Motherhood & Groceries

Once in a while I will go over budget on our grocery bill. In turn I choose to put us on a no frills spending for a week. This past week was one of those weeks. You would have thought that I was torturing my fourteen year old son by depriving him of soda and chips. It worked and not only was he giddy to have back the snacks, I have to admit so was I.

After school he has latest snack is sour cream and onion chips and slices of block mild cheddar cheese. At our local discount grocery store, Ruler Foods a subsidiary of Kroger, a block of cheese costs $4.00 and a bag of chips is a little under $2.00. It takes at least two bags and two blocks to last him the week. Thus $12 on his snack food alone. On one hand I think that he should eat maybe a bowl of cereal instead which would cost $2 for the cereal and $2 for the gallon of milk. The milk would probably last him a week and he would need two boxes of cereal for a total of $6. Or mix the two, one day have chips and cheese and the next have cereal. Or maybe a couple of peanut butter sandwiches with bread being $0.60 a loaf and peanut butter being $4. Nope. He is on a kick of chips and cheese. I'm not so sure any of the choices are much more healthy than the other. If I was going for health I would add in fruits to the mix. We won't even discuss trying to add in vegetables. For a week he wouldn't snack because we didn't have any of this on hand. He ate supper a little better though. Bonus.

Lunches on the weekends are another blasphemy to healthy living. I suggest lunch meat sandwiches all of the time but he would rather take the time to fry a pile of fries in the fryer which wouldn't be so bad if he had some with a sandwich. Nope. This past week when pickings were slim he cooked a Banquet Chicken Parmigiana and ate the whole thing (six patties) by himself. Cost wise he's a a cheap lunch with a large bag of fries being $3.50 or a Banquet meal being $2.29. I could force him to eat different stuff, maybe sit on him until he eats broccoli, His daycare provider gave him those for lunch at her house, he choked them down or went hungry. My problem is that I don't think food should be a battle. I choose bigger things to battle over like being kind to the new kid on the team, standing up for his friends when they're picked on, getting off of his X-Box and coming outside to work in the yard with us.

What did I miss out on that week? Not my coffee (decaffeinated only) because that's dangerous to other people's health for me to go without it. It was orange pop. Yep, I am currently addicted to it in the evenings. I replaced it with drink mixes. I sorely missed my pop though and joyously popped the tab on a can last night. Ahhh...