Last Week's Thrifty Moves

A new month and another busy week at our place.  Hope you all had a wonderful Halloween and first week of November.  Yes, November!  Can you believe it?!

The first quarter of school is complete and it was a week of parent teacher conferences.  I managed to get my youngest one's all done on Tuesday and the oldest's on Thursday.  I am happy to report they are doing fabulous!

I stopped into Dollar Tree to pick up some of their generic Ziploc bags and restock my supply.  While there I perused the grocery aisle and scored quite a few items I was low on in my pantry.  I was really happy to find applesauce, sliced pineapple, canned pumpkin (yippee!), molasses and candied cherries for making thumbprint cookies.

I also grabbed a couple bags of rice and five bags of black beans ($5 stock up item) to add to my stockpile.  They had a new supply of my favorite degreaser cleaner so I grabbed a bottle of that too.  Last time I was there they were out of it.  My oldest daughter wanted to try their pudding cups so we got a package of those too.

I also found four nice martini glasses.  I decided to splurge on those since we are planning an upcoming cocktail party quite soon and I am serving martinis.  These are sturdier than some of the others I've seen so I imagine they should hold up well.

The oldest and I made a trip to Cash & Carry to stock up on 80% lean ground beef that was on sale for $1.85 a pound!  Best price I've seen in ages so I bought 20 pounds.  The youngest one and I divided it up and wrapped it for the freezer.  We us ed some of the ground beef to make a pot of beanless chili, which is her preference, and got it divided into containers for the freezer.

I also picked up two bags of grated cheese, a container of grated parmesan and stocked up on potatoes and onions.  I shared some of the potatoes and onions with a friend.

I veered off course from our meal plan a bit to test a new recipe I am quite excited about.  I think it needs a little tweaking still so I'll probably make it again and fine tune it.  Once it passes muster I'll be sure to share it with all of you.

Another blogger had a link on her site for really cute pillow covers with cute sayings on them over at Amazon.  They were less than $3 a pop and free shipping.  I decided to go ahead and spring for those for the girls.  I plan to make an 18" square pillow form for each one and then I'll add them to my Christmas gift stash as an extra.  They will be super excited as they love pillows and these are so perfect for them.  I'm super excited to be able to get them an extra gift and at such a good price.  They have tons of different ones including Christmas designs.

While on Amazon I checked and found they had dropped the price of my old man kitty's special diet cat food so I added a case of that to my order too.  That Science Diet stuff is so expensive.  Anytime I can find it on sale I snap it up.

My youngest daughter thrilled me to death Friday morning when she told me she wanted to take up playing the viola as a second instrument.  We have been talking about it off and on.  Now purchasing a new viola (her school has no extra violas) is an unexpected and far from thrifty purchase, however I was able to soften the blow considerably by getting one from a music shop in another town (they shipped it overnight for free) and putting it on my PayPal account so I can pay for it over the next six months interest free.

Friday evening I cut out my daughters new orchestra dress.  Now all I have to do is sew it together.  No biggie, right?

Saturday morning my oldest marched in the Veteran's Day Parade downtown with her high school band.  Afterwards the girl's grandparents took us out to lunch to celebrate the end of marching band and their excellent report cards.  It was the perfect way to wrap up the week.

How was your thrifty week?