Summer of Fun..and Savings!

Summer is off to a sizzling start- with the beginning of the new school year, the tail end of a smashing spring season with Spencer's flag football team (GO UNTOUCHABLES!) and gearing up for Kaila's fall soccer season. Spence will be playing in the championship game on Saturday so wish him luck. He took a really rough hit during a game this past weekend. He got right back up and playing immediately after - he's a tough kid!

We've volunteered as team managers for Kaila's team so that's kept us busy these past few weeks getting all the uniform orders together and organizing a team meet & greet for this coming weekend.

And I've been dashing about taking advantage of some great deals this week. CVS is running a 3 day sale in which you score some free school supplies...unfortunately too late for this school year thanks to the year-round schedule, but I'll be storing these away for next year. You can get free pens, rulers, glue, 1 subj notebooks, 3 subject notebooks and scissors thanks to the wonders of rolling ECBs.

For those not in the know, ECBs are Extra Care Bucks that you earn for certain purchases by using a CVS ExtraCare card. You can use these as a form of payment for future CVS purchases. I had $6.50 in these when I went shopping early yesterday morning and by breaking my entire purchase into 5 separate transactions, I ended up spending just a few actual dollars on these school supplies and a Gillette Fusion Razor. It's basically a math game but if you go in with a plan & some ECBs already on hand, you can come out with a few bags of goodies spending little to no money at all. I love my ECBs!

They're also running a deal on 6 x 8 photo books. These are on sale for $7.99 and you get $7.99 in ECBs back when you buy one. Although the circulars and the store signs indicate a 1 per household limit, I've found that you can actually buy 5 and get the $7.99 ECB back for each of the 5. Great Christmas gift idea or, if you're a Mom to a baby/toddler, you could also take pictures of your baby's favorite things and enter in text for each and make a cute little reading book for baby. Organize your pics, save them on a CD, USB/flash drive or what have you, take them into CVS and make a nifty book gratis!

Kroger is also running another one of their Mega 10 sales- this is where you get $5.00 deducted from your overall order when you buy any 10 of the items within the sale. Pair this deal up with coupons and get even better savings. I spent a little over $25 on an order consisting of 4 Sobe Lifewaters, 4 Healthy Choice frozen meals (Jon's lunch of choice for work), 6 Deer Park 3L bottles, 2 big containers of fat free cottage cheese, bananas, blueberries, a box of Kroger oatmeal, box of 200 Kroger sandwich bags, 6 bags of Cheerios and Chex snack mixes and a box of Kroger active bars (these are a knock-off of Fiber One bars)- thanks to mfg coupons, internet coupons and the 10 item event savings, I knocked $37.13 off the order.

The Deer Park and the Sobe's were the best deals in the mix. With the 10 item mega event, each was only 49 cents. I bought ten total for $4.90 then knocked another $3.38 off this by using an internet Buy One Get One Free coupon for the 4 Sobe Lifewaters (the coupons rang up at $1.69 each- the non-sale price of the Sobes). So, I actually paid $1.52 for 6 three-liter Deer Park bottles and 4 20 oz Sobe Lifewaters. Sweet! Here's a link to the coupon for my fellow Kroger shoppers:

http://bricks.coupons.com/Start.asp?tqnm=qdcnfeh65041990&bt=wg&o=56053&c=SL&p=dP7JSciC

I am officially addicted to coupon shopping!