School Shopping Secrets

I was recently asked what my secrets are to shopping for school for my boys and if I could share a few. Well here is my secret: SURVIVE IT! That's it! A good bottle of wine will definitely help!

It did get me thinking about my strategies and lessons learned and if I even had any! I decided I might have a few tricks up my sleeve that I could regale you all with, though I am sure that half of you are saying, "you didn't already know that??"

Kids clothes are some sort of conspiracy I am convinced! You wear them for two months before they grow out of them IF they last that long, and a pair of jeans for little legs is not that much less than what I pay for mine, though I assure you that there is about 5 times the amount of material on mine as there is on theirs!

My kids have to wear uniforms. There are several places that I have found that carry the specific colors my boys needed and I always sign up for their emails. Every one of them had a 30% family and friends sale, though it usually happened after school started, but if I you sign up for the emails, you will be sure to know when that is happening. You also will usually get coupons emailed to you from them. I am not a fan of credit cards AT ALL, but I must confess that I do have a Kohl's card. This is where I do the bulk of my shopping for clothes. With the card, you get a coupon for 15%, 20%, or 30% off every 6 weeks or so. You can only use the coupon with your card. Here is the secret, however. Take your check book along and after checking out whip that bad boy out and pay off your account. You have to do it with your checkbook though if you want to pay right there at the register. Check out your favorite store for perks of having a card, but make sure its one you don't have to carry a balance on or pay a fee for.

Perhaps one of my biggest lessons learned is one concerning those uniform pants; particularly for boys! My boys had to wear the Khaki dress pants, but those knees could only handle so many trips of crawling though the rocks of the playground and the gym floor and over cafeteria tables before they went belly up. I was buying new pants every month on average, for each boy! So I heard from someone that Lands End/Sears will replace the pants for the entire lifetime of the pant! I ordered some for each boy. I ordered during a 30% off sale and ordered enough to get free shipping. My boys went four months before little knobby knees started poking out through the reinforced patches. Sure enough, they replaced them for me free of charge, and they replaced those again 3 more times. They do know my name and we do swap weather reports every time I call, but their customer service is excellent! I am promised that they do this with all of their clothes!!

My number one secret on shopping for clothes has to be shopping at the end of the season! You can get name brand clothes for a fraction of what you would normally pay! Just make sure your not going to be moving across the country to a school where the uniform will change just enough so that you can't use all of the polo shirts you bought last year!

Then come the actual school supplies. School supplies when I was a kid was a package of crayons and some construction paper. Now, though, if your lists were anything like mine, there were the typical crayons and markers and also very specific white board pens and paper towels and enough hand sanitizer to fill a swimming pool! Here in Florida, I found out that there is a tax free weekend on all school supplies! However I researched that, and decided that the $5 I would be saving wasn't worth trying to brave the throng of other school shoppers and risk having the glue sticks run out before I got my own required 48! So I went a few weeks before.

However if you are shopping for a big item such as a computer, this weekend is totally when you want to shop for it!!

I have incredible friends who are very savvy in finding the best deals for their school supplies. I even have a friend who, when all was said and done, was paid $5 for doing all of her school shopping!! So please, if you are one of those people, we all want to hear your secrets!! Comment on this post so we all can join you in your school shopping heaven!

If you can get your school list early on, then you can be watching the circulars for the stores you usually shop at, and can snatch up the items on your lists whenever they go on sale, especially those Clorox wipes and Ziploc baggies! Find out if the store you shop at has a loyalty card. For example in Colorado you wanted to have the King Soopers (Kroger) card if you were shopping there (its free). Target now has a debit card that is linked to your checking account. You save 5% every time you use it, and you get free shipping when you order online. And clip those coupons!!

Amazon is also amazing when you get to those last few days before school and still haven't found illusive Learn-to-Letter notepads! Amazon doesn't charge tax, and if you sign up for an Amazon Prime Membership, you will get free two day shipping. You can also sign up for a trial of this if you know you are going to be buying a bunch of things and want to give it a try.  For those of you with kids in diapers, you can also save a ton on them if you have the Amazon Prime membership (and last time I checked they took coupons for those diapers)!

Backpacks are always a frustration for me. They are expensive! My plan is to always make them reuse their backpacks for a few years, but so far they haven't made them to the end of the year! If you watch Groupon, sometimes you can get good deals, but make sure they are quality backpacks and not ones where the zipper is going to fall out after a week! I tend to love Amazon for backpacks as well, but again you can't "feel" it before you buy it. Amazon, however, has reviews and I love reading what other moms have to say about the product before I incorporate it into my crazy life! Outlet stores are a great place to buy backpacks. I love shopping those outlets stores! Again sign up for the emails from the outlet stores, because you will know of sales and get coupons!

I have to admit that most of what I have learned has been through other moms who have gone before me. True some things you have to learn from experience, like the subtle noise of a diaper filling with a substance that doesn't have a chance of being contained in its thin elastic plastic, and how that noise can wake you from a dead sleep from clear across the room while your husband who is awake never even hears it, but in most "mommy moment" cases, I have learned so much from other moms! We would all love to learn from you who have more secrets so again, please comment below so we can all learn from you!
Check out this link for more tips! http://www.creditcardinsider.com/insider/top-5-ways-to-save-on-back-to-school-shopping/

HAVE ANOTHER GREAT SCHOOL YEAR!!

Girl Power

I love being a mom! I have to admit that I even enjoy the chaos! The crazy shocking things my kids do, the ER memories, even the embarrassing moments. I love being a mom!! I have always wanted to be a mom. I know people think I'm crazy for having as many kids as I do, and insane for wanting more, but every kid is so incredible and unique and adds so much to our family! People comment on how busy and hard it must be to go anywhere or do anything with all 4 of my boys, but I don't really think its that big of a deal. Sure I have my moments that I want to scream and shake a child until his brains rattle. Shopping with just one is faster, and having to get all four out just to mail a package sometimes gets annoying, but as far as I can tell from my mommy friends of one or two, this is true even for them!

I have been struggling lately with guilt. Pressure from other people to do, think, or believe something just because they do. Pressure from people to not want anymore children, because that's "stupid". Pressure to home school, because not to is "unchristian". Pressure to bake with all natural and no sugar and only vegetables, because not to is "unhealthy". Pressure to read a certain number of hours from the Bible to my children, pressure to shop at certain stores, pressure to have certain traditions, pressure to read certain books, pressure to speak a certain "language", pressure pressure pressure.

When I announced my pregnancy with Liam, someone actually told me, that they didn't know why anyone would have more than two children. In fact I was made fun of regularly, and the butt of many jokes because I was having a 4th child. I did not realize that there was a rule on how many kids a family should have before they were considered "idiots". I have had so many people freely share their opinion that I should not consider having anymore, even if I do want a little girl. Why? 

Why is "different" bad? When did we stop rejoicing in our diversity and differences and instead "shoot to kill" if someone has a different belief, different lifestyle, different view than our own?  The woman that chooses to have two children because that is all she can handle is an incredibly wise and generous woman! The woman who chooses to have 6 children because that's how many she can handle and delights in being a mom is an incredibly wise and generous woman. Why do we think that one is right and one is wrong?Why do we think it is our job to inform them that we are right and they are wrong?

Is it because we are worried that somehow we got it wrong? Is it because to gain some of the confidence that was shattered and lost along our life road, we have to have everyone doing the same thing we are, to somehow prove that we are in fact doing ok? Do we have to shatter the beautiful confidence of another woman to make ourselves feel less broken? 

I am so amazed lately at the epidemic I see among women, especially Christian women. Its like we have some how adopted the belief that a woman who holds any confidence or beauty or uniqueness or talent is a threat, an obstacle in our search for self worth and she must be annihilated at all costs. There are so many hurting and broken women who have been devoured by their own kind! Any time I hear a woman, even "jokingly" putting another woman or another type of woman down, I can't help but view her as insecure and weak. And that is exactly what we are when we choose to tear another precious female companion down.

What if we delighted in our differences. Instead of being threatened that she has more children, what if I recognize her strength in mothering and use her to learn more about becoming a better mom myself? Instead of being threatened that she has nicer clothes and cuter hair, what if I used her to teach me about style? What if instead of hating her for keeping a better house than mine, I used her to learn some secrets in improving in that area myself. Chances are huge that there is an area that she might eventually come to me on recognizing that I am stronger than her in that area.

Can you imagine a world in which every single woman was different and cheered on in her differences? Some worked out of the home, some stayed at home, some home-schooled, some didn't, some cooked, some didn't, some had 10 kids, some had 1 and we all started delighting in and encouraging each other on what we were doing well. Can you imagine the strength we would have together? Can you imagine how powerful we would be as a community of women knowing we were building up other women, and that there were dozens of other strong confident women building us up? The resources we would have because other women were growing in areas we had weaknesses in?

The other day I noticed a woman in line waiting to order her food. She was a little older and overweight, but she had this bright colorful dress on and I liked it. I mentioned to her that I liked her dress, and she stared at me for a few seconds with distrust all over her face. I smiled at her, and she tentatively said thank you to me and walked to her table. Several times through my meal she caught my eye and every time she did her smile got wider until it nearly stretched off of her face. I left wanting to cry that she wasn't celebrated every day for her unique beauty. The only reason for the strong emotion I felt was that God has been speaking to my own tattered heart about this so strongly lately.

As women we have such incredibly potent power. Power to build something strong and beautiful with surprisingly little effort, and power to completely demolish it. Why in the world would we choose not to build something of incredible lasting value?

I saw this on someones Facebook the other day. "Don't compare your life to others and don't judge them. You have no idea what their journey is all about."