The most delicious day of the year

We celebrated thanksgiving alone this year. I was excited for the challenge of creating the feast, and surprisingly it wasn't too much of a challenge cooking for just the two of us. Our small turkey cooked in just over 1.5 hours and was the best turkey that Alli or I had ever eaten (sorry moms)...it was awesome with its crisp skins and super moist meats. I don't think Alli stuffed her plate full enough. Notice there's no stuffing there? She doesn't like stuffing. I knew she was weird when I married her, but come on who doesn't like stuffing? Luckily I like stuffing enough to finish off a whole box in a few days.
We got a $20 voucher from Alli's work to buy a turkey. We found this 8.5 pound turkey at Walmart for $10, so we were able to use the remaining money to buy the rest of our supplies for the meal. A whole thanksgiving feast for free!
Surprisingly this turkey didn't last as long as we feared it might. We finished off half the meat the next day and then I made turkey noodle soup with the rest the day after that. I also froze the carcass to use to make a luscious base for another soup.
Our favorite parts of the meal were the turkey and this lovely sweet potato casserole unlike any sweet potato casserole you've ever had. Yum! Alli would say that the pumpkin pie I made was her favorite part, but I don't count that since she was so excited to leave for black friday shopping that she never ate the pie until friday morning. I don't know how we forgot about the pie, but we did.
I loved the opportunity to spend so much time with Allison this past week. Although we were running around like crazy most of the weekend, it was nice to have a best friend to spend each thanksgiving memory with.

My Quick Trip

On a whim, I decided to go ahead and hit up Walgreens.. again. There are just too many good deals to pass up. This time, I scored even better, not as much.. but overall, much better. Also this time, the transactions went much smoother and all of my coupons worked. This time, it only took me around 3 hours of planning instead of an entire day. I am pleased.

2 Crest 3d Vivid White Toothpastes, 1 Colgate Total Toothpaste, 1 Lysol Wipes, 1 Woolite Carpet Cleaner, 1 Culturelle, 1 John Frieda Hair Dye, 1 Cortaid Itch Relief Spray, 1 GUM Toothbrush 2 pk, 1 Oral B Tooth Brush

Paid Total: $7.44 out of pocket for $77.47 Worth of Goods

Received $8 in Register Rewards

Will receive rebates for the Lysol, Woolite, and Cortaid equaling $15.47

Technically I was paid $16.06 to take all of that out of the store!

The best part, I paid for all of the goods with a rewards card we received from our Credit Card Rewards Program.

The craziest night of our lives

Happy Black Friday!! Allison takes black friday/thursday seriously. When she saw that Old Navy was giving away an undisclosed amount of free digital cameras, she was determined to get her hands on one. We don't need a new camera, but who can pass up a free camera? After spending all day wednesday planning out her walgreens transactions, she spent a good amount of time yesterday planning out our midnight extravaganza. It went down like this.

We were fortunate enough to have awesome friends who offered to take Louie for the night (yeah, ALL NIGHT!!!), so that allowed some serious deal work between the two of us. I dropped Alli off at Old Navy around 4:30 p.m.--the mall wouldn't open until 12:00 a.m.--to guarantee her a first spot in line (no one else would join her line until 8). Then, I dropped Louie off at her babysitters, went back to check on Alli, played some monopoly deal, and left for Walmart. I got to Walmart around 7--their deals started at 10--and was surprised to see about 100 people already bunched around the games. Luckily, most of them were surrounding the XBox games. I was the 5th person to the PS3 games. By the way there were no lines, it was more of a free-for-all bunch surrounding a pallet full of games.

I have never been so bunched up around so many people in my life! A thousand people, no, a million people filled the area around the pallets and the numbers continued to grow. Around 9 the police arrived to supervise. A lady walked over with a crock pot and coffee makers saying that someone had gone crazy and ripped open the pallet an hour before it was supposed to be opened. The woman speaking was complaining that she had thrown several crock pots in her cart only to have people grab them out. It was absolute chaos.

I've heard stories of people who died in walmart. I never believed it until 9:52 when a roar erupted and the wave of excitement slammed our pallet in the face. It started to the right of me. Someone couldn't wait any longer and ripped open their pallet. As soon as that pallet was exposed everyone in the whole place erupted. Faster than I could even think, I was on the ground, ripping off the wrapping, reaching for the two games I wanted. I may have elbowed a few people out of the way, and yes, I did grab the entire pallet and pull it towards me. I have never been so grateful for my small stature. I grabbed my games (from the floor) and squirmed my way out and directly to the registers. I was the second one to the registers. As I checked out I looked back and saw a giant mass of bodies crawling over bodies, punching and shoving, heard yelling, screaming, and witnessed lots of cameras rolling.

I made my way back to Allison. When I got there the line was probably 100 deep. I got a few jeers for cutting in line, but I didn't care. I had just won a war at Walmart. I let Allison sit in the car for a bit to warm up while I saved her place in line. When she came back I took our sleeping bag and blankies back to the car. The line was now around the building--I have no idea where, or if, it ended. At 11:59 The security guard came to open the door, but he wanted to be sure to open his door right at 12. He stood looking at his watch while we all braced ourselves in excitement. I looked back and saw another mall entrance had been opened. Our door stood still. Finally, the door was unlocked, and my Junior Hight track and field skills were tested. Allison had waited 8 hours for this free camera, we had to win it. I was the first to the Old Navy store.

They gave us wristbands. They told us that if we took it off it was void. The first 56 people with a wristband to make a $40 purchase would get the camera. I grabbed three shirts without thinking, Alli grabbed a few onesies, and I got in line. It was already huge. Allison went back to get more Louie clothes--since we each had wristbands we decided to try for two cameras--and in the rush ripped her wristband. She met me back in line, asked about her ripped wristband and was told that she was out of luck. She was pretty upset. But I reassured her that one camera was enough. We checked out. Got our camera and left the mall. We were out of there by 12:45.

On our way home we got a text from our babysitters. Louie Wasn't sleeping. Should we lie and tell then we'd be out for a while more or should we tell them we were on our way home to get her? We told them we were still at the mall. We slept well last night. At 8 this morning we picked up Louie.

Was it worth it? We've already started planning for next year. And, by the way, anyone want a camera for $40?

THANK YOU WALGREENS

We love Walgreens and as many of you know, we recently undertook our biggest couponing trip ever! It felt like Christmas morning as a child, we prepared all day yesterday figuring out our transactions and sorting our coupons, I couldn't even sleep last night. We came up with quite the extensive list of items. Walgreens is the hardest store to plan coupons for, but also the most rewarding. Here is our haul!

2 Sparkling Grape juices, 6 Tuf Paper Towels, 2 Bic Flex Razors 3 pk, 2 Scunci Hair Bands, 1 Dentek Floss Picks, 1 GUM toothbrush 2 pk, 1 Colgate Toothbrush, 2 Secret Body Sprays, 1 Cortaid, 1 PreparationH, 1 Sodium Naproxen, 1 Crest Toothpaste, 1 Colgate Toothpaste, 2 Right Guard Deodarants, 1 Chia Flax Seeds, 1 Thermacare, 2 Gillete shaving gels, 1 Advil PM, 1 Cottonelle 12 pk, 1 Revlon Lip Gloss

Just to throw out a quick explanation, Walgreens gives out register rewards (RR's), which can be used for anything in the store. So for example, a deal might be buy 2 colgate toothpastes for 6 dollars and receive $4 back in RR's. Then you do that deal coupled with 2 manufacturer coupons and in the end you get it for free. I know what you're thinking though, you technically paid $4 out of pocket. That is why it is so important to organize your transactions. Ok, here is our story!

We had it so nicely planned out to where we would pay around $15 and receive around $16 back in RR's to use on future purchases. However, things didn't quite go as planned. I knew you couldn't use a certain company's RR's (like P&G) to buy another of that same company's product, but I didn't know that if you bought two of the same deals in one transaction, you only get the deal on the cheaper of the two. This resulted in our first transaction being twice as much as we had planned.. we were nervous. This of course completely ruined our second transaction and again we paid twice as much. In the end though, we returned two items and ended up coming out making around the same amount, but missed out on two products.

In the end: We paid total $16.49 out of pocket for $163.64 worth of product

We got 4 free movie rentals from Redbox

We have $14 in RR's left for our next purchase (you could say we paid $2.49 for all of that stuff)

We plan to use our RR's to buy 4 products that we have mail-in rebates for and then get all of our $14RR money back in pocket!!!! All I can say is AWESOME!

Sweet baby Lou

Louie had been laughing for a good 5 minutes before I finally decided to catch her laugh on camera. Sorry for the weird camera shot; as soon as Louie sees a camera she becomes camera shy, so I had to catch her secretively. The video below is proof of Louie's camera-shyness.

As requested

A few people have asked for proof of Louie's crawling abilities. Here it is. She was a little camera shy, but I finally got this clip of her chasing after a few things she's not allowed to have. I will say, she has gotten much better at crawling the last few days. She's not quite as funny looking, but still looks a bit like a gimp dragging her limbs along.

After two weeks of rolling along to her various curiosities, Louie has now moved on. See, the problem with rolling is that it's hard to go straight forward--and it can hurt the head sometimes. So now little Lou has decided to give crawling a go. To be honest, it's not much of a crawl--with legs kicking, arms flailing, bum wagging in the air, and lots of grunting--but don't tell Louie. She's the most determined little girl in the world. It may take her a few minutes, but if she wants something bad enough she'll find her way to it. Usually the things she wants are the things she's not allowed to have (she loves the sound and taste of crinkled coupons), but that makes her just like her mom.