Posts from — July 2008

OK, so everybody likes a good deal, right?  Well, I get uber excited about them!  My last online shopping venture at The Children’s Place would have cost me over $200 and my total was $130!  I want to share with you some of my good deal, money saving tips.

Almost two years ago we found Ebates.  This is a really cool site!  You just sign up, and then anytime you shop online, you just go through them first.  Search for the store you’ll be shopping at, follow the link, and then do all of your shopping on the page that opens up for you.  Or, if you forget to go through Ebates first, you can go later, and follow your store’s link.  Just make sure that your final checkout is through the new page that opens up through Ebates.  We have gotten many checks from Ebates, I believe they send them quarterly.  It’s always nice to get FREE money!!

On top of your Ebates savings, you always need to search for coupon codes before your final checkout as well!  Some of my favorites are RetailMeNot and MomsView.  At Retail Me Not, you enter the site you’re looking for at the top of the page and then a list of coupon codes will come up.  The codes are rated by how many people have had success using them.  At MomsView, the stores are listed on the left hand side of the page.  Find the one you want and see if they have any current coupon codes.  I usually just copy and paste coupon codes into the promo/coupon code box on my checkout page.

My last favorite method for saving money is to shop off-season!  I’ve started watching for The Children’s Place Monster Sales through Baby Cheapskate.  I bought all of my big guy’s clothes for this fall and winter, at the end of last winter.  And, I’ve already got next summer’s clothes too.  These are GREAT prices!  Plus, you can usually find a coupon code too!  The Children’s Place is not available through Ebates, but at these prices, it doesn’t matter.  I’ve gotten several pairs of shoes for $4-6 dollars!  These are great shoes too!  Even at Payless you can pay $18+ for kids shoes.  You can do this at any store; I even do it for myself.  But currently, The Children’s Place is my fave for the kids.

If you find some great deals using these tips, don’t forget to let me know by leaving a comment.

A few years ago my husband started telling me all about “The Grocery Game”.  I looked into it a little, and if you’re not familiar with it, let me give you an idea.  You can go to www.thegrocerygame.com and find out all you need to know.  They’ll tell you what’s on sale at your local grocery store, you cut coupons, and they give you a detailed list of what you can get for a good price, stockpile price, and even for free.  Sounds great, right? And their site makes it very easy.  Of course, their services are not free, but you can get a 4-week trial for only $1.

The problem for me is, I wouldn’t normally buy most of the products that they can find great deals on in the first place.   Looking at an example list from their site, let me see, out of the 19 items on the list, I would actually buy five.  And four of those are produce.   I can look at my grocer’s weekly add easily enough to see what I need to buy on sale in the produce section without playing The Grocery Game.   The majority of the items on the list are frozen foods, or processed foods that my family doesn’t eat.  We like to eat fresh foods that I prepare and that are mostly organic.  I remember talking to my neighbor one time about her friend who was playing The Grocery Game.  She was telling me about all of the smoked sausage they had gotten that week at some amazing price.  My main thought during that conversation was, I don’t even know what with all of that smoked sausage.

I’m sure there are lots of happy people playing, and here is an interesting article about several different “players”.  Maybe you’ve never heard of The Grocery Game before and it looks like a great idea to you.   Well, go for it.  I’d love to hear from you about your experience! But as for me, saving money on things I wouldn’t buy in the first place is more of a Losing Game.

Now that our 2 year old is potty trained I’m always thinking about where he’s gonna “go” if we’re away from home for a long period of time.  We always try to get him to “go” before we leave the house.  So last week when we went to the zoo I knew I’d better find a clean place, since we’d be gone almost all day.  I was trying to come up with ideas of a place for him to go potty and I didn’t want it to be the public restroom.

I always see those portable potties that you can buy for your little ones to use when you’re away from home.  I’ve wanted to buy one, but we just haven’t yet.  I decided we’d just take our potty chair from the bathroom and see if he would use it in the trunk.  I brought along plastic bags from the grocery store and folded up some paper towels in the bottom.  I thought we could line the potty with the bags and then toss them in the garbage.

When we got to the zoo my husband put G into the trunk and helped him sit on the potty.  He – my hubby – didn’t want to try my bag/paper towel idea, so he just let G pee directly into the potty and then he poured it out right next to our car.  (Yeah, interesting, I know.)  Anyway, the potty chair in the trunk idea worked beautifully! I saved money by not purchasing a separate potty just for the trunk, and it worked great! I didn’t have to take him along to the yucky public restroom! Now I only wish I had one of those potties for myself to use when we’re out!

Grandma and Grandad made it to our house with a couple of different flavors of HAPPYBABY. So far the little guy has tried Sweeter Potatoes + Purer Pear and Grrreat Greens + Easy Going Greens. He has loved it all. Grreat Greens is an intro to spinach and the ingredients are: organic pears, organic spinach, organic mango, DHA algal oil. It smells really fruity. I served it warm once and at room temperature the next time. He seemed to enjoy it better at room temp. I snuck a little taste and wondered if that was how I should start preparing the spinach for the rest of the family!

I was also happily surprised that HAPPYBABY is only about .31 cents per ounce. Not that bad compared to most of the other frozen organic baby food I looked at, which was around .50 cents per ounce.

Now my only problem is that I can’t buy it here. Guess Grandma and Grandad are going to be loadin’ up for us every time they make a trip to Super Target.

My little guy just started eating baby food about a month ago. This is my second child, so we’ve done the baby food thing before. I made all of the baby food with our first child. I had more time then, and we tend to like the healthiest options we can find. We live in a small town so the only organic foods I can get here for baby food are apples, potatoes, some greens, bananas, peas, broccoli, some berries, and carrots. Not much. So I started buying some of the jarred organic baby foods – Earth’s Best and Gerber are the ones available – in flavors I couldn’t make.

I would still like to make the baby food this time around, but I just really don’t see it happening. I do have a couple of free hours in the afternoon and in the evenings when they’re both asleep, but I’d really like to do some reading or something else besides making baby food. So I’ve been buying the jarred organic baby food exclusively this time.

So one day this week I started looking around for better quality organic baby food than what I’ve been buying. Doing a little research online, I found out about frozen baby food, which is much healthier than the jarred stuff. It’s fresher, more flavorful, better nutrients, etc. Most of the brands I found are available at Whole Foods and some other grocery stores that are nowhere near our little town. One brand I found – Happy Baby is available at Super Target – also quite a drive, but it is closer. The Happy Baby cereals are available at Amazon. I only found one that would ship straight to your front door – Jack’s Harvest. Now that is a great option for me!

I can’t find out a lot in the way of pricing, but from what I can find, it looks like I pay about 19 cents per ounce for the organic jarred baby food and it’s around 50 cents per ounce for the frozen organic baby food. There’s always a price to pay for the good stuff, but in my opinion it’s worth it. I’ve yet to try some of this stuff, but as soon as Grandma and Grandad make a trip to the big city, I’m going to get them to pick up some Happy Baby varieties at Target for us. I’d still like to try Jack’s Harvest too.

Here are a few of the other brands I’ve found that you can look for when you’re out and about. There were some others, but the flavors were just a little too strange for me. I’d love to hear back from some of you if you’ve purchased the frozen organic baby food. Let me know about other brands, and your own personal – or your baby’s – opinion of what you’ve tried!

http://www.nicecubesbaby.com/

http://www.tastybaby.com/