booksneeze

Read Isaac Newton by Mitch Stokes recently. It was interesting because I did not know very much basic information about him, only the major accomplishments you learn about. I have to say it was a little boring to read but very packed full of information. I know that if Zachary ever has to do a report on him for some reason we will have a book with plenty of life details. :) Even though it wasn't my favorite read - I did learn from it so I guess it served its purpose! :)

Enfamil deal

I know that I am a big dork for posting about random savings that I get but I don't care - I like saving money. :)

So here is the deal that Chris and I ended up with yesterday....
Because of certain health reasons it was necessary for me to go back on a bc pill recently (I have had issues with ovarian cysts in the past). This meant that I could no longer breast feed because you can't take those meds when you are breast feeding. We had already been supplementing with enfamil formula for Zachary for a while so the transition for him was totally fine. I was COMPLETELY fine with no longer breast feeding - I am very glad that I was able to for the first 4 months because I know it is better for Z, but that was the only thing that had kept me doing it up to this point anyway.
The only thing that wasn't ok with me was the fact that this would mean having to use formula all the time - and the stuff is freakin expensive. Z has a spit up problem and Enfamil premium works best for him so we feel like we need to stick with that brand for now (although I recently heard that there are walmart and target brands that are the same thing so we might need to look into that - thank you Susan. :) ).
Well we were running low on formula so we ran into Babies R Us last night to get some and ended up with a lot more than we planned on getting...
They were running a special stating that if you bought 2 cans that were "bonus cans" (they have 20% more than normal) you could get a $5 giftcard to babies r us. So we planned to do this. BUT...they only had bonus cans in a big pack of 6. I didn't plan on buying 6 and spending $150. So we were trying to calculate the best deal and we ended up with the 6 big cans anyway.
This is how we did it...
Sundays paper had enfamil coupons which some friends were kind enough to give me so I had mine plus a few extra. There were 2 coupons in each paper: one for $5 off when you buy 2 cans and one for $3 off when you buy one can.
I ALSO had some "checks" that enfamil sends us every now and then for formula purchases: I had 2 $4 ones and 2 $5 ones. You can only use one check per can purchase though.
I had also received a coupon for a $15 mail in rebate when you spend $40 on formula.
So...this is how it went...
We bought 6 cans (each with 20% more formula free) so really we got the equivalent of 7.2 cans.
Cost $150
-2 coupons for $5 off 2 and 2 coupons for $3 off 1
=$134
-$18 in enfamil checks (u can only use 1 per can so we could use all 4)
=$116
-the $15 we would get back in giftcards for buying 2 bonus cans 3X
=101
-the $15 mail in rebate
=$86
-$5 because this purchase qualified us for $5 back on our rewards card to toys r us
=$81
-$30 we had on a previous gift card from babies r us
TOTAL PAID=$51
Keep in mind that a normal sized can costs $25....so we got the eqivalent of 7 cans for $50 (or $81 if you dont count the giftcards we used for the purchase)

Thats $7.30 per average size can that we paid today. (or $11.57 w/out giftcards)

YAY! Plus we are stocked up for a while...living on a budget means I have been going out to buy formula about every week or so. Won't have to go again for a while...unless of course another deal like this comes up. We still have about 8 more months of formula feeding to go so any awesome deals at this point are worth it! And I can think of MANY other things I would rather spend extra money on than formula so thank you Babies R Us. :)

Priceless

I'm thinkin' someone isn't a very big fan of peas.... Can't say that I blame him though...