Grocery Shopping and other exciting stuff like that....

Here lately (read: past year) we've gotten pretty relaxed about budgeting and sticking to grocery lists, etc. We even got to the point where we were going to Wally World about 2 or 3 times a week because we had forgotten stuff on the last trip, or ran out b/c we weren't paying attention. It was getting pretty irritating, because, really, who wants to go to Wal-Mart that much, ever?? I was reading in this book about how they started cutting back on grocery shopping until they only went ONCE A MONTH! Now that would be a major feat for us to accomplish, but we can start with baby steps, like only going every other week.

So, I got out my favorite cookbooks and a few new ones and started making up a menu for the next two weeks. I have some new dishes we haven't tried and some we haven't had in a while. I alloted for one family meal out, which will probably be Saturdays at lunch (not counting Hubby's lunches). That way, if we're out running errands we can grab lunch, but we don't get to lollygag around until it's time to eat out supper also! (I'm putting this in writing to remind myself, see?)

Then I made up the grocery list. Which was very long and extensive. Two reasons. First, Little Man was fiddling with the knobs on the refridgerator the other week and he defrosted my whole fridge!! I lost a lot of food out of the freezer by the time we caught on to what had happened! Then, the other day, I open my pantry and see these little gray bugs crawling all around! Apparently we had bought some "weevils" with our groceries! GROSS!! So, had to throw out almost all of my pantry. That really made me mad! A whole canister of oats, boxes of grits, pasta and cereal. All wasted.

Anyway, that meant today's trip was going to be a doozy, with trying to replenish what we lost and trying to shop for two weeks. I told Hubby it would be about $250 at least. We decided to also quit going to Wal-Mart (or Target) for our groceries so much. We always end up buying extras besides groceries when we're there! We made the extra effort to go the "big" HEB in Beaumont b/c it has a way better selection on everything.

I took the kids back to the car to wait while Hubby checked out. When he met us he said, "You missed your limit by $20!" So, it was only $230! $230 for two weeks, plus a couple of extras we added to the cart. Not bad, considering we were spending an average of $180 a WEEK before! Actually, that's a savings of over $100! I'm sure there are lots of ways we could scale down even more, but I'm excited that we started somewhere!