This is How We Do It: Meal Planning and Grocery Shopping

This post is a bit of a departure for me; I don't often blog about the practical parts of what I do, mostly because I've always felt like I'm not that good at the practical parts of my "job." At least the parts that have to do with organization and planning. But my friends Lori and Ashley are hosting a link-up, and I thought it would be fun to share ideas and encourage one another.

Historically, I've been a "fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants" type when it comes to meal planning (well, actually when it came to a lot of things). My approach was a mixture of keeping staples on hand that I knew I could make a meal with and sometimes making a grocery list as I wandered the aisles of Target or Joe Caputo's. It mostly worked for us, but I found myself having to run to the grocery store a lot for missing ingredients. This was annoying, but we could do it.

But a couple of things have changed in my life.

1. We now have four kids, and it's no longer as easy to load up and run errands all the time.

2. We started homeschooling, which means I don't have as much flexibility in my day as I used to have. Because you know, they have to be learning stuff.

All that said, we needed more of an organized plan.

I am a big believer in checklists. In fact, we have checklists for lots of things around here. I'm not sure if it's seven years of sleep deprivation or ADHD, but my ability to forget things is astonishing.

For a while, I used an app called paperless for grocery shopping. It allows you to create reusable checklists. The benefit to this system was that I virtually never lost my grocery list. The downside is that I could only sort grocery lists alphabetically, which meant I was often wandering all over the store. In the end, I discovered that I'm more of a paper-and-pencil girl when it comes to planning, so a few months ago I made an excel document that has almost all the things we buy regularly, including food, household, and toiletry items, sorted by category.

Now I leave one of these in my notebook-that-holds-my-life (aka homeschool planner) all week, noting the things we are running out of. Then at the end of the week, I sit down and fill in meals for the following week, and go through my checklist, highlighting the things we need for those meals.

I don't tend to plan specifically for breakfasts, snacks, and lunches. I just have a list of things we typically eat, and how much of those things we go through each week (for instance, I know that we need 3 dozen eggs, 2 big bags of frozen fruit, 3 loaves of bread, 3 quarts of yogurt, etc. )

For me one of the benefits of doing it this way instead of on my phone is that I don't feel like I spend all my time scrolling. I am able to see at a glance almost everything I buy, and I just highlight the items I need (I color-code by store).

Then I take my trusty clipboard (yes, I know) to the store and get shopping. I tend to grocery shop on Saturdays, because we are homeschooling all week and even though our mornings are somewhat flexible, it's almost impossible for errands not to completely derail our day.

Also, as fun as this is:

Things just go faster if I'm by myself.

The half-hour of planning I do at the beginning of the week helps things run so much more smoothly throughout the week. I'm not running out of things all the time, making last minute trips to the store, or buying a lot of food I don't need. It also saves money because the less I go to Target, the less this happens:

Most importantly, it helps me love my kids better, because, let's face it, they don't love the grocery store, and time is a very limited commodity these days. I'd rather be reading to them or going to the park instead of running to the store 3 or 4 times a week because mommy is forgetful.

And that, my friends, is how we do it. :)

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If you'd like a copy of my grocery checklist, feel free to grab it here. I left it an excel file so you could edit it for your own purposes.