2. Cooking: I made two batches of THM-friendly meatloaf for the freezer. Little by little I'm trying to clean out our freezers. I also made two pasta meals.
3. Date night: We used a $25.00 gift card at Olive Garden for date night. I signed up for their email list in order to get a free dessert, but the coupon didn't come to my inbox until an hour after we'd left. 😔 Minus the gift card, our cost was still $25.00. We thought about splitting an entree, but it's a good thing we didn't. Both of us ended up devouring our meals, plus a couple refills of salad and bread sticks. Lastly, we split a dessert (which could have been free... grrr).
4. Shopping: I got a free onesie from Kohls using some Kohls cash I had. When we were at the store I looked at the footie pajamas, but I just couldn't justify spending $5.00 (AFTER the free cash) or more on one piece of clothing for a growing baby. This year alone I've already spent almost $45.00 on new leg warmers for her, plus a swim suit and sun hat for her to wear on vacation. Yes, that was before I decided to do a $75/person/yr. clothing budget. So.... I need to save some of the clothing budget for the rest of the year. That being said... she still got a completely free, and quite adorable long-sleeved onesie!
I also went to Bath and Body works for their semi-annual sale. I got two bottles of very nice hand soap for $1.88 each (75% off) and a container of whipped body shimmer cream lotion stuff for $9.25 (50% off). At first I thought $9.00 was still expensive, but after a quick search I realized that it's on the cheaper end of the spectrum for similar lotions. Thanks to THAT luxury purchase, I'll probably be about $10.00 OVER our personal care budget for the month. Oh well.
5. Clipped a ton of coupons from the newspaper.
6. Cleaned out Baby's clothing drawer. I removed all of the outgrown clothes and put them in my clothing storage system (aka plastic storage bins). Then I looked in her next size up (I still have a small stash of gifted/hand-me-down clothing) to find clothes for her in a better size. And what do you know! I found the coveted footie pajamas! I also found some shirts, pants and onesies. That's what I'm talking about. I also figured out a better way to organize the outgrown clothes. Unfortunately we don't have a whole ton of storage space, so I have to store multiple sizes in each storage tub. Instead of throwing all of the clothes in topsy-turvey, or putting them in plastic bags where they're hard to access, I made a stack for each size and then rolled up the whole stack. Next time I reach for those sizes, all I have to do is thumb through the stack for what I'm looking for.
As a bonus, the wood we used was left over from cabinets that he made me last year. So it was completely free to us!

Til next time,
Bethany