random thoughts on grocery shopping.....

So back in the day when I was single (gosh that seems soooo long ago when I think of it) grocery shopping was very simple. Not to mention, I was going to school & working which means I was on an extremely tight budget, so I couldn't splurge a lot on food, just the bare bones to get by on.

I did shop at the healthy food stores, just like I still do now that I'm married. I would come home with anywhere between 1-3 bags of groceries on average (3 usually meant I had bought a big bottle of juice or something like that). If memory serves me correctly I believe I used to try to shop for 2 week periods since that was when I got paid....

Ever since I got married I was astonished at how much work grocery shopping had become. For one thing we just cannot manage to get everything we need at only one store--we regularly visit Costco, Trader Joe's, Whole Foods, & Henry's. And then there are occasional visits to a few others: Clarks, Goodwins, Mothers, I'm probably forgetting something here............ But the main reason it's so much work is just how much food I have to buy on a regular basis.

At the time I married I had a small pickup truck. It was fine when I did my single life grocery shopping, but it was not practical at all once I married. That was my biggest issue, grocery shopping with such a small vehicle to pack it all in. And people would often tell me to just put it in the bed of the truck--sometimes I had to, but I didn't like to. I was often visiting more than one store & couldn't just leave groceries sitting out in the back like that where people could steal them. And if it was raining the food would get wet & if it was hot the food might go bad. It was a never-ending problem. Never mind the fact that I now had a husband & 2 kids that I could not fit into my vehicle--it was not a family car at all.

Needless to say once I graduated from school & got my Hummer I've been a very happy camper--I can now fit the tons of groceries in my vehicle & I can also fit my family in my vehicle. And it's a safe vehicle (since I've been rear-ended so many times) & I just love it all the way around. I often stop to think about this when I am loading the Hummer with groceries.

These days I leave the heavy shopping (dog food, water bottles, etc) for hubby since I'm preggo, but I still do most of the rest of the grocery shopping--I just have to split it up a lot, no more than 2 stores in one trip.

So yesterday I stopped at Costco & Trader Joes. As I was dragging it all into the kitchen I stopped to think about how much food it is compared to when I was single. It suddenly occurred to me that for most people this probably doesn't happen. Most people get married & then have one more person to feed besides themselves--not such a huge increase. And then at some point they probably have a kid, but it starts out only taking baby formula & then eats very small portions & increases gradually, etc. So most people probably don't find themselves in grocery-shopping-shock, because it creeps up on them gradually.

But when I married I gained a husband, a 17 year old & an 11 year old; not to mention the 17 year old's boyfriend who ate here on a very regular basis. So yeah, that was a huge increase that sort of happened overnight for me.

Not really a profound blog. Maybe not even an interesting blog to most. Just somethin' that I have thought about a lot over the past few years.