Wednesday, June 18, 2008

Bargain Hunter Swap Package Received!

Lately I have been all about the Bargain Hunter swap on Craftster (here's the Bargain Hunter Swap gallery). I kind of got overexcited and made my swap partner pretty much a literal ton of stuff (I may have mentioned before that I like to bargain-hunt?), but today I got to burn off some of my swap anxiety, because I got my package of goodness from my partner today!

I'm lucky I got it at all because the postman actually rang my doorbell (twice! hee), but since I was sitting on the back deck enjoying my second cup of coffee of the day while the girls fought over Dinosaur Bingo at my feet, only passively instead of actively annoying me, I was too lazy to get up. I also thought it was probably this creepy alarm system salesman who came by earlier when the girls and I were painting out in the front yard (Is it paranoid to think that an alarm system salesman, if you refuse him, will come back later and rob your house to prove to you that you need an alarm system?). Anyway, imagine my delight when I went out the front door later and tripped over a honkin' big box on the front porch!

This is the girls' absolute favorite:
Coordinating tote bags! The denim outside and the ribbons are all alike, and the insides are all different. My inside rocks:
I also got yarn (yay!), an awesome old-school needlework instruction book, and these really terrific stickers of birds that I am totally going to turn into Christmas ornaments.

The girls got the best kid-thing ever: a huge roll of admission tickets--real admission tickets! Will and Syd immediately got into a raging, screaming, eyeing me to see if I'll look away so they can slap each other fight because Syd, being two, wanted to sit right down and tear off each ticket (which I, too, think sounds like the most fun), and Will, being four, wanted to put the tickets "up high and save them for a special game." So the tickets were divided in half, Syd did this:And Willow did this: And the girls got even more books and toys: The dinosaur has the name "Sinclair" embroidered on it, which for some reason cracks me up. The zebra notepad has another, smaller zebra notepad that goes with it, but Sydney stuffed it into her tote, and she took the tote to a party we were at earlier, at which there was a pinata, and so she also stuffed her tote with candy, and now, even though my partner is bouncing her to sleep on the yoga ball, she won't let either of us touch the tote because, as she yelled when Matt tried to take it off her neck, "Tandy! Mine!" So no photo of the wee notepad, but it's awesome, take my word. I haven't checked out those other two kids' books yet, but they kept the girls occupied for *several* minutes earlier so I could check my email in peace, so clearly they're pretty great. I'm pretty stoked about the watercolor pad, too, which gives me an excuse to stop sketching patterns on the girls' construction paper.

The coolest thing, though, is that my partner actually got the girls a book that I remember from when I was their age. It's this Little Golden Book, and the story is about a baby who has three older siblings and they're all really loud, and when this old lady babysitter comes over she makes all the kids shut up so the baby can sleep, but the baby can't sleep when it's quiet, so they all get to go back making noise, yay. Here's one of the loud kids. See why he's loud?

It's his TRANSISTOR RADIO!

Finally, Calsters got the girls one last toy--she found out that my kids love, love, love themselves some dinosaurs, and she found this terrific stegosaurus at her Goodwill. Well, here's what the stegosaurus is busy doing right now:

SHOPPING LIST:

  • Bird stickers--Free!
  • Tickets--Free!
  • Needlework Book--$1.00 (book sale)
  • Kids' Books--$1.05 (Goodwill)
  • Sinclair Dino--$1.00 (Goodwill)
  • Stegosaurus--$.50 (Goodwill)
  • Watercolor pad--$.50 (Michael's)
  • Zebra stuff--$1.95 (Meyer's)
  • Wool yarn--$1.00 (garage sale)
  • Denim fabric--$2.00 (JoAnn's)
  • Ribbon--Free
  • Kids' fabrics $.75 (Hancock's remnants)
  • My fabric $.25 (Hancock's remnants)
  • = $10.00 !!!!!!!

What bargains did you find this week?

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