Yesterday morning was my glucose test, and my OB appointment was right after that. I gained 7 lb this month – a real surprise and a huge disappointment. The midwife I saw was NOT optimistic about the test results based on my weight gain and the crazy sugar cravings I’ve had. She gave me some carb counts to follow and said we’d wait for the results.

Then I called today, and found out that the results were actually good. That was a surprise! I’m thankful though.

Stephen and I have been talking about going back South Beach again, and I’m not sure if we’ll do SBD itself or Nourishing Traditions or a combination or what. . .but we do need to revamp some things. I’m going to try to follow the guidelines she gave me for now. Hopefully I won’t be gaining 2 pounds each week for the last 13 weeks of this pregnancy (I’m 27 weeks now).

I go back in two weeks so we’ll see how things have gone. It’s crazy that I’m that far along already.

We have all the big stuff for Little Miss, but now I’m just trying to get more diapers sewn (don’t have enough dipes for 2 in cloth!) and some little dresses for her. Oh, and some meals in the freezer for after her arrival. Other than that, we’re good.

There is one more thing about coupons that isn’t necessarily a “how-to,” but more of a reminder. Ethics and doing what is right.

When a store has a super sale going on, and you can get things for really cheap or even free, go ahead and take advantage of it. Buy what you can and put some back for later. Most sales go in cycles, but it could be quite a while before you see a price like that on an item again. If it’s not something perishable (toiletries come to mind here), then put it away for later when you need it.

Most of the places I’ve seen call it stockpiling. The goal is to have enough in your stockpile so that you don’t ever have to pay full price for an item. By buying extra when an item is on sale, you can go for longer periods of time before buying more. It’s nice to avoid paying full retail price for something when you know you can get it for whatever your target price is.

One of the things for me is toothpaste. Stephen prefers one brand, and it happens to be a brand I can get for free with coupons. There is enough stored at our house that I shouldn’t ever just have to run to the store to buy more and actually pay out of pocket for it. That’s not been by buying a lot at any one time – just by getting 2-3 tubes when they’re free with coupons. When I notice the number of tubes on my shelf is getting low, I start looking for more sales to get more free tubes. You can do this with quite a few things.

A person’s stockpile is limited by one main thing – storage space. We don’t have a lot of extra storage room in our house, so I try to be careful with how much I bring home to stockpile. Some say that a good rule of thumb is a year – keep a year’s worth of any one item in the house so you can always get it at rock-bottom price. For our house, that’s just not practical. For others, it is.

There’s one thing I want to caution you about with stockpiling though. It actually applies to couponing in general, not just stockpiling. It’s greed. Don’t just buy items because they’re free. Just because you can buy 40 bottles of window cleaner at once, doesn’t mean you should. If you really need the cleaner, then yes, buy it. But don’t just get it because it’s cheap and you have a ton of coupons. If you buy so much that you end up having to throw some away after a while, you’ve bought too much. Be careful that your stockpiling doesn’t become hoarding.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to discourage stockpiling at all. It’s the mindset behind the stockpile and the tendency for greed that is the problem. It’s a heart matter. Some people will have bigger stockpiles than others. No problems there. But when the stockpile is built because of greed, there is the problem.

Also, be considerate when you coupon. Please be mindful of others who are doing it because they need to. There are people who may be depending on those deals to stretch their grocery budget enough to afford everything on the list. If you buy a bunch, just because you can, you may be depriving others of getting what they need.

That is something I’ve seen repeatedly during the triple coupon promotions around here. My store’s policy is that there’s a limit of 3 like items per customer, so people get around it by going multiple times a day or sending other people in their family to go get more. Unfortunately, by doing that, they clean the shelves of the really good items, leaving very little for others.

I don’t say that as a guilt trip – just as a reminder to be considerate. People so easily get caught up in “I bought 347 boxes of cereal for only $2 today and they had to clean out the back of the store for me to get them! What a deal!” Yet somehow they don’t realize how that can affect others when they’re just being greedy.

Another thing to be mindful of is store policies. If the limit is 3 of an item, then stop at three. Don’t try to go back into the store 14 more times that same day just to get more. The store employees know who is abusing the system, and the stores that double or even triple coupons can easily stop those promotions. I’d hate to be the one that the store manager dreads seeing every time I walk through the door! Please follow the rules, so that everyone else doesn’t have to suffer when stores tighten the rules about couponing.

One of the next steps to couponing is knowing your prices. I think that is one of the more time-consuming (at first) parts of couponing. It’s not impossible, but can be a challenge sometimes.

What it boils down to is knowing what your absolute lowest price is for an item. A coupon does you no good if you can go elsewhere and get an identical (or sometimes better) item for the same or lower price.

This is where having a price book is an incredible help. You can read my post about price books here.

Some people can manage to keep a running mental list of how much they’ll pay for each item. I’m not that good at keeping track very well that way. Everything goes into the HandyShopper program in my Palm. From there, I can find any information that I need.

Knowing the price per unit (per ounce, pound, gallon, per roll of tp, etc) will be the most helpful. At first glance, a bottle of laundry detergent may seem to be a better deal than the one you usually buy, but once you look at the unit price, you may discover otherwise.

To find the unit price, take the total price and divide it by the number of items/units in the package.

For example, if a 12-roll pack of toilet paper costs $7.99, just divide that $7.99 by 12. That gives you the unit price of $.6658 per roll. You could then round up that to $.67 a roll. This is helpful when a different size package than you usually buy goes on sale. By comparing the price per roll, you can see at a glance whether it’s a good deal or not.

After you know your basic prices, you can then add in coupons. Sometimes you can get a generic product cheaper than a name brand product bought with a coupon. On the other hand, some stores have really good sales. By buying sale items and using coupons with the sale price, that’s often when you can get name brand items at low, low prices or even for free.

Many stores now have their sale ads online. Some are easier to use than others, but most of the major chain grocers around her do have them available. That’s a good way to do some checking ahead of time, especially if you don’t get that flyer in the mail. They also often offer some sort of “specials by email” program. Right now I get email specials from 4 different area stores.

This is something that I’m still working on though. I live right on the NC/SC state line, so don’t get most stores’ sales ads for the NC grocery stores I shop at. I often forget to check those stores’ ads online – even though I know I could get some really good deals by doing so.

Once you have a good handle on regular prices, you’ll be able to establish what your threshold prices are. A friend of mine won’t buy cereal unless she can get it for under $.75 a box. Eventually you get to the point where you know when it’s time to just buy one or two items to get you to the next sale, or start stockpiling because it’s the best sale you’ve seen in a long time.

It can be time consuming, and is definitely a learning process. But knowing your prices is certainly worth it!

I originally wasn’t planning on blogging about Swagbucks, but after today, figured it wouldn’t hurt.

Swagbucks is an online search engine where you can win points (called Swagbucks) every few searches. You can then redeem those bucks for prizes.

One of the prizes that I particularly like is a $5 gift card to Amazon.com. Right now you can get the card for only 45 points. I thought it would take a while to get those 45 points, but surprisingly, it’s only taken me a week.

They also award MegaBucks periodically too. One day, instead of seeing the usual “You have 1 new SwagBuck!” message, I got a message saying I’d gotten 20. Nice.

It took me a long time to even register because I wasn’t convinced it was worth the effort. Now though, it seems worth it. Swagbucks even has an add-on for Firefox that allows you to add a search bar to your browser window (they have it for other browsers too – I’m just a loyal Firefox fan) to make it easier.

They also have a referral program where you can get points when people sign up using your referral link.

The only thing I had to do differently was switch search engines to Swagbucks. Easy enough.

So go over, take a look, and maybe even sign up. You might find it was worth your time.

Swagbucks

I’m going to interrupt my coupon series here to blog a little about a price book. It’s not absolutely vital to couponing, but it is such a HUGE help that I wanted to include it at this point. A price book is valuable whether or not you use coupons though – so hopefully this post will be a help to someone.

A price book is some sort of document or book that contains current prices for items that you normally buy – at each store you shop at. You can see at a glance where it’s cheaper to buy something. For instance, sugar might almost always be cheaper at Aldi, but it’s on sale this week for less at a different grocery store instead of Aldi.

You can do them digitally or on paper. I’ve done several different ways.

The simplest way is probably a blank notebook. A lot of places say to give each item one page, but I never needed that much space for any one item. Half a page would probably be plenty. You write the item at the top of the page, and then write down the brand, price, size of object (like 5 lb package, 12 oz, etc), the store it’s at, and the date. The reason you put the date is so you can start to learn sales cycles and so you can see if a price may be outdated or not.

I’ve tried typing a master list and then printing it and putting it into a 3-ring binder. It worked ok for a while, when I kept up with it. I even tried keeping the master list on my hard drive, but didn’t keep up with that very well either. I’d forget a few times. . .and I found I didn’t do a very good job keeping up with them at all.

Then when my husband got a new PDA for work, he gave me his old one. I was looking for other software online for it, and came across a program called HandyShopper. It’s only for Palm OS at the moment. It’s a list maker and price book all in one, and it has completely changed how I do my price book. Now, when I mark items on my shopping list, it gives me a total based on the prices that I have in the database. I can see how much things should cost before I even get to the store. Not only that, I can select a specific store and see exactly how much I can expect to spend at each specific store. For a tiny little freeware program, it has helped immensely.

The HandyShopper database also transfers easily from one device to another. When I upgraded to a newer Palm, I worried that it would be difficult to transfer the data over. It ended up being pretty easy, and was a huge relief that I didn’t have to rebuild the database!

I’ve tried to create price book documents for people to download, but haven’t been able to come up with one that I am truly happy with. Maybe that’s because they don’t work the best for me – I don’t know. If there is enough interest in the documents, I’ll consider putting them up online to download.

This morning as I was cracking quail eggs for breakfast burritos, I started to wonder how they would do as boiled eggs.

Our quail are laying 3-6 eggs a day. That adds up pretty fast, so we’re trying to come up with some creative ideas for using them up since we don’t sell them.

At the moment, there are 5 quail eggs on the stove hard-boiling. They sure would be a conversation starter at a church potluck if they turn out well. “Look at those tiny devilled eggs! How cute!”

We’ll see.

This is Part 2 of my coupon series. You can read the first part Coupons 101 – Getting Coupons here.

The next thing you’ll need is a way to organize the coupons. I use a 3-ring binder. It’s nice and portable, and can be customized to whatever extent that you like. You can view my coupon binder here. My friends Tammy and Annie use boxes for theirs. Some people don’t even clip their coupons ahead of time – they file the inserts by date and look coupons up that way.

There are several ways to organize the coupons. Some do it alphabetically (Scott toilet paper under S), some do it by category (all toilet paper coupons under paper goods or toilet paper or bathroom or whatever). I tried alphabetically, but it didn’t work well for me. By category works better for me because I can compare prices between brands easier – especially if it’s between brands I don’t usually buy. The important thing is that you find a system that works for you. I’m to the point right now where I actually need to subdivide my categories more. Some of my categories are too broad and things need to be broken down further.

It really doesn’t matter how you start. All you need is a way to know what coupons you have so you’re not flipping through fistfuls of coupons in the store. For me, that’s a notebook. For others, it’s a box. Whatever works for YOU is important. Otherwise you won’t use it and it ends up being a waste.

You’ll also need some sort of system for taking coupons into the store. Will you carry your binder or box (or bag, etc) into the store every trip? I do bring my binder, but when I have specific coupons to use, I use a two envelope system. All the coupons I want to use on a specific trip go into a business-size envelope. As I put each item into my cart, I take the corresponding coupon and put it into a letter envelope that’s inside the larger envelope. That way I can see exactly how many coupons I’m using and what I may have forgotten. This works especially well if your store limits the number of coupons you use. Harris Teeter around here will periodically triple coupons, but only 20 per customer per day. Using the two envelopes helps me stick to the 20-coupon limit without any surprises at the checkout lane.

Another thing to consider is the expiration date. Each of the pages in my binder has three pockets in it. The bottom two pockets I use to organize coupons. The top pocket gets all the coupons in that category that will expire that month or early next month. It makes it a lot easier to toss expired coupons. It also helps you use older coupons before newer ones, especially if they’re for the same amount. Even if you don’t file your expiring soon coupons separately, you will need to go through your coupons periodically to weed out expired ones.

Bees and honey are so addictive. I told Stephen that he has corrupted me, lol!

I mentioned earlier today that I found a double boiler for Stephen for beeswax. It got broken in tonight, and works just fine.

Saturday evenings are busy enough that I didn’t want to start a new project, but Caleb has a diaper rash again so I had more motivation than usual.

Throughout the day I’ve been researching recipes, and found a few that looked promising. I tried one tonight that should make a really nice diaper rash butter. At least my hands are nice and soft with as much as I’ve tried! We’ll see how it turns out.

I also ended up at a bee supply website and saw just how cheap some of the natural oils are that I could use. . .and this could be the beginning of a new addiction.

Caleb was able to experience Oreo cookies for the first time today. I don’t usually buy them, but succumbed to a craving this morning at Wal-Mart.

Samuel looked at him and said, “Mommy, he looks like he has a mustang!” He meant mustache, but the slip up made it even funnier!

We’ve had a lot of fun thrift shopping lately. It’s so nice to find what you’re looking for!

Since we have roughly three months left until Little Miss arrives, we’ve been working on rearranging things to make room for little girl things. We’ve had quite a few lengthy discussions about what would be the best way to organize. The other day, we finally decided to look for a large cabinet with shelves. Stephen figured it would be a great place to put all our linens, especially since they’re stored in random places right now (like in the boys’ dresser).

Yesterday I stopped at a thrift store run by a battered women’s ministry. Their prices on clothing are so good (children’s clothes for $1 to $2 each!), I figured furniture would be reasonably priced. It was.

There was a huge cabinet for $30, but all the furniture was on sale. I was able to buy it for only $20! What a shock – and a fraction of what we thought we’d have to spend. It works perfectly where we placed it in our room and actually frees up space from the steamer trunks that were there before. I’ll try to post pictures later once everything is situated on/in it.

Then today, we stopped by my other favorite thrift store on our way to Walmart. Can you believe the kids and I were out the door this morning before 9:30? I’m still amazed! Stephen needed a couple things for his beekeeping toolbox, which were easily found. I even found a double boiler for only $2.40. It’s small, but should make the work of melting down all our beeswax much easier.

The rest of our finds this morning were clothes for Little Miss. That was my original intent for stopping there, and we found some nice things. Samuel absolutely loves shopping for his little sister – he would find an outfit and ask if we could buy it. A lot of what he picked out was actually what we were looking for, so he was very pleased that we were able to buy it.

It seems like we tend to go thrift shopping in spurts, because it’s been a while since we’ve gone. But the fact that we were able to get so much of what we were looking for was really nice today!