... WITH SNACKS

I have written previously about how I have changed my diet in the past few years. "Healthy eating" & all that.

It just means there are foods I used to eat which are no longer on my menu. Mostly the foods I once loved to eat & ate too much of. Examples would be pizza, burgers, fried foods, etc. Yep ... no booze or beer, too.

Not that I'm ever going to shrivel up & blow away. I could still lose a few pounds. I continue to eat lots of carbs & sweets. Jelly beans are a favorite snack.

When it comes to "My Girls", there are no restrictions on "foodies". I try to provide them with a varied diet of both "wet" & "dry" food ... from several variety's & brands.

As with all cats, they have their favorite food items & will sometimes act hungry, only to refuse what is offered for them to eat. It's then my job to figure out what it is they are hungry for & present that food to them. [All cat owners know here I am coming from.]

All three of My Girls like the cat snack, "Temptations". They don't turn their nose up when offered this tasty, crunchy morsel. [Well, they have, but it's the very rare occasion.]

Temptations come in different package colors, an indication of the various flavors the product is offered in. I've never sampled any of them, so I don't know if the taste of the "beef" is beef, or the "salmon" is salmon, etc. Whatever it tastes like -- no matter what "flavor" -- My Girls eat it.

The advertising circulars which come in the Tuesday mail sometimes have coupons for Temptations & I'm quick with the scissors to cut them out. Anything to save money.

Recently in the mail at home were coupons for $1.00 off when buying two packages of Temptations. That same day, I went to the Post Office, both to get the coupon in my P.O. Box ... and ... to search through the garbage can in the Post Office lobby for coupon circulars people had tossed out. "Junk mail".

I ended up with the two coupons in MY mail & six more I snagged out of the trash.

Actually, these were not the most money saving coupons when it came to Temptations snacks. In January, there were coupons with an offer of "Buy one Temptations ... get one FREE". I did the Post Office "raid" on those too.

But ... I didn't read the fine print on the coupon. The cashier at Kroger did. The disclaimer was on the coupons top dollar value being $2.19. The cashier caught the fine print, so the second package was not "free", but at a cost of $2.96, with the coupon, the package price was 77 cents.

And ... being the resourceful & clever person I am, I used the remaining coupons at Target, where the check-out cashier was all too happy to sell me the second package as "free", without the "maximum value" of $2.19. She didn't read the fine print. I knew she wouldn't.

Whatever the flavor, the packages of Temptations are transferred to a container which sits on the kitchen counter. It's then easy to shake some "snacks" on the paper plates I use for just such feedings. That would be THREE plates, since each cat wants/needs/requires their own dish.

The name of the game in this household is "healthy eating" ... with snacks.