You probably get pages of coupons with the weekend newspaper. How many coupons do you end up tossing away because your family doesn’t use the products?

What if there were an easy way to trade the coupons you don’t want, for more of the ones you do? What if it were absolutely free? Enter Coupon Whirl. A free online coupon exchange that makes it easy.

Coupon Whirl is SuburbanDaddy’s latest side project. I conceived it while watching an episode of TLC’s Extreme Couponing with SuburbanMommy. (Before you make fun and take away my man card for watching TLC, realize I have 4 kids and lost that card a very long time ago).

Give it a whirl and let me know what you think.

Thing 1 got comfortable in a reading chair in his second grade (wow!) classroom.

Thing 2 tried his desk out in first grade.

But we realized we’ll have to do it sooner or later so yesterday we had a brand new, Carrier Infinity installed.  It’s the mac daddy of air conditioners home comfort technology.  It’s got a lot of whiz bang features like showing you the outside temperature on the thermostat and speaking of thermostat, it looks like an iPad hanging on the wall.

All that is nice, but last night I found out the feature that makes the hefty price tag worth it.  Apparently it does such a good job with its “home comfort technology”, that everyone in the house slept in until 6:30am!  At the same time.  You have to realize how amazing this is for us.  In the last 8 years, I don’t think we’ve ever slept that late.  We’ll see tomorrow if it was a fluke or the Carrier Infinity.

But it also marks another very important milestone – one more kid entering public (free!) school.

Two down and two more to go.

No more infant room. No more taking my shoes off to enter the classroom. No more filling out the sheet detailing when she last ate, last slept, and her mood for the day.

We’ve been in infant mode for pretty much the last 7 years. Bottles, baby carriers, pack and plays, spit up. It has become normal to us. I don’t remember life without it.

I won’t miss it a bit.

My kids are already well conditioned by brands and advertising. By the age of 3 they all knew Starbucks, McDonalds, and Target and ask for them by name. Except, of course, Thing 3 who defies any kind of conditioning and marches to his own beat. He absolutely loves Lucky Charms, at least we call them Lucky Charms, but in fact he will only eat the store brand “marshmallow oat cereal”. And trust me, he can tell the difference just by looking at the cereal in the bowl.

And, I never thought Thing 3 would be potty trained. But now he is! It’s something we’ve been working on for upwards of a year. It was going so poorly at one point we abandoned potty training completely, hoping he’d eventually come around. He was the only one left in his preschool class in pull-ups. Just getting him to give up diapers for pull-ups was an enormous struggle that took months.

Last week we went to Target and Thing 3 picked out the underwear he wanted. They were two sizes too big, but I didn’t care. He can wear a bra and panties for all I care as long as he doesn’t pee and poop in them. When we got home, we put all his pull-ups in a trash bag and threw them in the garbage. That was about 10 days ago. He cried for the pull-ups for a couple days but I told him they are all gone, he has to wear underwear now. We’ve had some accidents but for the most part he’s been peeing in the potty, especially at school. Pooping was where Thing 3 made his final stand, but I’m happy to report that tonight we had our first “splash down”.

We’ve been offering Thing 3 as many desserts as he wants for the last year if he’ll just use the potty. Tonight, we happily made good on the promise.

Next, following his performance in the school concert, Thing 1 got sick in the backseat of my car. Lovely.

Then, an hour later, Thing 3 threw up in his bed all over Buzz Lightyear.

Laundry. Lysol. More of the same tomorrow I’m afraid.

I’m happy that with three older brothers she will be very well protected in her teenage dating years. Forget about the nerves a teenage boy will feel having to face questions from her dad, SuburbanDaddy, for the first time. How about the gauntlet he will face going through Thing 1, Thing 2, and Thing 3.

Thing 3 already needs to be restrained if you try to take away his milk or Buzz Lightyear toy. Image what he’ll do if you make his little sister upset. Of course, with three older brothers, she will probably be pretty tough herself.

Over the next few months, I look forward to sleepless nights, spit ups, and lugging around baby gear. I also look forward to a whole new set of material that I can write about here. That’s the real reason we added a Thing 4.