This is what happens when you don't go shopping in a couple of weeks....

Looking at the ads the last couple of weeks did not push me out the door to do any major shopping. Once I cleaned up my cold storage and did a little mental inventory, I was not rushing to the store for a lot of things. So this is what a couple of weeks of no shopping will do to you. You go to the store and you leave with one of everything!

I took my 6 year old daughter with me tonight. She broke both arms a couple of weeks ago (she parachuted out of a swing and landed with both arms straight out)....anywho she wanted to get out of the house because she was going a little stir crazy. So I took her along. You know it's a long shopping trip when you have to stop for a potty break in between!

This list is a little too long to itemize, but you can see that I nearly bought one (sometimes more) of everything at the store. I went to my favorite store - Albertson's this week.

I bought 85 items and paid $143.44 which

makes each item about $1.69. This is certainly not the best shopping trip I've had, but I did find some good buys. I bought a lot of things that I did not have coupons for this time. That's sometimes how shopping goes. Also knowing that I only picked up a few basic items in the last 2 weeks, doesn't make the dollar amount I spent today seem so bad.

I had to take 3 pictures just so you could see everything.

Remember a few weeks ago when Albertson's had a great sale on their Hershey's chocolate chips ($.70 a bag)? Well I cashed in on my rain check tonight as well. I really wanted to try their Cinnamon chips, but they didn't have any. It appears that people are still clearing the shelves because of their rain checks as well. Albertson's was allowing people to buy 40 per rain check. All I got was milk chocolate though. They were out of all the other flavors. Milk chocolate is my favorite anyway! I'm happy.

Yes - that is 20 bags of chocolate chips - I'm going to post my favorite oatmeal chocolate chip cookie recipe in a blog coming soon. I can't wait to make some!

Don't forget to get a rain check on items the store is sold out of. Don't let the savings slip through your fingers. If it's a store you regularly visit, just plan to pick it up on a future shopping trip. Most stores will even allow you to place a special order if you're looking for a large amount. (I personally, would really like it if people would do this - instead of clearing the shelves - it makes other shoppers pretty frustrated to come into the store and find all the sale items gone).