Black Belt Shopping, Soccer, and Les Miserables
Today was quite the busy day for the family! Angela got up early and went shopping with some friends. It turns out that there is a new craze around coupon shopping and getting a TON of stuff for pretty cheap! Some call it “black belt couponing.” It takes some time to figure things out (where the coupons are, what stores are having the major sales on what you want, etc.) but once you do that, you can cash in big! Today, they went to Jewel and Angela came home with 44 boxes of various Kelloggs cereal, 12 bottles of Lawry’s marinade, and 4 boxes of Pop Tarts! She got all that (over $200 in groceries) for just over $40! That’s huge!
What you do I guess, is print out coupons for stuff that is on sale. You then go through and use a coupon or two, then get the “catalinas” that spit out of the register with your receipt. You then use those to go back through the line and purchase additional “stuff” with coupons AND your catalinas. You keep doing this and the more you buy, the cheaper it gets. If you’re interested, you can go to http://www.jillcataldo.com to see how this works. It’s pretty cool! We could save enough money in 1 month to cover Sarah’s car insurance! 🙂 We have a friend that told use she used to spend around $800 in groceries every month. She now spends around $200 for her family of 5!
When Angela got home, we went over to Zach’s soccer practice/scrimmage. He loves his team and loves playing! We love it because it’s fun to watch the pack of little kids running around in a big bunch kicking each other and occasionally the ball! 🙂 Plus, it wears Zach out and he comes home pretty tired.
After getting some work done around the house and yard (trimming edges, mowing, raking, vacuuming, dishes, etc.), Angela, Sarah, Kirstyn and I went to Waubonsie High School and watched their production of Les Miserables. What a FANTASTIC show! They had a rotating stage, just like the production on Broadway, and the voices and acting were amazing! It’s no wonder our school district gets Grammy Gold status every year at one of it’s high schools! Angela and I have both seen Les Miserables on Broadway and we both think that, with a few small exceptions, this was very close to 
Broadway quality! 🙂 What’s even more amazing is that the strongest voice we liked the most came from a Sophomore! Sarah knows him well and they went to school together for years. There was a young man from our ward in it, as well as a couple from other wards. Sarah knew many of them from high school last year. It was also amazing how many of the kids with major parts came from Still Middle School (where our kids go)! 🙂
Even though it was the school edition, it was still about 2 1/2 hours long and the music and singing never stopped the entire time (except during intermission, of course). Kirstyn was kind of confused at times about what was going on because she was not familiar with the book, so I talked her through the series of events and answered her questions. She even thoroughly enjoyed it!
