WHATEVER WAL-MART and Total..Nesting..Meltdown!

Well, we went grocery shopping today. We would be Ethan, Claire and I. I'm not happy with my local Wal-Mart. In order to save some money, I always take empty water bottles and refill. I'm not about to spend .88 on a bottle of water. No way, no how. Not doing it. Well, the water machine was out of order. Did they bother to put a sign on it? NOPE. I asked an employee about it and go, "Oh, yeah, it's like, broken or something. Should be fixed on Friday." Well, dandy, but I want water today. I had to break down and buy two 24 packs of water bottles so we can have something to drink until then. Another thing I noticed while shopping was that Wal-Mart (or at least the Wal-Mart I regularly shop at) seems to be getting rid of a lot of their family size Great Value items, and upping the price of the smaller Great Value items, making the cost to buy more of that item the same as the cost of the national brand. I'm not stupid, I check my prices. Even with price matching and coupons, I'm still spending more at this store. What the crap?! I'm so fed up that I'm going to be doing some serious shopping at Cub Foods for the next few weeks. They had quaker cereal on sale for $1.98 a box today, and I missed it. I'm just going to grab a Sunday paper in the mornings, come home and pour over my ad, and go shopping in the next state. I'd rather get awesome savings than be raked into spending more on 3 boxes of mac and cheese to feed my family lunch. Mmmmm..No thanks! Bye Wal-Mart..It's been nice knowing ya! Yeah I can buy jammies and bread at the same time, but it's so not worth it anymore.

In other news, I've hit the nesting meltdown. I've got 4 weeks as of today until baby arrival time, and only 2 weeks until my MIL comes to town to help out. I've actually gone so far as to check out books from the library on cleaning and organizing. I don't really know what compelled me to do these things, but I did. I spent ALL day cleaning Ethan's room yesterday. Really..I'm not even kidding. ALL DAY!! You don't even want to know what his room looked like before I finished. It really looked like the closet, his dresser and his toy box threw up. I went through and cleaned it all. I picked through everything. I made piles for freecycle and trashing. Whatever isn't freecycled, will be trashed. I just don't need it hanging around my house anymore. I also made a bedroom chore list and taped it to his closet, so everyday he knows exactly what he needs to do before he leaves his bedroom for school in the morning, and before he goes to bed at night. Want to see my after picture (I didn't take a before, because really, it would have been any mom's worst nightmare!)..

I think Ethan's room was THE biggest project. Now that it's taken care of, I just have to do the general upkeep of vacuuming and dusting while he does toy and clothing pick up. I still have the rest of the house to do, for which I made this:

Yes, that is a list of cleaning that needs to be done. Yes, that is a staple in the upper left hand corner, which means that yes, it is more than 1 page..Three to be exact. I told you, I'm in meltdown mode. This list will get done. I had a similar one when I was pregnant with Claire, and I got it done it just over a week, and kept it up with the general upkeep and weekly bathroom and bedroom run throughs. I'm on this. I can probably get this thing done in about a week. WOO!! Just sitting here seeing the list on the screen makes me want to get up and clean, but I'm working from the back to the front of the house, and I'm sure Claire would not appreciate it if I woke her by cleaning the bathroom right now. Cleaning shall start Tuesday, since I have my 36 week check tomorrow.

I also checked out a Nestle Tollhouse baking book and made this yummy little number today::Mmmmm....It's Peanut Butter Chocolate Bars. You can't taste any of the peanut butter though, just all that chocolate. I probably gained 10 pounds just looking at it. It's really good though. Really. And, this is proof I can bake, but not cook.