Adventures in Kroger

Ava's new love is the slide at the school playground by our house.

This girl knows how to have a good time!

Now that I'm nearly 18 weeks along in my pregnancy I'm finally starting to feel more like my normal self and less like I absolutely must take a nap in the afternoons lest I die. It's been nice.

A few months before I found out I was pregnant I started learning about the mystical world of "couponning" in order to try and save a little more money on one of the few somewhat flexible areas of our budget. Since we don't eat a lot of what the majority of coupons are for, like frozen meals and processed food it's a little more complicated to make it actually work for me. But it's been fun to figure out and I was just starting to get the hang of it when I got pregnant and hardly had the energy to go shopping period and so shopping with Ava trying to grab my list and toss my coupons into the back of the cart while I'm trying to do math in my head (never a strong point of mine) was out of the question.

Licking Frosting with Dad

Well for the last month I started buying the Sunday paper again for it's coupons and today went out to Kroger for my first full-on coupon shopping trip since then. I had a new pocket style accordion folder pouch thing for my coupons that I'd organized the day before and Kroger was having a "Mega-Sale" where if you buy 10 items the qualify you get and instant $5 back and if you have coupons for those, which Kroger doubles, you can save quite a bit. I was really loving my new coupon organization system and feeling more like a super savvy shopper and less like a frazzled penny pinching mom. Ava was being good and helping load the cart by tossing items in the back that I hand to her. She LOVES doing this.

So as I head for my last item, frozen veggies, relieved that we've made it through the time consuming coupon shopping trip without Ava crying and I'm worn out from all the mental math. Ava is wanting to hold my coupon holder and since I'm done with it I let her. I head to the check-out and get the thrill of watching my purchases ring up to $51 and then after sale prices from my Kroger card and coupons go down to $23. So worth the trouble. We head out to the car and I unload the groceries and start to get Ava out and I realize the binder is missing. I look in my purse and in the cart and in the car and realize Ava must have dropped it in the store somewhere. So we head back in, look down all the aisles, no luck. Ask the cashier if she's seen in, no luck. Ask the customer service desk if someone turned it in, no luck. So I figure it must have been picked up by someone and I head back out to the car feeling bummed that I just lost a good months worth of coupons not to mention my handy-dandy coupon holder. I start to load Ava in the car and decide I have to go back and look again. So I hoist Ava onto my hip and we head back into the store and look down all the aisles again and lo and behold we found it. It was in a store clerks shopping cart they'd been using while doing inventory. Ava loves to toss things into the cart and I guess while my back was turned getting a bag of frozen broccoli she tossed it into that cart.

Refusing to get out of her crib after her nap because she wanted to read.

Now this adventure will probably only sound like an adventure to those of you who know the joys of lugging toddlers around the grocery store and how you want to get in and out as fast as possible. These are the adventures my life is made of now. . . thrilling. . .