When Saving Money Actually Sucks...

I'm in the center.  Obvs.

I first want to establish that I love grocery shopping.  I credit this to being extremely picky as a kid and living off of cereal and spaghetti-o's.  Now that I am less picky, I love grocery shopping because I love seeing what kind of food I can make and force Jack to eat.  I love going through each and every aisle and looking at everything and taking it all in.  In the beginning of my grocery shopping life (when I was only buying for myself), I would buy whatever I wanted (regardless of price).  I always had the yummiest food in the house, even if it was just Milano Cookies and chocolate milk.  Once I was buying for Jack and I, I started being more mindful of the price of things.  Jack will seriously eat everything in the house in one sitting if you let him.  I have seen him eat an entire large bag of chips in one afternoon.  I started buying the store brands of things because it cost less (and we had to buy double the quantity).  We also invested in a Sam's Club membership for some of the things that go extremely quickly (NOT for the price, simply for the quantity).  Once Adam started eating people food (jarred baby food is NOT people food), I knew I had to wise up fast because he is exactly like his father.  About a year ago, I started clipping coupons.  I feel the need to establish the difference between clipping coupons and couponing.  Those who clip coupons do it more casually and typically don't save as much money as those who coupon.  Couponers can walk out of a store and pay $2.72 for $60 of groceries.  HOWEVER: couponing takes a hell of a lot of time and energy, not to mention organizational skills that I do not have.  I know several people who coupon and they have to shop the ads and keep track of their coupons, etc. etc.  I preferred the lazier way that still saves me $1.00 off just for clipping the coupon out of the paper.  I often talk about my envy of those who coupon and save tons of money and have walls and walls of stockpiled goods.  I have been following an incredible couponer (www.raininghotcoupons.com) who explains her methods and even offers How-To's on her site---all while raising her young kids.  Super jealous.  Anyway, inspired by all of the great deals she mentions, I decided that I was going to shop the ads with my months supply of coupons I had been saving from the Sunday paper.  It took me over and hour just to line up (and write out my game plan) for one store.  My plan was golden.  I was going to get over $20 worth of things for $4.39---a first for me.  I drove to this store and was delighted that there were hardly any cars there.  I walk into this store and over to the first aisle and EVERYTHING on my list was sold out...empty shelves.  I go to the next aisle, same story.  I am fuming at this point because part of my exceptional deals relied on receiving those rewards that print out at the register for future purchases.  I am so angry that I could cry, and to make matters worse, this shithole of a store doesn't hire employees to work in the store aside from ONE cashier.  I walk up to ask the cashier about checking the stock of the items and she informs me she is the only one working at the time and cannot leave the register.  Showing poor manners, I storm out of the store with ZERO items.  (A similar event happened at a location of this store by where I went to college.  A bag of something rang up for $4 more expensive than the tag and the employee couldn't go check the price so she told me she'd have to charge me what it rang up for...).  I need to find some of my extreme couponing friends and ask them about what the appropriate thing to do is in this situation.  Until then, I am going back to my style of lackadaisical couponing.  Sure, I don't get really cool deals or save any money, but it's a hell of a lot less stressful.

Picture Pefect

My friend and I had a conversation today discussing what we do with our digital photographs of our kids.  I have albums that my mother made for me “back in the day” when you had to develop pictures to actually see what they looked like.  With the convenience of taking pictures digitally, many great pictures get posted to the web or stored on the memory card just waiting for a viewer.

I thought I would share how I manage Adam pictures, because I always love when others share their organizational tips.  Today I embarked on a journey to print 431 pictures from 2009 so that I can put them in a nice photo box to sit and collect dust.  I am so scared that due to the digital revolution, adorable photographs will sit on my laptop never to be viewed by anyone---or, get lost when my computer gets another virus.  What I have done so far is organize my photographs of Adam by year:

From there, I organize each photo into a folder based on the month it was taken.  On Windows, you can learn the date taken on each photo just by holding your mouse pointer over the picture:

 

So that my photos don’t get stuck in Computerland forever, I do several things with them.  I have a chronological 12x12 scrapbook that I do that highlights events throughout the year.  For this, I choose my favorite pictures and do more of the “crafty” stuff, with stickers, backgrounds, embellishments, etc.  Since I can only fit a few pictures per page, I also print all of the pictures from that year and store them chronologically in a photo box (each year has its own box).  I tried to find a 4x6 album to accommodate all of the prints from that year, but I couldn’t find anything of high enough capacity.  Once I know all of the pictures are printed, I then burn that year onto a CD and store that in the photo box as well.  I found that printing all of the pictures from that year forces you to be a little bit more decisive with your pictures.  With the ease of being able to delete so easily with a digital camera, I know I am guilty of taking pictures of things and looking back and thinking "WTF!?"  Suddenly when it comes time to print them all, you can look and say, "There is no way I am paying for six back-to-back pictures of child 1.0 doing the same exact thing."  In the beginning of 2009 when I printed the photos from 2008, there were over 1500 prints (and that was only May-December).  I just got the willpower to go through the pictures from 2009 and there were only 431.  Five more months of photos, yet over A THOUSAND less pictures taken.  I took a peek into the 2010 folder and there are only 355!  As far as the scrapbook is concerned, I am up to summer of 2010 in Adam's album, and tomorrow my friend and I are attending a local scrap night where I plan on catching up on the rest of it.  My biggest joy is that I'll have albums (and boxes and boxes of photographs) to show Adam's girlfriend when he is brave enough to bring her around...I think I'll start with this one: