My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings » store

Holiday and After Holiday Shopping

Lisa — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 04:07:17 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I had some great experiences shopping this year before and after the holidays. Now, I am still not sure where there is a local TJ Maxx by me. However, I did some shopping at the one in Wisconsin by my family after Christmas. It is was just liked I remembered — great items for low prices. With the economy the way it is, we all need to start shopping at places like this. You get the same quality items — just at a way better price!

Now, the one of the best shopping experiences I had this holiday season was at Marshalls. We had a holiday party to go to on December 20th. Now, I personally hate shopping in the month of December, because well, it sucks. However, my wonderful little girl outgrew her Christmas dress! It fit at Thansgiving, and it looked like she grew 2 inches from then! Instead of panicking, Madison and I headed over to Marshalls. Now, this was high holiday shopping time, and I was impressed. They had a great selection of kids clothes that were marked, so it was super easy to find what we needed. The fitting rooms were clean and large enough for me to go in the room with Madison. On the way to the fitting room, I found shoes. I was able to try on about 20 different pairs that I liked. I loved that they had the little foot stockings at the end of each aisle for you to use when you forgot to bring socks. Being the weekend before Christmas, I was seriously concerned about checkout. However, they had a great system going and every register was open. (Nothing irritates me more when you go to a store that is really busy and they only have one or two registers open, and they don’t open any more). We had a great experience on Marshalls, and I will definitely be going there for more presents and items for my kids.

What are your favorite places to shop and why?

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Box Tops & A $50 Giveaway Too!

Lisa — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 17:55:05 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

The school that Madison is going to next year collects Box Tops. If you don’t know what Box Tops is, let me explain. There are a ton of items that you can buy that have the image to the left on the box. You collect these for your local schools, and they get 10 cents for every one you turn in. Now, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but when if you can get a bunch of people together, it adds up quickly. Now, the school’s goal is to earn $750 from Box Tops. Last year, they made $536, and I would love for them to meet their goal for this year (even though Madison is not even enrolled yet. I understand that any extra money to the school with benefit her). Now, there are several ways we can do this for our local schools.

First, you need to log into the Box Tops site and create an account. You enter your state and your school or if you don’t know that, just enter your zip code. I personally entered the school and state. From there, you are able to see how your local school is going. Now, how do you increase that number? Well, you can collect box tops with that logo on it. They also have a Marketplace. Now, until recently, I did not know about the Marketplace. This works so awesome too! There is a list of stores that will give a percentage of whatever you buy from them back to the school. There are stores like Avon, Gap, Kohls, Best Buy, Leap Frog, Target, and Walmart (this is just a couple of them — the whole listing is on the site). All you have to do is log into the Box Tops Site, click on marketplace, then click on the store you want to shop it. That’s it. Once you checkout, the percentage you purchased will then be applied to your school. If you are Christmas shopping online anyway, why not help out your local school (and if you don’t want to help any of them out, I’ll tell you the school we are sending our money too, and you can use them).

Did you know that Box Tops has donated more than $250 million to schools nationwide since 1996? Would you like to help raise that number? Then start collecting Box Tops and use their Marketplace to do your online shopping! To help you get started, I am giving away a $50 gift card to Barnes & Noble (thank you Barnes & Noble for your support of such a great program!). What do you have to do?

Each one of these things will give you one entry:

1. Leave a comment on this post. I want to know why you want this $50 gift card to Barnes & Noble!
2. Twitter about this contest. Please leave me your username so I can verify.
3. Stumble this post. If you don’t know what Stumble Upon is, please read Lori’s post at Blogging Cents. She explains it extremely well.
4. Add this post to other social media sites like Digg, Kirtsy, Blogging Zoom, Reddit, Propeller, Etc.

For 5 additional entries,

1. Blog about this on your blog. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
2. Add this to any forums you belong too. Please give me the URL, so I can verify.
3. Subscribe to this blog using either my email or RSS feed
4. Add my badge to your sidebar:

This contest will end November 26th at 8:00 pm CST and is for US residents. Good Luck!

Showertime

Lisa — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 21:37:44 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I have looked at more showers in the last year than I ever have wanted to. We remodeled my upstairs bathroom and added a new shower last summer. We also added a new tub and had to tear down all the tile that was there before (good times, let me tell you). This summer we added a new bathroom to the basement downstairs. I don’t miss living in a construction zone. However, it is very nice to have two full bathrooms now. However, both of my bathrooms spaces are small, so I could not go all out like I wanted to.

In the basement, we had very little space to work with due to the configuration of my basement. We ended up putting up a shower enclosure (However, I had no idea that you could get a shower enclosures online. If I would have known that, I would not have let my husband pick it out. Somebody had to stay home with the kids, so I let him pick it out by himself. He did do a good job, but I probably would have picked something different.) However, if you only have a small space and want to add a full bath, I definitely recommend shower enclosures. They offer a lot more room than they look, and it is nice having two showers when you are trying to get ready for parties and such.

Eventually, when we add on to upstairs, I am going to check out the shower store and look into getting discount steam shower. We are going to add in a hot tub up there, so we need the shower to be seperate. What would be better than a steam shower? They look awesome and extremely relaxing. If you are lacking on space, they even offer steam showers with minitubs attached!

I personally can’t wait to remodel again, so we can spruce up our house. Even the economy is in the tank, houses still are a good value. Even though houses prices have dropped for the time being, they will bounce back. Remodeling also makes it more enjoyable for you to stay in the house you are in. By building out our basement, we can definitely stay in this house a lot longer (my upstairs only has 980 square feet, so we were a little cramped up here).

What does your bathroom look like? What kind of upgrades would you like to make?

Hell Froze Over aka Why I Love My Hubby

Lisa — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 17:00:30 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

NOTE: If you are reading this by a feedreader this may be a duplicate post for you. Hint of advice to everyone, don’t write a post while you have DNS changes going on or it’ll get eaten.

I know, interesting title. But see, you have to know what the last week was like in my house. Last weekend we were gone to a wedding. All week, the earliest my hubby came home from work was 7 pm. Needless to say, the house was a wreck. On top of all that, I was changing hosting due to many issues with Bluehost (which I will blog about later!).

Hell froze over because well, the hubby actually got it into his head that we needed to clean the house. Not only that, he helped. We went from room to room and actually cleaned the majority of the house. He actually got on his hands and knees and cleaned the tub. He used an old toothbrush to clean the jets on the whirlpool. That’s what a good job he did. We rearranged the living room again too! After the kids went to bed last night, he also went grocery shopping and managed to spend less than $200 too! (However, some of his choices were not so good so I’ll be going back, but I am not complaining.)

It feels good to have a semiproductive weekend. This afternoon we will be going to one of his friend’s house for a little party, and I am not sure what we have in store for tomorrow.

Basements and Barstools

Lisa — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 17:00:45 +0000

My Thoughts, Ideas, and Ramblings - A day in the life of a busy mom . . .

I know that my husband is just dying to put a bar in our newly remodeled basement. That was a plan he always had since we moved here. Premiere Barstools has so many choices for anyone who is looking for counter stools, extra tall stools, or kitchen bar stools. They have an excellent selection for all of those.

Like I said, I personally am looking to surprise my husband with some bar stools for the basement. Now, I cannot decide if something classic like this:

would work best or if something more pretty would be in store. I found an excellent deal on something like this:

I guess it will probably come down to what kind of bar he decides to build. With having little ones, a lot of extra things come into play. As for the first stool, I would be worried about the stool having no back. Whereas, on the second stool, I would be worried that Will (my one year old) would use this chair as a climbing challenge (Yes, for some reason he has started the climbing stage after he learned to walk!). However, the second chair is about $85 which is a great price for barstools. Plus, whenever we get around to remodeling kitchen, these would look nice there. I have a huge kitchen (I think it is 15 x 15), so at some point we are going to remodel it. We may add in an island, and those stools would look awesome there too! Decision, decisions . . .

Do you have barstools in your house? What kinds did you go with? Did where they were going make a difference to which ones you got? Do you use the barstools as extra seating when company is over? I know, lots of questions, but I have never bought these before!