Mom Blog Work

Is it Friday yet? Almost! Here's what is on our Good Stuff list this week:

Megan's Good Stuff

• Running
• Super dad Ernest
• Fall TV starting again
• Summer-like weather in fall
• Dress shopping with my sis and my mom

Karissa's Good Stuff

• Car naps
• Mo wanting to go to Rustan Way
• Brady and dogs
• a big bag of M&M's hiding in the pantry
• Chuggington

Photo: ciao_yvon

$160. That's how much a week's worth of groceries cost me this week. One week's worth of food for my family of 4 (well, 5…my bro-in-law is living with us).

Let me back up a bit. A few months ago, I watched the movie Food Inc., and quite honestly, it immediately changed the way I think about food, specifically where the meat I purchase for my family is sourced and how it is raised. Being a middle class family, I feel like I am in the position to make better choices about the food I feed my family, and I was willing to pay a little extra to do so.

That was about six months ago, and really, it had been going pretty well. I ended up shopping a lot a Whole Foods, which is thankfully right down the street, and it seemed like my grocery budget went up about 10-15 dollars a week, something we could absorb pretty well.

I did start making different choices, namely:

1. Reducing the overall amount of meat we buy. It's expensive to buy meat at Whole Foods, so I tried to get at least one or two veg meals in a week.
2. Red meat in particular is really expensive, so I cut back on that a LOT. I noticed we mostly cooked it in ground form, so I used whatever was on sale (ground turkey, chicken, pork, or sometimes beef).
3. Buy local or organic produce. We started shopping at a local produce store, and I tried to pick items that were either organic or local (or both).
4. Shop at different stores if I need to. If I have the time, I'll go the produce store, Walmart/Target/Fred Meyer and Whole Foods, or some combination of the three.

This week though, things did not go as planned. I went back to one of the normal menu planning tools I had used in the past: the Grocery Bag feature in Everyday Food Magazine. Basically they give you 5 healthy, balanced recipes and the shopping list that goes along with it. The idea is that everything that you need for that week will fit in a grocery bag.

While the grocery bag part has never really panned out for me, I have enjoyed these recipes in the past. The food is usually good, generally includes a lot of vegetables and it's a complete plan, so I don't have to really think. Just grab the list and go.

That didn't work out so well this week. I spent $80 in general stuff at walmart, basically, everything for the week, plus laundry detergent, excluding produce and meat. I figured I was in good shape to spend about $20 on meat/produce. $100 a week is what we normally spend, so I try to stay in that range.

On to Whole Foods, where the meat cost me $40. GASP. That was for 1.6 lbs of skirt steak, 2 bone-in chicken breasts and 8 bone-in thighs. Sigh.

The rest of the produce I needed was $40. $7 alone for like 6-7 sweet potatoes. Which, btw, apparently wasn't even enough. I have to go buy more this week.

I left the store depressed and dejected. I don't know how an average family could afford to eat this way all the time. The food is high quality, but I just can't afford enough of it to feed my family (and the live-ins!) every week.

I have to say though, that my grocery bill has only reached this high point a few times since I stopped shopping solely at my local WinCo. So, I'll keep trying to find ways to make healthy, local (and sometimes organic) choices when I'm shopping. It's really hard though - I already feel like I'm doing more than you could expect an average person to do: planning ahead of time, trying to take into account weekly sales, shopping at several stores. It's taking a lot of time (and money!) to figure this all out.

Last night, I wasn't even home to eat the $20 skirt steak we bought this week. I heard it was delicious - thankfully!

Don't you just love short weeks? It means Good Stuff comes that much sooner!

Megan's Good Stuff

• Post-travel rest days at home
• Getting the boys ready for back-to-school
• Rey potty training!
• Submitting our mama mantras app to the App Store (finally!)

Karissa's Good Stuff

• Bagel day
• Margeaux and her baby dolls
• Visiting Spokane
• Bruchi's
• Hoodie weather

Alex and Megan upon finding their first cache

I'm always looking for ways to get my very wired family (too wired, really) out of the house to explore our local community. We're not very outdoorsy, but I feel like we get caught up in the play-with-iThings, watch movies, hang out rut and if we don't' make an effort, we'll spend our weekends tooling around, trying to keep the kids off the various iThings that they so desire.

Enter geocaching, a high tech treasure hunting game. Here's how it works: people all over the world have hidden containers, or caches, outdoors and then have posted the coordinates of the cache online. Using a GPS-enabled device (like iPhone or Garmin GPS, etc), you enter the coordinates and then set off to find the cache. Once you find it, you log your find in the paper log in the cache and online as well. If the cache is big enough, it will often have little trinkets inside it; if you take one, you leave one (this is the part the kiddos love).

Rey and Alex on a recent cache hunt

Anyway, if you are considering taking up the game, consider these tips and tricks:

• You'll need a GPS device - we use our iPhones with the Groundspeak Geocaching App. (There's one for Android too.) We also used the Garmin GPS that my in-laws have, which was really great at getting us to the general area, but the app is really helpful for reading the description of the cache and seeing and photos or hints that are available.
• Consider wearing long pants and closed shoes. Caches are often hidden by trees and in brush. Honestly, if the cache is in too woodsy of an area, we bail. Like I said, the Notartes are not Outdoor People.
• Pickup a long stick or bring a walking stick to help move away brush in especially brushy areas. Or, to avoid that one big spider that seems to be guarding the box.
• Bring a pen and little trinkets that you can use to trade for other items in the cache. These don't have to be anything extravagant. In our very first cache, we picked up a fruit bar and dropped a little army man.
• Be prepared to not find some. We're still pretty new to this game, but we sometimes can't find the cache. Many times it's there, we just don't see it, but occasionally the cache has been taken by muggles (what caters call non-cachers), or moved.

So far, we've done 17 caches, most of them in Texas while we were visiting my in-laws. Turns out Papa Goodwin is a very talented cacher! I think he's addicted now…I sense an iPhone purchase in his future.

Learn more about geocaching at http://www.geocaching.com/default.aspx. We cache under the username ernmeg.

We've got our family bed to ourselves again. Rey has been successfully sleeping for at least part of the night in his little toddler bed, in his new super hero room that he shares with his big brother.

Tonight, I'm able to hang out in our bedroom, working on stuff, watching TV, alone and quiet. I'm sure this sounds dreamy, but I have to say that I'm sort of bummed. My babies are getting so big - sleeping all by themselves! This king-sized bed feels like an ocean right now. I'm not sure I'm ready for both of them to be so independent.

Rey starts one-day-a-week preschool in a few weeks. Alex will be in his last year of preschool. Time is going so fast; I feel like I go to sleep with toddlers and wake up with teenagers.

So, tomorrow, when Rey asks to be held ("Mama, I want you hold me!"), or Alex asks for extra snuggles, I'm going to soak it all up. Soon enough, "I want you hold me!" will turn into "Moooom, can I borrow the car today??"