Week One -- Frugal February Grocery 'Fast'

Isn't it interesting how life intervenes in your best made plans? I had intended to make my final grocery store 'run' on January 31. I typically shop on Thursdays because our local Shop N Save often has coupons for $10 off any $50 purchase. I had $100 of the January grocery money (we spend $100/week for our family of 7, but that excludes Alicia, who is away at college).

On Jan 31 we had an awesome snow storm. In addition to having difficulty actually getting to the grocery store, I tend to avoid shopping on days when the general population gets nervous about running out of bread and milk. Not that they don't have good reason to worry around here. In the past couple of years we've had more than our share of power outages, so folks get a little skittish when there are storms of any kind.

So, anyway, I didn't go to the store that day. There were great sales on pizza (I needed to stock up about 8 for the month) at Dierbergs and some good deals on veggies at Aldi's, so I hit both of those stores on Feb 4 before the sales expired. I spent about $45 of my $100 there. I was hoping ShopNSave would have their coupon day this week, but they didn't AND I have a sick 8 year old at home, Doug was out of town, Alicia was at Union U with all the tornado mess, and Sammi still has her migraine. Needless to say I barely left the house this week. I have this internal desire to run out to the store, but in reality there isn't anything we need at the moment. We still have more than 1/2 gallon of milk and the only thing we are really out of is bananas.

My plan is to hold off on the rest of the 'stocking up' for Feb until next week Thursday, hoping there is another $10 coupon. As far as getting the milk/produce/bread, I'll wait until we need it...maybe Sunday or Monday so the bananas are fresh for lunches.

This week we had tacos, hot dogs, fish sticks, parmesan chicken legs (yum), leftovers one night, and tonight we'll have 'breakfast'. With the exception of the girls on fish night (they found other places to eat...), everyone's been satisfied with what we have.

I divided all of our stored food into four boxes so we don't devour all of it in one week...no one knows where they are or what's in them, so I just hit the boxes as we run out of things. Our week one box is still full!

You'd think I'd lived in the depression they way I've stocked our pantry...I'm going to have to find other things to put in there in the future because it's silly to have this much saved up. I bet if we tried we could continue on well into March with just a few exceptions (like those morning poptarts....).

Wow -- this got long, but I promised I'd keep you up to speed on our little adventure. Is anyone out there joining us?