CVS Score

Some of you may know that I am a couponer.  I'm not one of those crazy people that clear off shelves and buy 20 of one item, but I do stockpile up on some items that I know we will use, such as cereal, soups, toothpaste, etc.  I use a couple websites to match up coupons with sales each week.  My favorite is www.hip2save.com.

The week of Thanksgiving, CVS had some awesome deals.  I was able to get all of the following for $3.36!

(Yes, there are a few things that I don't need in this pile, such as the glucose tester, but I made $10 off of this, which I then used to basically pay for the soda.)

This was one of my better trips.  I can usually do very well the week of Thanksgiving.  Probably one of my top 5 trips in the almost 2 years I have been couponing.

Thanksgiving weekend

For Thanksgiving this year, as we often do, we went to my parents' house.  The day before Thanksgiving, my mom had Katelyn over to do a craft.  They made place-cards for each person who would be at Thanksgiving.  They also made a couple of pinecone Turkeys.

Katelyn's placecard turkey.

On Thanksgiving day, I tried to do a couple of activities with Katelyn.  Inspired by Pinterest, I tried to have her make a thumbprint turkey - she was just more interested in making thumbprints all over the page in random patterns and colors.  We also made a scavenger hunt turkey.  The girls enjoyed looking for the feathers and I kept the pieces and plan to use it again in future years.

This is from the blog I got the idea from (http://thecharmedmom.com/2010/11/thanksgiving-craft-fingerprint-turkey-cards.html), not mine as I forgot to take a picture.

I made a turkey very similar to this one and then Katelyn hunted for the feathers.  Pic from http://www.notimeforflashcards.com/2012/11/turkey-feather-hunt-gross-motor-game.html.

It is so fun now that she is getting older and can participate in these types of things.

I, of course, spent most of Black Friday shopping.  My mom and I met up at 5:15AM and I didn't get home until about 2:30.  Fun times!

On Saturday morning, Kyle & I dropped the kids off at my parents and we headed down to San Diego.  We took our bikes along and biked around Coronado.  We stayed in the Gaslamp District, which was pretty interesting, although we aren't too into the bar scene, so after dinner, we went to the movies and saw 'Lincoln'.  The next day we ate an AWESOME breakfast at a local restaurant.  I wish I had taken a picture of Kyle's breakfast.  It was a massive cinnamon pecan pancake thing.  Even he couldn't finish it.  We might be making future trips to San Diego just for breakfast.  After breakfast we headed to Old Town for a couple hours and then headed home to pick up the girls.

We had a great Holiday weekend. 

School Harvest Festival

This fall, my Aunt Lisa, who is a teacher, invited us to go with her to the school's annual Harvest Festival.  This takes place at my high school and was the festival I went to almost every year growing up.  It was Katelyn's first experience with this type of environment.  She had a lot of fun playing the games with Aunt Lisa, and of course playing in the bounce house.  Brooklyn mostly hung out in the stroller, but I am looking forward to next year, when she can be a little more involved.

Carnival Games!

Jumping in the toddler jumper/obstacle course.  I had a hard time getting her out of it. :-)

Thanks for inviting us to come along with you Aunt Lisa!

Halloween 2012

Ok.  So, I think we can establish that I'm not very timely at publishing my blogs.  It has now been well over a month and one major holiday since Halloween.  However, in an attempt to keep things in some semblance of order, and because my kids were way too cute to pass it up altogether, I am still going to post about our Halloween.

Halloween was on a Wednesday this year, so on Monday night, we carved our pumpkins.  We carved them in the garage this year, which worked out a lot better than in our kitchen last year.  It was a lot of fun because the girls both were able to help as it was on the floor.  They both loved to help too.  Brooklyn thought she was in charge of the big spoon and wanted to scoop out the seeds with me.  We bought one big 'family' pumpkin and the girls each had a smaller pumpkin (see the previous post on the pumpkin patch).  Katelyn enjoyed using the marker and drawing pictures on hers while we were working on the details of the big pumpkin.

Tips that worked well for us to remember next year:
1.)  Use a washable marker to draw the face as it wiped off really easily
2.)  When cutting out the top, include a large section of the back so it is easy to scoop seeds out.

Supervising Daddy

Scooping out the seeds.  Big Helpers.

The finished product (and the two small pumpkins).

On the evening of Halloween, we first took the girls over to my parents for their first trick-or-treat experience.  Then we had a couple of friends over with their kids, so it was fun watching 4 toddlers walk around our neighborhood.  It was also a little comical.  Katelyn would usually be the first to get the candy, but then didn't want to clear out of the way and let the other kids get close.  Brooklyn tried multiple times to walk into the houses when the doors were open.  We have never been home on Halloween before (even though this was our fourth year in our house), and it was interesting to see who came around to our house.  There aren't too many trick-or-treaters in our neighborhood.

I chose these costumes because Katelyn has been called 'Lady Bug' since she was born and Brooklyn is often called 'B(ee)'.  I love my little girls.