super cool blessing in the shape of a deal

ok, you know when you find a good deal and you get super giddy about it and want to tell the world? well, i'm giddy world!!!

so, if you live in michigan--or anywhere in the midwest, or anywhere in america-- and if you have a young family--or if you're newly married, or if you are single, or if you are alive and breathing-- you know that right now, budgets are tight-- did i miss anyone that has a tight budget right now? anyone? anyone? bottom line-- if you're not a billionaire, you get my point!

anywho....

we had some cashola set aside for baby megan's room. we already have the furniture, so, really all we needed was paint and bedding. not a prob, bob! we knew the paint and "stuff" for fixing the room would be our biggest expense. so nathan goes out today to find the paint. he's searching lowe's with connor to find the cheapest rollers, brushes, etc. that we would need. and if you know nathan he loves to paint, but he loves to paint with the good stuff. but this time he was agonizing over buying the cheap stuff knowing how fast everything adds up. finally, he decided and went to pick up the gallon of pink paint he needed. one of his favorite things to do at lowe's is check out the clearance items and the returned paint. you never know what you'll find. well, it's a good thing he checked! he was scanning and saw a can that looked like a very close pink to the one we had chosen. he had the lady check and found out that it was a different brand but it was the same exact color! what a special treat! $8 for a gallon!! unbelievable. so then he asked her to mix a quart of the darker accent pink we had chosen while he looked around at some other fun stuff. when he went back to get it, she pulled out a gallon sized can.... oh, boy. he told her that there was a mistake and he only wanted a quart. she said, no problem. she would charge him for a quart and he could just take it as is. so he got what would have cost us in the neighborhood of $50-60 for only $21!! so now, i get to do way more accenting in the room which is what i really wanted to do in the first place!

oh, wait, there's more! yesterday b/c of daylight savings we didn't give connor a nap. we figured if we kept him up and put him to bed early the transition would be a little easier on him. (and yes, btw it worked marvelously.) we told him that he at least had to have some quiet reading time on his bed....amazingly, that worked out well. i didn't know how he would do with it, but he read there for an hour with only one attempt at escaping. (the little bum told me he had to go potty. he's no dummy. he knows that's the one thing i WANT him to tell me.) right about the time he was getting tired enough to fall asleep, we decided to take him up to the hill and walk around target. that way he'd get some wiggles out, and a nice change of scenery would wake him up enough to make it the rest of the night. plus, he loves to get a pop and popcorn up there.

right before we left nathan checked the mail. in it was a target baby catalog. on the back of the baby catalog was a coupon. the coupon said, "start a target baby registry and get a $20 gift card". ....... uh.... OK! i figured we'd have to wait 6 weeks until they mailed it to us.... nope! we set up a registry at the kiosk, took the coupon to the customer service counter and the lady handed us a $20 gift card!!! can life get any better??? so, mom.... there's a registry with some cute baby clothes at target! haha! just kidding. i'm not asking for gifts. actually, nathan had WAY too much fun with the little scanner..... as any man would. he was zapping things left and right. but i did find some cute baby clothes and bedding through the process and i'll be watching them online to see when they are on clearance.

so there i was skipping through target with $20 burning a hole in my pocket. as we were checking out the cute pink girly clothes, nathan spotted a booster seat that we've been eyeing on ebay. it's the kind that connor will be able to grow with since it turns into the backless booster for older kids. and since we had recently heard about michigan trying to pass some law about kids car boosters we have been checking them out. connor got hope's old booster, but it's a one piece so later on, we thought we'd have to buy the backless booster anyway. we originally thought the booster we wanted was in the $60 range, so we were super thankful that we had hope's b/c, well..... it was free, hello? when we looked at target we found out it was only $40! and the backless version was $20.... ok, so do the math. we were going to have to buy the $20 booster for connor later, but instead we got the $40 brand spankin' new one for only $20 b/c of the gift card! and by the time connor's out of it baby megan will be able to use it which is fabulous b/c i am sure that hope's old seat wouldn't have made it much past connor's usage.


so we had a seriously cool weekend of deals and steals. i am so thankful for the little blessings that God sends our way. such a little thing, but i get so tickled when He shows us how much He cares and controls all things.

here's a video of connor helping with the paint. the office was a textured tan, so nathan did a plain white primer to smooth out the texture..... connor was pumped that he got to help.