Here is my fridge today. I took the opportunity afforded by the lack of stuff inside it to clean all the shelves. Doesn’t it look pretty! 😉 One advantage to eating everything you buy is that you can actually see what you have in the house. It might even force you to get creative with what you cook for dinner. Creative is good!
Today is payday for my husband. What that means is that the check should arrive in the mail. It does not mean that the money is available for me to go shopping. We are coming to the end of our groceries. I am pleased that we still have milk, both regular milk and the Almond milk that my two younger ones drink.
We used up the last loaf of bread today. That means I need to make bread either tonight or first thing tomorrow. We ended up using a lot of bread over the weekend. That meant the stash I had didn’t last all the way through our two weeks. I do not have any more money in the budget, in fact as you remember I went over by $16. It might be easier to run to the store tonight and pick up some bread. I do happen to have about $3 in my purse. And I could do that perhaps. [We received a survey from Neilson Surveys about our TV watching, it happened to have $5 in cash inside. Surprise!] I might go to the store. I don’t know yet. I also need peanut butter and if I am careful and maybe look for some hidden change I might have enough to buy one loaf of bread and a small jar of peanut butter from Aldi tonight.
Or I could make something different for my kids to eat. Yep I went there. I could actually make something different from peanut butter and honey for my kids to eat for their lunch tomorrow. Will that cause problems? Oh you bet! Will the kids complain? O Yes Sir!
Let’s consider something for a moment:
What do I want to be teaching my children? Do I want to teach them that it is my job to cater to their every whim and provide for them whatever their little fists demand from me?
Or
Is it my job to teach my children that the world does NOT revolve around their little conceited hearts and there are bigger problems in this world than whether or not they eat peanut butter for lunch. Maybe I can remind them of our little girl we adopted through compassion, Miriam Da. Such a sweet little slip of a girl from Burkina Faso. I doubt she has the audacity to complain to her parents about what she gets to eat for lunch each day. I have a feeling she is happy to have something to eat, and a home to eat it in.
I don’t know exactly what I will do about our lunch for tomorrow. But I do know I want to teach my kids to be thankful for what we have been given. We don’t have much by way of the world’s standards. I feel so rich at times. Sometimes it is because we have been given some amazing gifts. Sometimes it is because we have found some amazing deals. But I am sitting in a cozy house on a lovely couch I didn’t buy, typing on a computer that was given to me and seeing a living room where only one piece of furniture was purchased by me.
God has provided for our family in some pretty amazing ways and I am so thankful for the abundant riches he has poured out on our family. I want to be teaching my kids to trust that God will take care of them, and to be thankful for how he chooses to take care of them. Even if it means they eat salad for lunch instead of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
How is your week going? Is this the beginning or end of your grocery money? What are you doing to make it stretch to the end and not spend money you didn’t budget? Share with me and let me know how things are going.
Our Frugal Life 