BROOKIE IS 1!!!!!

My baby girl turned 1 today! I am a little sad, but only because she isn't the tiny little bundle that I can sit and rock all day. But I am thrilled that I am getting to experience all the new things she learns each and every day. Last night I was looking at a picture of me holding her shortly after she was born and I just broke out into tears. How sad is that? Oh well...I'm fine now. LOL
We are having her birthday party Saturday for friends and family but decided to do a little cake for her tonight. It was great. She was sooooo funny. I will leave you with a few pics.

For some reason they are in reverse order, but you get the gist!

Some deals I found at Save-A-Lot

Just got back from doing a little grocery shopping and thought I would share some deals I found.
The Fresh Express salad mixes are on sale for .89. There are .50 peelies on them making them .49 for a nice dinner salad.

I'm usually not too keen on buying my meat from there but we're running pretty low on cash right now so I must make sacrifices. Anywho, they had several packs of pork chops, pork steak, and pork roasts with 1 and 2 dollar off coupons on them...I spent a total of 38.00 and got about 5 packages of pretty decent meat in there.

They also had their store brand of real butter (salted) for 1.99....not too bad.

Don't forget you can go to their website here and sign up for the Smart Shopper club and get a $5 off $20 purchase. I didn't get to print mine off today because my printer is messed up but still not a bad deal!

Happy Shopping!

It's been awhile

HI!!! I'm back. We have been having some financial difficulties as of late and our internet was shut off for awhile. But we're back up and running! Things are nowhere near where we need to be but we are slowly & surely getting there and we have faith that God will provide for us. I wanted to share with you one of my favorite money saving tips today. For about the last 5 months I have been making my own laundry detergent. Now I was very skeptical the first time I heard about this because we are die hard Tide fans :) But we have been very pleased and in fact I personally like it BETTER than Tide. (shh...don't tell my husband) The recipe is as follows:



Gather these first:

5 gallon bucket with lid

Borax

Washing soda (not baking)

1 bar of soap (we have been using Dove & Dial some people like Fels-Naptha, it's really up to you and your preferences)



Fill your bucket with 3 gallons of water then stir in 2 cups of Borax and 2 cups of the Washing soda.
Grate your bar of soap then in a saucepan dissolve it. To melt the soap fill the saucepan with 2-3 cups of water and melt it in that (just don't let it boil because it will burn the soap).
When your soap is dissolved pour that into your bucket and mix everything together. Now fill the rest of the bucket up with water and presto! You've got yourself some laundry soap!
My suggestion for easier use is to keep an old detergent container on hand and pour your mixture in there.
Also, you may want to give the bottle a little shake before using to make sure some of the stuff didn't settle to the bottom. Oh, and this will get a gel-like consistency...that is fine.
You won't see many suds either because this is a very low sudsing mixture, which also means it works great in high effeciency machines, which we have.
Let me know how it works for you!