Suspicious Behavior

Thanks to my friend Tiffany for inspiring me, I have been having a blast saving tons of money on my shopping lately. This week at CVS, I got 7 bags of Stacy's pita chips, paying $2.50 out of my pocket, and receiving $10 in CVS bucks to use on a future purchase. Score! And at Giant Eagle, I bought $120 worth of groceries for $50. I am in the process of organizing my coupons. I want them in the order they are in at Giant Eagle. So, the solution seemed simple enough to me. I took my camera with me, and snapped pictures of each of the signs over each aisle that says what is found in that aisle. Well, I turned around, and found a manager staring at me. Turns out he said some lady complained b/c she thought I was taking her picture. I explained what I was doing, and offered to show him my pictures. To my annoyance, he didn't believe me, and made me show him all my pictures. He said there was a map of the store available at Customer Service. I got that, but it wasn't complete enough. So today I went with my partial list of what each aisle contained, and filled the holes in by hand...no camera. And my order the other day got red flagged b/c I was saving too much money...apparently, if you save more than 30%, the system flags it. Another manager had to come over and finish entering in my coupons. I am waiting for them to change their rules or bar me from the store LOL.

Snow Ball

We have been getting a ton of snow lately....we are very close to breaking the all time record for January (40 inches for Cleveland....must be at least 50 or 60 here in the snow belt). Yesterday we got about a foot, and had a snow day. The kids have continued to have a ball playing in it. The picture of the landscape shows how far they can go. When the conditions are right, they can go most of the way across the yard of the house you see in the background.

Happy Day

Over the weekend of January 17, I had the opportunity to travel (alone) to Texas for my brother Josh's wedding. I left behind wind chills of 15 below zero and headed to balmy Midland, TX. It was a fun weekend. Josh and Laura are so happy together. Here are some pictures from the weekend. Our family will be driving to Williamsburg tomorrow for the reception there.

Gingerbread Houses

Okay, I could pretend I took these pictures a long time ago...say back in December, but when I didn't. When I was cleaning up the Christmas decorations, I realized that I didn't have a picture of the kids with their gingerbread houses. So here they are.

Basketball game

Joe had tickets for last night's game between the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Boston Celtics. They were third row seats, and he was planning on taking a customer. Turns out the customer is very delinquent on his account though, so Joe decided not to take him. He couldn't find another customer on short notice, so he decided to take one of the boys. The question was, which one? I tried to let them come up with a solution between themselves, which they were not able to do. Joseph didn't want to flip a coin, and Jacob didn't want to do rock, paper, scissors. We agreed I would pick a number between 1 and 100 and then they would each pick a number, and the closest one would get to go. I picked 67 and wrote it down. When Jacob picked 73, I thought he would win. Well, Joseph picked 62. So he was closer by one. Jacob was pretty upset for a while, but he came around. I was gratified to see Joseph felt really badly for Jacob. I would have been worried if he didn't. But he and Joe had an amazing night. Joseph got to line up where the Cavs came out from the locker room and high five them. For a sports freak like him, it was heaven. Here are just a few pictures. In the picture with the flash, Joseph is in the foreground with his back to the camera and a green shirt, holding out his hand to high five LeBron James. In the last picture (bottom right), he thought it was great b/c of Ben Wallace making a turban over his fro with a towel and sweat band. The Cavs won handily, 98-83.

Ice Skating

During Joe's family's visit last week we went ice skating. Kim (Nana) was a great sport and got out on the ice with Joe and the kids. It had been a while since we had been ice skating. All the older kids got right out like no time had passed. Emma started out hugging the railing and holding hands with Nana, but she was zipping around by herself in no time. It was a great time.

You know you live in the country when...

This move has taken us to the most rural setting we have lived in during our married life. Case in point--today I went to eat lunch at school with Emma. As I sat with the first grade girls in the cafeteria, I asked them what they got for Christmas. One of Emma's friends shouted out with a huge grin,
"A gun!" We clarified that it was a bb gun. Even so....