Summer Time

Well, Elliott is officially done with second grade now.  His last day of school was Thursday, but his last day of doing anything work related was Tuesday.  His summer vacation lasts until the seventh of July, when we officially start homeschooling.  I think he would kind of like a longer summer vacation, but he's on board with starting school in July so he can have more time off at other times of the year. :)

We started summer vacation with a bang. We drove to Bismarck yesterday and went to the zoo and Red Lobster.  We considered staying the night, but couldn't find a hotel with a decent pool that had openings by the time we made up our mind to stay the night.  So we came home.  We are planning on going swimming at one of the hotels in Minot today or tomorrow, though.  My husband is going to make some calls when he comes in from mowing the yard.  We're trying to decide whether to spend the night in a hotel, or just do the afternoon at the one with waterslides. Decisions decisions!

We have a few fun things planned this summer.  Living in North Dakota, a lot of the stuff is only open from Memorial to Labor Day, so we are planning on having a fairly busy summer.  We have plans to work on some school stuff that is related to different places in the Dakotas.  As I have been doing research, I've discovered quite a bit about my current state that I didn't know before. :)   I'm looking forward to learning even more!  We believe that having a good foundation of state history is pretty important, too.  And since this IS Elliott's home state, and the only state he's lived in so far, we think now is the time to really find out more about it, and do some traveling to see it in person.

Target Sales on Groceries

Normally we don't buy much in the way of food at Target, because there's just not a lot of selection at our smallish store.  Most of what they do carry is similar (or even better) in price to the grocery stores in Minot, though, so we do pick some stuff up there sometimes.

This week I noticed that there was a $10/$50 coupon for food and beverage items at Target, though, so I thought it might be worth checking into.  Then I saw that Pepsi was on sale as well.  I'm the only one that regularly drinks soda at my house, and I'm cutting back, but I still go through a 12 pack every 3 weeks or so, and was down to just 3 or 4 cans left, so it was time to buy some anyway. :)

I didn't take any pictures, but I did end up spending $52.47 on food and beverages all together, so I was able to use the $10/50 coupon to bring the total down, and then used my red card to get another 5% off.  A few of the things that I purchased (veggie straws, archer farms salsa, and organic eggs) had cartwheel coupons as well.  So I think we ended up getting some decent deals.  It was nothing compared to the deals I used to get when I couponed a lot and really paid close attention to everything I bought, but it was still decent savings.

Adding up the amount I saved because things were on sale, the $10, the 5%, and the cartwheel savings, I ended up saving about $20, which is pretty good, considering Target was a spur of the moment stop with no preplanning at all Sunday afternoon. :)

Always a Project

When my husband and I bought our house seven years ago, it was in great shape.  In fact, of all the houses we looked at, it was the best, as far as new paint, carpet, appliances, etc.  I wasn't sure my husband would be totally happy here, since he had mentioned that he wanted to do some work on whatever house we ended up buying.  It turns out I had nothing to worry about. :)  Immediately he added ceiling fans to the bedrooms, living room, and dining room.  Then he slowly started working on other projects, including adding screen doors (and then changing one a while later to include a doggy door), an exhaust fan in the upstairs bathroom, converting a broom closet into a pantry in the dining room, converting a second closet with hanging rods in the spare bedroom into a linen closet, ripping Elliott's closet out (he uses an armoire now), adding a bedroom to the basement, adding built in shelves to the basement, redoing the shelves in the pantry to add more shelf space, redoing the back porch, fencing in the backyard, putting up motion lights, replacing the range, building shelves for his workshop, along with smaller things like painting, minor touch ups on dry wall, etc.  Have I mentioned that he works about 60-70 hours a week on average (with some weeks reaching over 100 hours)?  Even though he is always incredibly busy, he still always seems to come up with new projects he wants to do around the house, and he enjoys doing them, so I guess it's okay.

Right now he is getting ready to replace the flooring in the room that will soon be Elliott's school room.  When Snoopie was going through her bad separation anxiety, she ripped the carpet up by the door in there.  So for several months now, our floor has looked like this:

Snoopie even managed to scratch the floor enough there that Carl decided to patch it a little

Needless to say, I am ready for some kind of floor cover. :)  Because that room has the back door and receives a lot of traffic (the dogs are in and out pretty frequently, and we spend quite a bit of time in the backyard, too), we decided to do a fake hardwood floor.  Carl is planning on starting it this weekend.  I'm really excited!  I'll try to remember to post pictures after he's done, although it might take a while, since he has surgery next week and will probably need to take some time off from things like that for a short while.