Organic Cotton Basics!

While doing a little pre-vacation shopping, Bill and I stumbled into an H&M store and checked out the kids basic cotton clothing line.  We were surprised to see that much of the basic line is actually organic cotton, and the prices were very reasonable (especially compared to similar options at Hanna Andersson)!  If you've read this post, you know we always keep our eyes peeled for organic cotton clothing:)!

Here are a few of the pieces that we picked up for Miss Lucky:

This is Lucky's traveling outfit, because it's super comfy for long plane rides!!  The dress was $10 and the leggings were $6.

Here's another comfortable combo that could be used as pajamas or play wear.  The tank tops were $3.50 each and came in a two pack.  The leggings were $6.

And a few for Mister Charm:

The orange striped shirt was $6 and the short sleeve shirts were sold in a two pack for $10.

Please note that not all of these items were 100% cotton.  The leggings contain 5% elastane in addition to 95% organic cotton.  Charm's two short sleeve t-shirts contain 3% viscose in addition to 97% organic cotton.  Lucky's dress and tank tops are 100% organic cotton, along with Charm's orange striped shirt.

I'm probably late to the game on this find, but I thought I'd share anyway:)!!  I hope you all have a fantastic weekend, and Happy St. Patrick's Day!!

P.S. Organic cotton sheets are on sale at Target this week and there is a $5 off $40 Threshold purchase coupon that you could use as well for a super duper awesome deal!!  Also, these poufs are on sale for $30 (down from $50):

And that concludes this random post. 

IKEA Deal-for-Ya (Target and JCPenney too!)

One of the ideas I'm toying with for the New Year is focusing my blog a bit more on 'deals' that I find.  When I first started this blog, I posted about our grocery deals and other random things that I'd find along the way.  While grocery shopping deals have been sparse since our transition to organic eating, I still love deal shopping, especially when it comes to educational products, toys, games and clothing for kids.   I'm also thinking about starting a new blog that would focus on kids more since Sunshine On the Inside has been more about home decorating and healthy lifestyle as of late.   I'd want to write these deal posts in a timely manner so that others could benefit from my 'finds'.  Until I make a decision and/or set up a brand new blog, I'm just going to post everything here!

This IKEA deal may be store specific, but when Lucky, Charm and I headed to our local IKEA (Bloomington, MN) yesterday, we stumbled upon these finger puppets, which were normally $1 each on sale for 10 cents each!!

We also found these 'circus hats' on sale for 49 cents each (down from $3.99 each):

Target online toy clearance is in full swing too!  Here are a few fun toys that I found in the Target Clearance Toy section online.  (Locally, our retail stores have 30-50% off toys right now but they should be marked down to 70% off in the very near future.)

Maxim Everearth Ramp

$11.21 (Regularly $18.69)

Maxim Kitchen

$47.48 (Regularly $94.99)

Maxim Puzzle

$10.78 (Reg $17.99)

Also JCPenney is having a big clearance toy sale right now.

Captain Hook's Closet of Hooks

$5 (Regularly $20)

National Geographic View Camera

$10 (Regularly $40)

There are lots and lots of deals on JCPenney's site, and you can choose 'site to store' shipping for free shipping!

Happy Shopping!:)

Easter Take Two

Aunt Kiki and Cici are here for a long weekend, and we're having a blast celebrating a belated Easter!  We made footprint Easter Bunnies:

Cici's

Lucky's

Charm's

It was hard to get a picture with them all looking my way:).

We did a little shopping this weekend too:

If you liked the black and white striped Olin rug that I posted about in our front room, you may want to check out Home Goods where I stumbled upon a huge pile of flat woven rugs that are almost identical to the Olin rug.  They were available in black and white, grey and white, and several other multi-colored options.  Prices were fantastic at $7.99 for the 2' x 3', $12.99 for the 30" x 50", $29.99 for the 4' x 6' and $49.99 for the 5' x 8'.  

Also, Gymboree had a fantastic sale going on.  I picked up several pieces including this sweater dress (the picture doesn't do it justice!).  The dress was on clearance for $9.49, down from $43.95, and since an additional 25% off was taken from the lowest sale price for clearance items, and I had a coupon for my purchase as well, my cost for the dress was $3.78 (over 90% off)!  Lucky will get a ton of wear out of this next winter.  I heart deal shopping!!  

I hope you all had a nice weekend, too!

"Spring Break" Check In

Our Easter was really fun, although Aunt Kiki and Baby C weren't able to visit because of illness.  Big bummer, BUT they plan to come in a week and a half.  Yes!!  We can't wait.

After church on Sunday, we made a family trip to Home Depot to pick up a few things.  Bill thought the kids were a little overdressed.  I thought they looked perfect:), and I happened to have my camera in my purse so here are some pictures:

Later in the day, Bill read the Hunger Games, while Lucky played with Play-Doh and Charm re-enacted 'Toy Story':

This view was mine for a good chunk of Sunday.  And Monday.  And Tuesday, while I attended to a little continuing education matter than needed to be taken care of:

Luckily, I found a great website with a ton of free CE courses available, so it was just a matter of putting in some time to keep my pharmacist license current for another couple of years.  Now, I can focus on other things like cleaning out drawers and closets in preparation for our big garage sale coming up next month.  It's time to unload!!

I did sneak in some shopping this past weekend, as well.  (I know, the irony, right??  Buying when I should be garage sale pricing:))  I stopped at Goodwill.  I haven't been there in forever, but I thought I'd make a quick stop on my way home from picking up a few Target snacks.  One of the snacks was Alden's Organic Ice Cream, which I love, so I had about 2.5 minutes to go in and get out of GW so there wouldn't be a milk shake in my car when I returned.

Here is what I snatched in my 5 minute raid of Goodwill:

Brand New Zipfy Sled.  We own a red one already that I bought on super clearance at Target last year for about $8.  Now Lucky and Charm each have a Mini Luge.

You can't beat $2.99 for a brand new sled that retails for $35.  My Goodwill store had at least 30 of these on the day I was there.

Brand New 9 Foot Tilting Umbrella that was originally sold at Target.  We knew about one week after purchasing the umbrella that I talked about in this post last year, that we made a mistake.  It didn't tilt, so unless we used the table at high noon, it didn't help create much shade for us around the table.  We've been looking for a new umbrella for awhile now.  A week ago, Bill had this exact umbrella in his cart at Target.  It was $75, and I told him to wait a bit for me to do a little 'research' (aka find a coupon or a sale or something).

$24.99.  There were several of these umbrellas at Goodwill too.  Brand new.  Never been opened.  Happy Day!

Next up was this cute little gold chevron box that I had purchased earlier in the week for $6 on clearance at Target.  The one I found at Goodwill was brand new and was marked $2.99 (originally $19.99), so my earlier purchase went into my 'return' basket in the mudroom.  I go to Target often enough that $3 is worth it to me!

Finally, I found this stool for $2.99 which will be fun and easy to redo with a little paint and fabric.

And during a quick Sam's Club stop this week, I found this genuine sheepskin rug for $14.91 (originally $39). 

And now, I'll be returning to my spring break.  I'll be back next week with something fun, I hope:)!  Have a great week!

Let's Talk about Christmas Cards

Christmas cards are truly so much fun to make, to send and to receive.  They can also get pretty expensive if you're not careful and if you don't plan ahead.  For the last few years, we've found ourselves purchasing our Christmas Cards at Walmart about 10 days before Christmas.  They provide 1 hour service and the quality is good.

We need about 70 cards every year, and we typically pay $0.44 per 4" x 8" card plus $0.44 per stamp to mail them.  Our typical cost to send Christmas cards every year comes out to about $62.  Whoa.  (Side note:  I've been wanting to purchase 5" x 7" card stock Christmas cards for the longest time, but even on Walmart photo paper, a 5" x 7" card is almost twice the cost of a 4" x 8" card.  We've never ordered 5" x 7".  Enter sad face here.)

To reduce some of this cost, we've considered making a simple bordered picture from Walmart and including it in a paper card.  Bordered pictures are substantially less expensive than the actual Christmas Card option at Walmart, and range in price from $0.09 to $0.19 each depending on if the photos are picked up in store or shipped...but then we'd want to buy an additional paper card as well which brings the cost back up.

This year, I decided that I would keep my eyes peeled for a good online Christmas Card deal, and when I came across this one from Card Store last Saturday, we jumped on it!  I found the deal on Hip2Save, one of my very favorite coupon and deal shopping sites.  Basically, everything at Card Store was on sale for 70% off and included free shipping, free address printing, and free postage!  We ordered up a 5" x 7" flat card stock photo card that came in at $29.31 and included 70 cards, addressed envelopes and stamps.  Since 70 stamps would cost $30.80 alone, this card deal is a steal!

I'll be honest, I was a little nervous about what would show up at our door and how long it would take to receive our cards, but last night a little box arrived that contained these:

I'm ecstatic!  They are addressed and stamped!  We just have to stuff them and plop them in the mail!  (Side note: Card Store is happy to stuff them and mail them to your recipients for you, if you desire.  Personally, I don't mind stuffing them and mailing them myself, because I'm sure they are all going out that way!)

Other things of note:

*Bill was the designer of our card this year.  The card is a compilation of all the 'bad' Christmas Card photos we attempted to take this year, and the card reads, "We Tried!"  Bill's one funny man.  I know he's funny because sometimes he laughs at his own jokes:).

*I hand entered all of the addresses into Card Store's website.  We keep our card recipient list in an Excel file that I use to print labels every year (except this year!).  Apparently, there is a way to upload the Excel file onto Card Store's website.  That would have been a big time saver!

*We did not buy the cheapest card available at Card Store.  The 4" x 8" are cheaper, and people have commented at Hip2Save that they were able to purchase 50 stamped and addressed cards for $14.  Insanity!

*As for the quality, we got the basic 5" x 7" finish which is good, not great.  Also, some of the ink from addressing the envelopes is a little smeared in places.  For the money, though, you cannot go wrong, unless you are a super perfectionist, which I used to be, but now I'm not.  Life is too short.

*Card Store is offering different discounts every day.  As I write this post (Thursday Night), they are offering 60% off.  When we placed our order, the site was offering 70% off.

*We placed our order at 5pm Saturday night and received our order Thursday, so it took about 4 business days.

*Finally, this purchase is definitely a nearly $30 zinger on our  'No Spend December' Goal, but Christmas Cards are a necessity, right:)?  Perhaps I picked a bad month to try to be ultra frugal.

Has anyone else found a good deal on Christmas Cards?  Does anyone send e-cards?  I'll be back later this afternoon to show you an idea for displaying Christmas Cards now that they are rolling in!

Weekend Review: The Good, The Bad, and The Retail Therapy:)

This weekend started rough.  While taking pictures of our fall front porch, my camera displayed an error message pertaining to the need to reformat my SD card.  You know, the same SD card that has nearly 8 GB of family and blog pictures on it that I've never backed up on a computer.  It's the SD card that I've been using since mid-late August.  Two months of photos = hundreds and hundreds of images.  The pictures I worried about most were the pumpkin picking images, Lucky's birthday photos, Fall fun pictures at Gram and Gramps.  The videos of the kids through this time.  Ahhh!!

I got all panicked when I read the error message and my hands got fumbly and then my camera hit the concrete and broke.  I didn't mind having a broken camera (Even though I have a nice Canon DSLR, I predominantly use a Nikon Coolpix camera that we picked up a couple years ago for about $50 or so on sale.), as long as I got those pictures back.  I stayed up until 1 a.m. researching and downloading several free SD Card Recovery Programs to no avail.  Images = Gonezo.

In terms of blogging, usually this loss wouldn't be too big of a deal because I blog in real time.  I complete a project and blog about it within a few days of completing the project.  As I've posted here and here, however, this particular time was different.  We have so many projects that we've just wrapped up that I could write blog posts for at least a month.  Maybe more.  Now, many of those posts will not have proper 'before' images.  Insert huge sad face here.  I'll be doing some digging for 'before' pictures on older photo files, BUT that's going to take time.

Let me wrap this whole thing up for you with some lessons I learned regarding this experience:

1.  Always back up photos at least weekly.  I hadn't been doing this because our desktop computer is spotty at reading photo cards, and I wrongly assumed that my net book didn't have enough memory to handle all those images.  My computer savvy husband has recently informed me otherwise.  ***IF you have important pictures on your camera card, stop reading this post and back up your pictures NOW!!  You can thank me later:).

2.  TGFB = Thank Goodness For Blogging.  I use the best images in my opinion for the blog, so I have lots of my favorite pictures saved on my blog.  My blog, also got backed up on Friday as well.  I'll be spending time this week copying over pictures from the blog to my computer picture folder as well.  I figure the more places I save them, the better.

Now here's a question for you.  What would you do at 1 a.m. after learning that 2 months of important pictures have been erased?  Want to know what I did?  I engaged in some good old fashioned retail therapy.  I don't really support shopping as a form of a distraction, but I think lots of people do it, myself included.  I didn't need to shop for a new camera since I was able to fix mine with duct tape (what can't that stuff do?), but I did give myself a budget of $15 so I wouldn't get carried away.

Here's what I bought:

I used a coupon code found on this post and scored a FREE (free shipping too!) Veggie Tales DVD.

via

I also did this deal and scored the sweater I was eyeing at Target plus a pair of jeans for $2 less than the sweater cost alone at the store.  My total = $13.  And that includes shipping to my home!

via

Total: $13 for a DVD, pair of jeans and sweater all shipped to my home!  Not bad.

As for the rest of the weekend, we were busy!  We finished up our very last painting projects, and we brought in lots of new furniture.  We rearranged rooms and spaces.  

We had a family movie night with pizza!  (No pictures of this because I was still trying to recover my images at this point.  The kids were being so cute though!)

We shopped for our Halloween Costumes and spent time putting them together....we're almost done:

We finally finished up caulking our front step using concrete caulk (icky stuff) and sand to mask the grey caulk color:

We gathered doll house gear and we'll start work on it soon:

We went on a date night to a wonderful new restaurant and enjoyed calamari and beer.  We made our typical post date trip to Target and found these Missoni boots on clearance for $6.26 (75% off):

Missoni clearance is starting!  I think these boots went early and fast because they were marked 'online only' on the clearance tag.  I'm betting 'online only' items that were returned at the store are clearing out now.  I expect more clearance soon, although after reading this post, I'll be waiting for 75% off prices before I consider buying much of anything else from the line.  

And we made some bones using this recipe from Disney Family Fun Magazine:

And these ingredients:

Mini marshmallows, pretzel sticks and white melting chips (found at Walmart in the Halloween section)

Here is what we gobbled up:

These may be our second round of bones.  The salty-sweet combo is great (especially when frozen) and we gobbled up our first batch.  The pictures I took of our first batch got gobbled up during my 8 GB photo card disaster, so we used the opportunity to try it again!  They were just as good the second time.  Gobble.  Gobble.  Can you tell I'm looking forward to turkey day festivities?

All in all, a pretty good weekend!  Hope you all had a great weekend too!  

P.S. Bill is pretty excited about this:

Our garage is for cars again!  Just in time for the cold!!

I Decided to Invest in Gold

Not long ago, I was mailed this coupon from Coldwater Creek with a letter stating that the company had recently undergone a shift for the better.  The coupon was good for $25 off any purchase:

I browsed through the catalog that was attached to the coupon and found this pillow for $29.95:

I thought I would walk in, pay $5 for the pillow and then walk out, but when I got there I didn't love the pillow.  It was just okay and $5 is $5.  So then I found this elephant for $29.95:

I thought it would be adorable in Charm's room.  But then I decided it might be too 'baby' for him.  Then, I found this collection of giraffes in 3 sizes and priced from $19.95 to $29.95:

I really liked them, but I would only wanted to get one to maximize the coupon, and I preferred the grouped look.

I looked some more and found this book for $24.95:

I loved this book and considered framing several of the pages for artwork.  The illustrations are beautiful and the quotes are wonderful!

I also found this hand hammered gold bracelet (made of brass) originally $199.95.

It was marked $59.99 with a red tag indicating the price would be discounted another 40% off at the register = $35.99 after discount.  

I went back and forth between buying the book or the bracelet.  Book or bracelet.  The book would be free. The $200 bracelet would cost $11.  

Here's what I got:

I splurged on the bracelet!  I decided I could keep an eye on Amazon for the book to go on sale, but I probably wouldn't stumble upon this good of a deal on a beautiful bracelet for a long time!  I may never take it off!  

Here's my receipt for this crazy good deal:

Thank you for the coupon, Coldwater Creek!!