We are living on savings and unemployment checks now, and so far it hasn't been so bad. We did indeed cut our grocery bill in half that first week, primarily because we didn't have to buy diapers and we had a bunch of food in our cupboards that we built our meals around. Our second grocery bill was higher because we had to buy diapers and toilet paper and stuff like that, but it was still lower than usual, because, well, because it has to be.
One expensive item we've taken off our grocery list is cereal. Jett, Charlie, and I used to eat cereal for breakfast every morning. But those boxes are pretty expensive, and when you eat Lucky Charms and Sugar Smacks for dessert like Charlie does, you end up buying a lot of cereal every week. My friend Amy mentioned in her blog that her family eats bran muffins for breakfast - a recipe she got from the Frugal Gourmet. I googled the recipe and started making the batter too. It saves for weeks in your fridge, so you just spoon some into a muffin tin in the morning and let it bake for half an hour. I also started making pancake batter and waffle batter up ahead of time. Now for the last couple of weeks Jett and I have been eating muffins and yogurt and pancakes and bananas for breakfast. It tastes pretty good and I think it's saving us a few bucks.
The dinners that we cooked that first week were pretty good, didn't feel like penny-pinchers, and like I said, made use of food that we already had. We ate Pad Thai (one of Charlie's specialties), black bean and rice burritos, juevos rancheros, eggplant parmesan (frozen, breaded eggplant cutlets from Trader Joe's), Butternut Sage Orzo, and potato soup.
But the diapers. Oh, my sordid love affair with cloth and disposable diapers. I had Jett in cloth diapers for two days straight, and my word, no two-year old should poop in anything but the toilet. Cloth diapers might be idealistic and environmentally friendly, but oh, The Disgusting. To deal with it, I now have a plastic tub, a wet/dry bag, a can of sanitizer, and rubber gloves sitting next to the toilet in our guest bathroom. Lovely. Charlie suggested that we only put cloth diapers on Jett after he has, you know, done his business. I tried that last week, but that proved to be a ridiculous waiting game that had me obsessing about when The Disgusting would come. So now I have to either submit to The Disgusting and keep those cloth diapers on him all day or give in to the poop-on-my-rubber-gloved-hands-opposed person I really am. (Kai is in cloth diapers all day as long as I've kept up with the laundry, but his diapers don't yet need to be wrung out. In toilet water). So the diaper issue, and any possible cost-savings surrounding it, are yet to be determined. We'll see how this week goes.
In addition to disposable diapers, some other things have jumped back on to our grocery list even though they are luxury items. One is organic milk. This is killing Charlie because organic milk is $3 more per gallon than non-organic. But I talked Charlie in to that and I also talked him in to chocolate. We used to always have a package of Dove chocolates around, but I finally recognized my chocolate addiction when I found myself making a glass of chocolate milk for myself every afternoon after putting Jett down for a nap. We've never gone through milk, or chocolate sauce, that fast. It was obvious that I needed chocolate every day. We did downgrade, however. Last week Charlie bought Kit-Kats. They are already gone.
Of course, I am not the only one with the luxury items. While Charlie appears frustrated that the people controlling our satellite tv won't refund us any money for the football package even if we cancel it, of course there is no point in canceling the football package if we are stuck paying for it anyway. There is always a silver lining somewhere.
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