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Wednesday, October 04, 2006

Flexible Parenting Goes Under Cover

Okay, admittedly the title makes it sound a lot more exciting than it actually was. I needed to go buy formula yesterday evening from our wholesale club. I went to where I keep my stash of discount checks and to my great dismay I didn’t have any. How could that be?! I got a bunch when my younger son (YS) was first born. (Both the ones I requested and the ones I got from friends who’ve had babies who haven’t used Enfamil.) A few of my friends may, and I stress may, have also “had babies” for me too. That’s just hearsay though. Thus, I’ve been riding the discount check tide for quite a while now.

“Oh well,” I thought, “no biggie it’s just a small discount”. Than I began to compare the prices of the formula and once again confirmed that my child has to have the most expensive regular formula (I can’t complain to much because specialty ones costs more) particularly when I compared it to the generic brand. (My husband claims that this is proof that expensive taste is genetic.) However, that small discount from the discount checks does add up over the course of the year. I wondered if I could call Meade Johnson, the makers of Enfamil, and ask for more discount checks After all, it’s been a while since I’ve received any in the mail even though I’m a member of their “Family Beginnings Club.” I also thought perhaps some had gotten lost in mail. After all, my friend Cee had received quite a few of them in the mail after she had her baby a few months before YS was born. She had handed them all over to me. I had received a few checks, but not as many as Cee had. For reasons I didn’t understand, Cee’s checks were worth more than mine, which is kind of ironic because she’s a former lactation consultant and is exclusively breastfeeding her baby.

This afternoon, I dressed in a pair of black sweats, pulled my hair back in a ponytail and put on a black beret and one of those disguise glasses that has fake eyebrows, a big nose, and a mustache. Then I secured a sock over the phone to disguise my voice. I’m totally kidding! But I did give Meade Johnson a call, said point blank that it had been a while since I received any discount checks in the mail, and asked if I could please get some more. I was very pleased, but not too surprised, when the employee said she would have some mailed out to me right away. After all, discount checks like that hook people like me into using the same formula over and over again even when we don’t have coupons. So a few measly $5-$7 coupons (even the one for $1) are going to bring them back about $1,000 worth of business from me. Why am I not using Nestle Supreme with its fabulous $11 dollar off coupons they keep sending me? Oh yeah, because YS is doing really well on it, and I don’t want to rock the boat (translation I want to be able to sleep through the night). She even asked specifically which Enfamil formula YS uses so that I would get the appropriate coupon (I did get two fabulous $7 off coupons 2 months ago, but they were for the specialty formulas so they were no help to me.)

Then she explained the reason Cee got more coupons than me. Apparently they give out coupons on a promotional basis and not a fixed basis. In other words, it’s not that every member of the “Family Beginnings Club” gets 12 coupons a year for example, but rather every time there’s a promotion, members of the program get a coupon. When Cee joined there must have been a lot of promotions. However, a few months later when YS was born, they had already had their promotions so I didn’t receive as many. Fortunately when I called, they were willing to help me out.

A. Elliot’s Lesson Learned: Call your formula company to inquire about additional coupons and discount checks.

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Name:Alex Elliot
Home:MA, United States
About Me:Professional Mom of two cats, a dog, an ant farm, and oh yeah...two boys: a 6 year old and a 3 year old. Also found in my house is my husband who is known on this blog as The Big Giraffe.
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For those of us who didn't get an instruction manual with our babies and for whom parenting hasn't always gone as planned. On a more serious note this blog is about supporting a woman's ability to make her own choices about parenting including the choice, for whatever reason, to bottle feed her babies formula.

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