The World According to Mommy

At the beginning of this month I started keeping track of all my spending. I have categories for just about everything, and whenever I come home after spending money, I break out the receipt from my purchases and enter it onto my handy-dandy Excel spreadsheet.

I was just entering my grocery store trip onto the spreadsheet, and apparently, according to Mr. Excel, I only have $31.89 left in the grocery budget for this month. The last I checked today was the 10th. That means I have....oh, I don't know, quite a few more days left in the month.

When figuring out our budget I assigned us $400 per month for groceries (just for food, no other toiletry or household items; I have a separate line item for those). I sort of picked this number randomly, but I thought surely 2.5 people could make do with $400 to spend for food. Now granted, this does include Nate's formula, which isn't cheap, about $25 a can. He goes through probably one can every five or six days, so I would say probably five cans a month. That's $125 per month. That's a big chunk of the grocery budget, but I think it's definitely doable. Well, we'll see if it's doable come the end of the month.

I think I'm pretty much stocked up on meat after going to Sam's the other day and then the trip to the grocery store today, so we should be good there. And I think I have a can or two of formula in the pantry, so maybe I'll only have to buy one more can before the end of the month. So that leaves milk, eggs, maybe bread, and some vegetables I'll have to buy over the rest of this month.

Oh, man. I think I’ve already resigned myself to the fact that I’m definitely going to blow the grocery budget this month, but I really want to try and see if I can make it work. We have a huge pantry which is filled with all kinds of things, so maybe I’ll just have to get some creative juices flowing and plan our meals around what we already have.

At the end of this month I may have to reevaluate the amount I budgeted for groceries. $400 may just not be enough. But I really hope I can make it work, because if I do end up increasing it, then I’ll have to take money from somewhere else in the budget to cover it, and there’s really not a whole lot of wiggle room. I guess I could try to convince Matt that we should pull a Sheryl Crow and only use one square of toilet paper at each, well…sitting. This would definitely save us money, and we could use that extra money to buy more groceries. Although, if we buy more food, and eat more food, won’t we probably need more toilet paper? Ahh…the dilemma.