I'm Back...

Well, I didn't really go anywhere, I just haven't had a chance to post in a few days.  What have I been up to?  Well, on Wednesday we spent the day at the Fort Worth Zoo with my second cousin who was in town briefly.  She lives in Hawaii and I have seen her in person maybe a handful of times in my entire life.  She surprised me by paying our way in, buying us lunch, and sneaking off into the gift shop to get stuffed animals while I was taking the girls to the restroom, not to mention bringing them gifts from Hawaii!  We had a great visit, the weather was beautiful, and my baby learned a few more words, such as "tiger"!  Here we are about to head into one of the new zoo exhibits.

Thursday, I cleaned.  End of story.  I tried to take care of everything I didn't get to on Tuesday, and everything I wasn't home to do on Wednesday.  I ended up finishing half of it up this afternoon.  (Yeah, right....I'm not done!)  It has been another very busy day.

This morning, though, I took the girls to the library to check out some new books and movies, and we saw a few garage sale signs on the way.  My oldest daughter loves to go to garage sales, but we usually wait too late on a Saturday afternoon and all the good stuff is gone, so I thought while we were out and it wasn't yet lunch time I would stop by and see what they had.

At the first place I stopped, I lucked out and found a few nice polo shirts in my husband's size that were being sold for just $1 each.

Then, at the second one, I happened to spot something we really needed as I was about to head to the car empty handed.  My husband likes hats.  My husband sweats a lot.  Therefore, my husband has very dirty hats.  BUT, he won't let me wash them because "they will get all bent out of shape".  He has been wanting to get one of these contraptions (I honestly don't even know what to call them) for a while.  We really didn't even know where to go to look for one.  He has been tempted to pay the $6.50 they wanted for them on Amazon.  He was so impressed that I found one priced at just 5cents.  I couldn't even find a nickel in my purse so I gave her a dime instead. ;)

Except for a quick $10 run to Aldi on Monday, I haven't even been shopping all this week since my CVS trip that I shared with you guys on Sunday.  I purposely stayed away from the stores this week knowing that my husband's monthly paycheck was going to be in the bank by Saturday morning.  It's not that I was out of money in my grocery budget.  I actually did extremely well staying *under* budget this month by using rebates, pharmacy credits, and rewards earned on previous shopping trips to bring down my expenses on my non-coupon items.  Instead of buying extra items, I wanted to be able to stash that extra money away for gas because we have a college reunion coming up in a couple weeks.  It's only about 4 hours each way, but with gas going up as it has been, we were concerned about going over next month's gas budget if we went.  Now that won't be an issue. =)

Since I opted to stay away from the stores, I didn't have much to share with you guys this week, but that's ok because my house really needed some attention. ;)

I hope everyone had a great week.  I should be back to shopping and posting as usual.  If you found any great deals this week, please share them in a comment below.  Feel free to leave a link!