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Halloween Treat Gift Giving Supplies at Walmart

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For all you crafty and homemaking treat types, there is a TON of good stuff at Walmart this year. Much better then last year for sure. They have all kinds treat bags, buckets, decorating kits, sprinkles, cookie cutters and much more.

Each box had ideas and recipes on them to make it easier to come up with your own treats.

I could have spent all day in this section and bought most of it! Thank goodness I was with Paul who was on a mission for ONLY what we needed….

Most of it is Wilton brand, but there were a few others and some Great Value options. We picked a few things up today and I made some Halloween treats with the kids that I will post a little later on.

Between coupons and price matching, making treats for your kids classes, people at church and neighbors should not cost you a fortune.

Treat bags started at $.97 and up. Sprinkles were $2.57 and up to $4.88.

How to make a Harry Potter Wand

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We spent the weekend being crafty. My kids are on a BIG Harry Potter kick, about 5 years behind the times, but loving it none the less. We watched most of the movies in the car on the way to and from California and all over Arizona and Texas this past month. They turn everything from straws. to sticks to  granola bars into magic wands.

I love listening to them and watching the big kids get completely involved and play along. In fact, we have made up a list of our own “Ivanovsky Spells.”

My Favorite? In place of one of the more popular Harry Potter spells “expelliarmus” the Ivanovsky version is “smelly lamas.” I am sure you can see how the rest of them go!

My oldest has a “real” Harry Potter wand he got one year from Santa, it was the pricy kind at $40 that is motion activated. The little kids drug it out and have been fighting I mean sharing it nicely all week. They had a lemonade stand earning $42 and decided to pool the money to buy another wand. Like that is  going to go well…

My crafty 8 year old got online and found many different sets of instructions on how to make a wand. The other kids shook their heads and said “no!” She begged me to help her make one. Since I had just about everything I said sure, and we got started.

You will need: 

  • Glue Gun / Glue Sticks (about 3 large ones for each wand)
  • Craft Paint (we liked metallic and glitter)
  • Construction paper
  • Chop Sticks or wooden dowels
  • Elmers Glue
  • Marble or something to put at the handle end. We found a bag of wedding gems at Walmart for $3.50 that worked perfectly.

Place glue on one side of any color of construction paper.

Take your chop stick and roll from the corner tightly.

When I got to the end, I taped the corner down and we left them to dry.

Now, when they are all dry, you will need to cut off the ends so they are flat.

Working with one end, I filled the end with hot glue and stuck the end of the gem in. I turned it upside down and held it until the glue had set.

The bigger kids started to take notice and thought we might be onto something cool, so they started making their own construction paper tubes!

Once the top was set, I took more hot glue and make rings around the gem and tube reinforcing it even more. I needed them to be sturdy!

This is where your glue gun skills come in handy! If you lived though the craft phase of the 90’s you know what I mean! 🙂

Start from the below your gem/marble and start building up a few layers of glue. I tried to spread it down, and as it would drip I would roll it around, making some kinda funky patterns.

The thickest layers need to be at the top and get thinner as you go towards the bottom. Just keep in mind what a wand might look like with a handle.

Once you have the first 1/2 of the wand done and before the glue cools, use the tip and make designs in the glue. This will give your wand cool dimensions and areas to paint when you are finishing it.

Once the glue has cooled, you will paint a coat of solid black over the wand as a primer.

The black really pulls out all the 3D of the glue. They start looking really cool at this point.

By now, I have all 7 kids making a wand 🙂

Once the black has dried, you can start painting your wand. My kids liked the glitter and metallic paint for theirs. We used gold a lot for the accents.

They took a few coats because of a few mind changes. Plus a few hours of drying time. But once they were done I thought they looked REALLY cool!

The kids were really proud of themselves as well. The big kids were so impressed they wanted to have friends over to make some with them!

These are our finished Harry Potter wands. They are very sturdy and really neat looking! When you feel them it is hard to imagine that they are made of chop sticks, construction paper and hot glue!

I added a few more lines of hot glue at the end on the wands where I painted the gold you can see to give them more of a 3D look then they already had.

For the other end, the kids went out and grabbed a few little rocks and we glued them in. One of the kids use a small gem for theirs, and one of the kids didn’t want anything and I filled the end with hot glue. These really feel like they were made out of wood.

They spent all day playing with them.

One final step that I have not done yet but will when I can get them back is to take a few small drops of black paint and mix it in a lot of water to create a wash. I want to “antique” them some and so I will brush the paint water on and then wipe it off so it creates an antiquing effect.

Cost of a fancy Harry Potter wand: $40  x 7 kids = $280!

Total cost of our Harry Potter wands: $21 for 7!

I am assuming you have a glue gun in those calculations! I had to buy some paint, the gems, and more glue sticks. Total saved = $259. Now if I can just figure out how to make them light up!
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$5 for $50 worth of e-books ( Benefit for the Barlow family )

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For the next 3 days, many blogs will be running a special that is benefiting the sweet Barlow family.

Shortly before midnight on September 9th, Jenny Barlow called 911 because her husband Harold was behaving erratically. At the hospital, he was diagnosed with a serious brain infection and moved to the ICU, where he fell into a coma-like state.

Over the next 10 days, their family experienced a series of ups and downs on  the most horrific roller coaster ride you can imagine as they’d receive hopeful news followed by a setback.

On September 18th, Harold passed away despite everything the doctors had done for him. As you can imagine, Jenny’s heart broke, and not just for herself, but for her five beautiful children as well, who hadn’t seen their dad in 10 days and won’t see him again this side of heaven. For more information about this benefit, you can go HERE.

As a way to help their family while still providing a great resource for you, a small group of bloggers put together a pretty amazing benefit sale, which includes the 9 ebooks listed below plus the complete set of Life Your Way printables. The set is worth more than $50, but will be available for just $5 for three days only, starting at midnight ET on Tuesday, 10/2.

Click here to get your bundle now, you can see specific information on each book below, but you have to order from the link in this paragraph. 

Click here to get your bundle now.

2 Money Saving Places: Kroger Clearance & $.99 Only Store!

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There are 2 places that I can’t use coupons that I really love. One is the Kroger bread clearance section and the other is the $.99 Only store.

I can’t use coupons at either place, but I save so much money there! Technically I guess I could at Kroger, but I have never really seen anything in the bread section that I had a coupon for. Look at the savings I got the other day!

Gorgeous sourdough bread for $.90 and the Naan baked bread was $.60! Just ask at your Kroger where they keep the clearance and when they bring it out marked down. Mine is each morning before 9am.

The other place that I love to check out is the $.99 Only store. Just like Dollar Tree they have a lot of generic items but they also have a lot of brand name items for REALLY cheap! PLUS they have some produce and a refrigerated section.

I have picked up the best produce for under $1 that I could have never gotten at the grocery stores. Green peppers, avocados and mushrooms are what I usually look for.

I do avoid the toothpaste as it is not made here, it is from China or Mexico and that is not always a good thing.

What stores do you like that don’t take coupons? 

Why I do not “like” Facebook – Let’s be friends somewhere else.

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Facebook and I are not friends anymore. I am going to have to “unlike” them for a while because I feel like they are unfair to bloggers and many businesses in general.

You might have noticed that you no longer see MyLitter in your feeds and that you really only see the same people over and over again. Facebook is holding many business’s readers hostage and only allowing their fans to see them when the business pays for it.

MyLitter has grown a lot in the past few years, it costs quite a bit to run my site, from paying for hosting, newsletter fees, the coupon database, and MANY other expenses. Even with the increased expenses my site is still FREE for you to come to all day long, and it is staying that way! Bloggers make money to help pay for these expenses by the ads on the sidebars, some affiliates, and sometimes we make money when you print a coupon from us. It isn’t going to help us retire early, but helps pay for the 50-60 hours a week I work on this site and all the expenses that go with it.

Facebook has also always been free to use. But they make a LOT of money off us in advertising to our readers and don’t share any of that revenue. We promote Facebook without any compensation from them, and now they want us to pay an ENORMOUS amount of money for YOU to see US. 

For example the picture above I took from my admin panel, and you can see that if I want YOU to see that post I have to pay $200. I post about 12-15 things a day and would have to pay $2400 a day for all my Facebook fans to see what I post there. Obviously, that is so far out of line that it is maddening. There is no way I can afford to pay this for even one post a day. If you are seeing me now on Facebook it is because I am paying for it this time and following the lead from my blogging friend Brittany at The Prudent Patron.

I have even done tutorials on how to add me to your “interest list” so that you can see me and guess what? Facebook has filtered out deal bloggers from most of that and you STILL can’t see us in your interests and feeds.

YOU can try adding me back in and hopefully you will see me.

I loved Facebook. I felt like I could really connect with you on there, I could SEE you and see YOUR families and what you like. I love comments on my blog but it is not the same as Facebook. I don’t want to stop posting there and I won’t, for the small few that can see me. But I want to encourage you to connect with me somewhere else right now as we see what happens to Facebook’s business pages in the mean time.

Try my Facebook GROUP PAGE. We are testing this one out to see how it works and to see if Facebook shuts that down as well….  many of you have already been added, if not, make sure that you request to be there!

Get on the Newsletter! I have to pay for it anyway, you might as well not miss something by getting 1 email a day from me. I would still check the blog, as some deals are time sensitive, and you might miss them waiting for an email. I am changing providers for this in a few weeks, but it should not affect you at all.

Follow me on Twitter. I am not great at Twitter yet, but I am trying! You will get EVERY post I do this way, but sometimes I can’t figure out how to tag you! Working on it though and had a great conversation the other day with someone so it is coming along!

Anyway, sorry for the rant, but I am so frustrated because I feel like I am talking and no one hears me! I put a lot of time and energy into writing posts that I think you will enjoy, and sad that I don’t think you even see them.

Hitting the Wall.

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Hitting the wall is never pretty, for me it isn’t while running a marathon, it usually happens about two times a year and oddly enough I am usually in a grocery store.

I am tired, going to bed too late and getting up too early. We just got back in town which was stressful and I can’t seem to get caught up. I wanted to sit on the couch with my lap top and get a few things done while watching the Olympics, but I had a few things that I had to get at the store that couldn’t wait.

At 8:30 I ran to Walmart. They carry a few things I can get without running to 3 different stores so I thought I was saving some time. I had a list and grabbed what I needed. I walked up to the front of the store and started searching for a check out lane. There were 2, 15 items or less express lanes open and 1 regular lane with a HUGE line. As I had an entire basket full I got in line behind 7 of my new best friends.

I stood there for a few minutes and thought I would check my email, I took out my phone and noticed the time was 9:22pm.

The woman in front of me had 2 small kids who were clearly sick of being in the store. Her younger one kept asking to go potty, and you could see she really didn’t want to get out of line. Before I could suggest just leaving the cart and go, she bolted out of line and to the bathroom. I have TOTALLY been there!

She comes back, and I motion for her to get back in line in front of me. I explain I have been there and would have watched her cart for her. We both start wondering what is up with only 1 register open.

15 minutes goes by and 3 ladies walk up in line behind me. They have their carts completely full of groceries. I am looking around for a CSM to find out what the heck is going on. As I am looking the other way a CSM opens the lane next to us and takes the 3 ladies BEHIND us and starts checking them out! First, I would have ever let a cashier do that and would have asked the people in front of me if they wanted to go to the new line as they had clearly been there longer. Second, as a CSM you should have TAKEN the people FIRST who had been in line.

I am furious, the poor lady in front of me is dealing with kids, so I walk over to the service desk and start complaining. I would have just left my groceries and walked away but my son had a party the next day and I had to finish party stuff. The CSM listened to me and walked out to the floor to see what was up. He got on the mic and called someone up front. Still nothing happened.

I started listening to the ladies in the lane next to me, it is becoming clear that they are either famiy or friends of the cashier. They are also all “price matching” all the steak and products in their cart…. Um Yeah. Now I am really mad.

I walk away again to find the manager. I find him and let him know exactly how mad I was and what had been going on for the past 30 minutes.  He apologized and grabbed a employee walking by and told her to go open a lane. I was next to start putting my stuff on the belt and so I tried to just stay there at this point and have them take the lady behind me. The manager physically moved my cart over to the new lane (I am sure to shut me up) and I started unloading my groceries.

The cashier could not sign into the cash register. She tried about 50 times and then started asking for help. They had to call over 3 people to see what the problem was. At this point the lady that had been behind me in the other lane was checking out. I was really loosing it. I was late getting home, I was tired and I had about 3 hours worth of stuff to do when I got home. They finally got the cashier on the register and then they realized she didn’t have a drawer, so no money.

I could feel tears welling up in my eyes, I was so mad. I tossed my stuff back in the cart and went over to the line I had already been in for 40 minutes now. I lost my place in line and would have been checking out by now, but 3 more people had gotten in line.  I was at the end. AGAIN.

The cashier finally was able to get a drawer for her register. I watched to see if she would open her lane or not, it looked like she was trying to get out of it. Realizing how long the lines were she figured she had to. She flipped on her light and as I turned to walk over, the pregnant teenager in front of me and her friend bolted over with their cart. I am sure assuming that they were the next in line and should have been the one to go over. I WAS PISSED. But how to you argue with a pregnant lady, and look like a total ass.

That’s when I hit the wall.

As much as I tried I could not stop crying, which made me even more mad! I was just too tired to even think straight. I wished that I had the personality where I could just totally start yelling at everyone in the store, but I just sit and get more mad. I think I would have felt better in the moment if I could have yelled at someone! I did what I thought would make me feel better and I called my husband bawling from Walmart. This is not a new thing for him. “Who wouldn’t let you use coupons and price match?” He teased. I told him the story as I waited in line and felt a little better. He offered to come up and wait in line and let me go home. It was silly to say, but made me feel better.

Finally, it was my turn. Still crying I tossed everything on the belt, and both the lady checking me out and the lady behind me were clearly scared to talk to me. I am sure they thought I was insane. I paid my total and walked out… still crying. I am a total baby. I did notice though that the first CSM was STILL checking out her “friends” on the register next to me. I can’t wait for that phone call I am making to Walmart Corporate later today.

I got in line at 9:22, they starting checking me out at 10:11, almost an hour in line. I would have walked had it been regular groceries. But for my sons party I just could not.

This could have happened at any store, I don’t want to just pick on Walmart. I don’t know if you are like me at all that you handle everything just fine all the time, but maybe once a year you just have had enough! Deep breath in, deep breath out…

All is good! Got the “Lego Cookies” made and party stuff done. Got a few hours of sleep and promised my husband I would take a nap if possible. I might not be a marathoner as a runner, but I feel like sometimes I am a marathoner in life, if that isn’t too cheesy. That there are times when you just hit the wall!

Store Brand Vs. National Brand Taste Test – Something to do with the kids!

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Ok, so this ad for Kroger this week was a little boring… we can’t be mad, they just had 4 weeks of mega events. As I was walking through the store looking for unadvertised deals I kept noticing the price difference between the store and national brands. I thought it would be fun for my kids to do a taste test!

LET. ME. TELL. YOU… They LOVED it. If you are looking for something cheap and fun to do, set up some kind of taste test!

My almost 15 year old son was supposed to film it for me and I had 2 of my girls doing it, but the kids were all so curious and begging to do it that I had to add the rest of the kids.  Then the 15 year old was so bummed that HE wasn’t getting to taste the food ( it was CEREAL people! you eat it everyday!) that I had to wait and have their father film it.

I swear I am doing this once a week, it kills about an hour and they had SO MUCH FUN!

We had all these products to test. For the video and because of time I only had them do Honey Nut Cheerios, Lucky Charms and Oreos.

I will say the results on one were what I expected. The other 2 were a little surprising! Watch the video and see if you can guess who was the winner on each one…

I am posting the winners in the morning.

What so you buy that is generic? Are there products that you like better that are generic? 

Be Prepared for HIGH Food Prices.

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We knew this was coming. Driving across the country this summer, we saw first hand the drought that was affecting much of the country. I told Paul that I was betting we could expect sky rocketing prices this fall. Sure enough I saw a report last week and another one again today.

Midwesterners are seeing the worst drought in 50 years. Eighty-eight percent of  U.S. farmland where corn is grown is now drought-stricken. Stunted feed corn and withered grasslands are forcing some ranchers to cull their herds.

“We’re expecting another year of tough food prices, bad news for consumers,” said USDA food economist Richard Volpe.

Sources: Fox News and Wired.  

Last year we were told that peanut butter prices and a few other things were going to go up. Many brands have gone up 30% this year, as we can see at the store.

What can you do to prepare for this?

In my opinion these are the things you can do now: 

  • Start stocking up on the staples. Buy a few extra things each time you are in the store.
  • Learn to coupon.
  • Shop the generics and find the store brand items you like.
  • Learn to make meals at home with simple ingredients.
  • Have an emergency fund.
  • Learn how to save and stretch food.
  • Attend my frugal living class this fall 🙂
  • Get your family involved now.
When the price of food goes up, it seems that everything else does as well. Eating out will cost more, and assistance programs already struggling will be in real trouble.
You can be prepared and not hit as hard if you start paying attention and preparing now.
On Thursday’s after we get the new ad on Wednesday’s, if people are interested we can start making a list of things that are a extra good price and start stocking up on a few extra while you are already at the store. You don’t want to stress yourself out financially by trying to do things all at once. If you do a little at a time, you might not even notice a difference.
What are your ideas to adjust to the higher prices of food that we will be seeing? 

Who got their free Starbucks and Chick Fil A today?

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On the way to Chik Fil A I made my husband run by a Starbucks (not that there isn’t one on every corner) so I could grab my free  Refresher. They had samples of both and then you got one free. I sampled the lime and grabbed the fruit.

The lime was O.K. I was actually not a fan of the fruit. In fact we couldn’t get anyone in the car to drink it 🙂 It was, I am not even sure how to describe it…. if you are a tea drinker I think this might be up your alley!

What did you think?

Then onto Chick Fil A. We decided to go to a different one then the 2 we normally go to. It was lunch time and the others are by offices and so they are always really busy. This one was BUSY but also… for a long time we were the ONLY ones dressed up! I wasn’t expecting that. Plus my older kids were already not thrilled that they had to dress up, they helped all morning getting the little ones made up, but you know you hit that age where it is just NOT cool anymore. I think they were more horrified that their Dad donned a white trash bag with spots!

Did you dress up? Send in some pictures!

MAJOR Coupon Fraud Ring Busted in AZ!

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Yesterday in AZ, a MAJOR coupon fraud ring was busted. They had over 25 million in fraudulent coupons that they were selling.

From the article:  

“The Coupon Information Corporation is calling this the largest counterfeit coupon case the industry has ever seen.

These investigators discovered most of the fake coupons were being used in Arizona. Investigators also found that the coupons were being sold through the website, Savvyshoppersite.com. 

“They are variations, reproductions of what were at one point legitimate coupons,” said Bud Miller with the Coupon Information Corporation.

So the coupons often worked and as a result manufacturers lost millions.

Police say the scope of the investigation and the economic impact are massive with hundreds of millions of dollars in losses.

“We’re talking about anywhere from $400 to $600 million in loss,” said Holmes. “This is to American companies who produced American products and hire American citizens.”

Miller said consumers should never pay money for coupons.

“If you’re a consumer out there and you purchased coupons from this website you certainly should not use them. You are subject to arrest,” said Miller.”

Never, Never, Never pay for coupons that you did not buy yourself from the Sunday paper. Even from insert companies who sell the whole inserts, you can NOT be certain where the inserts are coming from. There is ALWAYS the possibility that they were stolen from the newspapers that YOU were supposed to be getting.

I have seen SO MANY emails from readers who have ordered coupons from Ebay, only to get obvious copies of internet printed coupons and coupons to good to be true in value for brands.

Coupons are a form of cash. You will be prosecuted for using fraudulent coupons. If you need more information you can go to the Coupon Information Center. 

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