This week the sales were measly…at best. Sadly, we are out of a lot of things. Poor planning, on my part, has left us sans our usual hearty stash of Juicy Juice and Madison has had to resort to soy milk and water to accompany her meals; honestly, that’s not a bad thing in my book. Last week, of course, Juicy Juice was BOGO at Publix, but I was too caught up in searching for my Dove’s Men’s Body Wash that I forgot the essentials. We’ll be munching on bread crumbs, and begging on the corner with a tin can, but hubby is going to be squeaky clean with an extra sporty scent.

It’s crazy when you won’t pay full price for something. I take it as a sign that I am getting older and wiser. I pray that I’m not teetering that line of penny-pinching insanity, like those old women that count their change out at the cash register…penny by penny…by penny.  Walmart, get ready. Find me a change purse and call me “Bessie”…by George, you’ll be lucky if I don’t throw my dentures at you in a fit over an expired  25-cent off coupon for Polident. I keep repeating the nursery rhyme, “Old Mother Hubbard went to the cupboard…” Funny enough, the chihuahuas are low on pup chow as well.

Although the pantry is thinner than the hair on Kojak’s head, I did manage to find a steal today. Not the kind of steal like the other day, when I came home from Target and realized I had accidentally brought home the bright red hand basket, but a kinder and less “OMG the pregnant lady is going to go to jail” find. Yes, run…run I tell you…if you are looking for a stroller, to Walmart. There you might be blessed with a $220 Graco Travel System (Wyndham) for a single Benjamin. (That’s Franklin by the way, not a loaded paint brush and a fantastic swirl of color.)

Sure the stroller is a lovely shade of baby blue with a bit of brown, but one of the names we are considering is “Peyton Barret” AND Madison is protesting to name her little sis, “Apple Cocoa”. Seemingly it all kind of flows. Yes, the nursery will probably be overdone in some nauseating Pepto Bismol pink to overcompensate. Poor kid. Obviously I’m not one of those moms that sticks to a color scheme for life.

Although it’s only Day …ahem… Five… I feel like it’s been about a month. You can laugh if you have caught onto my confusion the irony. The more I get into coupon queening and living without on the edge, the more I realize that the moola can, and has gone, to better places. For instance, today we received our tickets to Madison’s school annual “Sock Hop Dance”. All three of us are going AND Madison has a nifty and not-so-thrifty sock hop skirt. If it weren’t for finding 99 cent/lb for grapes (Target) and a few other extraordinary buys, come Friday we would have been cutting our own rug…at home…in sweats. So much for doing the swim and the mashed potato, we’d be lucky if Mommy didn’t pop (notice that’s NOT double “O’s”) and Daddy didn’t slip a disk. Of course, now there’s a public concern.

So, to all those cheap thrifty Moms out there, with scissors in hand and a smirk on your face, don’t despair if your kid resembles a shriveled grape and is lacking 100% of their vitamin C this week.  After all, the california raisins made it big. Or at least that’s what I keep telling myself…