Once-A-Month Shopping

Part 1~

As I sat down today to work on my shopping list, I thought some of you might be interested in how I do it. I'll be posting this in segments under Large Family Living, but even if you don't have a large family, you can definitely benefit from shopping only once a month and using master lists to do so.

Shopping once a month came about for me after having my 4th child. I also had recently added my 2nd oldest child to our homeschooling routine and life was just too busy at home to leave the house much. Something about that 4th child threw me for a loop. All my routines and ways of doing things no longer worked. I had to revamp nearly all my daily activities from cleaning to cooking to shopping. However, I am one of those women who can easily discern the PROBLEM, but can rarely find the SOLUTION on her own. However, I am very adept at searching for a solution and asking tons of questions from many different sources until I find an answer that works for my particular problem.

Shopping was one of these problems. I knew I absolutely could not shop every week. My husband had generously offered to do the shopping for me, but in reality, he did not have the time for this either, and I much preferred for him to spend that precious time at home with us. So, for many months, we just "got by" without any rhyme or reason to our shopping habits. For any of you who have tried to just get by anywhere in your life, you begin to realize that this type of living begins to suck the joy out other areas of your life. For me, it was cooking. I rarely had the right ingredients for ANYTHING; therefore, I didn't want to cook ANYTHING. Meals became a hodge podge of mostly junk. I knew something had to change. But what? Remember, I am very able to see the PROBLEM. ;o)

One day, while our family was visiting a family twice our size, I began to pick the mama's brain. For point of reference, this is the same family who lives in the garage (see my post entitled Stuff & Things), so I figure if anyone knows how to streamline things, it has to be her! She graciously shared her "secret" with me and it has become our own secret of success.

It was so incredibly simple, I could hardly believe it. It was to shop Once-A-Month. Now, we've all heard of COOKING Once-A-Month, but shopping once a month seems utterly impossible. (I will admit that cooking once a month for me seems utterly impossible as well...maybe someday I'll try it, but for now, I prefer to cook on an as-needed basis).

She said there are even some months they can go 6 weeks without shopping again; however, they do tend to feel like an out-house at that point..."out" of everything. She has floor to ceiling shelving that accomodates this major shopping trip, and a cute little juice cubby her husband rigged up. As I listened to her explain the ins and outs of shopping this way, I was fascinated and a little scared. Could it really work for us? We had only 4 children to her 9. But, I was at my wit's end and was willing to give it a try.

She gave me two more crucial pieces of information, that I will share in subsequent posts:

A Master Meal List

and

A Master Grocery List

I also want to add one thing before concluding this post. If you choose to shop once a month, you will still have to go out for milk and eggs about every other week. However, in my mind, this is much more doable than a huge shopping trip every single week.