Survival Week

This has been Survival Week for our family - an idea I picked up in one of the women's magazines I peruse while waiting online at the grocery store. Since I am too tight to buy them I like to pick the longest check out line, ignore my kids for 5 minutes and read through the catchiest headlines. I saw one promising thousands of dollars worth of grocery savings and picked it up. Among the many tips, I saw an idea called Survival Week where you simply do not go to the grocery store. As items run out, move to more creative food sources in the pantry. Like, that box of Cheerios that has been on the shelf for who knows how long, probably since the little one started first eating solids to baking my own bread. The Cheerios, well, I am glad they are gone and promise not to feed my family stale cereal again. And the bread baking turned out to be totally easy, thanks to the KitchenAid I got for Christmas, and totally delicious and probably more nutritious than the preservative laden breads in the grocery store. We learned a lot this week. We learned that the kids do not need juice and after a day of whining and crying drink water again and even see milk as a treat (in a moment of desperation we also learned that last New Year's unopened sparkling cider, and I mean New Year's Eve 2006, is still good).

Why would I do such a thing? Not grocery shop for, as of today, 13 days? Money, of course. We've been in a tight crunch and I just want to get back on top of the budget. For the weeks leading up to the holidays grocery shopping was getting out of hand. No lists. No menus. Just running in for milk or juice and coming out $80 later - 3 times a week! I needed to break the cycle. And I wanted to get my kids and myself off of some of our bad habits - like juice and deli meats.

This week has jump started my newest money saving plan - buy in bulk once a month and buy necessities once a week. And to bake and make things from scratch more. This last idea is more nutritious and healthy than buying a lot of preprocessed foods, besides being cheaper, because you know exactly what is on the food and that there are no chemicals or other preservatives with who knows what lasting effects for our children. And, it is tastier too.

So, Survival Week? A success and I'll do it again only next time I will have a plan going in (as well as a few bottles of merlot in the pantry) rather than just not having enough money for food shopping without a credit card because heating oil was $3.43 a gallon this week!! But that's another story.